Hacker News Reader

In the past brain drain meant good professionals would leave their countries to live in the US or Europe.

Nowadays, with remote work, people are being paid handsomely and spending their money in their home countries.

Anecdotally, I'm seeing that happening a lot with dev friends in Rio de Janeiro. People are using money earned in the US to help the local economy. They still interact with local universities and contribute to local projects. Cool stuff.

View on HN

Also causing the prices in some sectors, such as real estate, to raise abnormally.

That seems unlikely, unless the couple tech workers can buy out the whole town

This is a misconception that a few hundred of devs in a city can do this.

What drives the price of real state up is lack of new developments, low interest rates, and instutional investors using the housing market as a security instrument. The same thing can happen all over the world and is happening in the US and Canada at an alarming rate.

In the long term though this is not good for the home countries, they are left behind and at best become tourist destinations. There is no country that pulled itself forward this way, not even with remote work. Eastern europe is an example with very low growth rates since the fall of communism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com