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Comment by jmnicolas | Hacker News Reader

> employers also realize they can have employees work from home.

I think it's even worse than that. Once they realize that you're working from home, why wouldn't they hire someone much cheaper abroad?

I hope I'm wrong but I think in less than 5 years people will regret this WFH thing.

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They’ve tried countless times for the last 30+ years. It has not ended well.

Maybe this time is different with the advent of better online collaboration tools. But these tools do little to help with real-time communication across time zones and language barriers.

If this was an option they would have already outsourced the work.

It is an option and they will, it will start slowly though. First offering a job to someone out of state. Maybe they save some money and the next hire, they look à little further and they pick up an employee from another English speaking country, they save even more salary. The more these tests work out the more companies will expirement. Eventually hiring an American will seem unnecessary and costly if you're distributed anyways.

It's great news for non-Americans though, USD goes a long way in a lot of the world.

Last time I was at a company that tried that, the (US-based) management would fight over making sure their projects went to the US-based devs (even if not in the same office) vs the overseas devs because the communication gap - timezones and physical distance both - was that bad.

Zoom hasn't fixed this.

It becomes a lot easier as an office becomes remote-first, and adopts the changes necessary to make that work well. There's no longer that barrier between the in-person and remote teams.

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