Sure they can, but the Silicon Valley has an immense human capital in skills, talent and knowledge that you can't find easily in the rest of the world. The type of complexity, the scale of the systems and the engineering culture that you can find in SF is not common around the world. My experience as a developer in an European country is that it is really difficult to encounter engineers with a real experience in developing truly complex systems and companies with true engineering cultures. This is simply due to the fact that the majority of the companies that need that high quality of engineering and are willing/capable to pay for it are based in the Bay area, therefore creating an ecosystem that is unique in the world. Of course there are a lot of exceptions, but I don't think the "they can hire smart developers anywhere in the world" is as easy at it may look.
The effects of such decisions are going to be immense; people in the developed countries still live in a bubble thinking they are not going to be affected, but things will probably change dramatically the next couple of years.
But what if they wouldn't? For people from some countries, getting to live in the West is a major benefit on its own. (I have to say I'm a bit afraid that the WFH shift will make immigration way more difficult than it is now.)
Highly unlikely, there's still a lot of value in face-to-face meetings.
And--wouldn't it be great if our cities were designed so that people don't need to drive long distances to work? Density + mass transit in cities would go a long way towards reducing emissions.
(and no, we should not use the threat of a once-per-century pandemic to double down on isolated, suburban lifestyles--instead, we should work to make sure cities are clean and support a safe, sustainable density of people)
That is no reason to require not-remote work , and also not entirely true
More to the point, VRChat really makes you appreciate the minutiae of physically proximate human communication, like the lengths of pauses between various speakers. The "mute" avatars in VR also make you appreciate how much we communicate with high dimensional facial and body gestures that can't be duplicated with existing video conferencing. I highly recommend interacting with a mute player in VR if you have the chance. Watching a video isn't the same experience, but here's a short clip of two mutes communicating if you have 30 seconds: https://clips.twitch.tv/CrackyMushyAntelopeBloodTrail
- eye tracking
- facial muscle sensors (that sit between your skin and the rest of the headset)
- deepfake ML
- high resolution scanning
Combine all four, and wala, you can inhabit a high resolution deepfake model of yourself in real time. It’s only a matter of time before this becomes a thing, maybe one or two generations of headsets. It will be mind-blowing.
I see very likely Bay Area salary is now peaked. It is not like companies prior to the pandemic aren't looking for alternative. Now this is just in full acceleration mode.
If you've ever tried scheduling a call between India, East Coast US, Europe, and West Coast US...you've dealt with the fact that there's only a few hours a day such a call can occur, greatly limiting the ability to schedule last minute meetings.
For the same team, it is at most 3 hour difference, I would say.
You'll never get everyone together (unless someone takes a midnight meeting, but that's just cruel) except on special occasions, which sucks but it can be done.
They are about double the price of Asian and Eastern European developers. Which is about the price of a junior US developer. (Independent freelance devs try to charge about the same price that development firms charge you).
This solves the time zone problem. The distribution of English proficiency amongst developers is about the same as the other places, where only occasionally you will encounter a real language barrier with one or two devs.
Now that all big tech workers are digital nomads against their will, there are two entire continents that can chill on without stretching the time zone issue.