It bears repeating that if you're a tech worker in the US, your greatest asset is your physical location.

You might think you like remote jobs, but you will have competition from South America, Western and Eastern Europe, etc. as well as people in the US living in flyover states in the middle of nowhere with cheap rent.

If the focus also shifts more to raw input-output task accomplishmentbas opposed to in person social interaction, your cultural capital will also lose value.

There is a vast gulf between the salaries in the US and even Western Europe in tech. Americans seem unaware, but if you insist on remote work, you'll lose that advantage quick. If you think that everyone overseas is simply less intelligent, you'll have a rough awakening.

> you will have competition from South America, Western and Eastern Europe

Based on this Canadian's browsing of the average Who's Hiring thread, it seems that a very small fraction of US based remote friendly jobs are open to being filled by foreigners. They do exist, just not many.

You're bang on about competition from domestic candidates in lower cost of living areas though.

>There is a vast gulf between the salaries in the US and even Western Europe in tech.

American companies are welcome to start offering Western European level benefits (and compensate for missing government benefits) at any time. I would happily accept 30-50% less pay for a very solid health insurance plan, pay for my childcare 30 days of paid vacation a year that I'm actually entitled to take, 6 months of paid maternity leave + some paternity leave, a contract that restricts my working hours and makes it meaningfully legally difficult to frivolously fire me and practically impossible to lay me off of the company isn't failing, and an hour paid lunch every day.

Nobody seems to be offering that, for whatever reason. The closest is non-profits, who lack the cash to meet standard salaries but try to make up with benefits (which are, after all, cheaper), but for profit companies seem to prefer to pony up and retain the control at-will employment grants them

First of all, companies have already outsourced all that they could a couple decades ago. Then when it comes to hiring in different countries, this gets extremely complicated due to taxes and regulations. While some remote-first companies can navigate this complexity (usually through some sort of HR as a service type company), most companies are not structured in such a way to feasibly hire people outside their incorporated area.

I think that folks overseas aren't as capable of communicating with Americans as other Americans are. I think that American tech companies would prefer a motivated at-will employee at 3x the cost of an unfirable European with a statutory month off every year. I think that none of this will magically make it easier to raise money outside the US.

There are obviously plenty of brilliant people outside the US. Unfortunately, intelligence is not the only factor that revenue per employee emerges from - or else the US would not dominate the tech sector and it would be uncommon to find remote-first companies based entirely in the US.

The argument doesn’t hold water. Companies aren’t pushing RTO because they want to pay higher salaries to office-bound staff in expensive metros. If raw “input–output” and cheap labour were the only metric, they’d go fully remote, tap global markets, and slash payroll overnight.

RTO is about control and optics, not cost optimisation. It’s management preference, real estate sunk costs, and the illusion of productivity through visibility. Actual delivery of work is the only thing that matters in tech - and remote delivery has already proven itself at scale.

The idea that “physical location is your greatest asset” is backwards. If that were true, San Francisco developers wouldn’t already be competing with contractors in Bangalore and Bucharest. They are - yet the jobs remain, because employers value capability, not postcode.

In short: RTO doesn’t protect American tech workers from global competition. It just wastes time in traffic and props up bad management.

As a person working with Americans, if I may express my honest opinion, this is BS. Your advantage is the fact that you are professional, hard-working, are able to question the demands in a positive way, can communicate with American management more easily, live in the same time zone and in general you can get on with the rest of American team more easily. I would never say physical location is an asset (although I might be biased as I work for corporations that have multiple offices in various continents, for small startups it might be different).

If the entire organization is offshore then fine, but the time zone difference between they west coast and Europe is too big for close collaboration. South America is ok but there aren't many software developers there.

> If you think that everyone overseas is simply less intelligent, you'll have a rough awakening.

Counterpoint, developer offshoring has been happening since at least the late nineties with eh, limited success. It's hard to get around major timezone differences and thick accents. This isn't even getting into the fatal mistake that everyone makes -- thinking that there's, for example, a billion more "Brilliant Indian Guy in Our Office" clones out there in India.

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