I noticed recently on HN lots of talking about cancelling remote working, introduced as a temporary measure to fight COVID. I am wondering, if working from home is here to stay, wouldn't companies start hiring talents from global market rather then paying extra for US employees if they still work remotely? Is it not "wiser" from the company point of view to hire talented people for instance from Eastern Europe which have more competitive salary expectations (due to lower cost of living) than American counterparts?

You see these attempts every few years, with the work coming back with nearshoring and re-onshoring. How confident are you in the hiring processes of most major corps that they can find diamonds in LCOL global geographies? I am not confident. They can't even figure out hiring locally. It's also a lot harder to seek legal recourse when the employee is out of your jurisdictional reach.

(20+ years in tech, ymmv, n=1, thoughts and opinions my own)

I am not sure about diamonds but I was involved recruiting software engineers in London City a few years ago using the best recruitment agencies they were back then on the market. Let me tell you, it was a disaster. I do not know whether this was specific to UK, industry or time period but it was a joke. I do not see a reason why broader pool of potential candidates is worse then geographically limited selection, if permanent working from home is on the table.

> it was a disaster

Was the testing just leetcode crap, or was it based on actually being able to get stuff done? ;)

That's the problem - it was just for senior developers, not rocket scientists. Most of candidates (curated by agencies) have poor coding skills, soft skills non-existent. So we didn't even dream of people who can get the job done and be independent.

Hmmm, bad salary range for the location maybe?

If it's something you can share, do you remember what the salary range was roughly?

Scandinavia would be a safer bet. Especially Finland has pretty low salaries in IT but more skilled people than USA.

But it's not that simple. Cultural differences, timezone differences, the inability to meet face to face all make the employment relationship less effective.

Have you tried running a team in Eastern Europe?

Actually, we do - in Poland, but most developers are from Ukraine. All other operations stays in UK. The salaries leveled up after a few years, but it is still slightly more cost effective comparing to UK. But the actual skill levels and work attitude is night and day. That's why I am perplexed that so many US software engineers want to stand their ground in terms of working from home policy, potentially exposing themselves to compete on a global market while big software houses like Microsoft or Google cutting jobs like there is no tomorrow.

Because no one wants to live like the lowest global common denominator.

You are exactly right! So why give up one of the biggest trump card - locality, and allow free access for other people from around the world to your job market because you want to work permanently from home.

How does requiring staff to come into an office stop a company from hiring remotely globally? The only solution is unionization and nation state regulation. If you don't have labor representation, there are no controls on corporate behavior besides shareholder interests.

You're spot on and I totally agree with you. But pushing hard for remote work might backfire for current IT folks. If bosses get comfy with everyone being remote, they'll wonder why stick to local talent when they can hire from anywhere in the world.

Sure, companies can and do hire globally, but at the same time managers still want most of the people to appear in the office from time to time (for whatever reason). But if IT guys demand working permanently from home, then it changes everything. Suddenly, being local doesn't cut it anymore, and the job could be done by someone halfway across the globe. Be careful what you wish for; demanding remote work is a double-edge sword which could make lots of positions way less secure.

The positions are already insecure, we have nowhere to go but up.

What about his carbon footprint? Is it responsible to travel hundred thousands of miles without an actual reason to travel?

The trains go anyway, so it makes zero difference. Only if enough people stop commuting altogether will the carbon footprint of travel be reduced.

There's a fallacy where people believe the actions of an individual have any significant impact on emissions; be it travel, energy efficient homes, dietary lifestyle choices like vegetarianism and veganism. But the effect of those are all rounding errors at best. The only change can come from companies and large businesses.

> The only change can come from companies and large businesses.

the large polluting companies don't exist in vacuum. They sell what they sell because consumers are buying it. E.g. saying that Shell / BP is the largest polluter is nice but there is no way to run oil company without selling oil to the individual to be burned.