Tell HN: Don't root for WFH, it might destroy well-paying jobs | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Don't root for WFH, it might destroy well-paying jobs

76 pointsRestlessMind157 comments

There is a vocal crowd on HN cheering for the WFH trend. But that is a big risk for the US SW engineers and a great opportunity for the rest of the SW engineers in Americas.

The crowd cheering for WFH seems to assume that the jobs will be available anywhere the suburban US which is ideal for WFH with big houses with enough space to have an office, gym and whatever. They also assume SV level salaries, maybe with a 10-15% haircut and think they can live like kings.

But from my personal experience at a company going fully WFH, I can say that those are rosy dreams. I am in a position where I know about the company's hiring plans and salaries. Guess where is a majority of new hires going to come from? Other countries! Guess what will be their salaries? Much lower than what we are offering in the non-SV parts of the US.

If the WFH trend continues, it will do to the plum US tech job market what globalization did to manufacturing. In a WFH setup, someone in Mexico is on the same level as someone in Kansas or SV, but much cheaper.

It is time for tech workers to look out for themselves and root for a failure of WFH trend. Else for the short term king-size lifestyle in your remote corner of the US, you will destroy one of the last remaining well-paying job market in the long term.

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If someone can do what I do here in SV for half the price or less but do it just as well or even better but else where in the world, I don't feel how I'm entitled to my current salary. It's a bit hypocritical for us to bemoan this when software engineers in SV also automated people in other industries out of jobs. People outside of SV, outside of tech, and the US are people too. Don't they also deserve a chance at prosperity and contribution to tech and innovations? I don't know why a fellow software engineer in Mexico shouldn't have a shot at the same jobs as we do here in SV.

My company has started hiring engineers in the Midwest since the pandemic started and they've been awesome additions to our team. There are some great talent to be found among people who simply don't feel so enamored about SV or the Bay Area or simply want to stay where they are. We were drowning in work before and now we have some extra help. I don't see this as a bad trend.

> I don't feel how I'm entitled to my current salary

No one is entitled to anything. It is purely about protecting your bargaining power. Tech peeps should learn from Doctors/AMA. If you aren't vigilant about your privilege, others will be too happy to take that power away from you and enrich themselves. See who benefited from outsourcing manufacturing to China - only the outsourcing companies and Chinese middle class, but at a great loss to American middle class. While I completely understand Chinese middle class to fight for improving its lot, I don't understand why American middle class has to surrender its power so easily.

> We were drowning in work before and now we have some extra help. I don't see this as a bad trend.

LOL we might as well be working at the same company. Wait until you see the proportion of your foreign colleagues increasing. Again, same thing happened with manufacturing. "Oh but we are just seeing cheaper goods in our stores" was what they said in the beginning. And it was too late by the time capital owners established manufacturing elsewhere and drained out all those middle class jobs.

Doesn't this largely improve the american middle class? Most remote workers will still come from the US but from places like Kansas or Ohio.

How do we measure this? Quality of health care available for MC today as opposed to 30 years ago? Quality of education? Home affordability? Cost of living? I thought in the US all these had declined in the last 30 years (in adjusted terms) - i dont know if outsourcing is what caused it though.

By the same logic why not champion the same for exec/middle/upper management too? I am not sure how SWEs "out there" are a better ROI but execs are not?

I’m pretty sure this mentality is what causes the constant gutting of the middle class in the US.

It’s not like the income is distributed equally outside the US. It’s a cost savings. So, they’re gonna spend less and who gets to keep all the money? Exec team.

I actually don't disagree with you but I think there are some nuances that I should clarify. I'm not pro-exec nor super laissez faire, etc. but at the same time I don't think the target of our ire should be our fellow workers in other parts of the country or other countries. I don't know if unions or something else is the answer to this but trying to exclude other workers from getting opportunities seems wrong, especially when executive compensating is so high and many of us are drowning in work.

I guess I find the being “not pro-exec” etc to be contradictory to: “ If someone can do what I do here in SV for half the price or less but do it just as well or even better but else where in the world, I don't feel how I'm entitled to my current salary.” That - to me - is pro-exec talk because at the end of the day… advocating for lower wages is going to go to no one except the execs.

I don’t mind having more people in software. I DO mind when people start advocating for lower wages. There is no reason to lower the wages. We need to rise everyone together - not pull people down from the middle class in the US. (Even $400k engs in USA are still overwhelming middle class because they are wage slaves as much as anyone else is)

Yeah that's a fair point; I can see what I wrote can be read that way. What I really should have wrote is that me and my fellow engineers in SV shouldn't be the only ones holding these jobs and earning these salaries. Tech companies are among the most profitable and can afford to hire more and pay those engineers the same wages as they do in SV.

Have you made these views known to management? I think they would be very interested to learn that someone could do your job for half the price.

I've been sounding this alarm for years, on def ears.

Nobody wants to hear it but the truth has never been more clear. There is a HUGE pool of talented, hungry developers around the world who want YOUR job for 1/4th of your pay.

The second US companies open their doors to those engineers, we will see dramatic decline in SW salaries. What has held this at bay so far as definitely been the companies that don't allow remote work, and, the companies that are unwilling to hire across language or timezone boundaries.

I agree with the OP here that this WFH trend will not be the rosy future many picture it as being. Expect much lower salaries across the board, and possible even less job flexibility here in the US as competition for those positions rises dramatically.

BTW - This is NOT meant as a dig toward developers from outside the US. The point I am trying to make is that they are JUST as qualified, if not MORE qualified, than many here in the US. There's no reason they shouldn't have access to good jobs. It's just been a convenient reality for US engineers that the market has been something of a walled garden. That may change sooner than they'd like to admit.

