Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

No diploma here - still have recruiters from at least 3 of the 5 messaging me.

Edit: downvoters, care to explain a little? Why would they waste their time on me if they weren't interested in me working there?

I've worked at both Amazon and Microsoft. I'm not even an HS graduate. I worked my way in through contract gigs until I was able to get an FTE role. After the first one, moving to another place was no big deal. I was asked about it by HR only to make sure their records were correct and never heard of it again.

You can, but in France you would have to go freelance, as I did.

There would be no way to charge what I make if I were an employee. In fact, most companies would not give me the level of responsability I had as a junior freelance, even today.

And yet, it's better in IT than in any other field. You already make more money, and the requirements are relaxed compared to other sectors.

I some countries, like the UK (well, brexited now), it can be better. But you'll also most likely be working for a bank.

Europe is very diverse in customs and practices. In certain European countries credentialism is not really that big of a deal. In some others it's really uptight.

Your example is unlikely in Europe, but the importance of the degree depends on the type of company. For banks or older industrial companies, a degree is mandatory. Contacts/networks also play a part and can compensate weaker degrees.

I started a conversation with a visiting EU PhD and asked about programming languages. In a very good smelling way, he avoided the question. Apparently it is "blue collar" work to do actual programming? This one PhD did zero actual programming, apparently.

From what I can tell, in Germany at least, the requirement for a lot of dev jobs tends to be "a degree and experience" or "software specific degree and an internship". If you have a science degree of some sort, and a few years of industry experience, then you should be good. Your situation might be tricky.

I've walked a fairly similar path as you did (to an extent, I did get into code and systems as a teenager, but I've got little to no formal engineering education and drifted away from code for a decade) and getting decent opportunities is nearly impossible unless you're in Paris and pretty good at networking. Most of the work available is menial, with little prospects and pays the median salary (which is trash by EU standards, much less US).

The parent's premise is that it will make the US more powerful economically and make its tech companies more dominant. Which is exactly what it will do.

The local tech labor supply will go to work for US corporations, which pay better than most everyone else. That will cement the US hegemony globally in tech (the sole major exception being domestic China, and to a far lesser extent domestic Russia). The US tech juggernaut will buy up the world's talent without having to plant expensive offices everywhere; that will occupy the talent pool and reduce competition to US tech.

> the importance of physically residing in the US will decrease, and that there is an opportunity for other locales/governments to attract remote workers.

COVID really did changed everything, and proved working from home not only works well, but more importantly to CFOs, made it significantly cheaper by literally outsourcing real estate costs to employees.

The past few months have been interesting. I've been contacted by so many recruiters the past year not from my state or even country that it's wild, and all for remote jobs. Compare that to the past few years where the conversation ends abruptly as soon as I mentioned that i would not be relocating.

Meanwhile, I’m hoping that global competition increases tech pay for non-US companies and I can land a remote gig that has some actual benefits like paternal leave.

Now a days, it's very much true. I've worked for FAANG companies, a number of mid-major sized tech/internet companies, have had a engineering job for 20+ years, been a CTO and co-founded a VC backed company. All without any degree, in fact in the 20+ years in the field I've never once been out of work. Early in my career I was rejected a couple of times for lack of degree but I can't even remember the last time I was asked about a degree. I know a number of other long term successful non-degree engineers also. So unless you have solid data to back that up, I'd agree strongly for it not being bullshit. The only tech field that I can see that argument for is higher level Data Scientists and that's clearly becoming less and less of a requirement also.

That's pretty big news indeed, but I'll wait until it happens. For now it's just a plan, and I've heard so many plans.

They do hire in Europe but pick expensive locales such as Switzerland, London or Dublin. I can't stop wondering why not open shop in Italy or Spain - wages may be much lower with way higher life quality.

There's also some very high paying software engineering roles in the UK, such as machine learning engineers. Of course, the salary varies from the north to the south quite a bit.

