Didn't read the article - no access, just some thoughts: the downward pressure on wages will probably become a norm for WFH. Google has already set a precedent. However, unless it takes another unexpected turn, WFH is win-win-win: companies can save on office space and a bit on reduced salaries too; employees will have a healthier life and the freedom to live in cheaper locations; and finally WFH is good for the environment!
Potentially yet another "win" for the companies: some of the unnecessary engineering manager jobs will be eliminated. My impression is that in fully remote companies the opportunities to prove your importance when there's little to none, are limited. The occasional video call situation as opposed to always-in-the-office one means everyone becomes more efficient in communicating things.
Pro tip. They can only cut your pay if you let them. Or, rather, if we collectively let them.
Make it clear that you won’t accept a pay cut for the same work output. And keep negotiating your full rate for any new position you take, and this won’t affect you at all.
Personally, I always bill out at my Bay Area rate regardless of where I’m physically located (and I’ve been located in some pretty strange places). It has never been an issue.
> Pro tip. They can only cut your pay if you let them. Or, rather, if we collectively let them.
There's no "we" here. I live in Moscow, Russia, and I just got a remote job from an American company that pays 4 times more than my last one did, but still less than FAANG level. There are a LOT of developers all around the world that would be glad to "let them" pay less that what they used to when they were hiring only locally. Because for us it would still be a lot.
I don't think that American developers understand it yet, but remote work, in terms of it's influence of supply and demand of labour is not a good thing for you guys.
Same salary despite where you are living is really unfair. I live in Italy and with a silicon valley salary here I'd be millionaire. It just won't work, companies would find equally qualified people for less money and long term we would all have to move to cheaper places.
Fair isn't what we're optimizing for. The goal is to have knowledge work cost the company the same regardless of where they source it.
So yes, it's true that your cost of living in rural Italy is less than it would be were you to move to an apartment in Palo Alto, and that there will remain a surplus after you have accounted for those expenses. But I'd prefer a world where that surplus was captured by you rather than J. Random Software Company.
After all, you're the one who has to tolerate all those walkable streets and good cheap wine day in, day out, to live there. Gotta balance that somehow...
> companies would find equally qualified people for less money
That's where you're mistaken. The software industry has spent the entire time between 1994 and today hiring every one of those people all over the world. There are only so many of them left who haven't figured out their true value. You certainly aren't going to build a Facebook off of the remaining people who are willing to work for $10/hr. Anybody who is any good will demand a market rate. And that market rate is set in the Bay.
It may look reasonable from your viewpoint, but imagine applying the same logic across the board: my parents are retired and get their pension from their former job in the city, but they moved to the country side. Should they get their pension slashed because living costs is now lower to them ?
Or try applying that at a micro level, and renegotiate your salary every time you move in a city because your rent has changed, or you finished paying your mortgage.
Your living costs shouldn't matter to your company or people who own you money in general.
It's not unfair at all. If you produce the same as someone in SV then you are worth the SV salary since the company is willing to pay it to someone in SV in the first place!
No, the point is that, obviously, company do try not to pay more than they have to. They know that if you live in a cheap location where there may not be too many opportunities you will likely accept a lower salary so that's exactly what they do. It's a cost cutting exercise.
Obviously the counter point is that if everyone WFH then why would they bother paying SV salaries in SV or anywhere else? Just drop salaries across the board and cut SV people.
This is just the argument SV people don't want to hear. Of course I want my 200k and live in a cheap place.
What irks me is the ego, people thinking they're really worth a fortune....companies where (and are) fighting for talent, true...but now that remote is unifying the market salaries will raise where they were too low and high salaries will go down where they were too high. We're just hearing the denial phase of the high salaries people.
Salaries are fine as they are...it is based by the value you provide to the company, multiplied by a factor depending on where you live.
If we do what the egocentric people here want "pay me 250k a year because that's what I'm worth" then only USA based companies would do software and everyone else in the world would be growing tomatoes (as they seem to think).