> companies that are unwilling to hire across language or timezone boundaries

Companies might still be reluctant to hire across language or time zone boundaries. It might be explicit, but more likely it'll be less conscious resistance among interviewers and attrition among the "odd ones out" themselves. The result's practically the same. And if the bulk of the team is in US/Pacific, then same time zone doesn't include many other countries.

I think the job market is going to soften, but not totally collapse. Some jobs will shift to other countries for much less money (as has been going on for decades BTW). Some will shift outside SV but still within the US for slightly less money.

South America is an obvious choice for anybody concerned about time zones.

But you have language issues. Canada could supply 5% but salaries are about the same.

Amen, brother. Well said and I hope we are able to defeat this trend.

If someone earning half your salary is able to satisfy everything that you offered to the company, I think the problem is not what you mentioned but it is a reflection of inflated salaries in the valley.

I think it is a good thing if this happens. This salary inflation has made it impossible for anyone else to afford living there. It will also help curb the entitlement that valley IT employees carry around thinking that they are always changing the world.

If this problem was only narrowly applicable to SV, then yes, you might have a point. I am talking about a majority of new hires being in other countries. At that point, to spite SV rich techies, you are rooting for destruction of a good pool of middle class jobs for the entire US. Is that really what you want?

> I am talking about a majority of new hires being in other countries.

That would be no different from the mid-2000s outsourcing trend, which never really worked out either. There were just lots and lots of horror stories where quality and productivity would take a nosedive whenever those outsourced teams were involved.

But that time, we were outsourcing whole projects which was doomed to fail because of collaboration hurdles and a lack of context. This time is different - we are hiring one team member at a time, who are equally effective as other team members, except at 1/3 price.

I have seen both, 2000's outsourcing and what is happening now. It is a very different game now and far more dangerous to US techies.

I don't see how this is not already happening pre-WFH: most big tech companies have offices in Ukraine, Belarus, India, China, etc with "low cost" tech workers.

Because a lot of talent was in office and when a majority of your team is in office and a small minority remote, that remote minority has no chance of catching up to the productivity of in-person team. Be it SV vs Atlanta or SV vs Budapest. I saw that first hand in my 15+ years in this industry.

But with WFH, it is an even playing field. As long as everyone is in a similar timezone and logging in from their home and collaborating via Zoom or Slack, productivity differential vanishes. Why do you think you are seeing a sudden flood of biggish companies going fully remote now?

Like many things Pandemic related, this isn’t creating a new trend but rather accelerating trends already under way.

Push for WFH at your peril.

Has been happening since the 2000s

Tech salaries still went up.

I think one reason why wages might not decrease is communication speed. My team works with folks in Europe and Singapore, and while the asynchronous communication works and we love our teammates the time delay can be killer. Worse, if you do need to speak realtime you need to hop on meetings at odd hours. Who wants to do that? It might be cheaper, but if cost reduction was a factor I feel like we’d already have done it. I think communication speed will minimize any salary impact by a globalized talent pool.

US domestic competition is a concern, but my hunch is that even with the wider talent pool companies will still have trouble recruiting and good developers will still have leverage over not needing to move. I think it would be interesting to find numbers on how concentrated developers are in expensive cities, I know plenty of people who moved to California for the work.

Also, if my wage suddenly decreased to match levels with places that are cheaper to live in I’d probably have to move away from all my friends and now family as I wouldn’t be able to afford to live where I currently do (SV). That would suck, and I think it’s fair that I feel concern over losing that. Not sure where all the negativity in this thread is coming from.

I am not worried about Europe or Asia. But I am seeing a lot of headcount being placed into other countries in Americas - Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia... at that point, someone in Colombia is far cheaper than someone in Kansas (I know, I have seen the salaries offered for both).

The point is that your ENTIRE team will be in Europe or Singapore so there will be no time delay between them ... the US team/person will be the odd man out

Hot take: if you're a mediocre dev, maybe be worried; if you're in a niche and have deep expertise you'll be fine.

This has a flywheel effect where once you start gathering critical mass in a place, the original experts lose their edge eventually. See what happened to manufacturing, where China is leaps and bounds ahead of Western nations.

You haven't seen any european factories did you? They are proper high-tech in comparison to your average chinese one.

What people might not realise that manufacturing is still going on in Europe and US. It's just that less people are working in factories. Output is 'more' than in decades before. Automation and all that.

> less people are working

i think that's kind of his point

Not in this case though as unemployment in the last decade is at its lowest in developed world.

Lot of that employment is under-employment like Uber/Doordash/Instacart contractors and nowhere close to well-paying manufacturing jobs of the prior generation

> See what happened to manufacturing, where China is leaps and bounds ahead of Western nations.

Wait, no they aren't. They do a lot of labor-intensive, non-specialized manufacturing but other countries are still way ahead where it matters.

That’s what barrel makers told the horseshoe fitters :)

From Wikipedia In some countries, such as the UK, horseshoeing is legally restricted to people with specific qualifications and experience

> That’s what barrel makers told the horseshoe fitters :)

I'm not following - can you explain the analogy?

OP said "if you're in a niche and have deep expertise you'll be fine". The analogy apparently means that deep expertise in a particular field won't guarantee your employment when that field is not in demand anymore.

I think the cat is out of the bag on this one already, regardless of whether "WFH" is here to stay or not.

I can't help but feel a bit sad about it. The pay and perks were honestly obscene(ly good), but the best part was not being treated as expendable. Friends in other career paths talk about horrible managers/PIs/advisors and working conditions in law, academia, etc. I think because it's so hard to hire a good dev, I've been treated really well by my bosses up to this point. Or maybe I got lucky.