Nevertheless, you can get 100k just out of uni in an ML role! Especially if it's following a PhD.

Probably mostly censors. Roblox has about 4000 censors, outsourced to low-wage countries.

Tons of places use devs in Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Bulgaria, and Serbia for example. Most of the US companies that outsource to Europe mostly just choose to outsource to the cheapest places with good talent.

Office wise though, that would make sense to open up in UK, Spain, Germany, etc.

It's really expensive, yes. But honestly, another significant part of it is that the way of life of some americans is crazy.

I'm considered a spender among my peers, and even I am amazed when I discuss with american friends, watching the money they throw away.

Most of them have huge food budget: they never cook and eat outside all the time. They have so many recurring payments for so many services. They spend tons money to refund a student load for a degree they never finished, or a mortage on a car or credit cards fees. Cigarets, alcohol, weed, then various kinds of meds.

Some of them have several generations of console, one PC, and changed their phone every 2 years for the last decade.

When I visited the USA with my father (he worked for an airline), we always ended the trip with flipping through garbages in nice neighbourhoods. Once we found a printer. Another time we found a tennis racket.

So when they tell me they are having a hard time with money, it's not easy to be compassionate.

I know there are people working 3 jobs, living paycheck to paycheck and eating junk food to survive. But they are not coders in the valley.

If you want to be located in a place which pays relatively high in Europe, housing prices are adequate. 10-15 years ago it would be possible to have disproportionally large salary in eastern places like Prague, but that's history now.

Even if it still costs less than SF, your paycheck now looks adequate. Covid era raised prices everywhere.

White males are one of the highest paid demographic groups in the US and always have been.

House prices are often even higher in Europe, relative to wages. Check prices in London or Paris to see: you get smaller apartments, smaller houses on smaller lots than in US, and you’ll pay larger percentage of your paycheck for them.

House prices where? We got our house for 345k and I earn 100k+ in North Carolina. Not everyone needs to live in California.

Imagine being so bad at your chosen career, a career so in demand that there are serious efforts to expand the talent pool to a wider variety of people, that you are afraid that those efforts will cost you your job.

For something like Haskell, you can definitely negotiate that kind of thing if you have some experience. Those skills are highly coveted and valued if you know your worth imo.

>I have since moved to the Bay Area and am working for an Eastern European country while earning a Bay Area rate.

If I understood it correctly, you physically live in Bay Area while working remotely for a company located in Eastern Europe, and you are earning Bay Area rates? This seems like the complete inverse of the situation I usually hear of (working for a Bay Area company remotely in a cheaper area and earning Bay Area rates).

Out of pure curiosity, do you mind sharing the name of that Eastern European company? Totally understandable if you aren't willing to do so, but I have a feeling that there is probably literally 1 or 2 companies tops that would be willing to do that, so it isn't really an option for almost anyone. The first two that popped into my mind were Yandex and, to a much lesser degree, VK.

I'm living in Moscow, Russia and I know for sure that we have so many crypto companies here but still I was not aware that they are ready to pay Bay Area salaries :)

Heck, even Ocaml!

https://www.lexifi.com/

Right by they do pay more. A lot more

Yeah, but that's a bit like trickle down economics. It's literal trickling, it's not a deluge.

In these cases the top jobs will still tend to stay in the home country. So the most successful of these companies will be able to hire more top level folks and most of these will be in the home country.

>Not a problem for foreign companies that can and do pay "like the US", because they compete globally.

Do they really though? How many non-US companies are paying $150k+ to mid level front end developers? I don't think that exists anywhere else.

Can I ask how/where you get good remote US jobs? I'm also from Eastern Europe.

Don't get cocky. In Europe you literally can't get a job paying 200.000€ per year as an individual contributor, except for US companies.

I'd be very happy to be proven wrong and for the respective position to not be a beyond-senior-contributor thing (so maybe 0.0001% of jobs out there).

How are you dealing with local tax and labor laws?

