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Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

> 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

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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.

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