I'm just having a hard time believing that we're at this moment in time where life suddenly got better for workers.
Besides if it's cheap enough to hire someone overseas (who by definition would be remote), how would it not be cheaper to just pay their current workforce to work remotely?
Now the other half of that is what remote-first, "all I need is more time to code" developers really don't want to hear, is that in resolving conflict, in-person communication is much higher bandwidth than even zoom communication, both for the whiteboard, and for the fact being in-person de-escalates emotion. This is particularly true for early career developers, where some pushback (i.e. conflict) in their naive assumptions is actually how they are going to learn better from senior developers.
So while 5 days a week in the office is dead, its way too early to say what the eventual outcome will be. But I do agree less days a week will force some amount of square-foot downsizing, so I am glad I don't own any office buildings.
1: Indian wages are going up. The difference gets smaller every year.* Note that many of the best Indian developers are paid in USD, and even for the developers that get paid in Rupees, the company they are hired by locally often does get paid in USD by the American company that buys their services, so the fact that the Rupee goes down doesn't necessarily offset their wage increase for the American company that hires them.
2: American workers can still meet in every Tuesday. It's hard from Hyderabad.
3: Time difference can be a real issue (but of course it can also be an advantage).
4: It's often easier for Americans to understand American English than Indian English.
5: American developers might understand the American market and competing products better.
* https://www.statista.com/chart/25729/india-annual-average-sa...
Some companies do outsource everything but it’s HARD.