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Comment by kthxbye123 | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s much more likely that, rather than empowering employees to live rich and fulfilling lives outside of work, a massive shift to remote will drive down wages everywhere to the level of the cheapest locations where talent can be found - so instead of living on an SF salary in Coer d’Alene you’ll be living on a Lagos or Jakarta salary - while obliterating the distinction between “work life” and “home life” and massively sharpening the knife of competition hanging over every engineer’s head

This may be different in firms where the workers actually have a say in the management of the company, but god knows there aren’t too many of those

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> Lagos or Jakarta salary

This is fear mongering to say the least. Nobody is stopping those companies hiring from the said regions today. And it is super unlikely western engineers would want to relocate to the said regions given the choice.

Let's all admit outsourcing is a thing and it has been for more than 20 years. The reason outsourcing is dialed back is much more interesting to understand, and offers insight from perspective other than costs.

The high CoL in Bay Area is not sustainable. Software engineering is already democratized in a way, Bay Area no longer holds monopoly.

The high salary here is a reflection of prosperity of past decade of internet bloom, but there is no momentum to keep it that way as the party will end never-the-less eventually.

If anything, I see those remote working as a welcoming trend, to redistribute tech talents and money across US/Canada. Yes, the salary will go down, but it probably reflect better the reality we are already living.

The bay area is unique in that it has two major research universities where a lot of computer science was developed.

Berkeley and Stanford will continue to drive innovation.

And yet the collegiate programming contests includes high performing computer science schools from every region. You can raise an incredible programmer from Wisconsin, Colorado, Texas, Virginia, and Ohio just fine.

Innovation is not generally about hiring people who are really good at programming contests.

Does it have to come from schools that are known for what they did 40 years ago?

Ohio and vietnam and russia and bulgaria. Let's add to the list. People who have moved to costlier cities have done it at a significant cost and sacrificies. Making it all decentralized can potentially cause large harm to those individuals.

It'll boil down to completing with countries that have large human capital. Clearly USA is not a winner there. Talk about jobs being taken by people living in Bangladesh/pakistan/Indonesia and other highly populated countries.

Well, I have had Russian coworkers and coworkers from South East Asia, so it would seem I already have competed with them.

edit: I see you've modified your post, I'll update mine, too:

> People who have moved to costlier cities have done it at a significant cost and sacrificies

They're all welcome to return to the places they want to be. We often encourage people in dying towns to move elsewhere to find work or sustainable living. The people that have made 250k+ a year can do that, too.

> Talk about jobs being taken by people living in Bangladesh/pakistan/Indonesia and other highly populated countries.

I see the argument here; but, I don't expect it will be nearly as bad as is said. The platform may certainly change; but, there are still reasonably-sized development teams in countries that do their own thing. Further, a deep understanding of a given culture is very useful when developing software for them, or working with them as a team. We will become more global, certainly; but, there will still be advantages for US companies to pay for US developers: culture. Also, working hours. I had enough struggle on a team with a 3 hour difference in working hours. Having a team with members in Europe (7-8 hour difference from Pacific Time Zone) or India (13 hour difference) has a real impact on productivity that shouldn't be overlooked, unless the whole operation is moved elsewhere

But if the whole operation is moved elsewhere, what are all the developers in the United States and similar going to do? They'll probably start their own companies (yes, probably at diminished wages) and produce their own products; and, recognizing the job losses they've seen to skilled, overseas competitors, they may choose to prefer to hire relatively local employees, and the whole cycle may start again.

I believe the assumption that it will fully swing to 100% of development being out of the country is misguided.

Microsoft might not hire Silicon Valley or other US engineers; and, Facebook might not; but Stellar Games Interactive and the next "YNAB" or FreshBooks might.

Agreed it might end up being the way you mentioned but it might end up being very extreme. We both don't know yet which way it'll end up being.

-> but, there will still be advantages for US companies to pay for US developers: culture

I disagree here. My company has moved completed teams to India with no loss in productivity. Company today survives because of some projects that happened in India. Had the projects not moved to India some American folk would have been working on it and gathering accolodes and feeling proud of their work.

-> People will start companies here and hire people in other countries to code for them.

I don't know. People don't want to work for other people if they can start companies. How many chinese work for US organizations. They have their own companies and people to work for.

There are lot of points I want to bring forth but I fear they might hurt someone. In the beginning it'll help people people living in Texas or Nevada. But that benefit will be short lived. People in USA are still super expensive compared to people in other countries.

Same argument hold for H1B. You get some selected very smart people ( only smart not the abuse that Infosys has been upto ). They train 10 people. Start companies hire americans. Economy and people here in general benefit. You stop them from coming here. They can do their work sitting in their 10 by 10 room in some other country.

See guys California's/New york's loss will soon boil down to USA's loss. Maybe it'll take 10 years. But USA is still one country. Taxes people pay in california is still used for the developement of the country.

Don't think of a 4 year picture here. 20 year picture in WFH situation will not settle well for USA's dominiance.

It'll work well for China's dominance. They don't let their innovations leave their country :).

> -> People will start companies here and hire people in other countries to code for them.

This is not what I said. I said:

> They'll probably start their own companies (yes, probably at diminished wages) and produce their own products; and, recognizing the job losses they've seen to skilled, overseas competitors, they may choose to prefer to hire relatively local employees, and the whole cycle may start again.

That is: they may hire local devs.

Actively refusing to hire local or even in-nation devs and hiring only international devs is either something for a company so small they can't have a coworker; or, if they're hiring teams, some kind of money lover that wouldn't have hired local in the first place.