My employer (mid-sized international software company) recently posted a revised work/travel/location policy. Basically, for anything over a month, we are only allowed to work in a locale where the company has an existing presence, and we have to notify the company in advance so they can plan payroll accordingly. I believe (thought not 100% sure) this is because they effectively transfer us to the local entity for the duration of the travel.

Those middle-man companies charge extraordinary margins. I don't know whether that is warranted. But you could pay $150/hr and get $15hr developer. Something's wrong with that math. I think that's because of lack of competition, basically they charge as much as possible and pay as little as possible, because they can.

If you can outcompete local rates by 30%+, why would your employees complain about disguised employment?

Labour laws generally come into play when professions are poorly compensated or mistreated - pampered tech contractors being paid far above local market rate don't really fall into that category.

Large corps have an economy of scale with this stuff. The smaller the company, the bigger a barrier it is

Worked in tech at a large financial - while it may be second largest by headcount, I would guess perhaps not by total number of MDs/Partners? In my experience at a similar company, the off-shore offices were not viewed as being innovative or producing the same level of value per-person. There were a lot of junior/mid-level people there, but the projects were typically being driven from the US/UK. How does that stack up with GS?

Sure but my main point is that hands-on tech jobs in NY, SF, London, etc, remain plentiful.

And yet there's still no shortage of developer jobs in the US.

In any case, did EDS succeed? I had forgotten about them until your mention. Just because they offshored to India, it doesn't mean it worked and their business is flourishing.

I think the model has changed, at any rate. Companies like EDS are mostly obsolete. Sure, professional/technical services companies are still around in the form of IBM and their ilk, but they're not even remotely the dominant way of doing things.

Oh totally. But hands-on tech jobs in the USA aren't eliminated, the sector is buoyant!

Colleagues in India feel like colleagues not "replacements" these days.

Launching money into space is unlikely to help the situation.

How high are they?

There is a shortage of people - with experience. A side effect of this is employers are less willing to take on less experienced staff as they lack the employees to act as mentors.

Getting my first job in tech was the hardest - but since it has been smooth sailing as I have a track record of experience & war stories to tell.

Interesting, my experience was the exact opposite. I recently got my bachelors in business information systems and finding a well paid job turned out to be fairly easy (although my working student relationship with my current company certainly contributed to the easy hiring process). This seems to be a fairly common experience, at least among my peers.

That's institutional inertia and bureaucracy. Don't mistake it for the typical case.

First job out of uni and can handle a lowerish salary? Find the startup scene in your area and network like crazy.

> All of this machinery to filter out candidates

That's because most of the people that graduate with a CS degree can't code and, what is worse, can't be taught how to code.

As an employer, it is also very expensive and time consuming to hire someone like that, since you're not just wasting money by paying someone who's non-productive, but you're also wasting the productive time of the team (or whoever is in charge of mentoring you) in a potentially fruitless attempt to teach you how to code.

Unless you have work experience, there's no quick way to tell if you'll be able to learn or not. Faced with that problem, a lot of big companies just throw all the cognitive tests they can find at you and hope for the best.

Yeah, hiring processes for Software Developers is just the pits. Due to accounting rules, most established companies don't want to hire full time positions anymore because it reflects as a recurring expense which counts against profit making management look bad. Contractors can be applied against capital expenses making the figures look a lot better. "Sure we spent $5 million extra on the project because contractors are expensive, but we made $3 million more in profits! What do you mean who will maintain it?"

The result is that we aren't maintaining core groups of subject matter experts anymore. Instead the idea is that teams are interchangeable and software should be well documented and replaceable. Developers are expected to be able to pick up immediately and need to have the skills ahead of time. So there is no mentoring, skills development, core subject matter experts, or entry level positions for college graduates in most companies.

This means that things will suck for anyone with less that two years experience. Also it means that employees will have zero loyalty and company IT culture will rot like an old tomato in the sun. However, once you get that initial experience you will be getting offers to apply constantly from your company's competitors looking for someone.

