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Comment by otagekki | Hacker News Reader

Sort of.

If remote is efficient, they'll outsource the position to a low-income country.

If remote is not efficient, they'll urge people to go back to office and whoever fails to comply will be let go.

I don't think it's that straightforward. Remote US employees are not (in any scenario I've witnessed or been part of) equivalent to Remote Low-income Country employees. A person who previously worked in Snap's LA office who relocated to, say Scottsdale, is likely still going to be a much more valuable employee than an offshore person.

Depends on what you mean by 'Remote Low-Income Country'. I work for a US company that opened an office in my country, pretty much only because it is much cheaper than the US. We are in the EU and our culture is pretty similar to the US (we grew up watching US TV shows in the original language), and everyone here has good written and spoken English (I say that as a native English speaker).

Timezones and language barriers eat into the profits fast.

What’s with the idea though that 300 million people can just be ignored? Me thinks you’ve let yourself get lost in the economic philosophy and detached from reality.

There is no just shutting down the US economy because economists can’t make fiat currency math work. Such ideas are ludicrous.

Ludicrous? So how come has the US and Europe relocated a large fraction of their manufacturing industry into low-income countries? Are these companies raking in billions in profit ludicrous?

It takes some effort to understand another culture, and I think it's definitely easier in the US since they have so many people coming in there from so many parts of the world; and also because cultural differences can be overcome, and it's profitable over the long-term, given the wage gap lasts long enough. Language barriers doesn't matter if the whole team speaks the same language and the manager is bilingual.

If that was not the case, why would big tech companies have engineering teams in Europe and all over the world?

What’s ludicrous is the idea they can close up shop altogether in the US and 300 million plus will just sit on their hands and do nothing.

Twice as many guns as people over here. The public will make a new economy without them. Real people don’t just vanish because aristocrats find their demands inconvenient.

Let them eat lead will quickly follow any contemporary version of “let them eat cake.”

Physical reality does not bend to our philosophy. Philosophy always bends to reality.

I know people prefer to forget reality because ew it’s dirty, but reality doesn’t bend to ape hallucinations.

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