We Changed Our Lives Because of Our Remote Jobs. Now It’s All Crumbling

false. for commercial real estate prices.

even martha stewart has been advocating for butts in seats lately.

empty office buildings don’t print money.

I don't know what it is, but there's a sort of personality type which seems common among technical roles. Text communication is curt, feathers get ruffled easily in zoom/email, just really hard to work with.

Then you sit down with them for 15-30 minutes and talk, it's like night and day. They see you as a person, things resolve quickly, you both go about your day.

Even though I do most of my work remotely, I try to schedule interactions with these people on days when we will both be in the same room. They're not bad people, but it makes things so much easier, so much less drama.

If you’re a young person who has learned front-end development, you’re more likely to have picked up English along the way than German. English exposure is casual (documentation, tech communities, American pop culture); German exposure outside of DACH requires seeking it out.

I work at a big, traditional German manufacturing company, and the “old” parts of IT (infrastructure, SAP) generally talk amongst themselves in German and produce obviously translated English documentation stuffed into badly-organized PDFs, while the newer parts (machine learning and its cloud-based infrastructure, web and app development) are a glorious mix of languages and cultures, with English as the means of communication (German colleagues occasionally having arguments and explaining complex things to each other in German) and documentation of varying quality accessible and searchable as HTML.

Several colleagues in the “new” part of IT who speak just enough German to deal with the Ausländerbehörde and order at a Biergarten, but have to interact with our local internal customers in English. They get hired anyway. They’re offered German courses, but as a side benefit, not required training.

Not speaking German well puts a ceiling on your career here, but certainly wouldn’t stop someone getting hired for a hard-to-fill technical role.

To put it bluntly, yes, economically Germany wants skilled immigration, but socially it doesn't.

How about another view point: there is no such thing as "attracting too much talent", this is the free market at work, and USA and Germany both attracted the exact amount of talent they deserve based on the pay and working conditions they offer for skilled workers, fair and square, and that's considering that getting a US work visa is insanely more difficult than a German one which is a rubber stamp since they left the immigration flood gates wide open to attempt to fix the "labor shortage" which is just corporate b.s. for "we want to get away paying shit wages and need more people desperate enough to accept them".

And I don't mean poor pay in absolute terms, because obviously Germany can compete with USA on pay, I mean pay in relative terms an national levels. SW devs are still paid blue collar wages in Germany when you look at how expensive everything is, especially buying housing. While in the US SW dev is a top % pay relative to the national wages levels and expenses. German workers in finance, controlling, marketing, management, get paid way more in Germany than SW devs which are treated more like cogs.

There's also the somewhat racist traditional old-school German culture at play that sees anything non-German as being of lower quality, including products and also people, making it more difficult for foreign talent to rise through the ranks and get top positions in German companies, as opposed to immigrant friendly countries like US, UK, Canada, Australian that don't have such tough glass ceiling for skilled workers. Case in point, the CEOs and execs in many US, UK, Canadian tech companies have migrant background while in big German companies they're as white German as it gets, with the newsworthy exception of the CEOs of BioNTech and Crytek who're Turkish.

For many SW engineers in Eastern Europe emigrating to Germany is no longer attractive. Take home salaries 50% more than back home, with a 100% in cost of living with ridiculous hoops to jump through to find a decent rental, and 300% in housing price increases. Germany wants workers but doesn't have the housing to attract them because it's also trying to use immigration to enrich the landlord gentry at the same time by squeezing the migrant workers.

When I (an Eastern European) was working for a US tech company, the colleagues in Dallas-FW area owned big houses in the suburbs (on mortgages obviously) while the colleagues in the Munich offices were all stuck renting with no prospects of ever being able to afford to buy something in the greater Munich area unless they had well-off parents, which migrant workers obviously did not. Munich land prices per square foot/meter are similar to SV but not the wages. Absolutely insane.