If you want to find a company to look for, the big banks and such will be a hard pull for entry level work. Working as a contractor or at a smaller company with poor capitalization may be easier to get into. Unfortunately degrees don't mean much anymore unless your senior project was something relevant to industry like Kubernetes, AWS, Kafka, etc...

Get the first job in the field, almost no matter what.

Once you have that first job and about 1 year of experience, things become much easier.

Also, practice interviews, find books, courses, etc.

But it's good for exactly who they are - the management. As long as Americans are replaced time and again, it changes the US. We used to care for each other. I think the fact that the greed machine is so precise and backstabbing and self-documented and codified there's nothing to tell it to stop hiring people outside the US simply for cheaper labor.

I keep seeing people say that the economy is not a zero sum game - but all I see is people getting poorer and offered worse jobs with fewer benefits.

I think however there is ONE potential out: Building HOMES. It seems that the people that DO have a really high paying job is willing to pay 1M for a 2 bedroom house. I think the next major thing is for people to pick up the hammer and build houses for rich people wanting their second and third home. Next change for the laws? Make it easier to get a Gen-Con license...?

Reading this post it occurred to me that if huge levels of remote work become the norm, there may be consequences for what 'rights' remote workers may obtain at the 'host' richer countries. I mean, somewhat like large companies effectively influenced the mechanisms for immigration, right?

The same may happen wrt. access to financial services (e.g. Facebook employees around the world may eventually be indistinguishable from US citizens for the purpose of opening bank accounts or owning property in the US, etc.), for example. Maybe a particularly bad example because taxation is very complicated and this messes with that too directly

Perhaps a better example would relate to access to State-sponsored programs like healthcare. Imagine future in which Amazon, Facebook, Google lobby for allowing a knowledge worker to travel from their country of residence to their country of work to utilize a governmental program that was previously reserved to citizens only. (Add a bit about actual citizens losing that right if they are 'unproductive' and you got yourself a setting for a sci-fi story)

It's late and maybe I'm not making much sense, I don't know. I'm aware there are a million possible reasons why this should not come to pass but at least on law & regulation I think that if the incentives of the companies align with 'extending rights of remote workers towards citizenship-like rights', then law and legislation will be changed via lobbying, etc. without much ordinary citizens can do about it

I offer no judgment of value - simply pointing out something that we may see happen over the next years or decade

EXTREMELY competitive salaries. The company owner believes in paying for talent.

This is a good point, the ratio increases both ways.

Except that developers from countries that earn on average less than their US counterparts have an incentive to work for a US company remotely but a developer from the US does not have many incentives to work for less for a company abroad

There is quiet some supply but the demand is in capable and a bit more senior people, I'm told. But hey if it means with remote work US tech company can fish for Dutch talent and raise the average pay here in the Netherlands I'm all for it.

Already had a talk with friends about it, before the pandemic remote gig work was hard where we live, but now that working from home is more accepted. It should be a lot more attractive for urban companies to hire remote workers in the rural parts.

Yep. Every time I see a US-focused article complaining about pay adjustments when people move to new regions to work remotely I just wonder where everybody has been for all these years where their coworkers in London or Vancouver are getting paid 50% of their wage for the same work.

I think the whole “evil white person” demeans the effort to be inclusive. Nobody is saying white men are evil when they hire a diverse candidate. They are just valuing having a diverse workplace over traditionally looked at traits.

> Outsourcing

This isn't outsourcing, this is hiring to work for the company's own teams based in the US.

> offshoring

This isn't offshoring in traditional terms, the projects stay in the US and are managed from there, with team members from all over the place.

In 2010, being an independent developer for a startup in the US in argentina meant a 2-3k monthly wage. It is now at 5~6k, and plenty of opportunities to make 10k monthly.

Bear in mind this pays <5% tax and you can maintain a whole family, pay for a house, food etc for 2k a month.

This arbitrage has always been there and its become way easier to manage after the remote shift.

