I think a lot of workers do see this. My suspicion is that the current vocal minority is comprised of: truly smart people (10x developers) who will be irreplaceable and liked the comfort of remote work during covid, foreign workers for whom this is a golden opportunity, useful idiots who think 2020-21 is going to be the norm with 150-200K packages out of school and 1M TC for 6 years of experience.
> What do you suggest that a "useful idiot" like myself should do?
Seek a cluster of companies which have a culture based on in-office work. They are not going to change overnight and will be the last ones to replace American workforce with foreign ones.
> all I see are doomsday predictions
I agree and maybe that's the psychological effect of seeing multiple rounds of layoffs in the last year with new headcount only in foreign locales. Also, because when I look at how American manufacturing sector declined due to outsourcing, how China rose to prominence, how that enriched the upper class but shredded the working class, how a demagogue like Trump tapped into their resentment to gain incredible political power - it is very difficult to not connect the dots with what is happening now.
I will be extremely happy if my predictions are proven wrong.
> Seek a cluster of companies which have a culture based on in-office work
Won't those be the first companies to go under if your prediction happens and they're left competing with overseas remote companies with much lower operating costs? Especially given that they're not only paying higher US salaries, but also physical office space.
Depends on the industry and moats these companies have. eg. I don't see any competition emerging for operating systems or adtech or healthcare systems from nimble players anytime soon. I see plenty of nimble competition in the nascent fields of AI, Crypto etc.
Moving to a cheaper location allows them to cut a major % of the salary requirement due to living costs. Companies are already saving billions by creating satellite offices in cheaper states and providing remote work in that state or region - some even without requiring any days in the office.
When the salary requirement is reduced by cutting out the cost of living like that, what ends up being the salary minimum is not so much different from what the overseas dev would want. Its not like top talent in that country will work for the American companies for dimes so that American shareholders can have a payday. You either pay that dev something that will make it worth for him to not go for a major local company and lose the social status and perks associated with it (very important in many local cultures), or he will just take a more traditional career route and work for the local giants.
And its not like sloppy copy-paste work from juniors who accept $10-15/hour when they start their career was not available before. If any company that is worth its salt was not able to run a major tech business with such juniors before, they wont be able to run it now either.
Therefore what remote work in the US hurts is basically the outrageous real estate sector and its margins. Which is why they put pressure on companies for RTO through the politicians it backs...
> what ends up being the salary minimum is not so much different from what the overseas dev would want
This is FUD. Based on both qualitative data - my company, which pays Canadians much less than the cheapest US workers, and Latin Americans less than Canadians - and quantitative comparison of median total comps:
American workers, who think they can live in Midwest on SV salaries are delusional. If they think they can live in Midwest on 80% of SV salaries, time to know that it's not 2021 anymore. Your competition is with Toronto (proficiency of English, cultural compatibility etc) and depending on what your company wants, you are competing with Bogota and Sao Paulo.
> Therefore what remote work in the US hurts is basically the outrageous real estate sector and its margins.
Tell that to my American colleagues who were by and large replaced by foreign colleagues in the last year.
Your qualitative data refutes your own argument: Leaving aside that you are using the average wages as a comparison, so that the wages of the guy in Sao Paulo or Bogota cannot be directly compared to - holy hell - the salary of a guy in San Fran, the numbers outright say that there isnt so much difference in between sending a job to Toronto vs sending it to some underutilized American state. To boot, the Midwest is not the only American region and the midwest is not so poor in technology sector, especially Texas. And amazingly, populated and highly talent-rich India is missing from that list, a top outsourcing location, and instead a random Bogota is in. Why not pick Aleut Islands - the average pay of a dev there would be much, much lower there due to the scarce presence of devs.
So who do you think that you will employ in Bogota and how many of them are there? All the top-tier talent that those countries have historically been producing before was flowing into places like San Fran or other tech hubs as immigrants. You think that if the kind of remote work offshoring that you imagine happens, you will be able to grab ~200,000 people from top talent tier in those countries? A number way above the population of many cities of those countries?
No. In such a situation, either the top immigrant talent now in SF will flow back to their homeland, still not reducing the price of the talent in those countries because there is no way in hell the education systems of those countries can churn out hundreds of thousands of tech graduates a year. So basically its another case of relocation of talent - this time, the immigrant talent goes back to their own countries to work for the same companies from there just like the American talent goes back to another US state to work for the same companies from there.
Take India as an example instead - a country that can actually educate that much talent and already has a large tech sector that is not only advanced but segments of it were actually geared to do the very specific thing that you are prophesizing doom about - getting the outsourced jobs of richer countries.
Did that change anything? Has the average pay in SF constantly increased over the last 2 decades or not? Has India been able to get American companies to outsource all development jobs?
...
Long story short, you are prophesizing doom about something that was already prophesized to happen, and just did not. Its not that American companies were not able to outsource to Bogota or Trinidad or Tobago before. They were. And it did not change anything. It seems like the already present reality of remote work stayed outside your radar for whatsover reason. But it existed, and it did not cause doom.
> Tell that to my American colleagues who were by and large replaced by foreign colleagues in the last year.
$300k/year salaries and positions in SF may suffer until remote work brings down cost of living in the hellish real estate landscape and general prices, there is no doubt about it.
However I doubt that the loss of such positions are related to remote work - all the layoffs that we saw in the past year has been due to the companies trying to shore up stock prices due to the loss of the zero interest economy. Its not like they laid off 200,000 people and then hired 200,000 remote offshore devs in their place...
