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Comment by geoelectric | Hacker News Reader

I think it'll potentially shift radically for some industries. Tech and other knowledge worker industry adapts more easily to this sort of thing than most, and tech in particular probably will pivot for a large segment for sake of not having to pay rent.

What I expect to really take off, though, is things like managed IT you do from home for some manufacturing company somewhere--small groups embedded or servicing larger companies that can be hired and spun up more cheaply from elsewhere in the country.

Basically, everything that people said would happen (but didn't work out) with globalization in knowledge worker industry, I personally expect to actually happen and work out with "domestication" of it to include a large segment of remote workers. The business considerations are mostly the same, minus the cultural, governmental, and time zone barriers that prevented it from working.

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A lot of outsourcing was basically done with the difficulty set on hardest to get at perceived lowest labor costs. So you ended up with big time zone differences, cultural and language issues, etc.

Yeah, exactly. Back in the 90s-2000s, though, it was easier to deal with an office-based outsource hub that had its own line manager, etc, mostly because things were so damned slow to send back and forth that you wanted to chunk project coordination. Those were comparatively rarer in the US, since anywhere you could put one together had enough tech industry to make the costs there prohibitive.

Nowadays, you could just hire from the flyover states, find all the good techies that didn't make the pilgrimage to one of the traditional hotspots, and train them on the last bits on the job for not very much more money than an international team, when all costs are accounted.

It'll be interesting seeing the trajectory of tech salaries over the next however long though. That part didn't happen either but probably will now.

I can't imagine why someone would pay a Bay Area FAANG salary for any job that could be fulfilled at Arkansas costs. That makes it a really positive outlook for Arkansas techies, maybe a little less so for us in San Jose. I'm sure there are special cases and vanity teams, and culture moves slowly sometimes, but if things truly spread across so will the comp.

> Nowadays, you could just hire from the flyover states, find all the good techies that didn't make the pilgrimage to one of the traditional hotspots, and train them on the last bits on the job for not very much more money than an international team, when all costs are accounted.

Why just the "good" or "perfect" techies?

They need to be less picky about who they hire. One could even go with the less desirable, "diamonds in the rough" candidates and still do well. If it worked passably with guest workers, it can work with flyover candidates.

As for my personal situation, I'd be happy to have options that were more than just government or healthcare.

Logically, to the degree that a company really is indifferent to where in the US people live, I'd expect a new equilibrium to develop that's somewhere between the Bay Area and Arkansas. But, as you say, there's a lot of inertia and Google isn't likely to one morning announce an across-the-board pay cut in the Bay Area so they can redistribute it to workers in other locations. But you could certainly imagine things like premiums for new grads shrinking.

Equilibrium is what I expect. That may have a more sharp effect than the math would suggest, though. Bay Area SWE salaries inflated via competition in a way I suspect completely deflates with area pressure off. The cross-effects of a limited pool tend to be multiplicative, not additive.

The fact that the people doing the hiring probably enjoy those salaries too is maybe the biggest counterargument I'd have to my own prediction and the reason I think it'll take a bit to change. I'm firmly convinced that's one of the phenomena that have kept college degrees inflating--cognitive dissonance around admitting you shouldn't perpetuate your own experience.

FWIW, I think a lot of techies would probably love to have the freedom to live wherever they want and make a decent living. The comp gold rush has been fun, but the industry will arguably be better when it's gone. But the transition period--especially for those of us already at FAANGs or similar--that gets spicy.

Personally I'm hoping it means in a decade or so I can pseudo-retire to an easy remote job somewhere cheap enough to be happy on what an easy remote job pays. Given how hard actual early retirement can be to swing nowadays, that'd be a great holdover strategy to have available.

> Bay Area SWE salaries inflated via competition in a way I suspect completely deflates with area pressure off.

It will be very interesting to see just how big the pool of people who can pass the interviews[0] but weren't willing to relocate is.

The demographics (and housing prices!) in the tech hubs reflect a big influx of highly-paid developers. If only 10% of the folks who could pass those interviews and get those offers were willing to relocation, that'll cause a much larger downward pressure on prices than if, say, 75% were, in which case the pool doesn't expand as much.