Yea pretty much, Canadian VC is just an employment scheme for failkids + some guy who cashed out 20 years ago on yahoo or whatever to coast around.

Self-sabotaging in what ways?

The differences in languages, culture, and legal aspects mean that at least for consumer-oriented startups EU is very much not a single market yet. There has been a lot of progress over the last decade or two, but when starting a company you still pretty much start with the market of a single country and have to do a bunch of work, adjustments and local hiring to expand to a neighboring EU country.

China has a huge internal economy. You won’t be able to replicate that in many a country. At all. You’ll end up with useless, expensive, outmoded products that seem to only ever get worse. (Speaking from personal experience.)

Other than the 3D skills, these are mostly run of the mill skills for a mathematics major. Why not train a decent math major in the 3D skills?

Now the company is losing you and they have lost 6 months of time to train a new employee. Many companies are short-sighted and unwilling to accept candidates that don’t match exact specifications to their own detriment.

Ireland aside from usual suspects Stripe, Workday and a bunch of others you can get 200K total comp

$5K is normal pay in Poland? that's around 9 minimal wages

If you're talking about tech hubs in the US, you can definitely get more than 10k USD/month as an experienced dev at a startup.

Not intending to sound completely clueless about the world, but these wages you're quoting...is that USD per month? That sounds way off for a yearly salary.

They also seem to work very long hours with long commutes and get few vacations. When I see that the average cost of a house in Cupertino is 2.5 million dollars for example, I would imagine most of those Apple engineers live far away.

I think the "equally qualified" point you're making is highly disingenuous.

Qualified doesn't mean you can churn out so many lines of code or have X years of experience at a company or whatever, it means you have right kind of experience. To a big company like Facebook or Google, someone from SV who has a few years in the local industry has more relevant "experience" to the position than someone in London with 10 years at a financial firm.

Companies pay the prevailing wage in whatever labor market they participate in. The prevailing wage in the UK is lower than in Silicon Valley, but higher than in, say, Oklahoma City.

Not sure why people are still confused about this. But it seems many still don't understand it. The funniest thing is when people try to concoct some sort of fairness argument to explain this, or equally hilarious is when they try to come up with a fairness argument to condemn it.

Different markets have different prices due to differences in supply and demand in those markets. Want developer salaries to be much higher in the UK? Create an environment where a bunch of big tech companies all want to massively increase hiring there. Salaries will go up. Want developer salaries to be lower in Silicon Valley? Get most of the tech companies to leave. Salaries will go down.

One can say that ultimately the reason why Silicon Valley wages are so high is because there is a productive ecosystem that was so beneficial to the creation of tech companies that there was an explosion in demand for local tech labor. That ecosystem consists of easy access to credit and VC funding, existing networks of suppliers and vendors, existing mentorship networks for engineers and entrepreneurs, stable regulations and enforcement of contracts/property rights, together with sufficient local talent to pull off the difficult job of company creation.

London didn't have that to the same degree, and so has a lower demand for tech labor with correspondingly lower wages.

at that pay level in Europe you are almost certainly not going to social healthcare because in most of them you will not get the same level of service as in private hospital and will lose more time. so u usually end up paying the healthcare and using it only in extreme circumcises. there is Switzerland where that is different.

> a greater proportion of it will go to taxes

Is this true? Taxes in the US are pretty high if you have a high income, and remember to include state and local taxes, and property taxes.

> the things you get in return, like pensions or healthcare aren't as attractive at that income level

Perhaps, but it's also attractive that _other_ _people_ get those benefits because ultimately the level of stress everyone else is under has an effect on your quality of life, one way or another.

Especially when you consider bacon.

This kind of comparison makes no sense because whether quality of life is better in US or Europe depends on the US city/state vs European city/country you are comparing in each, as well as whether you're comparing someone of lower, lower middle, upper middle, or upper class.

US upper class in a wealthy area is very different from US lower middle class in another. And the same goes for Europe.