Anyway, I hope that doesn't go away just because the talent pool is widening. I liked being treated like a human.

But outsourcing already exists, with well known pros and cons. I would be a bit surprised if this WFH thing meant that everything went offshore.

There is still a huge culture gap to bridge that sure enough some firms will try, but enough others will not. Even hiring an English speaker in India would put off a fair number of people, and that's despite us all knowing that IIT grads are pretty smart.

What I do think will happen is this will turn out to be a win for experienced devs and a lose for new grads. I can now hire a semi retired guy (or gal) who wants to live in the countryside and pick up his kids each day, for something that we can negotiate to suit us both comfortably.

The grad is gonna have problems, because I don't come across a lot of people who think they can be trained at home. They need that injection of culture that is a bit of leap into the deep end of the pool for most people when they start working.

Exactly, WFH is different to outsourcing, offshoring, etc.

If it is so easy for US companies to hire good remote developers en masse from places where it is cheaper to live than it is in the major US tech hubs, then why did US companies not start doing it years ago? Are the people who run software companies so cautious that it took mass enforced work from home to make them decide that hiring cheap developers remotely could actually work? I have some doubts about this. Maybe hiring good cheap remote developers is not as easy as it seems.

They do it a lot. The whole India outsourcing story is about exactly this.

Your arguments really need a jump in logic to be accepted.

They also completely fall apart when you realize two things:

Offshoring has been happening for decades. H1B abuse has been happening for decades.

Yet salaries rose.

I explained the big difference this time here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27697067 )and here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27697088 )

Summary: outsourcing was never really going to work due to collaboration hurdles. Current model is to replace one US-worker at a time with a non-US-worker from the same timezone. Much more effective and much more lethal to US workers.

I think your argument both proves my point and contradicts yours.

You assert that collaboration hurdles stops outsourcing. A point that I do not agree with, but if it was true, to outsource one person at a time requires remote collaboration tools between two teams that honestly wouldn't be that much more different than WFH to train and collaborate.

Once again, you assert a lot of things without providing evidence besides your own testimony that is what your current employer is doing and your experience that in-person teams are more effective.

I could assert my own experience dealing with open offices being too noisy to program in, in-building construction, employees making office chatter around you, or senior engineers needing to fly out to attend events, investor meetings, or sales; and you have to collaborate by zoom anyway.

You also treat other countries legal, language, and cultural barriers as if they are not material. And trust me, they are.

So its not nice working amongst people who can be even more talented and picked from a wider pool of people?

Nope, it's much nicer to maintain your relative power and privilege. Stop being altruistic and learn from Doctors. If you don't fight for your power, it will be snatched from you and no one will care about you. Just ask all the former workers in the manufacturing sector in midwest, whose only available career option now is to work at a Walmart. Do you think it is "nice" for them to compete with a global pool of manufacturing workers? Why should they care about the middle class opportunities in foreign countries when their own life is in peril now?

> Stop being altruistic and learn from Doctors.

I did not get reference. Can you explain a bit about it?

The AMA is a very effective lobbying group which has made it difficult for people to decrease doctors' wages by advocating restrictions on the number of doctors, making it extremely difficult to convert foreign credentials in medicine into US ones, and so on. They also are largely responsible for killing the earliest efforts at a national healthcare system on the theory that a single payer would use its negotiating power to reduce payments to medical providers.

Unless you also buy things that are more expensive (not 5% but 2-5x more pricey) simply because they're made in the US your argument holds no weight.

You would have the cushey job because of the 'power' for a while. But it has nothing to do with altruism - to win you need to adapt and have the best product or service.

Naive to think that's why US wages are high.

Difference from high wages and good product. There's a reason iPhones aren't made in the US

Labor is different from goods. People are absolutely getting different wages for the exact same work in different places.

This will happen anyways. It’s already too late. All I can say is that networking will be more important than ever and that client-facing positions might be saved. This will be bad for the US workers but amazing for the rest of the world. It will be a great equalizer.

What prevented the high-paying SV companies from just opening offices in low-cost countries before the pandemic? From my point of view people who establish hiring process in those companies guarantee their job-security by leetcode-style interviews with some "cultural fit" sprinkled on top. People outside of SV-bubble (e.g. all your normal devs, including very smart ones) are not accustomed to reversing AVL trees on whiteboard in 20 minutes and preparing stories from their previous jobs according to STAR.

I don't understand the proposal. Let's say everyone on HN suddenly stops praising WFH. So what? Are companies going to stop outsourcing? Are legislations going to stop being passed?

Then what value are you bring to the table? What will keep a company from replacing you? Companies will spend the money to keep top-tier employees. What’s going to set you apart?

In California, people complain that “immigrants are stealing all the jobs”. If your job can be stolen by an immigrant, you’re not doing a very good job.

If your company can replace you by hiring off-shore, you’re not doing a very good job.

And I say this as someone who once lost their job to an off-shore worker. It was a real wake-up call.

I'm in SV.

What a horrible take. Globalization of tech jobs is net positive for the whole world including the US. We're all gonna have more thing made cheaper and faster, isn't that great?

I can see how you can argue it's not the case with some industries, e.g steel and coal (see poverty in Appalachia), because it's hurting those communities. But this is tech, we already have it way too easy.

I say let's double down on the whole WFH thing instead and bring opportunity to people all around the world.

Hahaha... for a moment, I thought you were being sarcastic. But in case you are serious, please go and study the decline of manufacturing and the plight of manufacturing workers and how their lives were ruined because of globalization. I certainly don't want that for me. I care for my own comfort first, because no one else is going to.

