this explains everything. you can stage a walk out in a meeting but you’re still on zuckerbergs payroll. and if 50% of the us based engineers quit based on some social principles there’s thousands of engineers ready to fill those spots around the world for a fraction of the price. covid has shown remote work works. unionizing and making the US more costly to work with will only accelerate how “remote” these jobs can be
The FAANGM types aren't hiring mediocre programmers out of Uzbekistan, they're looking for MIT/Carnegie Mellon/Stanford types. Plenty of primo talent coming out of Texas A&M, Virginia Tech, etc. as well.
Plenty of bodies to replace those who leave, for sure, but they're not about to start hiring random offshore types.
But there are brilliant IIT graduates from India who would much rather work from their home city in India than pay Bay Area landlords just so they can sit on an 80 year waitlist for a green card.
Extreme time zone differences are still a challenging problem that might actually be an insurmountable limit to remote work. (Depends on the level of asynchronicity of the job, of course.) Unless there starts to be a culture of remote shift work, which would just be dystopian.
this description of target candidates does not match what i have seen. i’m not implying random or mediocre. it’s purely bay area hubris to assume no one else in the world except some top university graduates can learn our crud microservice development skills or put together some components
It’s not clear to me that claiming political leverage would cost them dollars. Typically unionized employees make more once it’s said and done. I tend to think that there’s a shortage in engineering skill, which drives their cost up.