This is true in some respects, but as someone who recently moved from Munich back to the states, there's definitely some aspects of life that I prefer here.

I'd list them now, but that would just invite the European Defense Squad to come out and tell me how all those problems are specific to Munich/Bavaria/Germany, ignoring how the original comment I was responding to was generalizing the same way.

The truth is that there are some things you can generalize okay on (e.g. healthcare being cheaper in Europe than the US, or the US having poor public transit), but many things really are specific to the particular European country at least. Biking, for example, might be amazing or completely terrible depending on the part of Europe.

The quality of life may be higher for lower middle class or poor people, but not for developers making $150k+ a year with benefits. And most of your points are just silly or negated by having money.

I’m struggling with American “superiors” who won’t have a meeting in any time that isn’t perfect for them.

If it’s not between 9:00-17:00, sorry, bad luck for everyone else.

I think it's getting better - a number of countries worldwide (such as Portugal or UAE) are making it easier and easier for people to work remotely as "contractors". While not perfect, it's definitely a good solution for highly skilled workers who have a strong negotiating position and can ask for all the benefits their country's labour law would otherwise assure.

There are startups aiming at solving this problem, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deel_(company)

The "flexible" approach does work, but tends to be quite a drain on workers lives. Theres always someone somewhere who has to wake up at 2am for the weekly 'sync' meeting, or who doesn't see their children after school because their calendar is clogged with 1:1 meetings with all their USA reports most evenings.

I remember after "corralito" a lot of US companies started opening their CoE (center of excelence) in Argentina because wages were really low, and they could hire easily.

I heard (not sure if it is true) people wanted to be paid in USD because car loans were denominated in dollars rather than pesos.

My experience has been different. Ive found it difficult to find senior people. Junior and mid level people abound, but there are precious few qualified seniors.

I think it's the nature of the market. There isn't as much demand to outsource senior roles, so the market just doesn't produce a lot of them.

> but not so great news for IT talent located the U.S. if more companies start doing this.

We've been saying that for 30 years.

In the end, the demand for engineers is much bigger than we think. And if price of engineers goes down just a little bit, more projects will become feasible, so demand will go up.

So, if anything we might see wages grow less aggressively, long before they stall, and wages will stall long before they go down.

Who knows how long the party will last, but odds are it's longer than nmy career.

(Unless a bubble blows up SV tomorrow, hehe)

Meh. I think folks under-estimate the variety of economies in the US. I could move to WV and live very comfortably on about 60K a year. I could very realistically take a 10x paycut (not that I would bother working for someone else in software at that point... "my engineers/scientists might leave and create the start-up that kills me" is definitely upward pressure on wages at least for a certain class of tech worker)

(FWIW, I don't really have a horse in this race; my skillset is unique enough that everyone who competes with me for jobs qualifies for special visas and there's a 10:1 or maybe even 100:1 labor shortage with a 6+ year ramp-up time. But I've worked with off-shore talent and seen the comps... my general impression is that Americans over-estimate the cost of living in the cheapest parts of our country and MASSIVELY under-estimate the cost of living in urban cores of other countries)

The most I was offered locally so far was 60k. While I appreciate where you are coming from, put yourself in my shoes for a moment, if you had the opportunity to triple your income today, would you take it?

In every country it always is and must be the interest of the great body of the people to buy whatever they want of those who sell it cheapest.

- Adam Smith, 1776.

Modern remote hiring is very different to the offshoring of old. Hiring individual skilled developers remote is very different from outsourcing an entire project to a consulting shop in India.

Modern offshoring is a very different experience, and likely will have downward pressure on US wages.

Yeah There's better jobs then programing for 50k a year. Why would I keep doing this then. I'll work a ski lift or something

I think you are really onto something truth is if you have 100K remote job in Spain you will hav better lifestyle than having 300K job in SV. If I only could convince my wife to move :(.

Where do you live? If you have kids in Madrid it is almost mandatory to have a car.

