Tell HN: Don't root for WFH, it might destroy well-paying jobs
The crowd cheering for WFH seems to assume that the jobs will be available anywhere the suburban US which is ideal for WFH with big houses with enough space to have an office, gym and whatever. They also assume SV level salaries, maybe with a 10-15% haircut and think they can live like kings.
But from my personal experience at a company going fully WFH, I can say that those are rosy dreams. I am in a position where I know about the company's hiring plans and salaries. Guess where is a majority of new hires going to come from? Other countries! Guess what will be their salaries? Much lower than what we are offering in the non-SV parts of the US.
If the WFH trend continues, it will do to the plum US tech job market what globalization did to manufacturing. In a WFH setup, someone in Mexico is on the same level as someone in Kansas or SV, but much cheaper.
It is time for tech workers to look out for themselves and root for a failure of WFH trend. Else for the short term king-size lifestyle in your remote corner of the US, you will destroy one of the last remaining well-paying job market in the long term.
164 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadMy company is already on 4 and may soon move to 5. Is that a future you want? You may take a 15-20% paycut and enjoy your suburban luxury lifestyle for a few years. Beyond that, as the WFH from foreign countries kicks in, you will see that there won't be many job openings at a high salary for your role.
You would have the cushey job because of the 'power' for a while. But it has nothing to do with altruism - to win you need to adapt and have the best product or service.
I did not get reference. Can you explain a bit about it?
So the right question would be:
"Why do you oppose hiring devs (who are upper-middle everywhere in the world) elsewhere?"
And the answer is obviously: "Because it will push salaries down."
Personally, I think it's normal. SW development will be done remotely more and more in the future. Those, who want to build a moat, should probably focus on HW or firmware development.
I’ve worked at a geo-distributed company for a long while and let me tell you: The diversity of viewpoints and experiences will make your teams stronger, happier and more resilient. That culture needs to be consciously built though. That won’t happen in and of itself. But it’s so, so worth it.
To anyone else reading this: Don’t buy into the "us versus them" rhetoric. It will lead you down a dark path.
There is something to be said for watching out for your community. The only reason to be hyper-free-market is if you're an owner of the means of production.
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To be clear, I also work for an international company and I have nothing against any colleagues. I simply think it's naive to not be wary of a sudden, further erosion of the middle class if companies dump the US as the primary source of high-skilled work.
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edit: I resent HN throttling posts for 40+ minutes, so I'll respond to corobo here: I am criticizing the US. I am suggesting that American companies will save money while letting their host country rot.
However, that's almost the opposite of where we are now. The demand for tech workers is growing, and that greens will likely continue for decades as the world upgrades to a modern digital infrastructure. That means that salaries will still rise, none will still be readily available, and the pie if high paying positions will likely increase.
There may also be a solid market for "blue collar" engineers. Folks who build basic but necessary programs. It's not machine learning, but it will pay the bills and potentially lift more families into the middle class around the globe
First, the substance: Of course not. It's healthy to analyze the pros and cons of any significant change to a system. We're definitely in the rose-colored-glasses part of WFH. There will absolutely be negative consequences. My main argument is that given the current supply of tech workers vs. demand for tech workers, and the likelihood of there needing to be more - not fewer - tech jobs in the future, the comment's dystopian vision is unlikely to occur any time soon. The time to start sounding alarms is when the acceleration curve for the growth of jobs vs. available workers becomes consistently negative. That's the first sign a trend is starting to reverse. We definitely aren't there, so it seems reasonable to call OP's rhetoric hyperbolic at best.
Secondly, I've noticed a trend on HN where folks post an open-ended, contradictory question in response to something that they disagree with or don't like. This implies that that parent comment is somehow flawed, but doesn't actually provide much substance in the form of concrete thoughts or opinions. It invites readers to fill in the blanks without ever challenging their (or the original author's) ideas. And it generally invites a flame war instead of a healthy dialogue or debate.
Apologies if this wasn't your intention. Given how open-ended the question is, I don't have much to work with :p. If you do have opinions about why either of my ideas are flawed, I'm definitely interested in hearing them!
I'm really curious to see whether or not wages actually end up rising for everyone because of WFH. Up to now, employers have been able to use location and either cost of living or cost of labor as the argument for paying people less than in the Bay. That's starting to fall apart in the current market, which will push wages higher everywhere. All of the sudden, the Bay needs to pay every higher to convince people to move there.
I'm not convinced that'll be the outcome, but it wouldn't surprise me once the labor market becomes a lot more liquid. The kind of multiples software development brings to a business is just so much higher than current salaries
Mate if you're going to try that one don't be defending America with it haha. Gofundme campaigns are a part of your healthcare system..
e: acknowledging your edit and comment, throttling for downvotes does suck. I wont force a back and forth through edits.