Germany is just not an innovative powerhouse in the international SW sector that's capable to generate the biggest returns and pay the best wages, nor does it have a great housing market, or the lowest taxes, or the best openness to employing migrants in top positions. Considering all this, they will continue to have a skilled workers' shortage for the foreseeable future that will decimate their international competitiveness. Sure, they make Zeiss mirrors and Trumpf lasers, but those niche low-volume precision manufacturing sectors don't scale as well as SW, which makes it a much more profitable industry that's dominated by the US.

But you don't have to take my word for it, the comments on that Youtube video you shared tell the exact same story.

And although I check virtually all the boxes of your backend tech stack and education requirements plus a lot of JS/TS and Angular experience, I would not consider applying. The job ad explicitly mentions a location. So this reeks of a position with no real "home office". I once interviewed with a company which advertised as full-remote and then when it came to the offering was only granting flexibility nominally, but was legally a when push-come-to-shove-your-butt-is-in-our-office-seat contract. Also, it is in my eyes not sensible to exclude the developers with a vocational education (Fachinformatiker Anwendungsentwicklung or MATSE) with your degree requirements.

During the height of the pandemic, the craziest real estate jumps were in nice rural areas where formerly you either had to be retired, independently wealthy, in an unusual profession that was lucrative in rural areas, or take a pay cut to live.

But as soon as people in tech and many other “traditional business” jobs could keep their high salaries and live in Truckee, or Boise or Coeur d’Alene or Bellingham, quite a number of them moved, and liked what they found.

I’ve lived in places like that for most of my life, so I get it. But I’m not sure how it’s going to shake out.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next few years. The trends/factors I’ve been thinking about are:

* Will they like these areas long term? E.g., Coeur d’Alene is chock-full of natural beauty, but the winters can be a slog. And the politics are wild. In many ways these migrants have brought with them the things they liked from cities, so that smaller rural communities now are likely to have better coffee and nicer restaurants, but they still can’t compete with major metros on a lot of fronts. I anecdotally know one family that migrated from Portland to our community in Idaho during COVID, liked it, but found they missed what the left in the city and are now moving back. I’ll bet they’re part of a trend, even for workers who have the option to stay remote.

* What’s gonna happen with real estate prices in cities? Tremendously high commercial vacancy in cities has yet to cause a crash. But for all the talk about employers forcing people back to work, I think lots of them are going to continue to take advantage of lower rent opportunities. Will that eventually cause a crash or significant dip in overall real estate values in major urban areas? Will that entice more COVID migrants back?

* What about real estate in popular rural areas? I’ve been seeing a lot more price cuts and new listings for homes in our popular COVID migration community in the past few months. Sprig and early summer are traditionally our hot real estate months, and while people are still asking prices they would be laughable a few years ago, they’re not getting those asking prices. Houses are sitting unsold longer, and taking price cuts on the way. I think the sense of “I’ve got to get out of here” is gone, and people aren’t willing to overpay for an “idyllic” rural dream like they were a year or two ago.

* How long will employers who don’t require in-person work have an advantage? I work at a small marketing agency, and I’ve been hiring for a few positions. We can’t always compete with the big agencies for salary, but we offer a better quality of life (anything outside of 9-5 is very rare), and offer very flexible hybrid arrangements (we prefer people in our time zone, and prefer people in our metro who can come to client meetings a couple times a month without getting on a plane, though neither is a hard requirement). The last few months our job openings have gone from “struggling to find qualified applicants” to “struggling to sort through all the qualified applicants because we’ll never have time to interview them all.” At the same time, we have a few clients who require in-person work for positions that could easily be remote, and are open about the fact that they have to pay above market rates to attract talent.

I’m glad I’m not job hunting at the moment, but my sense is that we’re in a time of turmoil, and things will get better for people like the questioner in the article long-term. Not worse.

As an aside, I think the best advice from the article was to work on relevant continuing education. I’m always impressed with candidates who are working to learn new things, particularly if that seems to be coming from a place of sincere curiosity. In my experience, curious people with broad interests tend to be good problem solvers.

Facts to back up that wide generic claim?