Hence my comment about steel and coal. I get it, globalization is not always great. But like, we're not in the same situation here. Even if it's a totally level playing field you and I will be fine. Do you really think your life is going to be ruined if you take a 30% pay cut?

Or do you think it's going to be more than 30%?

I think it will be much more than 30% based on the numbers I am seeing offered to other non-US developers who are equally good.

> What a horrible take. Globalization of tech jobs is net positive for the whole world including the US. We're all gonna have more thing made cheaper and faster, isn't that great?

That will definitely hinder the progress of local companies who will miss out on good talent.

Sure, it's beneficial for some and not beneficial for others.

US employers win some

US employees lose some

Oversees employers lose some

Oversees employees win some

---

But it's going to be a net positive for the whole world because everybody else wins because they get better products and services at better prices.

Not true, the net positive is just a hypothesis, in reality they will become bonus and stock grant for the execs

> We're all gonna have more thing made cheaper and faster, isn't that great?

Not really, if the savings come at our expense.

What percentage of a pay decrease would you accept to work from home? If your job said come into the office, or take a 30% cut and work from home, would you do it?

Here is how CFO and finance people are thinking: 1. give only 15% pay cut -> 2. train people to WFH -> 3. build all the necessary systems to make WFH effective -> 4. Leverage those systems and start hiring new workers, for much cheaper than the cheapest US workers, from other countries one at a time -> 5. Stop hiring within US

My company is already on 4 and may soon move to 5. Is that a future you want? You may take a 15-20% paycut and enjoy your suburban luxury lifestyle for a few years. Beyond that, as the WFH from foreign countries kicks in, you will see that there won't be many job openings at a high salary for your role.

If I were making above 100k then yes and I would locate either in a cheap rural area or another country with affordable cost of life. My SO works in construction so that won’t happen. No WFH there.

Zero pay cut. Why should a person take a pay cut in exchange for being more effective at home?

Because I would take your job for a pay cut, if it let me be completely remote.

People have been worried about this since the 90s. But it hasn't stopped compensation from increasing dramatically.

Demand for software work is only increasing. The more software we create, the more valuable marginal software becomes. The total number of software engineers has doubled every 5 years for a long time. Of course that won't continue forever but there's no reason to think it will stop very soon either. For a long time employers have been unable to hire enough to meet demand (the marginal engineer at the top tech companies adds something like $500k-1m in value).

I would guess that increasing WFH will cause at most a modest slowing of compensation increases. I would be very surprised if it led to any decrease. In the long term it will only be a minor factor, the bigger things to worry about are general economic trends and things like better tools (even AI?) making the job more accessible and easier to learn.

Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

See my other comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27697067

“People have been worried about this since the 90s. But it hasn't stopped compensation from increasing dramatically.”

Software devs a few years out of university in places like Atlanta and Boston made 100k 20 years ago. How much more do they make now? Not much more. You must be thinking like a myopic Silicon Valley FAANG fan.

I was actually a fresh college grad a little over 20 years ago, and I can tell you we were not making even close to $100K. Maybe a few who lucked into Microsoft or SGI or something, but not the vast, vast majority. My first salary was $45K with no stock, back in 1998, which felt absolutely amazing and already put me far above the median US worker.

The inflation calculator says that would be $74,317.64 in today's dollars. Not too bad.

Also, in '96, it was a standard joke on sgi.bad-attitude about the interchangeability of stock and toilet paper.

I'm not sure that anyone who got options from SGI in the late 90s made a profit on them.

I'll also note that making $45k at Taos (doing tech support at SGI), I was making more than my father was at the time.

> Software devs a few years out of university in places like Atlanta and Boston made 100k 20 years ago.

I've never worked in Atlanta or Boston but that does not sound right. Unless those cities were paying well over Silicon Valley salaries back then. Which I doubt.

20 years ago I was in Silicon Valley, already with a handful of years experience, at a top company and certainly not making 100K yet. Maybe I was super underpaid but according to the salary bands (which the company published) I was somewhat over the median.

The SV compensation explosion first into the mid 100s and then into the stratosphere started later than that. In the late 90s into the dot com bust, software engineering was a well paying job but nothing special compared to other professsional jobs.

Good. If lots of US companies with lots of money start competing for tech workers worldwide, in places like Mexico or India, and they have to start paying more, well... that's the Free Market (tm). And good news for workers in those places.

Its not that simple. To make it as a one percenter here in South Africa you have to take home a little over $40k a year. The CEO's of most of the smaller tech firms probably take home less than the starting salary of a US FAANG developer.

There is a limit to how much those salaries can increase before the company goes out of business.

The company I work for has lost a good few staff to EU companies recently. I presume their staff have been moving to US ones.

I fully agree its the Free Market and I'm not sure I would change it if I could but that doesn't mean it isn't painful for everyone.

Want to fight that? Unless you're part of the donor class and can contribute to one or both of the dominant US political parties, don't bother with protectionism.

Globalization did not end US manufacturing. It Just made it easy to move low-skilled (and dirty) jobs to other countries. The manufacturing sector here in America is highly specialized and thriving now. Try turning software into real engineering to get the same benefit.

Not donor class and not up to being an engineer? Well even non-engineers can organize. Unionize your workplace.

Don't like those ideas? The mere fact that there are more responses than mere protectionism suggests that there may even be more possibilities.

This is a very self-centered and US-centric attitude. You assume that everyone who wants to work from home only does it to have a "king-like lifestyle". Some of us don't have the privilege to be able to get non-remote jobs that easily, for example because we live in another country and traveling/moving isn't an option, or because of many other factors like social anxiety making remote work much less stressful and allows us to be more productive, especially if given the option to just write in a text chat (e.g. Slack) rather than forcing verbal communication, eye contact and all.

