Remote work means anyone can take your job

Remote work also means companies can get the best people for that company anywhere.

Remote work means life changes can happen and you can retain the best people for that company. With jobs and life, changes happen, people move, have families, want to be close to family, want to change scenery, get a new significant other, go to school, buy a house, all of these things can mean you might have to quit if you have to physically always be in the office.

Even when companies have remote/different city offices, virtual communication is very important anyways.

Clients and customers are almost always remote with some sprinkled in meetings but mostly virtual communication and communication through the work.

Companies would be wise to switch to remote first thinking and processes with a focus on virtual communication and a nice to have of physical meetups, integration sessions etc.

Remote work helps companies focus on their external view not just their internal machinations.

For truly unique talents and workers, location has never really mattered.

I was just reading another piece that suggested the current crisis is likely to accelerate a number of trends that were already happening to some degree. I certainly don't expect the Bay Area to empty out or for Google to move their HQ to Omaha. But a lot of big tech companies were already shifting more of their hiring to new offices in areas removed from their HQ even if they don't make a big deal of it like Amazon did. And, anecdotally, I hear of a lot more people in my circles leaving the Bay Area than moving to it.

A lot of software companies’ customer contracts specify that only U.S. employees can access customer data, also. Ops, customer support engineering, and many kinds of bug fixes all require that access.

Yes, but with caveats. This is what happened with call centers in the US which broadly went to places like India with big outsourcing firms.

That back-fired big time when the quality of service went to crap with companies rushing to bring these services back home.

Similar stories with tech outsourcing. There are things that have been successfully outsourced some functions to places like India, but there’s also a reason why high performing companies actually don’t seem to offshore key IP development efforts. The labor might be cheap but the true cost of bad quality is sky high.

So this will happen to an extent but cost can’t be the only factor driving decisions if the goal is long term success.

The day before they graduate, a Harvard college student will work on your research project or startup for $0/mo, if it’s interesting enough. The day after, Facebook is ready to pay them $10,000/mo+.

They’re the same human being before and after graduation day. Just as talented the day before as the day after. It’s the pedigree variable that explains the vast majority of the salary.

You’re saying something similar, it’s just that you’re getting distracted by the red herring of the out sourced worker. You should be analyzing the difference between a Harvard and a UC Irvine student, whose average salary difference is as large as the difference between an average US programmer and Accenture contract off shore programmer. It’s got nothing to do with time shifts and organizational culture. You’re looking at this way too logically, along with many other commenters. Indeed I think hardly anyone, including the people who actually say work for Facebook, understand really why one person is paid more or less than another, at their own companies or elsewhere.

That aside you’re onto something with low skilled workers being replaced. The net result of hoovering up low paying programming jobs and sending them to another statistical group (not in this country) is that programming salaries appear to rise. Which is exactly what happened. So if you are of the opinion that programming salaries rising reflects increase in demand, so you should get into programming boot camp, you’d be like 200% wrong. You’re chasing a low salary programming job that doesn’t exist. Which again, is sort of exactly what happened.