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I think it will be more differentiated than that. If you are top talent at FAANG you'll probably continue to be able to demand top comp. If the you are a medioc

I think it will be more differentiated than that. If you are top talent at FAANG you'll probably continue to be able to demand top comp. If the you are a mediocre dev and you're salary is only high because you are in SF, your comp will likely go down. Comp in developing countries is already going up as well as part of the remote boom. Comp in Colombia for example seems to have practician doubled in the last year. My thoughts on this in longer form: http://amurmann.com/posts/remote-labor-market-future/ http://amurmann.com/posts/remote-labor-market-future/

kkfx 4y ago
Your articles is still not really "optimistic" although it appear to be with a certain neutrality... As OP said most salaries will tend to slowly align to low income countries, like in nature, the communicating vessels principles, where liquids tend to align to a common mean level. That's means some Tajikistan or Paraguayan or Samoans workers will be happy, while other, like us in the western worlds with our actual cost of living will no be happy at all. Oh, sure formally being remote we can relocate. Unfortunately living in the physical real world relocate is not just a matter of physical location on Earth but also physical situations around, for instance if I relocate to northern Urals from here (France Alps) I'll probably able to spot a nearly-similar climate (a bit hotter in summer, a bit colder in winter probably) and appear to be hyper-rich in the Urals BUT if I just need to buy food there is no Drive supermarket nearby there. If I just have a carious tooth I'm almost on my own or I have to fly 500-800 miles at minimum just to sort that out. Not talking about real eventual emergencies. Such services until we have global teleport network (something really fictional from our real current perspective) can be "remote". Long story short IF I'm a young slave (yes, not Citizen, not worker) with a significant dose of optimism transfused in my body I can be happy and say: "hey, I'll go to some 'tropical-alike' area of the world where with very little I'm still rich! Wonderful! Or maybe I'll even be a digital nomad! Hooray!" and PERHAPS being happy for a little while, than discover it's too late to came back and being a new poor slave. Not much different than modern digital service mass market where some services start free, nice and friendly than they start to offer premium features, quality lower without them (and also with them, often), some fees for all arrive, ... and most customers are so locked-in even only by their peers being communication-centric that they have to remain, suffer and pay. Now if we enlarge such vision: top talents are very few. Some or even most of them are considered "top" just because they choose to live to work instead of the contrary. All the rest? Try to enlarge the game behind eligible remote jobs: did you think you can get good food and health just paying more? Sorry, you can't. Surely in hoteliers terms just seeing some south Americans clinic you might think that's false. Unfortunately if you really touch the (obscene) quality of their real services you'll discover that scale matter also to form talents. To give them experience. There is no school that can substitute scale. If we do not have OVERALL good services for the society we also can't have good services for a small élite. We can mock them, we can self-convince them they are good seeing the sorry state of others humans, but we do not get nothing really good. Try to see how innovation after public research era/bit labs era drop. Our actual IT is still way BEHIND old Xerox PARC level. Oh sure, is popularized, more colorful, more performant, far cheaper etc. What we can call "non-talented improvements" but there is NO REAL INNOVATION anymore. That's the result of scale: private markets can't reach the public research scale for the public and as a result they just produce popularized crap. Now imaging the result on social scale outside IT.
- sofixa 4y ago
  IMHO there will always be a language and culture barrier, and timezones. A Spanish company would prefer to hire Spanish speakers ( so Spain or Latin America) over Tajiks. What good are developers, for instance, if you can't really communicate with them due to limited timezone overlap and language issues?
  - kkfx 4y ago
    Learning a language enough is not that hard, especially with languages like English... Spanish is a little bit harder, but still easy. It's not Chinese or Japanese with more alphabets etc... Surely as I said that happen more or less slowly witch means that at first we will experience a proximity preference, but just see for call centers: here (France, Italy) there is an epidemic of offshored call-centers operators in the Balkans and north-Africa: they barely speak Italian or French but they get far little wages so for many companies that's good.

kkfx 4y ago

Your articles is still not really "optimistic" although it appear to be with a certain neutrality... As OP said most salaries will tend to slowly align to low income countries, like in nature, the communicating vessels principles, where liquids tend to align to a common mean level. That's means some Tajikistan or Paraguayan or Samoans workers will be happy, while other, like us in the western worlds with our actual cost of living will no be happy at all. Oh, sure formally being remote we can relocate. Unfortunately living in the physical real world relocate is not just a matter of physical location on Earth but also physical situations around, for instance if I relocate to northern Urals from here (France Alps) I'll probably able to spot a nearly-similar climate (a bit hotter in summer, a bit colder in winter probably) and appear to be hyper-rich in the Urals BUT if I just need to buy food there is no Drive supermarket nearby there. If I just have a carious tooth I'm almost on my own or I have to fly 500-800 miles at minimum just to sort that out. Not talking about real eventual emergencies. Such services until we have global teleport network (something really fictional from our real current perspective) can be "remote". Long story short IF I'm a young slave (yes, not Citizen, not worker) with a significant dose of optimism transfused in my body I can be happy and say: "hey, I'll go to some 'tropical-alike' area of the world where with very little I'm still rich! Wonderful! Or maybe I'll even be a digital nomad! Hooray!" and PERHAPS being happy for a little while, than discover it's too late to came back and being a new poor slave. Not much different than modern digital service mass market where some services start free, nice and friendly than they start to offer premium features, quality lower without them (and also with them, often), some fees for all arrive, ... and most customers are so locked-in even only by their peers being communication-centric that they have to remain, suffer and pay. Now if we enlarge such vision: top talents are very few. Some or even most of them are considered "top" just because they choose to live to work instead of the contrary. All the rest? Try to enlarge the game behind eligible remote jobs: did you think you can get good food and health just paying more? Sorry, you can't. Surely in hoteliers terms just seeing some south Americans clinic you might think that's false. Unfortunately if you really touch the (obscene) quality of their real services you'll discover that scale matter also to form talents. To give them experience. There is no school that can substitute scale. If we do not have OVERALL good services for the society we also can't have good services for a small élite. We can mock them, we can self-convince them they are good seeing the sorry state of others humans, but we do not get nothing really good. Try to see how innovation after public research era/bit labs era drop. Our actual IT is still way BEHIND old Xerox PARC level. Oh sure, is popularized, more colorful, more performant, far cheaper etc. What we can call "non-talented improvements" but there is NO REAL INNOVATION anymore. That's the result of scale: private markets can't reach the public research scale for the public and as a result they just produce popularized crap. Now imaging the result on social scale outside IT.

sofixa 4y ago
IMHO there will always be a language and culture barrier, and timezones. A Spanish company would prefer to hire Spanish speakers ( so Spain or Latin America) over Tajiks. What good are developers, for instance, if you can't really communicate with them due to limited timezone overlap and language issues?
- kkfx 4y ago
  Learning a language enough is not that hard, especially with languages like English... Spanish is a little bit harder, but still easy. It's not Chinese or Japanese with more alphabets etc... Surely as I said that happen more or less slowly witch means that at first we will experience a proximity preference, but just see for call centers: here (France, Italy) there is an epidemic of offshored call-centers operators in the Balkans and north-Africa: they barely speak Italian or French but they get far little wages so for many companies that's good.