So why isn't it? Genuine question. A enormous number of jobs can be done remote. Certainly mine (I've been full remote for over three years - one day during Covid the boss just told everyone to go home and we literally never went back to the physical office, which no longer exists). I can see entire companies, maybe entire industries, where vast amounts of the work can be done remotely.

So why aren't all these companies cutting salary costs by 90%? That's a huge, huge amount of money. The stock price would go berserk. Dividends would soar. The C-suite would see incredible increases on their wealth. So if all these jobs can be done for 90% less, PLUS the savings of having no expensive office lease costs, why aren't they?

There are massive barriers evenif we assume that the work can be done 100% remotely, which in many cases is not true. Barriers include things like linguistic/cultural, legal/regulatory (domicile, contracts), financial (paying in a different currency).

But for sure the pandemic has shown that there is also a lot of inertia.

The office already doesn't matter when it comes to offshoring. Companies are rarely in the same office already, and are spread across the US. Even if a team is co-located, their stakeholders aren't.

Further, timezone-friendly offshoring is about 70-80% of the cost and comes with larger organizational complexity. Good (not mythical 10x, mind you - I mean good by standard definitions) developers are expensive no matter where they live.

70-80% is incorrect, it's more like 40%. I made 22kUSD last year in Kiev. I think my colleague on same team in USA was making 65kUSD. Not SWE, just comparing numbers. I was also paid more than the average for my position/geography. I was a contractor, as was all of the UA team....don't know what coworkers arrangement was...

How much was the contract company getting paid? How much overhead did they have? I saw what the blended rates were grow our negotiations with one of the big players and it wasn’t what the people on the ground were getting paid.

I’m guessing you were getting contracted out at minimum 45 USD an hour.

I contract through my own company. It's a common system in Ukraine to own your own company, because taxes are less if you do business through companies. -- sorry if i explained it poorly. I said that I was a contractor also to say that there are no other benefits that I am getting from employment.

If your job isn't remote, it can also be offshored for 1/10 the cost - just get an office building.

The arbitrage from offshoring is much narrower than most people think. You mostly get what you pay for and companies can easily waste a lot of money and time trying to go the low-cost more-employees route.

That's not true, the amount of US based scale-up jobs in Europe has risen a lot in the last couple of years also bringing up compensation at the top end to a bit higher than you used to be able to get here.

What's not true?

Why are there so many highly paid remote tech workers then?

The internet has been around for decades; we used to call this practice "offshoring". Yet jobs are still here because not all workers are not fungible, and transaction costs are involved. That said I do believe companies are more geographically concentrated than they need to be.

If across the board all work that could be remote were 1/10 cost with no downside, literally every job that could be remote would already be offshored at this point already.

The internet has been around for decades; we used to call it "offshoring". Jobs are still here because not all workers are not fungible.

No, not necessarily. And also, many office jobs can be done remote. Even if the policy is that you must come in to the office, that doesn't change the fact that it's possible to do it remote.

Why would anyone with skills agree to work it for 1/10 if they can get 7/10?

You get what you pay for.

Time zones and shared language/culture disagree? Or if you think you can get a 90% margin on the competition with the same result, go start a company and see how that works out for you.

The market is simultaneously efficient and yet refuses to offshore absolutely every job to make more money and increase profits. Strange world we live in.

1/3 of the cost, at least in Kiev. I assume there are some laws preventing more than X% of company offshore

To some extent, yes - but still, there are many challenges:

- Time zones - Security - Language barrier - Work culture - Employment laws

And the list goes on.

The devs themselves can be cheap, but by the time you've jumped through many of the hoops to actually get them employed for you - they might not longer be THAT cheap.