Why not? The US has an enormous welfare state, one of the biggest and most expensive in the world in fact.
Which isn't the same thing as pretending the US has a well-run and efficient welfare state, which it does not.
Fun fact: the US spends more of its economy on its welfare state, than either Canada or Australia do, and just below Switzerland. That's simultaneously a testament to how massive the US welfare state has become, and how poor its efficiency often is (what with our world-topping per capita healthcare costs, nobody gets less bang for the buck on welfare spending than the US).
The bottom 24%-28% (depending on the year) in the US receive free healthcare, which costs north of $700 billion per year. Medicaid alone costs around $650 billion now. The US further has an array of other free and subsidized healthcare programs, at the local/state/federal levels, and I suspect most foreigners are entirely ignorant that any of it exists.
The various government systems of the US spend $9-$10 trillion per year, depending on the year, or roughly 40%-45% of the economy. Did you think that was all going to military spending?
Yes I'd love it if they had the training to get good jobs, and the great news there is -- they've already been there and done it! :)
Yes I'd absolutely give up some of my salary, assuming it's a fair question and not "haha well you wouldn't give up half of your salary to hire someone so I'm right" yea I don't give up half my salary to pave the roads either, it's a group effort!
The majority of the world is not on SV wages, so yeah they pay "as well as knowledge workers" in that none of the above pays nearly as much as you're thinking outside of your utopian society bubble. Trade jobs (electrician, plumber, etc) can earn equivalent or more in the real world :)
- It’s nationalistic to defend the income of your fellow Americans? If it is, then everyone should be a nationalist.
- Geo diversity improves the company? How come? Language barriers, cultural barriers, time zone barriers, in person location barriers, the list goes on.
You just threw in some buzz words without any substance.
Yes, that's (part of) the definition of nationalism.
> If it is, then everyone should be a nationalist.
No, they really shouldn't. For the same reason that we shouldn't all be trying to sabotage each other trying to improve our own status.
> - Geo diversity improves the company? How come?
He described exactly how. You may have had a different experience personally, but that doesn't mean he's wrong. There have been numerous studies showing that diverse groups produce better results than homogeneous ones, for exactly the reasons he described.
From Wikipedia In some countries, such as the UK, horseshoeing is legally restricted to people with specific qualifications and experience
I'm not following - can you explain the analogy?
Wait, no they aren't. They do a lot of labor-intensive, non-specialized manufacturing but other countries are still way ahead where it matters.
What people might not realise that manufacturing is still going on in Europe and US. It's just that less people are working in factories. Output is 'more' than in decades before. Automation and all that.
i think that's kind of his point
Half your salary is still a massive raise for me and I'm pretty well paid by UK standards. Viva la WFH.
Putting a dent into global poverty is a good thing, by the way. Bonus if they're paying you less they can hire more people overall too, even better.
But I guess it's okay to leave us all out to pasture if it means you can concentrate just a bit more of wealth.
(I am from Poland and some informatics/programming is outsourced here already from USA)
If we're speaking of things like employment, of course people should look out for their own self-interest. Proposing the opposite is to propose suicide.
The people of Norway should donate their trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund to Togo? As opposed to continuing to concentrate their extraordinary wealth figure and continuing to act in their own national self-interest. Togo only has eight million people, imagine how rich all the people of Togo could be if Norway weren't so selfish.
Next you might want to convince all the world's great economies to drop all trade restrictions and stop protecting themselves.
Then take the next logical step: stop protecting all workers from big globalist corporations, drop all labor laws and protections.
That feels extreme... I don't think the opposite of "some jobs will leave the US" is "I'm going to kill myself".
Ditto the rest of your post. Nothing but a bunch of straw man/ slippery slope.
It's particularly obvious "suicide" is meant as a figure of speech, although frankly it's not too far from the truth, given what deindustrialization (loss of very large numbers of manufacturing jobs) did to large swaths of the US. It did in fact cause large increases in suicide numbers, along with a horror show of other consequences / fallout. I doubt anybody is confused over the dire consequences of what happened across the US as manufacturing jobs got wiped out.
Saying the most highly paid US workers take a 10% pay cut if it means other economies rose above the poverty line is absolutely fine in my opinion. If you think that is akin to starving the entire US population so my country can live like Sheikhs, I feel like that's on you.
Talk about jumping 27 places in terms of drawing artificial conclusions.
