> That office was your moat and now it’s gone.
I don't think sitting in an office somewhere, with my headphones on is any kind of 'moat'. I'm judged on the quality and speed of work that I do. I'm also paid for understanding the underlying needs my company has for the application I'm building. I'm paid for the ideas I contribute, the work-culture I share, and for being present and consistent during work-hours - even though I work almost always from home.
Twice in my career so far I've been involved in projects "paying someone across the world" for "the same output" and they were both total disasters: ending multiple-times over budget without even being completed.
The time-difference alone would have been bad enough (where the feedback loop was often a couple of days even for the smallest change), but we found that the coders you were supposed to be dealing with would regularly be replaced, simply disappear altogether (sometimes reappearing in the project weeks later); the new developers would need to be re-briefed, and altogether the coordinating project manager halfway around the world would spend most of their time either bullshitting or stonewalling us.
Payment, taxes and other problems all just added to the headaches.
I don't mean that these developers were producing code that was lower quality (we barely saw enough to really judge), it's simply that working with someone "locally-remotely" is (almost literally) a world away from expecting to be able to just export that job to a low-wage coder in some other part of the globe.