11 ms·

The point isn’t that existing companies in the US or wherever will lose talent, but that the existing companies might retain or even gain talent, and that the

The point isn’t that existing companies in the US or wherever will lose talent, but that the existing companies might retain or even gain talent, and that the workers will reside in locales other than the US. Your points seem to be in favor of the author’s argument that the importance of physically residing in the US will decrease, and that there is an opportunity for other locales/governments to attract remote workers.

adventured 5y ago
The parent's premise is that it will make the US more powerful economically and make its tech companies more dominant. Which is exactly what it will do. The local tech labor supply will go to work for US corporations, which pay better than most everyone else. That will cement the US hegemony globally in tech (the sole major exception being domestic China, and to a far lesser extent domestic Russia). The US tech juggernaut will buy up the world's talent without having to plant expensive offices everywhere; that will occupy the talent pool and reduce competition to US tech.
- echelon 5y ago
  > it will make the US more powerful economically and make its tech companies more dominant. Which is exactly what it will do. Why wouldn't other nations react accordingly? What power does the US have to stop this? 1) Other nations increasingly have a large supply of high-skill talent. 2) Other nations will use capital and subsidies to launch their own tech firms employing their own workers. There are startup accelerators spinning up all over Europe and Asia to capture, retain, and reward domestic talent. They see how the game is played now. 3) Other nations will create more regulations that limit how much US tech companies can participate in their economy and monopolize their citizens as consumers. This is already happening with major international antitrust rulings hitting Google, Apple, and Facebook. This is the nail in the coffin. They will foster and protect their own industry at the expense of the US. There are many more international tech companies participating at the global stage these days. Atlasssian, JetBrains, Spotify, SoftBank, TSM, ASML, miHoYo... Not to mention all of the Chinese tech companies popping up. Epic Games is 50% owned by Tencent. This trend will continue. The US only has 300M people, and it's not growing with the same significant postwar tailwinds it once had. It can't keep the wealth and talent monopoly forever. Just look at how much the middle and lower classes are hurting as a symptom of this global rebalancing. You can also look to other industries. Automotive, aerospace, etc. The US isn't peerless anymore. Not saying this is good or bad, but it's definitely happening.
  - darkwizard42 5y ago
    The US has the tech companies MASSIVE wealth to stop this. It is all well and good to subsidize local tech companies, but for a majority of junior/senior devs you can't compete with $250K/yr in pay from FAANG companies whose stock won't stop rising and whose name on resume basically sets you up for life (exaggerating, but its not that far from the truth for a non-US and even US developers) Your third point doesn't make any sense to me as no country will restrict their own citizens from working for a foreign company...earning massively higher salaries than local jobs (more money earned locally is more money spent locally... all metrics that nations care about will go up). Monopolizing your citizen's attention != monopolizing their talent. Every company you just mentioned added up doesn't even equal or come close to Google's market capitalization (Atlassian, 150B, Spotify, 55B, TSM, 550B, ASML 350B, JetBrains, private, but some say 7B?, Epic Games, 30B) and of note, TSM and ASML draw much of their valuation from hardware than software.
    - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      >no country will restrict their own citizens from working for a foreign company This might surprise you, but some countries manage to achieve something like that. In Austria for example, if you go freelance (self employed) you'll actually end up paying more tax than being a FTE (which has already one of this highest taxes in the EU) while losing all the benefits of being a FTE like PTO, overtime and such. So yeah, turns out high taxes are a pretty strong deterrent.
      - oblio 5y ago
        > In Austria for example, if you go freelance (self employed) you'll actually end up paying more tax than being a FTE (which has already one of this highest taxes in the EU) while losing all the benefits of being a FTE like PTO, overtime and such. This is the case everywhere in Europe. I don't know if it's a literal policy meant to discourage this or it's just that freelancers are easy political targets since they tend to be disorganized/disunited.
        5y ago
