> But since my company is fully remote and distributed, the downside to hiring in LatAm and Eastern Europe has been significantly reduced.
The WFH zealots keep downvoting any comments about this, but the offshoring of tech employment and massive layoffs were the predictable, and predicted, consequences of the massive push for WFH.
Either agglomeration effects exist and people work much better when they were physically collocated, or they don’t exist and companies incorrectly believed their employees worked much better when they were collocated (to the point that most companies were willing to relocate someone from Minnesota to SF and pay them an additional $100k than they would need to otherwise), the net effect is the same.
By insisting on WFH you’ve given companies absolutely no reason to continue paying 5-10x what they could pay the same person if they were living in a low CoL area.
The irony, of course, is that the WFH zealots understood this. Heck, many of them said this was an advantage of WFH as it would bring more jobs to mid tier cities in the U.S. etc.
Of course, being zealots, they wouldn’t take the argument to its logical conclusion, which was why would a company ever move a job from SF to Sioux Falls and shave off 20% when they could move into Buenos Aires and shave off 80-90% of the cost instead.
The icing on the cake, however, is that people outside the US are far more likely to be working from the office and wanting to work from the office. So not only are they cheaper for companies, they also benefit from the real benefits or the perceived benefits of the agglomeration that had companies paying their employees so much more than they needed to in the first place.
The WFH zealots keep downvoting any comments about this, but the offshoring of tech employment and massive layoffs were the predictable, and predicted, consequences of the massive push for WFH.
Either agglomeration effects exist and people work much better when they were physically collocated, or they don’t exist and companies incorrectly believed their employees worked much better when they were collocated (to the point that most companies were willing to relocate someone from Minnesota to SF and pay them an additional $100k than they would need to otherwise), the net effect is the same.
By insisting on WFH you’ve given companies absolutely no reason to continue paying 5-10x what they could pay the same person if they were living in a low CoL area.
The irony, of course, is that the WFH zealots understood this. Heck, many of them said this was an advantage of WFH as it would bring more jobs to mid tier cities in the U.S. etc.
Of course, being zealots, they wouldn’t take the argument to its logical conclusion, which was why would a company ever move a job from SF to Sioux Falls and shave off 20% when they could move into Buenos Aires and shave off 80-90% of the cost instead.
The icing on the cake, however, is that people outside the US are far more likely to be working from the office and wanting to work from the office. So not only are they cheaper for companies, they also benefit from the real benefits or the perceived benefits of the agglomeration that had companies paying their employees so much more than they needed to in the first place.