"I think it’s much more likely that, rather than empowering employees to live rich and fulfilling lives outside of work, a massive shift to remote will drive down wages everywhere to the level of the cheapest locations where talent can be found - so instead of living on an SF salary in Coer d’Alene you’ll be living on a Lagos or Jakarta salary"

I disagree. If companies felt they could readily get the same level of talent outside the US, why wouldn't they do that currently? Just set up their business in a foreign country and recruit internationally? And if they're still hiring domestically, why are you so sure they're going to dramatically reduce salaries? They still have to attract talent. If an employee wants to move from the bay area to Wyoming, and their employer says their pay will be cut 50%, what's to stop them from applying to Twitter or another company allowing full remote with (I'm assuming, I haven't checked) a much more competitive salary?

"while obliterating the distinction between “work life” and “home life”"

I've seen far too many emails sent by people at 11:30 PM and followed up with another email at 6 AM for me to believe this hasn't already happened. Not to mention the self imposed aspect of it (neither of those emails NEEDED to be sent at those times).

Last couple of companies I worked at, they are already outsourcing "average" work. We had a QA manager in the bay area, and then he had a team of six people in SE asia doing QA/QA automation. On the engineering side we had a team of 20 engineers in eastern Europe working for less than 30k/year usd working on bug fixes and test coverage, UI fixes, modifying legacy code from the original monolith that didn't change a whole lot etc

In the bay area we only had five engineers, mostly focuses on architecture, R&D, new products etc, and even then they only came in two-three days a week mostly for face to face meetings. The VP had a lake house in tahoe and would work remote for 2 months every summer.

I can see a bunch of legacy code maintenance/qa work moving offshore further, but there will always be a core group of five to ten engineers who meet at the central office a couple times a month. Remote will increase but humans still need face to face contact periodically.

Yeah I know a bunch of QA companies in Vietnam. How did your company find them? I am Vietnamese American myself and have spent a lot of time in the region. It is an amazing place w/ a hungry yet educated youth population, great food, beautiful beaches and quite fast internet. Surprised not many American companies heading there to recruit.

We initially hired the QA manager as our first QA hire, then he built the team in his country. After a couple of years we paid for his visa and he lives in the US now and has been with the company for over five years.

We went through Vietnam including Nha-trang on a tourist trip two years ago, of which I think Nha-trang is sort of their tech capital, I was really impressed with the level of development there and how modern it was, although I didn't talk with anyone directly in the industry while I was there. It definitely had an international modern vibe compared to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

I would replace Nhatrang with Danang. Danang is the next big coastal tech hub now.

How is that "outsourcing"? Everyone is still from the same company but instead of just different cities, it's different countries as well.

You are correct, this is technically offshoring, not outsourcing since they are on the company payroll.

>> If companies felt they could readily get the same level of talent outside the US, why wouldn't they do that currently?

Well, by the same logic, why didn’t FB have a remote forward strategy before now? Presumably the pandemic has changed firms assumptions about the relative value of remote and in person work.

Executive changes? One of the engineering leaders, Jay Parikh recently left. He was not a fan of remote workers.

Because it's hard to drive change if there isn't a "need". Going into the office is the status quo, and there wasn't any real pressing drive to change/innovate there.

Now that companies have been forced to go remote, I think they're seeing some benefits from it, and there's a lot less inertia to fight against.

Yes, my point is that this is the same mechanism that will reduce the inertia for "move half of our engineers to low-wage countries and squeeze the wages of the ones that are left"

I think the point is not hiring in Lagos or Jarkarta, but hiring closer to that salary level. Facebook has already indicated salary cuts may be forthcoming for those who relocate out of the Bay Area, and we're still in the very early stages here.

I would like to offer a more nuanced position. People bring many attributes/abilities to work which have value. These include knowledge, integrity, communication, personality, etc. In the past, being willing/able to live in a place like the Bay Area was one of those attributes. Now that one attribute is less valuable. But the rest of the value proposition hasn't changed.

I understand why a person who REALLY wants to live in the Bay Area would be concerned about that. But for most of us in the world, not much is changing. In fact, salaries for the rest of us might go up because demand for our labor will go up.

Or in other words, people in Lagos and Jakarta will now have access to higher salaries (not as high as SF ones, but higher than their alternatives) because they can now work for Facebook and similar companies, rather than being discriminated because they happened to be born in Africa.

That's great for them, but it means the current employees day-dreaming about leaving their luxuriously appointed home office in their palatial Mountain West exurban home for a Wednesday afternoon skiing trip are going to need to seriously readjust their expectations towards "splitting an apartment in Sacramento instead of SF"

There are multiple sibling comments dismissing this argument because it could have happened already, but consider this:

Few companies were very accepting and open about remote work or had the structure to support it with any kind of scale (hiring, HR, legal, team structure, meetings vs async communication, ...)

If companies adapt their processes and workflows to include remote workers as first class employees, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to seamlessly integrate team members not only across the country, but across the globe.

This avoids the usual cost of outsourcing (communication and coordination overhead, lack of integration, etc), while still opening up a large, much cheaper labor pool.

This doesn't have to be primarily negative, but it very much has the potential to put a lot of downward pressure on salaries and should be considered.

Those engineers are already available in cheaper international locations, and they have yet to drive down engineering salaries down to subsistence level in the US.

Because company policies were not as open to remote talent. It took us over a year of lackluster local talent interviews in SF to convince our CTO that we have to go for remote talent.

By the time the pandemic hit, we were ready to be our most effective as a geo distributed team.

Do you hire in Jakarta?

And yet there seem to be many companies that are fine with lackluster?

Seems to be very much a reflection of how engineering is managed at a company.

You said this much better than I could. I'd expect the power of management to increase over individual ICs, too.

>will drive down wages everywhere to the level of the cheapest locations where talent can be found

god forbid we earn the same as everyone else with our skills instead of an arbitrarily inflated quantity thanks to luck of the draw wrt lat/lon we were born near.

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