I got to see, up close, what deindustrialization looks like, during the 1980s and 1990s in the US. Its consequences are intensely negative on the population it affects. Allowing the US tech industry to be outsourced to save big corporations money, would be an identical repeat of the stupidity of what the US intentionally allowed to happen to its industrial empire - in the name of globalist corporations boosting their margins - in the second half of the 20th century.
If you want to see what a selfish industrial policy looks like, look no further than Germany. They protected their industry, they acted in their own national self-interest, and their people have benefited enormously from it over the last few decades.
I don't have the same experience so I can't argue it.
> Allowing the US tech industry to be outsourced would be an identical repeat of the stupidity of what the US intentionally allowed to happen to its industrial empire
And yet it seems to me that you're doing rather well as an economy all these years later. Wasn't the capitalist argument that the size of the pie is not fixed or some such?
1/4 to 1/3 of the country did well, that much is true. If you're in that group, you're among the best off people on the planet, generally.
> Wasn't the capitalist argument that the size of the pie is not fixed or some such?
The pie does indeed expand, sometimes substantially. Otherwise we couldn't have nearly eight billion people that are better off at the median than at any other time in recorded history. The examples of vast national improvement from around the world the past 30-40 years are prolific.
The pertinent question usually is: who is extracting what share of the expanded pie. Where is it going, to how many people, due to what policies/reasons.
In the US, the tech boom has produced eight people now worth one trillion dollars collectively. That's equivalent to the bottom 100 million (!) having an additional $10,000. Obviously not a trivial sum, in other words, compacted into just eight people. It has also produced 1.47 million software developers yielding a median salary of $110,000 per year (1.47m is 1/2 of 1% of the US adult population).
Tech is particularly potent at concentrating wealth, for various reasons (often rapid growth, global reach and winner-take-most outcomes).
The US middle class has not thrived over the last half century. The US, for the better part of a century (post Civil War up to the early to mid 1970s), had an elite middle class outcome. That is no longer true, the US middle class outcome has receded vs many of its peers.
Whereas in software, the very mechanism that opens the job market to people in other countries ensures that it stays open for people in the U.S. We're not going to see a gutting, we're going to see a balancing. The door won't be shut on the way out. If cost of living makes it hard for U.S. workers to compete, it will probably also come down quite a bit, seeing as tech workers have been one of the huge drivers of its recent increase in the first place.
This is manufacturing story all over again.
Bring it on!!
No. People in other areas work just as hard, or harder, it's just their industries are not that trendy. Just like IT was in 80s - and developers where geeks who were paid not much more than other white collar jobs.
Citation needed? I don't see IT anywhere on this list... https://stress.lovetoknow.com/Which_Professionals_are_Prone_...
Get real - you've been spoilt and have no clue of how others earn a living
Shall I begin listing all the consequential technologies that were invented in the US in the post WW2 era? It's an exceptionally long, comprehensive list, spanning from the GUI to the router to the microprocessor to Unix to the transistor to the LED and LCD to DSP to ethernet to RAM to hypertext to streaming media to the digital modem to the PC modem to the cable modem to the modern laser to the supercomputer to the personal computer & mobile computer to the PDA to digital graphics to virtual reality to USB to the cellphone & smartphone to the IBM hard drive & solid state storage to fiber optics to email to GPS to the relational database to Java & C & C++ & JavaScript & Basic to TCP/IP to the spreadsheet to the digital camera to the lithium ion battery all the way down to the mouse. And a zillion more things.
To pretend that the US didn't earn its advantage, is plain bunk. The entire tech industry rides on the shoulders of what the US built up over the past six decades.
Past inventions don't count as brownie points in the present
Tech salaries still went up.
But with WFH, it is an even playing field. As long as everyone is in a similar timezone and logging in from their home and collaborating via Zoom or Slack, productivity differential vanishes. Why do you think you are seeing a sudden flood of biggish companies going fully remote now?
Push for WFH at your peril.
Trying to hoard the jobs won't work in the long run anyway.
If you are living in say London plumbers, mechanics, housing, eggs are more expensive than in say Vietnam.
you can be paid more in London and have a lower quality of life
I can't help but feel a bit sad about it. The pay and perks were honestly obscene(ly good), but the best part was not being treated as expendable. Friends in other career paths talk about horrible managers/PIs/advisors and working conditions in law, academia, etc. I think because it's so hard to hire a good dev, I've been treated really well by my bosses up to this point. Or maybe I got lucky.
Anyway, I hope that doesn't go away just because the talent pool is widening. I liked being treated like a human.
I mean isn't $150k in the Bay Area a poverty wage? Can you get a starter home for less than $1M?
