Re:Revenge of the Suburbs
by zhdc1 on Sunday June 21, 2020 @04:16AM
(#23590636)
This COVID-19 induced remote work experiment has really been interesting.
One of the unexpected outcomes of the IT/software revolution was just how much industry centralization (e.g., Silicon Valley, Seattle, and later San Francisco/Shanghai/Paris/etc...) impacted competitiveness & employee wages.
It should have been the opposite - the diffusion of communication infrastructure (and information in general) should have made it easier for companies to outsource work to cheaper locations. This turned out to not be the case, at least in software, for a number of reasons - one of the main ones being that high performing employees on the whole prefer living in and around convenient urban locations.
Now that everyone has had a taste of remote work, it will be interesting to see if this trend reverses.
One of the unexpected outcomes of the IT/software revolution was just how much industry centralization (e.g., Silicon Valley, Seattle, and later San Francisco/Shanghai/Paris/etc...) impacted competitiveness & employee wages.
It should have been the opposite - the diffusion of communication infrastructure (and information in general) should have made it easier for companies to outsource work to cheaper locations. This turned out to not be the case, at least in software, for a number of reasons - one of the main ones being that high performing employees on the whole prefer living in and around convenient urban locations.
Now that everyone has had a taste of remote work, it will be interesting to see if this trend reverses.