This will almost certainly be bad for most everyone but company shareholders, unfortunately.

Which most tech workers who get paid in RSUs are?

Until they're replaced with a team in Jakarta or Dhaka making 10% of what they made.

You really believe an in office work environment was the only thing preventing this from happening? Top talent gets paid the most.

It wasn't possible before because companies couldn't figure out how to effectively manage a workforce remotely. Now that they've been forced to learn, this will be explored with renewed vigor. There are a lot of highly talented foreign workers who will work for a fraction of US salaries.

Companies that are good about integrating foreign workers into their existing teams are already reaping the benefits of this. Fortunately for Western tech workers, the majority of companies are terrible at integrating their offshore workers and have very outdated concepts of "outsourcing" where trusted local workers send robotic tasks to offshore teams being paid ridiculously low salaries. This model will continue to fail and should slow the enthusiasm for offshoring for a lot of companies.

If a tech company is sourcing engineers in an office work environment, they need to pay salaries competitive for the location of said office. (You can find great engineers in Jakarta, but you have to relocate them to SV and pay SV rates)

If everything is remote work, you hire the same worker, and pay them Jakarta rates (you can sub Jakarta for any very-low COL city).

This was possible before COVID and it didn't happen.

Outsourcing is and has been a massive trend for years. So much so that they have a word for it!

Time zones still matter. Which is a huge deterrent for being productive more so than being in the same office.

They also help you have around the clock coverage without people waking up at 4am to see if the alert is serious or not

But they also have to live without an office and may not have meaningful stakes to make the tradeoff worth it for most.

Which again is only large corporations, right?

Why would it be a benefit?

The worker can escape screaming kids, nagging spouse, etc.

Because you don’t have to cram 2 new desks into the expensive 1 bedroom apartment you share with your partner.

Well that’s offset by the fact you no longer have to get a small one bedroom near a large city downtown.

Without the commute suburbs or smaller cities offer much bigger and better spaces for less. Why pay $4.5k for that one bedroom in SOMA when you can get a 4 bedroom home in Sacramento for the same price.

I can't help but feel that this is going backwards. Cities are effective engines for value generation. Being in a city is valuable due to network effects, density, and overall efficiency that suburbs lack. Increased urbanization has gone hand-in-hand with increased prosperity for centuries. People don't pay $4.5k for a one bedroom in SOMA (just) to be close to the office.

It's too early too say if the historic value of cities will be replaced by the internet, IMO. YC makes each batch move to SV for a reason.

SV isn't a city; it's mostly suburban sprawl. In most metro areas, you can get to reasonable property prices while still being in the gravitational well of a city even if you wouldn't want to commute into the downtown every day day.

What if I live somewhere for other reasons? Anyway, it doesn’t really matter how expensive or big my home is, switching to work-from-home means I have less of that home available to me.

You're given a space to work in!

socially it's gonna be weird seeing all these business center full of empty skyscrapers

I imagine cities would probably eventually allow rezoning large parts of those skyscrapers into housing.

If you have seas of empty skyscrapers and closed storefronts/restaurants, that's not going to be a city most people are going to have any interest living in.