If everyone has to be in one of a few cities to have a good job, the cost of real estate in those cities will explode to the point that it will soak up all that advantage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent
Obviously my overall outlook probably be a lot worse if I didn't have stock in the picture. But I'm still able to live well and save well with my cash salary, so I don't think "poverty wages" is accurate.
There is a limit to how much those salaries can increase before the company goes out of business.
The company I work for has lost a good few staff to EU companies recently. I presume their staff have been moving to US ones.
I fully agree its the Free Market and I'm not sure I would change it if I could but that doesn't mean it isn't painful for everyone.
My company has started hiring engineers in the Midwest since the pandemic started and they've been awesome additions to our team. There are some great talent to be found among people who simply don't feel so enamored about SV or the Bay Area or simply want to stay where they are. We were drowning in work before and now we have some extra help. I don't see this as a bad trend.
No one is entitled to anything. It is purely about protecting your bargaining power. Tech peeps should learn from Doctors/AMA. If you aren't vigilant about your privilege, others will be too happy to take that power away from you and enrich themselves. See who benefited from outsourcing manufacturing to China - only the outsourcing companies and Chinese middle class, but at a great loss to American middle class. While I completely understand Chinese middle class to fight for improving its lot, I don't understand why American middle class has to surrender its power so easily.
> We were drowning in work before and now we have some extra help. I don't see this as a bad trend.
LOL we might as well be working at the same company. Wait until you see the proportion of your foreign colleagues increasing. Again, same thing happened with manufacturing. "Oh but we are just seeing cheaper goods in our stores" was what they said in the beginning. And it was too late by the time capital owners established manufacturing elsewhere and drained out all those middle class jobs.
It’s not like the income is distributed equally outside the US. It’s a cost savings. So, they’re gonna spend less and who gets to keep all the money? Exec team.
I don’t mind having more people in software. I DO mind when people start advocating for lower wages. There is no reason to lower the wages. We need to rise everyone together - not pull people down from the middle class in the US. (Even $400k engs in USA are still overwhelming middle class because they are wage slaves as much as anyone else is)
Trying to hoard jobs will not do the US any good.
US domestic competition is a concern, but my hunch is that even with the wider talent pool companies will still have trouble recruiting and good developers will still have leverage over not needing to move. I think it would be interesting to find numbers on how concentrated developers are in expensive cities, I know plenty of people who moved to California for the work.
Also, if my wage suddenly decreased to match levels with places that are cheaper to live in I’d probably have to move away from all my friends and now family as I wouldn’t be able to afford to live where I currently do (SV). That would suck, and I think it’s fair that I feel concern over losing that. Not sure where all the negativity in this thread is coming from.
I think it is a good thing if this happens. This salary inflation has made it impossible for anyone else to afford living there. It will also help curb the entitlement that valley IT employees carry around thinking that they are always changing the world.
That would be no different from the mid-2000s outsourcing trend, which never really worked out either. There were just lots and lots of horror stories where quality and productivity would take a nosedive whenever those outsourced teams were involved.
I have seen both, 2000's outsourcing and what is happening now. It is a very different game now and far more dangerous to US techies.
They also completely fall apart when you realize two things:
Offshoring has been happening for decades. H1B abuse has been happening for decades.
Yet salaries rose.
Summary: outsourcing was never really going to work due to collaboration hurdles. Current model is to replace one US-worker at a time with a non-US-worker from the same timezone. Much more effective and much more lethal to US workers.
You assert that collaboration hurdles stops outsourcing. A point that I do not agree with, but if it was true, to outsource one person at a time requires remote collaboration tools between two teams that honestly wouldn't be that much more different than WFH to train and collaborate.
Once again, you assert a lot of things without providing evidence besides your own testimony that is what your current employer is doing and your experience that in-person teams are more effective.
I could assert my own experience dealing with open offices being too noisy to program in, in-building construction, employees making office chatter around you, or senior engineers needing to fly out to attend events, investor meetings, or sales; and you have to collaborate by zoom anyway.
You also treat other countries legal, language, and cultural barriers as if they are not material. And trust me, they are.
Speaking of the long term, it's not hard to imagine it is doomed no matter what individuals choose.
SV exists because there was no efficient way to collaborate remotely. WFH still sucks today, but is much better than before. There are countless startups are trying to fix this, therefore it will get better gradually. Eventually, SV won't make sense anymore other than a cultural symbol, because the high-quality and cheaper talents reserve is all around the world.
Companies will take advantage of things when they see fit, and that does not depends too much on the choice of individuals. The question left is when will it happen rather than will or will not.
Better how? By making WFH more like working in an office?
Many people are trying to tackle this, so their approaches and values provided should be pretty diversed. There are also possibilities that people came up with something really "remote native".