But if you have to live in SF or NYC to earn those salaries, those salaries are not actually that high.

I mean isn't $150k in the Bay Area a poverty wage? Can you get a starter home for less than $1M?

If everyone has to be in one of a few cities to have a good job, the cost of real estate in those cities will explode to the point that it will soak up all that advantage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent

I make $150K not counting stock (which I am holding, not selling) in San Francisco. I don't feel poor. I live a comfortable lifestyle that makes me feel almost rich compared to others, I feel grateful and fortunate. Sure, I am a little frugal, but I am quite comfortable.

Obviously my overall outlook probably be a lot worse if I didn't have stock in the picture. But I'm still able to live well and save well with my cash salary, so I don't think "poverty wages" is accurate.

I have outsourced IT work to Moldova, Slovenia, Spain, India of course. Here is the lowdown: huge rotation of staff, the offshore team is basically a Boot-Camp for fresh grads. Then political instability and cultural surprises, most often hidden animosity between sub-groups, pops up and turn the headache factor to 11. As of now I think that any offshoring strategy that does not include a clear climate-risk mitigation plan is out of touch.

I haven't looked into this particularly deeply, but from what I can tell, many major tech companies have made more revenue per developer the higher their developer count has gotten.

To my mind, this also matches the tendency of big tech companies to always be hiring, often with no specific positions to fill, and of the incredible wage increase over time. And the manner in which we build upon each others' work makes some sense of this as well.

Its really not that easy to build teams in dramatically different geographic locations. Ignoring all the legal waters you have to navigate you typically slow down output while your management complexity explodes. Not saying it can't be done. Just that in my experience it typically doesn't have the effect people initially think it will.

And that is the point. You are not building teams. You are hiring one member at a time for a team in my company. Just that most of the new members will be from Canada or Colombia going forward, and not from Atlanta or SV. And they are equally effective because of the same timezone unlike Europe or Asia. How long before our CFO crunches the numbers and stops US headcount completely?

You've got a massive headstart advantage over anyone born in countries like India or Mexico, and the actually good developers in those countries can command higher salaries (and demand h1b visas and a path to US citizenship) as well.

What if the Government tightens rules for job offshoring? We already have strict norms for H1B which politicians would love to harden further if it suits their voters.

Would they though? The interests of their donors are different.

Two of the biggest hurdles with remote work are work efficiency problems due to timezones, and culture fit in business. I don't see any solutions to that.

It makes sense what you're saying. But "rooting for" one outcome or another doesn't do anything.

This might surprise you but Americans aren't the only people on this forum.

But I guess it's okay to leave us all out to pasture if it means you can concentrate just a bit more of wealth.

What is described here is why I am hopeful about wider WFH in USA and general. Precisely because it can result in some jobs moving to poorer countries, including mine.

(I am from Poland and some informatics/programming is outsourced here already from USA)

Also, OP, the world is bigger than just the American continent :)

yes - thats why i'm hopeful for a decent paying (by my standards) job with a US company

Bring it on!!

> But I guess it's okay to leave us all out to pasture if it means you can concentrate just a bit more of wealth.

If we're speaking of things like employment, of course people should look out for their own self-interest. Proposing the opposite is to propose suicide.

The people of Norway should donate their trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund to Togo? As opposed to continuing to concentrate their extraordinary wealth figure and continuing to act in their own national self-interest. Togo only has eight million people, imagine how rich all the people of Togo could be if Norway weren't so selfish.

Next you might want to convince all the world's great economies to drop all trade restrictions and stop protecting themselves.

Then take the next logical step: stop protecting all workers from big globalist corporations, drop all labor laws and protections.

You conveniently misrepresented an opinion and then ran it to the most illogical conclusion possible.

Saying the most highly paid US workers take a 10% pay cut if it means other economies rose above the poverty line is absolutely fine in my opinion. If you think that is akin to starving the entire US population so my country can live like Sheikhs, I feel like that's on you.

> If you think that is akin to starving the entire US population so my country can live like Sheikhs, I feel like that's on you.

Talk about jumping 27 places in terms of drawing artificial conclusions.

I got to see, up close, what deindustrialization looks like, during the 1980s and 1990s in the US. Its consequences are intensely negative on the population it affects. Allowing the US tech industry to be outsourced to save big corporations money, would be an identical repeat of the stupidity of what the US intentionally allowed to happen to its industrial empire - in the name of globalist corporations boosting their margins - in the second half of the 20th century.

If you want to see what a selfish industrial policy looks like, look no further than Germany. They protected their industry, they acted in their own national self-interest, and their people have benefited enormously from it over the last few decades.

The very fact that we're talking about remote work undercuts the comparison to deindustrialization. When a factory closed in a U.S. town and a new one opened in China, those displaced workers had no option to compete for those jobs at the new factory. They were lucky if they could compete for any related jobs without moving across the country. To work in a factory you simply have to live next to the factory; there's no way around that.

Whereas in software, the very mechanism that opens the job market to people in other countries ensures that it stays open for people in the U.S. We're not going to see a gutting, we're going to see a balancing. The door won't be shut on the way out. If cost of living makes it hard for U.S. workers to compete, it will probably also come down quite a bit, seeing as tech workers have been one of the huge drivers of its recent increase in the first place.

>I got to see, up close, what deindustrialization looks like, during the 1980s and 1990s in the US.

I don't have the same experience so I can't argue it.

