Remote work means anyone can take your job

And you can take anyone’s. The scale is bigger but is hard to argue if the ratio isn’t similar but just at a larger scale. I think the bigger difference is the option to WFH is not just an after thought, but a real option now.

Yes? For a tech company outsourcing software creation is like outsourcing upper management, sure you can do it but then you basically move the whole business. If you want to create an American tech company then the tech needs to be built in America. Indian tech companies are not nearly as successful as American ones, so you probably want to stay an American tech company today. Once India starts cranking out companies that beats out American ones you will probably see more tech companies move their entire HQ there, but until then they will mostly stay in USA.

Except for the owners of the company, they get to pocket the difference...

But of course this is less about tech workers that are already getting outsourced because the, well, workers are more technically savvy anyway so of course it happened sooner.

It is possibly more relevant to people in management, or people like professors and many other random jobs who are discovering that working from home works fine for them. Though sometimes it's questionable whether this is because their work is largely on a computer or just because they didn't do much anyway...

If we don't have permanent UBI in place soon it will continue to be an emergency response to job losses like now. The economy is shifting as surely as the sun sets to one where if you don't own or play a major leadership role you either aren't necessary or can be outsourced.

Floor workers are getting replaced with robots and touchscreens; managers are realizing they too can be outsourced; lawyers are finding that no, the work they do isn't that hard to automate; doctors are finding that machine learning can analyze images better than they can; it's not going to stop... why would it? Why would a business owner want to keep a human with a continually increasing salary around if they can possibly replace you with technology that costs your annual salary once and after that just requires maintenance?

There are cases where that's just not possible, but my imagination for what is possible to swap has definitely gotten bigger. Even if a job isn't entirely replaceable, productivity tools are making the same amount of work take a quarter of the staff.

> European countries are outliers due to EU regulations. Any EU "citizen" can work anywhere in the EU, so pragmatically speaking, why would you only want to hire Spanish people instead of opening the door to French, Italian or German candidates? It comes at literally zero cost to the company.

The employer needs to pay social contributions in the employee's residence country. And more often than not, the employee cannot just become a freelancer or incorporate a single-person company and bill only one customer, as this is considered disguised employment. So no, it's not necessarily trivial for an EU company to hire a remote worker somewhere else in the EU, unless they have a local presence already.

Is that just because the total number of jobs that would be considered to be in your field went up by 10x in the last 20 years?