Just outright insane.
1. It enables them to live in lower cost of living cities. This makes them more competitive relative to outsourcing because a lower wage in a cheaper city goes farther.
2. It opens up the job pool. If you work remote, you can work at any company that takes remote workers regardless of where you live.
3. It reduces the cost of switching jobs. Many people are stuck in jobs they don't want because there are few other local opportunities and switching jobs means uprooting and moving. For a single 20-something in an apartment, that doesn't sound so bad. But once you have a partner with their own career, kids with meaningful friendships, a mortgage, etc. then moving can be extremely disruptive.
In general, more job flexibility increases the efficiency of the job market for employees.
It increases the efficiency of the market as a whole, but that's not the same as saying that first world software engineers (already highly paid and previously protected from foreign competition) would be better off.
2. Correct. Given that the majority of SW jobs, especially the highest paying ones, were located in the U.S. this is a net benefit to anyone living outside the U.S. even before you take cost into consideration. More American jobs opened up to a Londoner than global jobs opened up to someone living in SF.
3. Efficiency approximately = lower costs. In this case costs = developer salaries.
So you’re right. We got more efficient. We reduced the average cost of developer salaries per job. Since very few people are willing to take a pay cut this means jobs are moving/will move to places where people are willing to work for less.
As someone who is Indian and frequently visits the sub continent (writing this from a suburb in Delhi) I can categorically tell you that no one actively wants to live in the cheapest Indian cities (just left my family’s home city which falls into this bracket).
I’m not sure if you’ve travelled much around the sub continent but I’d say you’re quite badly romanticising it. Yes we have our own culture which is different to that of the USA but, as with all things, there are A Lot of aspects of the culture here which are not admirable.
Sorry to burst your bubble but, I love living in my T3 city I was born in.
Don't talk for 1.4 billion people.
Thanks.
The data for Indians moving out of India does the talking.
> I can categorically tell you that no one actively wants to live in the cheapest Indian cities
It is pretty easy to disprove it, as me and my friends that are living in T3 cities are pretty content with our lives.
As others have said, even the richest cities have a swathe of issues which simply do not exist in the west (reasons for which are another discussion).
*looks at air pollution chart which is literally at 359 right this second (01:38)*
this is comparing Seattle and Mumbai
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
Real estate is about 2x-1x the price (I bet the cheap stuff is much worse than in the US though).
Cars and more expensive big purchases are cheaper in the US. And don't forget, the US has absolutely first-class-bar-none access to financial services, with abundant cheap loans, so you can support a much nicer lifestyle on the same income.
As someone living in EU and working (and job hunting) for American companies for the last N years I just have never seen it happen. American companies were opening subsidiaries in Europe long before COVID - they were just making everyone go to office there. Surge of remote work didn't seem to bring new American jobs to Europe as far as I could see - if anyone was hiring remotely, it were the same companies that already were hiring for in-office jobs before. Meanwhile, most remote jobs by American companies seem to be open for American residents only.
Thing is, for most locations, you still need to establish a legal presense to hire there, and that is enough of bureacratic burden for most companies to expand their geography very sparingly
I currently live in Seattle. On Zillow, I can find a house in the small town where I grew up with the same stats as mine (square footage, number of bedrooms, baths). That house is about a fourth of the cost that Zillow says my current home is worth.
Oh, and the house in the small town has a 750' storage building out back. And another 1,500' shop. And five acres of land. And a fish pond.
Some may accept a significantly lower pay (to go such a long way), but many wouldn't.
Overall my observation is that costs of living doesn't proportionally follow compensation. The far stretched example is how offshore staff often live in countries with costs of living at about a fifth, earning a third of their counterparts in the U.S or other top paying countries
Of course for skilled jobs perfectly doable remote such as software engineers.
I may be biased by the fact it also makes sense, a worker understands the value provided to the business is more or less equal, and since we live in a market society, why wouldn't it be expected to earn the same. In effect we don't earn the same no matter the location, but it is somewhere between that and aligned to location comp.