How would a company in India compete with that?
If you are earning a silicon valley salary and pretend to move anywhere in the world and keep your salary because "that's what I'm worth" I have two news for you: 1) it won't happen, companies are not stupid. 2) you have a big ego problem.
Agree on most counts apart from the efficient communication angle. Purely anecdotal but I find that the number of meetings has grown significantly since constant WFH became the norm. In the past, most meetings required a meeting room whereas now, as long as the meeting organiser can see that most people have an open space in their calendar, a meeting can be arranged.
Not an insurmountable problem but I find myself protesting about this regularly.
I know what you mean, but we can hope it's temporary. Remote work requires some adjustment in work culture.
I just thought there's another interesting upside for workers: you are now more flexible in changing jobs since obviously you are no longer tied to the location. So eventually you might find an employer who is more WFH friendly and manages the communication better. And that should put pressure on your existing employer too!
We also noticed this. We have added a rule saying that almost all meetings are optional and there's no pressure to go to them (scrum meetings are not optional i.e. daily, refinement and retro). It's helped a lot and helped managers see which meetings weren't found to be helpful.
I've seen few unnecessary engineering manager positions, typically if anything companies have too few managers for the number of engineers.
I constantly see those positions filled with people who may be great engineers but are trash managers, though. Companies can still get by, but they often don't even realize how much better they'd be if they prioritized management skill instead of mere years of experience (I'm looking at you, Google, I've never seen such a high percentage of completely clueless people managers anywhere else).
I have seen way too many useless managers,the ones going from meetings to meetings, distilling incorrect information, gatekeeping a lot of things, creating unnecessary mess due to their lack of knowledge that I need to clean afterward, obviously without I/or the team getting any merits.
Oddly enough, these managers don't know much technically and are blatantly toxic, as they drive people in mass, they just move up the ladder and promote their alike peers for another round of madness.
I would love to live in these unicorn companies where everyone is marvelous, but I have never seen one in 20 different clients in Europe, from the small startup to largest 10 companies in the world, including NGOs (among the worst place to work).
So one may have a great manager but you are 6months away from yet another reorganization that would kill any teams.
Part of this is promotions. There's still no real parallel technical track for career advancement. Senior/Principal/Fellow track ended up being a management track in disguise, with all the managerial responsibilities and little of the authority.
There's local groceries though, also local services that can't be remote or online. Groceries alone is a big part of my budget after rent. Clothes & stuff I have managed to bring to the minimum: one or two online purchases per month at most (some months even zero)
My local grocer is a Safeway (a nationwide American store chain). For most of the year, fruits and vegetables are imported from other states or countries, like cherries from South America and lettuce from California. And I doubt my Cheerios and Nutella are cooked locally. Pretty much the only local impact of grocery shopping is all the low-paying jobs they create, like shelf stockers and Instacart people.
> the downward pressure on wages will probably become a norm for WFH
That depends on where you live. If you live a population center that currently has very high wages then yes. Otherwise you've just potentially gotten access to much higher paying jobs than you would've had access to before.
So what we should see is a geographical evening of wages. Which I can only really see as a good thing.
In this case the article is available apparently if you disable JavaScript in your browser. Many media web sites show the full text to the search engines but hide them with trivial HTML overlays once visited by a human. Sometimes your browser's Reader can show you the full text (though it's not the case with the Economist for example)
Maybe a different user agent or something? I'm sure that the companies writing these articles do want them to have good SEO and therefore allow crawling them for all sorts of bots, so that they'd show up on search engines.
Maybe HN should start banning paywall links. It greatly degrades the experience of HN if you can't access half the stuff on the front page by just clicking on it.
Potentially yet another "win" for the companies: some of the unnecessary engineering manager jobs will be eliminated. My impression is that in fully remote companies the opportunities to prove your importance when there's little to none, are limited. The occasional video call situation as opposed to always-in-the-office one means everyone becomes more efficient in communicating things.