This isn't really a problem though. The people who really benefit from SV salaries are SV landlords and realtors. If SV companies can pay a remote person 75% of the SV salary instead the company saves some money, shareholders get a bigger dividend, someone gets a tech job where they want to live (maybe on more than the local median), and that's good for everyone.

It's probably an absolutely devastating problem for SV landlords, but they've had it pretty good for a long time so they must have been able to see it coming eventually.

Seriously, I've been working with the US west coast for most t of the last decade (i'm in Europe) and its reall realluy hard because of timezones.

Like I guess Brazil and Argentina would work, but you'll essentially just cause wages to equalise over time.

This will happen to some extent, but it's much more likely that US software engineers pay will normalise first.

Yes, there are ways to answer all three of these questions, but I'm not sure if there's a way that's simple, non-invasive, and scalable in organizations dealing with lowest-common-denominator challenges. Many startups and smaller IT companies were already doing remote work before COVID - but, let's face it, many of these companies also had a small enough footprint in terms of head count and job diversity that it was possible for them to manage 10-100 remote employees without running into major issues.

How do you do the same with 5K-10K employees? Yes, FAANG is taking a shot at it, but they also have the benefit of hiring their pick of top-level, motivated talent. Google and Facebook, at least, also have revenue streams that are resilient enough to survive massive mistakes purely through inertia.

This is an interesting natural experiment. I'm glad that it's forcing companies to reassess how they do business. However, I don't know if remote work first is going to persist after the pandemic.

why can't you rely on the existing org chart?

You have a 5-10 person team, and their manager just has to keep that team accountable. The fact that the company has 1000 more teams does not substantially change the nature of checking that every person in the team delivers.

In fact, this is not even different in office work! Either you rely on a punch-in the-employee-is-time model or you will still have to evaluate a person's commitment and competency based on their output.

I mean, sure, maybe employee X has hired a sub-contractor which works in their place while they go to the beach, but as long as work gets done, does it matter?

I don't think that companies can offshore anything but the trivial tasks which you wouldn't want to do anyway. They're definitely after it and would love to but in my experience I don't see it happening. On the other hand you find yourself competing with very high quality devs from all English-speaking countries in the world.

Dunno. I guess we'll see how it plays out. Either way COVID seems to be driving things now and for foreseable future. Not much you can do.

This isn’t a bad thing though. The world is bigger than SV or London.

1. Cram xx% more people in the same place under the pretext of creating a collaborative environment == save xx% on rent. 2. Invest a small percentage of that sum on noise cancelling headphones, because (shocker) people need to be alone from time to time.

No one is arguing that the same won't happen with remote becoming more mainstream. There's value in remote, especially from a utilitarian/equality pov, so we need to be mindful and try not to fall in the same traps (i.e. don't drink the kool-aid).

So, even beyond being fortunate is the weight of what matters to oneself more.