I think this is true: employees will be able to choose from far more options, and they will have more competition. The first phase of this is competing with anyone in the US, but soon enough companies will be hiring abroad for zoom-based jobs. If a foreign employee can work in a reasonable time-zone, and has great english language skills, what's the difference?
I think you'll see increasing numbers of Canadians working for US companies (that's already happening). Of course that's little different than hiring from areas in the US outside the major hubs. Somewhat lower average salaries, but similar skills and work habits, same time zones, etc.
Expanding further, it's already the case that if you're looking for an international employee with similar skills and capabilities to a domestic one, you're going to end up paying similar to what you would domestically. You're rarely going to find someone that you can pay meaningfully less than you'd pay someone in the US (again, outside of places like the Bay area) who has a similar level of skill and ability.
You might find someone with 80% of the ability for 60% of the price, or 50% for 25%, and in some cases companies could save a lot that way. But obviously two 50% developers != one 100% developer in output. And just to reiterate, I'm not saying excellent developers don't exist in other countries; they of course do, but you can't generally expect to get them for a fraction of the price. Maybe a slight discount, which would obviously be worth companies pursuing, but not enough to suddenly put US developers out of work en masse. That's already mostly true, and will become entirely true as remote work becomes more the norm. So it will be somewhat good for developers outside the US, and for US companies; I just don't think the change there will be as massive as it might appear.
I also expect on net it will be great for most domestic US developers as well; there may be added competition, but there will also be more flexibility. The one group that I guess will likely lose out are those who really want to live somewhere like San Francisco, as you'll still have the disadvantage of cost of living, but lose the advantage of privileged access to high-paying companies. (Though as a result, those property values will probably come down over time.)
> if you're looking for an international employee with similar skills and capabilities to a domestic one, you're going to end up paying similar to what you would domestically. You're rarely going to find someone that you can pay meaningfully less than you'd pay someone in the US (again, outside of places like the Bay area) who has a similar level of skill and ability.
I know. This is going to sound crazy.
The pay gap is still very much alive. I’ve been hiring internationally for 10 years and salaries in India and Indiana are still very far off.
A little over 10 years ago, when we were getting started, we were good at finding A Players, but paying less (otherwise we couldn’t have existed). Did work for Google, Twitter, Sandisk skunkworks, on basically magic creation. Deep OS work. We hired product builders & former startup CTO’s, engineers & designers & PhD’s, who cared about their craft.
Nice, you clearly have more experience with overseas hiring than I do. I've attempted it a few times, but haven't been able to consistently find people who were available and some combination of sufficiently good & inexpensive to make it worthwhile vs hiring domestically (in Canada in my case), given the added challenges of time zones, potential language barriers, etc. I'm sure they're out there, but my impression was that you can't just go and hire an equivalent developer for half the price easily.
Care to share any of your strategies for finding talent and hiring in India?
It will be less stable, but I think I agree with your analysis ( and in real terms, when was it really stable .. 50s? ). Oddly, I think it may only add to the 'Previous team didn't know what they were doing. Fix it.' vicious cycle. In a sense, companies will be re-inventing the big 3 consulting companies.
It is not just just English and skill set that is the issue. In my neck of the woods, I just dealt with otherwise really smart data guy, who was giving me something that clearly did not make sense in the business context - not everything can reasonably be placed in a requirement ( assume earth is not flat ).