Imho the best place to live in Spain is in a 'capital de provicia': you have all the services the law mandates but it is not crowded.

Because they're not receiving the same CoL adjusted compensation as Americans. Your attitude sounds a little patronizing.

Because the rest of Europe pays 80k.

This is mostly about FANGs and they can do it because they make $1m plus in revenue per employee.

These are senior positions so don't think this is normal. Average dev salaries are $60k to $150k in USA depending on a ton of factors.

The USA also has no social safety net so it's like comparing oranges to apples when you look at parts of Asia or Europe :)

They can do whatever they want. You accuse others of being patronizing but your sense of entitlement is polarizing. It would do you well to realize that the US pays a lot for software engineering as a result of the same societal structure, policies, and priorities that cause the problems Europeans love picking on (e.g. healthcare, paid time off, parental leave, etc).

bollocks

By "vacation" you mean fully paid days ? Unlimited?

> You can probably take more vacation that you already get in Europe.

I’ve always heard that places like this tend to pressure you into not taking many days or taking a more “normal” amount.

I just started a job with unlimited vacation, so I’ll have to see how it goes. I think best case is I can have more shorter stints through the year.

28 business days of vacation per year? More than 5 weeks? I know of no company in America that offers that, not even informally.

Few US companies offer most of the benefits Europeans expect, from free/cheap health care to child care to generous maternity/paternity leave to low tuition to job security to strictly enforced equal opportunity.

Combine all of those into one employer in the US? That unicorn doesn't exist. However such beasts live all over Europe. But they just don't pay US wages, perhaps for obvious reasons.

What's more, as soon as US companies hire remotely en masse in Europe, regulators there will surely demand the same benefits & protections for their people from remote employers. This will erase the economic advantages of outsourcing there unless wages paid there are substantially lower than in the US.

It's just what I have at the moment. 30 business days is also common.

That's actually a good point! I could put that on my CV :D

> All those cases can be dealt with by the foreign company who knows the local laws and customs.

I haven't seen it mentioned here but while in many cases you can as an employer outsource payroll and labor law compliance, you can never completely shed the potential liabilities that come with employing someone and this can get complicated when your workforce is based in different countries.

There are a lot of things that can go wrong. Your payroll/compliance vendor could screw the pooch. Your foreign-based employee could do something negligent or malicious that leaves you in a legal bind where your costs of protecting your interests skyrocket. And your employment of an individual in certain countries could subject you to laws and taxes you never even knew about.

Of course, a growing number of companies do employ remote workers around the world but it's really not as simple as "I can hire anyone in any country as long as they are talented". The world simply isn't that flat.

I've personally been remote since 1999 and run teams from around the world since then. The largest was a company I grew to ~130+ people over 18 countries. I know you are underestimating the rep of the USA outside of politics and the dysfunction :)

Remote is a great opportunity and one I've used at every company I've built. But, the thing that draws global talent is money, and American companies have all the money. If anything this is going to hurt local companies who can't compete for top talent hiring out of the USA :)

I will note, i think Canada is doing a great job of being pro-immigrant in a way the USA can't and American companies are opening lots of offices and hiring there.

And I think you overestimate how much things have rapidly declined. Is the US's heyday in the past? Of course. It is on a decline. But if your entire lens of what is happening in the country is news channels and the Internet, you need a reality check. As Dave Chappelle said, Twitter is not a real place.

> I think you overestimate the reputation of the US and underestimate how much it has rapidly declined the last decades.

How has it rapidly declined? Please list the ways. I don't necessarily disagree, but I am curious.

Agreed, but if you read down the list the author notes in that list Panama, Croatia, which while beautiful and stable in some ways... are also knows for corruption and other issues.

The USA is very affordable if you look outside of SF/NY and compare it to Western Europe (esp with tech pay). What are you comparing it too?

Compare corruption in NYC to India or Thailand or Romania :)

A waist high pile of poop is much different from one the size of a skyscraper. I am not saying it doesn't have aspects of corruption, but it is low and solid resources on the local and national level to constantly investigate and make cases.

