Probably a bimodal distribution will be the outcome.

The skilled on-shore would be paid more, the fungible would be paid less.

But again offshoring is not always the cheapest answer due to the inefficiency that time difference introduces.

Is that over $200k a year ( per engineer) in inefficiency

Well if the inefficiency is blocking a couple people who all make $100k/year...seems pretty easy.

Yeah, obviously, or they'd just be offshoring whole teams/departments at a time already. The reason they don't do that is because there's a market rate for good engineering. When an offshore contractor gets good enough, they figure out the market rate and start charging it.

I've been hearing this sort of doom and gloom since the 90s, yet here I am making bank in the USA still

Cannot make generalizations, but anecdotally I have experienced situations where senior engineers have to spend half of their time to coordinate work due to this.

Things that can be resolved in 5 minutes have to wait for a day.

Currently trimodal now

Organizations are currently able to use remote workers from foreign countries. The relevant legal change would mandate them to accept them from their own country.

If remote work would "drive wages down", it would already do so -- since that's an option available to employeers now

That argument existed now for how long? Depends if you are doing just the ""barista equivalent tech job"", but it seems there is more to it.

NDAs don't work in different countries. We've already learned what hassles there are offshoring IP to China -- who promptly stole it. Ditto for non-competes, stock grants, etc. -- these get very messy across borders. That's fine for L2 support drones or QA box checkers but no way I'm hiring anyone I care about for this purpose.

AI is coming for those roles before they end up in India or PI.

Speaking of NAFTA, that's one of the reasons we're seeing Mexico City as an offshore hub. Better timezone overlap, can usually trust that their credentials are legitimate, and it's not hard to find a (Mexican accented) Spanish speaker in much of the US.

Plus the NAFTA TN visa means if they're good you can easily bring them across the border with no H1B headaches. Cheaper flights, too.

> Remote work will drive wages down, not up

I know you don't mean it this way, but it should right? It's fundamentally cheaper - no commute on the employee part, no office space on the employer side. Greatly enhanced flexibility all round. Both sides should definitely splitting the dividends.

I'm fine with it if that is how it works.

I agree actually. Stated differently, commuting is a pain for workers, so they're willing to accept a lower wage to avoid it.

This also means the worker can live where the cost of living is lower, and be willing to work for less--thus pushing down wages. Arguably the worker still comes out ahead though if she can live where she wants to...assuming she likes working remotely from a low cost-of-living place. If she'd rather live in NYC and go to the office, she might not be happy to see her wage go down.

> If she'd rather live in NYC and go to the office

yep - in the short term there will be some discontinuities like this. But longer term - more staff working remotely is going to take pressure off real estate prices in cities, so it will actually be justifiable even there that salaries can fall. Unfortunately since so many office space leases are long term, and rezoning of land use even slower, this can take a very long time to flow through.