> Allowing the US tech industry to be outsourced would be an identical repeat of the stupidity of what the US intentionally allowed to happen to its industrial empire

And yet it seems to me that you're doing rather well as an economy all these years later. Wasn't the capitalist argument that the size of the pie is not fixed or some such?

They keep changing the narrative on that. It depends who benefits and where they can move their money and industry.

> And yet it seems to me that you're doing rather well as an economy all these years later.

1/4 to 1/3 of the country did well, that much is true. If you're in that group, you're among the best off people on the planet, generally.

> Wasn't the capitalist argument that the size of the pie is not fixed or some such?

The pie does indeed expand, sometimes substantially. Otherwise we couldn't have nearly eight billion people that are better off at the median than at any other time in recorded history. The examples of vast national improvement from around the world the past 30-40 years are prolific.

The pertinent question usually is: who is extracting what share of the expanded pie. Where is it going, to how many people, due to what policies/reasons.

In the US, the tech boom has produced eight people now worth one trillion dollars collectively. That's equivalent to the bottom 100 million (!) having an additional $10,000. Obviously not a trivial sum, in other words, compacted into just eight people. It has also produced 1.47 million software developers yielding a median salary of $110,000 per year (1.47m is 1/2 of 1% of the US adult population).

Tech is particularly potent at concentrating wealth, for various reasons (often rapid growth, global reach and winner-take-most outcomes).

The US middle class has not thrived over the last half century. The US, for the better part of a century (post Civil War up to the early to mid 1970s), had an elite middle class outcome. That is no longer true, the US middle class outcome has receded vs many of its peers.

You conveniently missed my argument. If things are going to stop at a 10% cut, I won't be sounding alarm. But a majority of our new hires are going to come from non-US countries. There is barely any new hires joining within the US. That is the big red warning sign that our job opportunities might dwindle because others can do the same job as us for much cheaper.

This is manufacturing story all over again.

> Proposing the opposite is to propose suicide.

That feels extreme... I don't think the opposite of "some jobs will leave the US" is "I'm going to kill myself".

Ditto the rest of your post. Nothing but a bunch of straw man/ slippery slope.

You didn't actually say anything in retort. Merely saying ditto, or saying that something is supposedly a straw-man, isn't a supported position, it's the lack of supporting your position/claims.

It's particularly obvious "suicide" is meant as a figure of speech, although frankly it's not too far from the truth, given what deindustrialization (loss of very large numbers of manufacturing jobs) did to large swaths of the US. It did in fact cause large increases in suicide numbers, along with a horror show of other consequences / fallout. I doubt anybody is confused over the dire consequences of what happened across the US as manufacturing jobs got wiped out.

Yeah, I don't have to have a substantive response to a strawman.

Companies should also look out for their self interest and employ the best possible talent at the lowest possible cost

… While simultaneously living under the umbrella of the US taxpayers who fund a monster US defense department that sends young Americans to secure resources for these corporations by killing countless people in defenseless nations.

I heard that same thing in the 90' about outsourcing.

Adapt or be gone.

And those warnings proved to be true for a bunch of people. Kind of the point, isn't it?

I don't like my salary going down any more than everyone else where, but how are we going to save the planet without reducing carbon emissions and shouldering some of the resulting impact on our personal lives?

What’s that gotta do with this discussion?

WFH -> less cars on the street?

Disagree. More Americanization and consumption spread to the rest of the world will devastate the environment.

How did we suddenly go from WF to Americanizing the world and increasing consumption? WFH is an American thing now??

“I don't like my salary going down any more than everyone else where, but how are we going to save the planet without reducing carbon emissions and shouldering some of the resulting impact on our personal lives?”

Increase income of poor countries via remote work increases consumption which increases pollution. Furthermore, jobs going from US to other countries may still be performed in offices further negating benefits of less cars on the road.

I'm not in SV. I'm not even in the US. Unlucky lol. Welcome back to earth.

Half your salary is still a massive raise for me and I'm pretty well paid by UK standards. Viva la WFH.

Putting a dent into global poverty is a good thing, by the way. Bonus if they're paying you less they can hire more people overall too, even better.

Well at least it'll curb some entitlement from the current IT crowd. A lot of IT people making 4x more than people of other professions assume that they are the cream of the crop and sincerely believe that their work is so hard that they deserve to have a 4 hour working day (because it is 'impossible' on being productive for a longer period of time in a day).

No. People in other areas work just as hard, or harder, it's just their industries are not that trendy. Just like IT was in 80s - and developers where geeks who were paid not much more than other white collar jobs.

We should pull other professions up, not pull IT down. Else we will close more doors to a middle class life.

Pulling up other industries isn't something that you 'do'. It happens (or not) naturally, when the industry is growing and generates more wealth. Often at the expense of other people, I must add. Disastrous healthcare situation in the US is actually very lucrative for people in Health and Insurance industries.

The question of working 4 hours is more like 4 hours of intense work and honestly nobody in any industry could consistently put more than 4 hours a day without burning themselves up (or they’re some type A personality and feel miserable not working every single waking moment of their lives). Second, the IT industry has some of the highest burnout rates, that must have something to do with the amount of work put in, don’t you think?

> Second, the IT industry has some of the highest burnout rates, that must have something to do with the amount of work put in, don’t you think?

Citation needed? I don't see IT anywhere on this list... https://stress.lovetoknow.com/Which_Professionals_are_Prone_...

oh cry me a river of tears. You obviously have no idea of what it is like to work 8-12 hours a day, for 6 days a week, of constant concentration for days, turning to months, turning to years on end.