Legalizing corruption through lobbying is a good move. There are other options but better than keeping it underground.

I love paying taxes in NYC. I estimate NYC taxpayers saved me ~$100K in medical bills when I unexpectedly needed surgery and qualified for low-income Medicare coverage. I love that I’m again a heavy contributor to that system and happily so. And I love watching bike lanes built left and right, I love the city buying up empty lots to build parks, I love the Marathon, the “5 Boro” bike tour, the incredible (and heavily subsidized) ferry service, the public school free lunch programs, the vaccine outreach campaigns, the reliable snow removal, and the wonderful collection of libraries and museums and public spaces that are free and open to me. I love that the city cuts long-term lease deals with multi-tenant property owners to guarantee supply of low-income housing. A bunch of my friends grew up in that kind of housing and some of my sweetest neighbors live there now. I think MTA is one of the very BEST features of this or any world-class city — trains run all night! And it makes me super happy whenever I’m going somewhere at 5am and the train is packed with workers in steel-toed boots and jackets with local union patches commuting to the job site. I think my taxes are spent well enough — I know this because I love living here and have never given a serious thought to leaving for tax avoidance or whatever other fake drama is being projected onto this city from afar.

You Americans have no idea how you have it good, do you? If you think NYC is corrupt, let's trade passports, see how you like brasilia.

Canadians who read the news and keep abreast of such things would have a bad view of things (as they should). But, the reality is the USA still has all these things even if cracks are appearing. Don't let the hype cycle and media's focus on the bad lose sight of the big picture. I wouldn't expect many Canadians are immigrating anyway as you are in the top 10 well governed countries globally.

Agreed, America's biggest problem is that 40% of Americans believe they are #1 at everything :). We should be stealing ideas left and right from other countries and instead we are stagnating under the belief that only we know how to do things.

As someone from a second-tier Canadian city that had relatively few tech employers, this has definitely been a boon. Previously there was one game in town, and they attracted talent with a fancy office and above-market salaries for the region. I left after a couple years and joined a bay area startup remotely for a ~30% pay raise, and several of my former coworkers have as well. The company in question is suffering from a brain drain as old-time employees leave for greener pastures, and they struggle to attract international talent - because they didn't have much cross-polination with other tech companies in the past, there's a ton of NIH built by very smart new grads with no real world experience, and experienced engineers tend to take off once they realize the extent of the problems.

Language and cultural barriers are not a problem if you hire people to directly work in the team.

They are not problem if you do hiring directly and select right people.

Biggest problem is that companies want to hire bunch of worm bodies and dump trash tasks on them.

Managers expect that they will be able to throw vague requirements and bunch of people who are not part of their company will figure out what to do. What is especially funny that bad things happen even with people inside companies when manager tries to just throw vague requirements at dev team.

It is also problem with big "software houses" where you hire bunch of people - nowadays people have good internet at homes are much more conscious and one can hire specialists directly from other country and skip BS providers.

time zones are probably the biggest issue i see coming up.

as someone in PST/PDT with a sleep disorder, its pretty easy to work with east coast people. i've had a boss in the UK before and it worked because he was okay with ending his day with a 6pm meeting his time. but working with people on india time is going to be a mess one way or the other.

All the qualified Canadians move to the USA for USA incomes. Canada is going to be an immigration station for people companies want to bring in but can't get US visas for. Its already a thing.

+1 for Argentina. There's an argument from the book Germs, Guns, Steel that in the past civilizations flourished most where geography allowed for trade to happen at roughly the same latitude, where all the same crops would grow and could spread - for example, Europe and the fertile crescent, which is in contrast to the Americas and Africa. Now there seems to be a opposite effect happening along longitudes around remote work because of time zones, and I would expect South America, despite the lower % of English speakers, to be at least as big of a receiver of SV benefits as Europe in the short term and probably bigger over the long term.