Do you think remote work will hurt Americans?

Not even a little tiny bit.

This question is as old as outsourcing itself; I've been hearing scare stories about how all the programming jobs going to cheaper developers in India or Eastern Europe or wherever else for literally decades.

Language/cultural/communication barriers are a real barrier. Working around significant timezone difference is a real drain. In the long run it's more expensive and has lower quality results (not, I emphasize, because non-US developers are less skilled; simply because clear, synchronous communication is so important to good software development.)

Currently, it is harder to hire outside the US due to legality issues such as taxes, the gov. designed it so for US workers to remain "competitive".

It is apparent that if these regulations were irrelevant, the market will become more fair and corporations won't be able to secretly discriminate by location.

Not for the next couple of years at least since there is tons of free money in the market from VCs and then we have the FAANG type giants. There is lot of demand for good talent and for the right talent, companies are paying all kinds of money.

This will become a problem if demand goes down and Employers have more choices. Right now, not so much. It is a candidate's market for a while and will be.

I think this is temporary. For a few reasons.

So much of the US economic system is tied to commercial real estate. Small business loans to sandwich shops, parking garages, office building and the people and companies that support them, build them, plan them, etc. It’s an industry that is not going to die.

I think the “kids” today will swing the pendulum back to working in the office after having spent significant periods of their adolescence on lockdown. People who think remote is forever will resent the next generation for these reasons. Resentment leads to replacement, the tech stacks aren’t as technical as they used to be. The cloud can make beginners rockstars.

When data can be produced to show quarterly earnings from non remote companies (Msft, Amazon, Apple, Tesla, presumably Twitter and more Morgan Stanley, Charles Schwab, Exxon Mobile) are “better” than remote, the CEO will demand everyone back to the office. I think the ones that will remain remote are more call centers, insurance, billing and customer support. I don’t think that those jobs are very compelling to folks with CS degrees and backgrounds.

It’s crazy to think employees have the power here by going remote. Once you’re locked into living out of state and your company goes back to the office, those remote salaries in the US will rival remote salaries elsewhere in the world, and remote developers will work multiple remote jobs, poorly further depressing earnings or revenue.

We’re just well on one side of the pendulum. The middle is not hybrid, but telework (like one day a week), and the extreme opposite is no jobs due to recession and employees fighting for a space in a cubicle.

As an example, I bought a house in the Bay Area in 2009. The market was so depressed that they gave me an $8000 tax credit and a low interest rate for doing it. When I talk about that now people think I am a crazy person. Things change because we make the stuff up as we go along.

It might lead to more salary polarization. The average salary for the average developer will likely go down. For companies that only hire the cream of the crop, salaries will likely keep increasing as competition increases (a European company can more easily compete with top US companies and hire top US developers, for example)

Remote work isn't really changing the international hiring situation. Companies were previously hiring internationally, even before "remote" was a thing. That being said, it still takes work and logistics to setup subsidiaries in other companies. Companies like remote.com are making that portion easier - that does change the calculus a little bit.

It's not new, and despite this trend the unemployment rate in the U.S. is low at 3.6%. Americans are consumers as well as workers, and companies that can access lower-cost labor can charge lower prices. Higher cost-of-living regions in the U.S. should address their costs by making housing easier to build, for example.

Yes but it will take years, maybe decades. High cost of living makes everyone less competitive. I'm not seeing anyone strategically making life less hard on a hard cash sense so it is undeniable. Although if you rush to "outsource" everyone for the cheap talent abroad it would be a shitshow.

Not in any meaningful way.

I think this would be true if "the sort of work that can be outsourced like this" were extremely essential, but I don't think it is (i.e. it's more "speculative and perhaps redundant") B.S. jobs and all.

Of course it’s hurting Americans. These companies are saying that lower wages are more important than Americans, period. Your instincts are dead on.

More like it will hurt people tied to the most expensive areas SV/ New York rather than cheaper areas around the US