Get real - you've been spoilt and have no clue of how others earn a living

That looks like a problem you can solve by changing the company which is relatively easy in Tech/IT.

That type of thing is one of the reasons I moved to Mexico about 3 years ago.

Your post seems more nationalist than anything else.

I’ve worked at a geo-distributed company for a long while and let me tell you: The diversity of viewpoints and experiences will make your teams stronger, happier and more resilient. That culture needs to be consciously built though. That won’t happen in and of itself. But it’s so, so worth it.

To anyone else reading this: Don’t buy into the "us versus them" rhetoric. It will lead you down a dark path.

Your post is all sorts of wrong.

- It’s nationalistic to defend the income of your fellow Americans? If it is, then everyone should be a nationalist.

- Geo diversity improves the company? How come? Language barriers, cultural barriers, time zone barriers, in person location barriers, the list goes on.

You just threw in some buzz words without any substance.

> - It’s nationalistic to defend the income of your fellow Americans?

Yes, that's (part of) the definition of nationalism.

> If it is, then everyone should be a nationalist.

No, they really shouldn't. For the same reason that we shouldn't all be trying to sabotage each other trying to improve our own status.

> - Geo diversity improves the company? How come?

He described exactly how. You may have had a different experience personally, but that doesn't mean he's wrong. There have been numerous studies showing that diverse groups produce better results than homogeneous ones, for exactly the reasons he described.

Are you willing to give up some of your salary to hire people in other poorer countries than where you live? Would you rather your neighbors and family get good jobs and/or training for good jobs? Or would you rather those jobs go to people in another country? Are you a “dirtball nationalist” going down a “dark path” for wanting people in your community to get these jobs?

Personally most of my neighbours have jobs that can't be outsourced due to the fact they're physical jobs.

Yes I'd love it if they had the training to get good jobs, and the great news there is -- they've already been there and done it! :)

Yes I'd absolutely give up some of my salary, assuming it's a fair question and not "haha well you wouldn't give up half of your salary to hire someone so I'm right" yea I don't give up half my salary to pave the roads either, it's a group effort!

Must be nice living in a utopian society where physical jobs pay as well as knowledge workers. In such a place, your community can easily give up some of their salary. Not sure your community is representative of most in the world however.

I feel like you've deliberately missed the point at multiple levels to get some snark in so just to jump right to the core: Silicon Valley salary is the utopian society you're so snarkily describing, and as OP has pointed out it's coming to an end.

The majority of the world is not on SV wages, so yeah they pay "as well as knowledge workers" in that none of the above pays nearly as much as you're thinking outside of your utopian society bubble. Trade jobs (electrician, plumber, etc) can earn equivalent or more in the real world :)

That's all well and good until you're the one who loses your job. Then you can root for the non-US worker's family who got your job for half the salary. Enjoy your American-owned employer making more money for its stockholders and executives while it continues not paying taxes, to a country that doesn't federally provide basic social services.

There is something to be said for watching out for your community. The only reason to be hyper-free-market is if you're an owner of the means of production.

---

To be clear, I also work for an international company and I have nothing against any colleagues. I simply think it's naive to not be wary of a sudden, further erosion of the middle class if companies dump the US as the primary source of high-skilled work.

---

edit: I resent HN throttling posts for 40+ minutes, so I'll respond to corobo here: I am criticizing the US. I am suggesting that American companies will save money while letting their host country rot.

This rhetoric may make sense when the job market is gutted, there's a much larger supply of qualified tech workers than demand, and we've reached a global maxima that forces us all into a zero sum competition for capital (think coke vs. Pepsi). That will definitely push pay down.

However, that's almost the opposite of where we are now. The demand for tech workers is growing, and that greens will likely continue for decades as the world upgrades to a modern digital infrastructure. That means that salaries will still rise, none will still be readily available, and the pie if high paying positions will likely increase.

There may also be a solid market for "blue collar" engineers. Folks who build basic but necessary programs. It's not machine learning, but it will pay the bills and potentially lift more families into the middle class around the globe

So they should wait until all the negative things come to pass before warning about them?

I have two takes, one the substance of your comment, and another the format it takes.

First, the substance: Of course not. It's healthy to analyze the pros and cons of any significant change to a system. We're definitely in the rose-colored-glasses part of WFH. There will absolutely be negative consequences. My main argument is that given the current supply of tech workers vs. demand for tech workers, and the likelihood of there needing to be more - not fewer - tech jobs in the future, the comment's dystopian vision is unlikely to occur any time soon. The time to start sounding alarms is when the acceleration curve for the growth of jobs vs. available workers becomes consistently negative. That's the first sign a trend is starting to reverse. We definitely aren't there, so it seems reasonable to call OP's rhetoric hyperbolic at best.

Secondly, I've noticed a trend on HN where folks post an open-ended, contradictory question in response to something that they disagree with or don't like. This implies that that parent comment is somehow flawed, but doesn't actually provide much substance in the form of concrete thoughts or opinions. It invites readers to fill in the blanks without ever challenging their (or the original author's) ideas. And it generally invites a flame war instead of a healthy dialogue or debate.

Apologies if this wasn't your intention. Given how open-ended the question is, I don't have much to work with :p. If you do have opinions about why either of my ideas are flawed, I'm definitely interested in hearing them!

Well, to rephrase my idea in declarative form, my concern is that by the time that trend becomes apparent, it may be too late to do anything about it. Developers have more leverage now than when they're no longer needed. Of course there isn't any real call to action being made here so maybe it doesnt matter in that sense. And full remote still does not seem to be what most employers are looking for.

Yeah, that's definitely a risk. I just think we're far enough from that at the moment that it's premature to do much besides acknowledge that it could happen at some point.