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  It goes both ways: local talent will learn from the biggest companies in the world without having to leave, meaning their know how can be turned to local entities as well. For the pay, eventually it settles down as more and more companies try to see what they can get away with. US companies won’t be paying boatloads of money eternally (they were already resorting to offshoring to skimp) and local companies will have to align to get people to work for them.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > It goes both ways: local talent will learn from the biggest companies in the world without having to leave, meaning their know how can be turned to local entities as well. It really doesn't. You end up with a whole segment of engineers that effectively become invisible to the local tech scene, because they are way above the local rates. Local companies are, basically, a waste of time for them. Also, keep in mind that working for a foreign subsidiary opens up many additional visa to someone who wants to relocate to the US main office. So a "first remote" approach might actually accelerate brain drain in the long run.
    - atlasunshrugged 5y ago
      Unfortunately I agree with this - I'm currently doing some work in tech across sub-saharan Africa and what we're seeing is that local devs from Cameroon to Kenya to Tunisia (okay not sub-saharan but we happen to have an office there) who are any good are now working on the global marketplace and not available to local companies with rare exceptions (e.g. junior who haven't figured out how to compete globally yet or happen to both have the preference to work in person and don't want to move away).
    - makeitdouble 5y ago
      It's a valid point, but it's not the whole story. When there is too much of a gap between the local scene and the global scene, there is an isolation effect. But it doesn't mean these engineers live in their remote bubble. There will be a halo effect of showing the way to local talent, we've seen when subcontracting html integration to a remote shop. Once the contract and legal framing was established, it was easier for us to ask their junior member to do administration tasks or other basic data entry tasks. The other path is for these higher level engineers to move directly to high level positions in local firm. You'll see a junior engineer by EU standards move to a CTO like position in a local company or startup. All in all, I think the local part still tremendously benefits from having highly competent remote workers.
alfiedotwtf 5y ago
> the importance of physically residing in the US will decrease, and that there is an opportunity for other locales/governments to attract remote workers. COVID really did changed everything, and proved working from home not only works well, but more importantly to CFOs, made it significantly cheaper by literally outsourcing real estate costs to employees. The past few months have been interesting. I've been contacted by so many recruiters the past year not from my state or even country that it's wild, and all for remote jobs. Compare that to the past few years where the conversation ends abruptly as soon as I mentioned that i would not be relocating.
- neom 5y ago
  I'm on the business side of the house, we keep waiting for rent to drop so we can find more space for growth, and it's not dropping because folks in real estate think there will be a rebound. As soon as I try to get into a negotiation, it's almost like they're MORE sticky on the price than they used to be, I guess because everyone is looking for a deal. I don't know what will happen but it makes no sense for me to pay premium for space when we can just hire people remote, and landlords are still not negotiating in a lot of markets (SF and NYC aside) exacerbating the business side of the house want to push hard into remote.
  - alfiedotwtf 5y ago
    Must be the area you're in. In Melbourne, office real estate is practically on life support and they'll happily discount
    - JanisL 5y ago
      Melbourne Australia is in the third year of population decline now. I know on top of this population shift that a huge number of the major employers have shifted towards much more work from home arrangements due to the pandemic and due to the the 263 days of lockdowns that were imposed I think many of these changes will last for longer than in places that were less disrupted. That said I still think commercial real estate prices here are artificially high/in a bubble because of the high number of vacancies even if there's already been a pullback in prices. Just structurally speaking the demand side for commercial real estate here has substantially fallen, but I'm not sure the same can be said for other parts of the world right now. I'd be curious to know more about what's happening in other locations as I feel like Melbourne is a bit of an outlier in many regards.
robotastronaut 5y ago
Meanwhile, I’m hoping that global competition increases tech pay for non-US companies and I can land a remote gig that has some actual benefits like paternal leave.

