The problem is that if you lose your job this plan will crumble on first contact with the enemy. I'm job hunting right now, and between 'ghost jobs', bad recruiters, low ballers, take-homes with unstated requirements, leetcode grinding, system design studying, optimization for "best talent, lowest salary", and the fact that workers have absolutely no power means you don't have a choice how you work at some point.
Once savings start to dry up, you'll work in person. You'll move if they ask, you'll take a lower salary and a worse position... after all, do you want to eat?
It makes more sense to focus on the capital-intensive and oligopolistic parts, e.g. cloud computing, social media and advertising. Tech, broadly, maintains a threat of new entrants.
In the technology sector, our income and share of remote work is actually pretty good. For example, most of us (in the U.S., in technology) are in or close to the top 10% of individual incomes in the United States.
Problem is waking up everyday at 6:30 am so I can be in office by 9 is a huge mental and physical stress. Moving closer isn't an option because I own my house. Right now my thinking is do I want to spend an extra 4-5 hours per day on my career just to work in a shitty cubicle for only 30k more? I'm honestly leaning towards putting up with less money and waiting for another opportunity to cross my path.
If shit really hits the fan I can sell my California house and buy a whole house outright in another part of the country and sustain myself easily. I'm just choosing to stay here but I really don't have to.
What we save on living in a HCOL locale, we can spend on traveling several months out of the year while I work remote.
Over the years I occasionally toyed with buying a small city place but, in addition to the increasing real estate prices, I always came back to the fact that I can always get a hotel or whatever in that or any other city if I want to spend some time in an urban location.
The mass exodus already happened.
Everybody who wanted to leave what they thought was overpriced pretty much already did.
We might see some continuation - but given that companies are trying to claw back as much remote work as possible - I'm skeptical.
South Carolina is too choice of a place to live.
I read that Jamie Dimon's office is a fully decked out apartment on Park Ave (NYC) so for all his griping about remote work, he essentially works from home full time.
Fully remote work doesn't eliminate the risk of layoffs throwing a wrench into your life. It's only viable for senior/staff level devs who have much higher job mobility compared to everyone else in the tech sector.
This job was on-site, so there was no choice but to live here. And by "here" I mean a 60- to 90- minute commute, both ways.
Now? My job is 100% remote, and any job I would consider would have to be 100% remote. Assuming this trend continues, I think we'll see an exodus from high cost of living areas to (slightly) smaller towns.
People are still going to want to live in places that have services, entertainment, and so on, so this isn't going to gut cities, but it will make living in the sticks more plausible.