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Comment by whatever1 | Hacker News Reader

Btw all these costs would be zero if remote work was legally mandated.

But remote work showed how high they would have to pay to retain talent in a real free market environment.

So unsurprisingly everyone forced a return to office policy.

Remote work will drive wages down, not up. The company can get a remote worker from overseas. Remote work is to the office worker what NAFTA and container ships are to the manufacturing worker.

Organizations are currently able to use remote workers from foreign countries. The relevant legal change would mandate them to accept them from their own country.

If remote work would "drive wages down", it would already do so -- since that's an option available to employeers now

Probably a bimodal distribution will be the outcome.

The skilled on-shore would be paid more, the fungible would be paid less.

But again offshoring is not always the cheapest answer due to the inefficiency that time difference introduces.

Is that over $200k a year ( per engineer) in inefficiency

Yeah, obviously, or they'd just be offshoring whole teams/departments at a time already. The reason they don't do that is because there's a market rate for good engineering. When an offshore contractor gets good enough, they figure out the market rate and start charging it.

I've been hearing this sort of doom and gloom since the 90s, yet here I am making bank in the USA still

Cannot make generalizations, but anecdotally I have experienced situations where senior engineers have to spend half of their time to coordinate work due to this.

Things that can be resolved in 5 minutes have to wait for a day.

Well if the inefficiency is blocking a couple people who all make $100k/year...seems pretty easy.

Currently trimodal now

That argument existed now for how long? Depends if you are doing just the ""barista equivalent tech job"", but it seems there is more to it.

NDAs don't work in different countries. We've already learned what hassles there are offshoring IP to China -- who promptly stole it. Ditto for non-competes, stock grants, etc. -- these get very messy across borders. That's fine for L2 support drones or QA box checkers but no way I'm hiring anyone I care about for this purpose.

AI is coming for those roles before they end up in India or PI.

Speaking of NAFTA, that's one of the reasons we're seeing Mexico City as an offshore hub. Better timezone overlap, can usually trust that their credentials are legitimate, and it's not hard to find a (Mexican accented) Spanish speaker in much of the US.

Plus the NAFTA TN visa means if they're good you can easily bring them across the border with no H1B headaches. Cheaper flights, too.

> Remote work will drive wages down, not up

I know you don't mean it this way, but it should right? It's fundamentally cheaper - no commute on the employee part, no office space on the employer side. Greatly enhanced flexibility all round. Both sides should definitely splitting the dividends.

I'm fine with it if that is how it works.

I agree actually. Stated differently, commuting is a pain for workers, so they're willing to accept a lower wage to avoid it.

This also means the worker can live where the cost of living is lower, and be willing to work for less--thus pushing down wages. Arguably the worker still comes out ahead though if she can live where she wants to...assuming she likes working remotely from a low cost-of-living place. If she'd rather live in NYC and go to the office, she might not be happy to see her wage go down.

> If she'd rather live in NYC and go to the office

yep - in the short term there will be some discontinuities like this. But longer term - more staff working remotely is going to take pressure off real estate prices in cities, so it will actually be justifiable even there that salaries can fall. Unfortunately since so many office space leases are long term, and rezoning of land use even slower, this can take a very long time to flow through.

> legally mandated

> real free market environment

I'm hoping you're just kidding.

They're not. "Free market" is an unstable phenomenon that exists only when dynamically stabilized by appropriate regulations. Without that, it collapses on itself.

I honestly can't tell if you're serious.

I'm absolutely serious. Try to take the things you know about the free markets, supply and demand, etc. and simulate them in your head. Like, run them in a game loop for a couple steps. It should become apparent that the ideal free market is not even an equilibrium state.

Modern markets are obviously legal abstractions.

The tech labor market would not exist as it does today without substantial very specific regulations of various parties' behavior; e.g., stopping me from:

1. copying my employer's codebase, or

2. exfiltrating my employer's customer and pricing lists, or

3. holding two jobs at competing companies at the same time, or

4. shorting my employer's stock then actively sabotaging the company.

To say nothing of the even more basic stuff like squatting in my employer's office or even just using force to take what I want from the company or its executives/sharholders, for example.

Labor markets can't exist without lots of strong legal guardrails, and in the case of tech those property rights and contractual obligations are highly fictional and extremely unnatural. Intellectual property, non-competes, non-disclosures, securities regulations on insider trading, laws about industrial espionage and sabotage, the list goes on. All of it highly fictional and unnatural.

Modern markets are, definitionally, just a dynamical process playing out that is governed by an enormous collection of state-backed rules. Nothing like what you might consider a "natural" market, such as early civilized man bartering at the bazaar.

The amount of propaganda/brainwashing required to believe that something like a modern equity or labor market is a naturally occurring phenomenon... oof.

You do know that "free market" does not, and never has, equated "anything goes", right? There are things like regulators, laws and such.

> if remote work was legally mandated

This is hilarious

So were weekends at one point. No intent of derailing the thread, but everything is impossible until it’s done.

Would you have thought a few weeks ago that California and the federal government could apply enough pressure to the largest pharma companies to set the price of insulin at $35? Me neither, but here we are. Come out swinging, we have nowhere to go but up.

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/01/1160339792/eli-lilly-insulin-...

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/sanofi-insulin-pr...

Edit: Looks like California has gone so far as to contract to have it manufactured and set the price at $30, even better. Thesis is “change is possible.” Please excuse the length this example took to demonstrate the point.

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/3907583-california-mov...

Why not? With one stone you hit multiple birds.

Housing crisis, traffic crisis, transportation infrastructure crisis, environmental crisis.

Covid showed how many jobs can be conducted fully remotely.

And it showed also how much unthinkable is possible if we want it.. however here we are already again, not being ok to give up false luxuries and who cares about the environment ;)

> Housing crisis, traffic crisis, transportation infrastructure crisis, environmental crisis.

You forgot freedom of assembly.

> Covid showed how many jobs can be conducted fully remotely.

Alternatively, Covid showed how little people were working in the office too.

This doesn't make sense. What would a mandate for remote work even entail?

Positing a cartel in employment wages doesn't explain RTO.

Easy. $10,000/month city taxes to the employer for each employee in office. Proceeds will be used to offset carbon emissions and fund transportation infrastructure.

The city wants people in the offices, because those workers get taxed by the city whenever they buy anything else while in the city. Having a large population of people in your city promotes commerce like nothing else. The exact last thing a city would do is deter people from coming into it.

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