> And if they can do their jobs remotely, why can't an equally skilled engineer in a country with a cost of living 1/10th of the "rich countries" do the same?

I'm an American expat and one of the things that I quickly discovered when I left and started traveling is that skilled engineers (and designers, etc.) in countries with significantly lower costs end up figuring out how much they're worth to employers/clients in richer countries. When they do and they have enough of a track record to prove their worth, their rates go up.

So if you think you're going to take your freelance developer in the US who charges $150/hour and replace him with an equally skilled freelance web developer in, say, Brazil for $15/hour, good luck. Any such developer in the Brazil will eventually discover that he's able to command much more. Except in a few rare instances it won't be $150/hour, but when you factor in time zones, cultural differences and language, there is far less of a difference in cost than you'd think.

Anecdotally, I have a few friends that run companies in the US that have expanded their hiring to consider remote candidates outside of the US and Canada and they still struggle to find suitable candidates even though the rates they're offering are based on qualifications, not location. In other words, they're willing to pay $100+/hour to the right people no matter where they live. Good people are in demand everywhere, and they know it.

I’ve observed this as well, good workers are generally smart people and will figure out their worth.

I think people underestimate the demand for talent and think that globally we can fill that hole. We can’t, yet. Humans don’t scale well enough and eventually automation will be the real problem. (But I also think that is further away than currently advertised, but different topic.)

“Everyone remote” works right now because everyone has pre-existing relationships. Double your team with everyone having never met in person and I guarantee the cracks will start to show and the culture will suffer.

I’m dealing with a company that decided to try outsourcing for a second time starting just before covid hit and it’s just as miserable as it was the last time they tried in 2009. “But video conferencing” doesn’t bridge cultural friction and timezones.

This is not so different as one might believe. Those exact arguments about off-shoring and remote work already existed back then. Even your first argument was pretty much the same in all those other events as “has been shown that every code monkey can do their job remotely”. Turned out pretty soon that Software engineering is much more than just churning out code.

> This is not so different as one might believe. Those exact arguments about off-shoring and remote work already existed back then.

This is far different than then.

In 2000, remote work was almost an impossibility... between bandwidth, protocols and everything else.

These days it's as easy as enabling your built-in HD cam and mic and getting to business.

Successful off-shoring isn’t about enabling a bandwith-hungry HD cam streaming your team in 4K. Neither back then nor nowadays. The right communication tools for the job existed back then but that wasn’t the reason why it didn’t work out in 2000 or in 2009. Management isn’t dumb and would happily off-shore to the cheapest remote workers all those last years where nothing of that was a major issue but the problems aren’t primarily about tooling, protocol or bandwith.

> Management isn’t dumb and would happily off-shore to the cheapest remote workers

I've had my share of severe pushbacks with "management" over the years.

They've often been burned by shopping projects out to the lowest bidder and suddenly realize you need competent engineers to make it happen.

The problem is you can find competent engineers now across the planet for far less than what you would pay a US-based engineer, forget about whatever is going on in SF/SV.

A lot of people would like to stick their fingers in their ears and say "nah nah nah" rather than realize what is going on, but I deal with it daily.

So in 20012, when Skype was huge, why didn't this take over? It's not like it didn't happen, people have been poaching rockstars across the globe forever.

But are you really saying that it's only in 2020 that people put effort into outsourcing to cheaper foreign talent?

Or that the technology of remote work is now what makes it possible? I dispute that as well, good remote collaboration has been happening in open source for forever. People who can make it work make it work. It's not the issue and never has been.

Linux was 9 years old in 2000.

But all big companies knew already that they can offshore, and in fact they have been doing it for decades. Intel and Microsoft were offshoring already in the 90s and perhaps even earlier. The only real "news" here is that you can have high functioning fully remote software teams. But the phenomena of offshoring has been happening for a long long time.

> This is different because Covid-19 has shown to everyone that they can do their jobs remotely.

Citation needed.

> Citation needed.

We're on HN, a technology site.

Many of us have realized we can do our jobs the exact same way as we did before.

I'm not talking about construction workers, police, fast food, etc.

I'm not sure this needs a citation.

Many of us have also realized the quality of work is not the same when there is zero in-person collaboration

> Many of us have also realized the quality of work is not the same when there is zero in-person collaboration

"Many of us" with decades into this career and who have managed such teams would disagree.

I have more often than not heard the quality is better, as in the output. Are you referring to the quality of the experience of work being worse?