[0] the usefulness of the algorithm interview can be debated, but I don't see remote work putting any pressure on this process

If anything, I expect more questionable snake oil strategies for hiring and managing remote to come and go. The same old problems predicting actual performance will persist, and honestly probably not any worse than now, but people will try to "solve" them for the new format.

The open office movement should be all anyone needs to see to believe that the no-office movement will have legs. We perpetuated an employment style for years that widely known to be worse for both employees and employers on many levels than a traditional layout, and merely absorbed that as the cost of doing business.

If it works well it'll hit all the much faster, but in tech, anyway, all you need to hear is "less overhead" and "cheap office rental" to know it'll become popular no matter how well it does or doesn't work. I dunno other knowledge worker industries but I can't imagine they're much more altruistic.

> The demographics (and housing prices!) in the tech hubs reflect a big influx of highly-paid developers

How? For at least the last decade, your typical developer in the Bay Area has been a renter...long since priced-out of a single-family home. Even FAANG developers are priced out of the better suburbs.

A lot of Bay Area tech companies have basically been constantly hiring for a decade, with a lot of new companies constantly being formed as well. Talk to those folks who've been hired, and a large portion of them did not live in the Bay Area a decade ago.

The rental prices and turnover speed are another indicator of this - sure, the ones buying houses are the ones who've hit the stock jackpot, but the competition for places of any sort is intensified by the importation of well-paid talent.

>> you could just hire from the flyover states, find all the good techies that didn't make the pilgrimage to one of the traditional hotspots

How many are there, though, really?

And what happens when you now have to compete with _every_other_company_ that also wants to hire them?

They'll make more money, good for them. But the majority of companies will just have to settle for hiring C-level talent.

Why not hire C level talent from the flyover states?

Speaking specifically of my own lane, tech, I think you might underestimate how many people--particularly people of color--never make it into the "industry pipeline" because of lack of local opportunities. Those of us who came into the tech industry from the side in the 90s know the school doesn't make much difference at all in most jobs, it's just a predictor of whether you've otherwise prepared. The initial preparation tends to be self-driven, in the best employees, and they exist everywhere. The biggest differentiator comes down to whether someone gives you a shot, and that’s almost entirely about contacts and location for name-brand-company SWE positions.

However much competition there will be then, there's more now with everything chunked up. We're talking about an existing situation. Widening the applicant pool to cheaper applicants can't do anything but help an employer.

This is an important point, so much of the so-called diversity problem with Silicon Valley is driven by the enforced colocation of techies into a small geographical area in central CA. You also lose out on people that are more family oriented and not apt to move far from where they grew up. There's plenty of smart and talented people that are hard workers who need that kind of proximity to their loved ones and they can't just pack up their whole extended family and move to SV.

Granted, I've never worked outside the Midwest, and what I know of tech hiring is mostly from reading HN. My impression is that "we only hire A players" is considered to be kind of a running joke. Interview processes seem, from a safe distance, to be dystopian. In addition, there seems to be an article every week on "hiring is broken" and an entire ecosystem of startups trying to solve that problem.

Yet somehow firms do OK with the people they manage to hire.

So maybe firms could just be less fearful of hiring, attract equal talent, and get on with life.

I doubt that I'd be considered an A player. My employer already makes productive use of talent in the Midwest, but we are not predominantly a software company.

One of the first ever desktop app stores had its desktop app developed entirely by a flyover state team in 2002. So the devs exist, if you can find them.

Also, there's plenty of C-level talent in the bay. You can pay the same and get B+ or better in an inland state.

If the tech salaries would become much lower, a lot of people would simply start doing something else, which in turn reduce the pool of candidates. I'm not in a very intense tech job, however it still requires lots of reading, trying to figure out things and some days are nerve wrecking and tense,which often results in headaches,etc. So why do it for low money if I could go and many other jobs that would require additional reading once a year and won't have to sift through stack overflow comments to be able to do my job..

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