Remote work means anyone can take your job

Assuming a theoretical point of view as pointed by the article, there are multiple pieces still missing in my head.

Lets say a traditional software team has these 5 types of people: - Design / XD - Software Engineer - Software Manager - Product Manager - Data analyst or Data Scientist

If you assume all of these roles can be collaborated on a async basis and from within different timezones - that makes progress extremely slow right? Someone emails, someone has a question, someone has a clarification, etc.

Now if we assume same locale, that drastically changes the game since everyone can communicate at the same time even if remote. Therefore, my point#1 is, a global distributed teams that are across time zones really don't make sense.

Keeping in line with the article, let's say a company decides to outsource all these different professions. That would mean, you're even outsourcing management, people that need to oversee are needed to the same region. How high does one go? All the way to directors of each respective field or Vice President? Maybe we go as far as till we reach an owner for a service or product for that region. This is what happens basically today (pre-covid). Each region has a focus in a deliverable. India team is working on X, China team is working on Y, etc. So point#2, outsourcing has to happen not only for people that are executing work, but for people that are overseeing the execution as well.

That finally gets me to the last point. If we have these vertical's of people localized to specific regions, you cannot have specific outsourcing of jobs. You would need a batch outsourcing of jobs from IC's to managers. However, each region a company is in, requires locale specific folks to solve specific problems. Amazon US is very different than Amazon India pay after you receive package, for example. So my point#3, I don't believe we will see too much of a shift for jobs to other countries. We might see a shift in jobs from California to Texas for example.

By now, you might understand where i'm going :-). If you hired enough of a presence in mid-west, suddenly, you now have a pool of candidates that competitors, and other companies can also hire from. You as a company, unless you can spin an entirely new vertical, will back-fill employees from the mid-west again since the remaining team is located in that region. Thereby creating a pocket of talent. Enough pockets of talents will create many companies that want to hire that talent. This is what we effectively have today in major cities. The only difference is, you have a larger area vs a smaller city.

> Will remote work go MORE globalized while everything else possibly reverses?

I think this is the right approach. Global bits, local atoms.

The basic premise of this post is "the key edge that you have over your worldwide competition is that you are local". That premise is false, or at least heavily overblown.

If the only detail barring you from working for a company which otherwise totally really would hire you, then there are often times way around this already. I moved half-way around the world for my current job. My competition was therefore people from all over the world. My job won't be "taken" by "anyone" now more than pre-Covid.

A lesson learned in other markets applies here: you can avoid a race to the bottom by effectively competing in one of the many dimensions other than price. If you don't want to be a commodity, you have to be able to answer the question of what is the one thing you do better than almost anyone else, and sell that. Geographical proximity isn't a great answer in a market where everyone is going remote. It doesn't even need to be technical in nature for a developer.

Different companies place inordinate value on different things, so it is partly a game of matching your exceptional dimensions to companies that place a lot of value on those dimensions. How many people here are using the cheapest laptop that will technically do the job? The developers that are at risk are those that are "average" in every dimension that an employer might care about.

If someone says SV engineers are talented, but only in some technical way that doesn't really matter, I'd classify that as a claim that they're not really talented.