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Comment by paulcole | Hacker News Reader

I always think this is a funny argument because most companies don't need top talent.

For nearly every business, good enough is definitely good enough.

So the question to me is for average to slightly above average employees, will remote companies "win"?

I'm not sure it's a question of having top talent. What I see happening is that any given organization has a minimum acceptable level of skill and experience for developers in order to be acceptable for hire. There's no concept of "well we'll hire this kind of crappy person for the open job because that's all we can get". What remote work has done is to make the pool of available candidates that exceed the competence bar massively bigger. I have seen this play out in a medium sized SV tech start up -- they were able to staff up during the pandemic at a much higher rate because nobody cared where the candidates were located. This seems like a Rubicon that can't be un-crossed -- once you have a ton of people in Seattle and San Diego and on the east coast, and people who decided to move back to their home town in Kentucky, there's no going back to on-site folks who rode the bus in from Gilroy.

In the US for W2 employees, there are significant costs (money, time, and effort – both upfront and ongoing) that go into hiring an employee in a state where you currently don't have any employees. These costs are most significant to small businesses because larger companies have either dealt with them in the past or have the resources/knowledge/experience to deal with them.

It can still be a lot cheaper to hire good enough talent remotely.

If you're an average company in California you can hire good enough, remote talent 2-3 times cheaper remotely than if you had to hire locally. Just compare avg developer salaries in US vs Europe. "Slightly above average" developers in Europe can do the same job twice as cheap.

If you are average startup in California you should absolutely not hire devs in Europe unless you are ready to pay time zone cost. You will have literally 30min/day that’s inconvenient for everyone to meet (8:30AM in SF/5:30PM in Berlin). Good luck making Europeans meet after 6pm or Californians before 8AM)

I hear you. In this case why even have an HQ in California? Why not become fully remote and hire from a range of compatible timezones?

I'm just saying that such a fully remote company could hire "average talent" 2-3 times cheaper than its counterpart headquartered in an expensive area. That's clearly a competitive advantage.

I'm just saying that being remote also gives an edge for hiring average talent, not only top talent.

Yup, most of the hard problems were solved in 1960 to 1980, and modern libraries cover 99.999% of use-cases.

If people are focused on Research and Development in a large commercial project, it will often catch the ire of people responsible for risk mitigation.

> most of the hard problems were solved in 1960 to 1980

Yes, if you're talking about sorting algorithms and similar. But there are, of course, still many, many even harder problems waiting to be solved. Harder, because they are compound, and more complex. There's still need for top talent. But it's true that most "ordinary" businesses do not need those types of programmers.

True Scientific inquiry is unpredictably random, and while someone will often eagerly publish a paper on a subject to boost perceived relevance... many rarely credit upstream sources outside academic contexts. Patents are also nice, as you often get to sue people who forgot to cite your work properly.

It is astonishingly impressive anything relevant, generalizable, and repeatable actually makes it back into the public domain. Like watching your dog eat 1kg of cheese... impressive for all the wrong reasons... lol =)

^^^ this.

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