adventured 5y ago

The parent's premise is that it will make the US more powerful economically and make its tech companies more dominant. Which is exactly what it will do. The local tech labor supply will go to work for US corporations, which pay better than most everyone else. That will cement the US hegemony globally in tech (the sole major exception being domestic China, and to a far lesser extent domestic Russia). The US tech juggernaut will buy up the world's talent without having to plant expensive offices everywhere; that will occupy the talent pool and reduce competition to US tech.

echelon 5y ago
> it will make the US more powerful economically and make its tech companies more dominant. Which is exactly what it will do. Why wouldn't other nations react accordingly? What power does the US have to stop this? 1) Other nations increasingly have a large supply of high-skill talent. 2) Other nations will use capital and subsidies to launch their own tech firms employing their own workers. There are startup accelerators spinning up all over Europe and Asia to capture, retain, and reward domestic talent. They see how the game is played now. 3) Other nations will create more regulations that limit how much US tech companies can participate in their economy and monopolize their citizens as consumers. This is already happening with major international antitrust rulings hitting Google, Apple, and Facebook. This is the nail in the coffin. They will foster and protect their own industry at the expense of the US. There are many more international tech companies participating at the global stage these days. Atlasssian, JetBrains, Spotify, SoftBank, TSM, ASML, miHoYo... Not to mention all of the Chinese tech companies popping up. Epic Games is 50% owned by Tencent. This trend will continue. The US only has 300M people, and it's not growing with the same significant postwar tailwinds it once had. It can't keep the wealth and talent monopoly forever. Just look at how much the middle and lower classes are hurting as a symptom of this global rebalancing. You can also look to other industries. Automotive, aerospace, etc. The US isn't peerless anymore. Not saying this is good or bad, but it's definitely happening.
- darkwizard42 5y ago
  The US has the tech companies MASSIVE wealth to stop this. It is all well and good to subsidize local tech companies, but for a majority of junior/senior devs you can't compete with $250K/yr in pay from FAANG companies whose stock won't stop rising and whose name on resume basically sets you up for life (exaggerating, but its not that far from the truth for a non-US and even US developers) Your third point doesn't make any sense to me as no country will restrict their own citizens from working for a foreign company...earning massively higher salaries than local jobs (more money earned locally is more money spent locally... all metrics that nations care about will go up). Monopolizing your citizen's attention != monopolizing their talent. Every company you just mentioned added up doesn't even equal or come close to Google's market capitalization (Atlassian, 150B, Spotify, 55B, TSM, 550B, ASML 350B, JetBrains, private, but some say 7B?, Epic Games, 30B) and of note, TSM and ASML draw much of their valuation from hardware than software.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >no country will restrict their own citizens from working for a foreign company This might surprise you, but some countries manage to achieve something like that. In Austria for example, if you go freelance (self employed) you'll actually end up paying more tax than being a FTE (which has already one of this highest taxes in the EU) while losing all the benefits of being a FTE like PTO, overtime and such. So yeah, turns out high taxes are a pretty strong deterrent.
    - oblio 5y ago
      > In Austria for example, if you go freelance (self employed) you'll actually end up paying more tax than being a FTE (which has already one of this highest taxes in the EU) while losing all the benefits of being a FTE like PTO, overtime and such. This is the case everywhere in Europe. I don't know if it's a literal policy meant to discourage this or it's just that freelancers are easy political targets since they tend to be disorganized/disunited.
      - 5y ago
makeitdouble 5y ago
It goes both ways: local talent will learn from the biggest companies in the world without having to leave, meaning their know how can be turned to local entities as well. For the pay, eventually it settles down as more and more companies try to see what they can get away with. US companies won’t be paying boatloads of money eternally (they were already resorting to offshoring to skimp) and local companies will have to align to get people to work for them.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > It goes both ways: local talent will learn from the biggest companies in the world without having to leave, meaning their know how can be turned to local entities as well. It really doesn't. You end up with a whole segment of engineers that effectively become invisible to the local tech scene, because they are way above the local rates. Local companies are, basically, a waste of time for them. Also, keep in mind that working for a foreign subsidiary opens up many additional visa to someone who wants to relocate to the US main office. So a "first remote" approach might actually accelerate brain drain in the long run.
  - atlasunshrugged 5y ago
    Unfortunately I agree with this - I'm currently doing some work in tech across sub-saharan Africa and what we're seeing is that local devs from Cameroon to Kenya to Tunisia (okay not sub-saharan but we happen to have an office there) who are any good are now working on the global marketplace and not available to local companies with rare exceptions (e.g. junior who haven't figured out how to compete globally yet or happen to both have the preference to work in person and don't want to move away).
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    It's a valid point, but it's not the whole story. When there is too much of a gap between the local scene and the global scene, there is an isolation effect. But it doesn't mean these engineers live in their remote bubble. There will be a halo effect of showing the way to local talent, we've seen when subcontracting html integration to a remote shop. Once the contract and legal framing was established, it was easier for us to ask their junior member to do administration tasks or other basic data entry tasks. The other path is for these higher level engineers to move directly to high level positions in local firm. You'll see a junior engineer by EU standards move to a CTO like position in a local company or startup. All in all, I think the local part still tremendously benefits from having highly competent remote workers.

alfiedotwtf 5y ago

> the importance of physically residing in the US will decrease, and that there is an opportunity for other locales/governments to attract remote workers. COVID really did changed everything, and proved working from home not only works well, but more importantly to CFOs, made it significantly cheaper by literally outsourcing real estate costs to employees. The past few months have been interesting. I've been contacted by so many recruiters the past year not from my state or even country that it's wild, and all for remote jobs. Compare that to the past few years where the conversation ends abruptly as soon as I mentioned that i would not be relocating.

neom 5y ago
I'm on the business side of the house, we keep waiting for rent to drop so we can find more space for growth, and it's not dropping because folks in real estate think there will be a rebound. As soon as I try to get into a negotiation, it's almost like they're MORE sticky on the price than they used to be, I guess because everyone is looking for a deal. I don't know what will happen but it makes no sense for me to pay premium for space when we can just hire people remote, and landlords are still not negotiating in a lot of markets (SF and NYC aside) exacerbating the business side of the house want to push hard into remote.
- alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  Must be the area you're in. In Melbourne, office real estate is practically on life support and they'll happily discount
  - JanisL 5y ago
    Melbourne Australia is in the third year of population decline now. I know on top of this population shift that a huge number of the major employers have shifted towards much more work from home arrangements due to the pandemic and due to the the 263 days of lockdowns that were imposed I think many of these changes will last for longer than in places that were less disrupted. That said I still think commercial real estate prices here are artificially high/in a bubble because of the high number of vacancies even if there's already been a pullback in prices. Just structurally speaking the demand side for commercial real estate here has substantially fallen, but I'm not sure the same can be said for other parts of the world right now. I'd be curious to know more about what's happening in other locations as I feel like Melbourne is a bit of an outlier in many regards.

robotastronaut 5y ago

Meanwhile, I’m hoping that global competition increases tech pay for non-US companies and I can land a remote gig that has some actual benefits like paternal leave.