I'm really curious to see whether or not wages actually end up rising for everyone because of WFH. Up to now, employers have been able to use location and either cost of living or cost of labor as the argument for paying people less than in the Bay. That's starting to fall apart in the current market, which will push wages higher everywhere. All of the sudden, the Bay needs to pay every higher to convince people to move there.

I'm not convinced that'll be the outcome, but it wouldn't surprise me once the labor market becomes a lot more liquid. The kind of multiples software development brings to a business is just so much higher than current salaries

> to a country that doesn't federally provide basic social services

Mate if you're going to try that one don't be defending America with it haha. Gofundme campaigns are a part of your healthcare system..

e: acknowledging your edit and comment, throttling for downvotes does suck. I wont force a back and forth through edits.

> Mate if you're going to try that one don't be defending America with it haha. Gofundme campaigns are a part of your healthcare system.

Why not? The US has an enormous welfare state, one of the biggest and most expensive in the world in fact.

Which isn't the same thing as pretending the US has a well-run and efficient welfare state, which it does not.

Fun fact: the US spends more of its economy on its welfare state, than either Canada or Australia do, and just below Switzerland. That's simultaneously a testament to how massive the US welfare state has become, and how poor its efficiency often is (what with our world-topping per capita healthcare costs, nobody gets less bang for the buck on welfare spending than the US).

The bottom 24%-28% (depending on the year) in the US receive free healthcare, which costs north of $700 billion per year. Medicaid alone costs around $650 billion now. The US further has an array of other free and subsidized healthcare programs, at the local/state/federal levels, and I suspect most foreigners are entirely ignorant that any of it exists.

The various government systems of the US spend $9-$10 trillion per year, depending on the year, or roughly 40%-45% of the economy. Did you think that was all going to military spending?

If jobs start going to other countries we should bring them back by investing in education and producing the best devs in the world. If we can't compete, good for whoever beats us.

Trying to hoard the jobs won't work in the long run anyway.

The US does produce the best devs in the world already; of course many of those devs are students of the top American universities from other countries. Furthermore, many of those students are not poor in their home countries and come from privileged backgrounds.

The main discussion aside, there is a living cost that education doesn’t bridge.

If you are living in say London plumbers, mechanics, housing, eggs are more expensive than in say Vietnam.

you can be paid more in London and have a lower quality of life

I feel it was long overdue for the market to correct this anomaly. I believe there have been some synergies in concentrating geeks in one place but it just went out of control.

How will that help ? A person living in city x needs to be paid y to have a z quality of life. In another city they would need to be paid another amount to have the same quality of life. Zero to do with their occupation

Salary is not about providing a certain level of quality of life for an employee. It is about the value the employee can create for the company. There part of the value can be due to the synergies of being physically close. In the mid term the salary will be dependent on what the employee brings to the table and not how expensive his lifestyle is (at least in companies that will do well in the long term)

That is true from the company's perspective but from a community's perspective pretty disastrous.

> you will destroy one of the last remaining well-paying job market in the long term.

Speaking of the long term, it's not hard to imagine it is doomed no matter what individuals choose.

SV exists because there was no efficient way to collaborate remotely. WFH still sucks today, but is much better than before. There are countless startups are trying to fix this, therefore it will get better gradually. Eventually, SV won't make sense anymore other than a cultural symbol, because the high-quality and cheaper talents reserve is all around the world.

Companies will take advantage of things when they see fit, and that does not depends too much on the choice of individuals. The question left is when will it happen rather than will or will not.

“There are countless startups are trying to fix this, therefore it will get better gradually.”

Better how? By making WFH more like working in an office?

It could be, since it might give the employer some subjective confidence. Though I'm not a big fan of the idea... But it seems like an Okayish idea for the transition period.

Many people are trying to tackle this, so their approaches and values provided should be pretty diversed. There are also possibilities that people came up with something really "remote native".

Why do you hate the global poor?

He/she doesn't. SW developers are not poor anywhere in the World. And what he says is not "don't enable jobs for non-US citizens, because I hate them", he says "..., because we will earn less money". It's a completely different motivation.

So the right question would be:

"Why do you oppose hiring devs (who are upper-middle everywhere in the world) elsewhere?"

And the answer is obviously: "Because it will push salaries down."

Personally, I think it's normal. SW development will be done remotely more and more in the future. Those, who want to build a moat, should probably focus on HW or firmware development.

They didn't write that anywhere.

ok, 2005.

It's inevitable the playing field will be leveled, and we never deserved the advantage to begin with.

The US more than earned the advantage. It built half of the global tech industry from the ground up.

Shall I begin listing all the consequential technologies that were invented in the US in the post WW2 era? It's an exceptionally long, comprehensive list, spanning from the GUI to the router to the microprocessor to Unix to the transistor to the LED and LCD to DSP to ethernet to RAM to hypertext to streaming media to the digital modem to the PC modem to the cable modem to the modern laser to the supercomputer to the personal computer & mobile computer to the PDA to digital graphics to virtual reality to USB to the cellphone & smartphone to the IBM hard drive & solid state storage to fiber optics to email to GPS to the relational database to Java & C & C++ & JavaScript & Basic to TCP/IP to the spreadsheet to the digital camera to the lithium ion battery all the way down to the mouse. And a zillion more things.

To pretend that the US didn't earn its advantage, is plain bunk. The entire tech industry rides on the shoulders of what the US built up over the past six decades.

That way, the entire world owes India for inventing 0.

Past inventions don't count as brownie points in the present

C++ was invented by Bjarne Stroustrup who is Danish. But otherwise your list is mostly accurate.

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