…
> switching jobs means uprooting and moving. … moving can be extremely disruptive.
This one thing has two aspects that you claim is both a benefit and a drawback simultaneously.
Everything is trade-offs.
Efficiency benefits society at large, at the expense of the people being made more efficient. This is just capitalism and the result of price (and also sometimes societal respect) being a function of scarcity of a product/skill.
There's a reason construction unions, doctor's associations, and the like exist - to promote members interests (i.e. predominately money). If you can cartel an industry to produce lower efficiencies; assuming that a disruptor can't break into your market and ruin your party your members will accrue higher salaries and usually given our system more respect from peers in society. Locally I'm hearing "get a trade"; and when I say I'm a SWE people sneer - the respect for the profession IMO due to "efficiency/AI" has crashed over the last decade.
Tbf, a lot of SWEs sneered at other professions getting automated by AI - even on HN.
There isn't much sympathy to be given to SWEs and techies simply because we are paid significantly higher than other white collar roles with comparable or worse working hours like accounting, marketing, other engineering disciplines, dentistry, nursing, and even various subfields of medicine like primary care physicians.
A lot of techies who are complaining on HN need to realize that in reality they are the elite even though they don't think they are.
Why does Jeff in Cary NC deserve a $200K TC working 40 hours and remote first and just a BS in CS when a CPA at PwC makes $120K TC with added debt from a masters in accounting, a Management Consultant at BCG makes $175K TC with added MBA debt, an Biomedical Engineer at Biogen earning around $120K TC with added debt from bio undergrad and grad school, a journalist working for a local newspaper earning $30k-50k with debt from journalism school, and a teacher earns $50K with debt from getting an education credential on top of a bachelors?
My comment was more I think that "sneer" is more around the profession's worth. A few years ago people would go "wow, that's cool". Very different now which shows status of a job is determined by perceived job prospects, security, and impact.
I did (and sometimes still do) attend professional events but the level of interpersonal-contact pre-COVID was gone long before I semi-retired.
-Bruce Springsteen (1984)
Big corporations are the opposite. Doing something that looks good locally / helps a quarterly report but works to the detriment of the company as a whole is often par of the course :(
that covers more bases
Neither generalization works for ALL cases but hand wavey claims of some ism is small comfort to those of us who've seen the results more than once.
And I've worked with excellent offshored workers as well, but that doesn't make claims to the contrary invalid.
There is also a big difference in mindset between an employee hoping to advance their career at a company, trying to become a SME, pushing initiatives, incentivized by stock grants, actually caring about customers, etc, and a vendor employee - even a good one - to who this is just a temporary gig, and has no vested interest in the quality of the codebase or building value for the company.
If the top down message is "this is the direction, make it work", and people further down in the hierarchy understand that the boss doesn't want to hear that his plan (e.g. hire the cheapest to save money) isn't working, then he is not going to hear it.
Go ahead, downvote. As if working in the office would have magically protected you these layoffs.
https://aflcio.org/issues/immigration
> The only way to stop the race to the bottom in wages and standards is for working people of all races, religions and immigration status to stand together
> Find resources to help union members know their rights and ensure they are prepared to defend themselves and the immigrant members of their families and communities in the event of workplace or community raids
What about this one that explicitly advocates for non-Americans?
https://aflcio.org/issues/global-worker-rights
> The AFL-CIO believes that confronting these challenges requires building power for people around the world.
The whole site is just college leftist activism. This isn’t about bettering my job and career
“This approach will ensure that immigration does not depress wages and working conditions or encourage marginal low-wage industries that depend heavily on substandard wages, benefits and working conditions.”
And:
(1) an independent commission to assess and manage future flows, based on labor market shortages that are determined on the basis of actual need;
(2) a secure and effective worker authorization mechanism;
(3) rational operational control of the border;
(4) adjustment of status for the current undocumented population; and
(5) improvement, not expansion, of temporary worker programs, limited to temporary or seasonal, not permanent, jobs.
[0]: https://aflcio.org/resolution/labor-movements-principles-com...