With all due respect to janitors, by your logic, janitors are the most essential workers at said company.

In earnest, whom did you actually envision to be "essential" then?

What will probably happen is the company will want to lower the workers salary based on the local market that the IC is operating in. If you aren't trying to wage arb, then you could keep your job, and potentially be happy.

Im not OP. How do you measure level of essential-ness? How soon someone complains about that work not being done? Janitor would be pretty high up there.

-Mark

Does anyone have a counter to the idea that greater management confidence and expertise in remote work will unlock offshoring of IC tech roles, and therefore create a vastly bigger pool of low priced tech competition?

The primary problem I see is that offshoring tech work to India has been an option for a long time, but has largely failed for a variety of reasons - US companies seem to feel they get better value paying a much higher price for talent in tech hubs. It's not clear how the calculus would be different now.

It’s an attractive idea to anyone who hasn’t actually managed a team of Indian devs or worked with a typical Indian BPO company. IME they tend to require an obscene amount of oversight and micromanagement. I’m certain that’s not categorically true of all Indian labor, but it’s definitely been true of all my experiences.

Most people who are under mid 30's don't realize how cruel age bias is. With remote work there is a reasonable guarantee that it works against age bias and a huge blessing to developers who have crossed mid 30's. I lost about 1/3 of my hair due to genetics before i hit 30 and i look older than my age. I consider myself above average developer(passed FAANG interview after 10 years experience in the industry), yet I fear constantly of age bias.

I don't understand this argument.

My interpretation of "essential" with it comes it ICs is someone with a vast amount of domain knowledge which is critical for the continued operation of the company.

I've worked at many places where essential workers were in other countries, and I didn't know if they worked in an office, from home, or from a ski resort. But it didn't matter because they had the information I needed.

As with most generalizations it falls flat when making contact with reality.

It's an unpopular opinion for a reason. Many people (too many at my current company) believe that effective collaboration requires in-person presence, but they only believe that because they never had to learn any other way. Once they open their minds to the idea of using remote collaboration methods to their fullest extent instead of just using VC as a direct replacement for ephemeral hallway conversations, both they and their companies are usually better off. A lot of remote collaboration involves writing instead of speaking, which can make conversations more inclusive and more searchable later. It can strengthen both focus and accountability. These are good things, but for various reasons some people still resist.

This ignores all the companies that were operating fully remote before this.

By that logic, who is an essential worker then?