Comment by y-c-o-m-b | Hacker News Reader

Comment by y-c-o-m-b | Hacker News Reader

I had this same fear a few years back. I don't have any notable personal projects on GitHub and my skills are pretty standard (Full Stack .NET) these days. I don't even have a degree. Nothing really stands out in my resume that screams "hire this person". I figured I would hardly get a response when applying to remote companies let alone an offer. The competition is surely way more qualified than I am. Furthermore I was applying on StackOverflow where talent pools are endless. I applied anyway.

Well, I was wrong. I've had many interviews from that platform and so my last two jobs have been fully remote companies. The compensation has been even better than what I get locally (Portland, OR). It seems there is still a strong desire for experienced professionals and cultural fit; both of which many candidates don't posses. Despite the immense number of applications these companies received, they still complained that good talent and good personalities are hard to come by. What that tells me is even an average Joe like me doesn't need to worry about "anyone taking my job" because there's always a demand for it somewhere that's not being fulfilled.

I appreciate your short term perspective, and agree with you that today remote work doesn't have these fears. However, the author is thinking about a longer time horizon.

As an example, with agreements between Canada/US and similar culture it would be very easy for your company to start hiring remote workers in Canada. Suddenly due to currency differences their salaries are 30% cheaper, and with a strong social safety & gov. subsidies likely even cheaper for similar talent.

Then some time later after your company has had success with some international workers they branch out farther and hire a few juniors from South America in the same time zone. Repeat this cycle over the next decade and now salaries have been eroded even for high paying information workers.

I'm starting to feel globalization is a race to the bottom for everyone but the owners.

But then there's nothing stopping American workers from moving to cheaper COL places and still competing for these jobs. And with reduction in salary costs, the product becomes cheaper as well, meaning more people have access to it and (potentially) opening up new opportunities than before.

I'm not saying it's going to be a completely painless process, but I'm far more optimistic about the ultimate end point.

Globalization is and always was a race to the bottom for everyone but the owners. In my opinion, the idea has always been outsource work to other countries to bootstrap their economies into the modern era so whatever work we didn't outsource could benefit from additional customers.

I think Globalization went a bit too far and left too many American cities in the dust while catapulting strategic competitors into a powerful position. The idea that millions of workers who lost their jobs could just immediately retool and find work higher up the value chain was a disaster. Many argue that Globalization has been a success for lifting millions out of poverty, but to me that just says we ruined some peoples livelihood for the benefit of other countries who seek to simply replace the need for us instead of trade with us.

We were told that globalization made things more efficient. So, if you always saw it as a race to the bottom you are smarter than I and many others because that wasn't what was sold to us.

Maybe the real problem is that in the 60s we were told that our future selves would be filled with leisure time due to automation. That leisure team turned out to be a synonym for unemployment. The problem is that the wealth generated from globalization became centralized instead of benefitting everyone.

> I'm starting to feel globalization is a race to the bottom for everyone but the owners

And the people in Canada who can get paid twice as much - or the people in Ukraine who can get paid ten times as much as before. It flattens the competitive landscape globally, so it is a loss for those who were the highest earners previously without much competition (US, Switzerland, London) but a gain for people everywhere else.

Writing code is only like 60% of the job, and the other 40% can far outweigh the value of the code. Technical talent is everywhere for sure, so the 60% is easy to off-shore or put to remote. But rarely in my experience does that off-shoring to cheaper locations result in candidates qualified in the other 40% of the job. That may change (hopefully will) over time, but it's not like it's a lurking fact that is just waiting for its moment.

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