Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

Yeah this model sucks, unless they give you A LOT more of these options than they would give you RSUs. Then it could work out, if you believe in the company.

OP was contending that even the FAANG gravy train is over. My claim is that if increasingly talented engineers exist elsewhere, they would have already been hired and emmigrated to the US Tier 1 city HQs in the first place.

We already have a majority immigrant workforce, and talent is still scarce as it is. I am originally from the American Midwest growing up within driving distance to a top ranked CS university that attracts diverse students from all over the globe with near perfect standardized test scores, literally contending with the likes of Stanford and MIT.

However, our graduates all leave town afterwards for greener pastures at the usual suspects. We just recently got out first homegrown unicorn startup, and there are plenty of satellite offices for brand name companies here. Still, hardly anybody ever stays.

World class engineering talent abroad wants their golden ticket to the US, in particular, to a handful of specific cities only. The vast majority of my FAANG coworkers are immigrants, for example, and our interview bar is more selective than Harvard in terms of raw acceptance rate. Tech companies are essentially in an arms race for brains, even lobbying for more favorable immigration laws. Surprisingly, none of the people we have hired (and cleared our challenging bar for algorithm interview performance) have any desire to return to their home countries. Meanwhile, this global workforce has not dropped total compensation one iota.

We have been in a global pandemic for one year now. Meanwhile, nothing has really shifted in terms of market value of world-class engineers. If a pandemic isn't enough to cause the "bubble" to burst, any reasonable person would struggle to say that doom and gloom is impending. Software is still eating the world (arguably even moreso as of late).

If companies are fighting for remote talent by showering them with the same kind of compensation packages as they would have gotten in San Francisco and New York, how is that the logical conclusion that can be drawn? Almost all of the remote engineers I know have successfully negotiated keeping their same salary (despite all of this hubbub about lower salaries elsewhere). Where is all of this hidden world-class engineering talent? I'm from the Midwest and could count on fingers how many people from my hometown even knew what C++ was. Out of all of those fortunate people, only one of them still lives there.

Can you imagine any American company contending with the Chinese government for hiring remote workers (let alone risking infosec -- the other top article on HN today is about a Chinese company breeching a US competitor)?

Can you imagine any IIT-caliber engineer wanting to work remote instead of move to the US? My Indian-American colleagues have described the abject starvation and poverty at home to me. I've also seen it myself first hand while traveling.

South Korean engineers have close-knit online communities for moving to the US for work in Silicon Valley (there's even a Korean government agency to facilitate this).

Pockets of talented engineers have also existed in Poland, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine as well (look at the IOI rankings), but timezones make these remote workers hardly manageable. My previous company was almost entirely staffed from Eastern European immigrants who happily packed their bags and booked one way plane tickets to SFO. Those people have been through multiple periods of history aptly described as none other than sheer hell, with the literal climate to boot (I.e. hath frozen over).

Outside of these countries, you're no longer hiring the best of the best. Talent is still scarce, and nations that have the government, culture, population, and resources to foster it are numbered. If I had to guess, every single person I worked with while I was at FAANG had a 150+ IQ (top 0.1%ile). Many had PhDs (we called them "research scientists") or Ivy League caliber degrees.

Yes, Romanian partner it is. But it's pretty nice here, why do you call it a mishap and what is a better option? Portugal right?

Other than learning skills (getting new qualifications because your current qualifications are not in demand) which are in demand and pay what you wish to be paid?