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This is why I strongly suspect this is a self-correcting problem. A company decides to pay based on COL. Their engineers in rural areas are much cheaper and t

This is why I strongly suspect this is a self-correcting problem. A company decides to pay based on COL. Their engineers in rural areas are much cheaper and they now have a strong incentive to hire more people in Des Moines than in SF. They do so, thus driving up the demand for (and thus, price of) engineers in Des Moines. Likewise, by hiring fewer SF engineers, they're driving down the demand for (and thus, price of) engineers in SF. Give it a while and the national price for a given engineer converges. I don't know exactly what the timeline here is - probably longer than a couple years, but less than 20. As an SF engineer, this'll probably pull my salary down, but the salary of engineers throughout the country up.

titanomachy 6y ago
That was my first thought reading this article. As more of the workforce shifts to remote, the market price of talent should become less location-dependent. > As an SF engineer, this'll probably pull my salary down, but the salary of engineers throughout the country up. I'd say the salary of engineers throughout the world would go up. I think this is a positive change that will make the overall industry more efficient and benefit society as producing high-quality software becomes more affordable. And I say this as an engineer in a high-pay city who benefits from the current inequality in the system. I believe the change will be gradual enough that people like me can keep earning good pay by continuing to improve our skills and learn from experience.