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Comment by spoonie | Hacker News Reader

    We haven't even figured out a way to get people from
    home to work quickly and efficiently in Silicon Valley

I'd say there is a rational reason for this. If the cost of living was lower in the SFBA, salaries would likely be lower. By creating remote working technology or attitudes, an engineer would almost be working towards lowering their own salary (effectively allowing their jobs to be intra-country-outsourced to lower cost of living areas).

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There are lots of engineers who would be willing to work towards decreasing cost of living, even if it decreases their salary.

I certainly would. I don't really care if my salary goes down by 10 percent if I massively help make the world a better place.

How about a 50% salary cut for a marginal improvement? Just curious at what point you care more about your own well being versus the well being of others.

It would actually be the opposite effect. If I found a way to cut developer costs in half I would become fabulously wealthy, not poor.

Why wouldn't someone want to both become rich by putting devs out of a job and making the world better?

Maybe due to misplaced loyalty, and so as to screw over the rest of society To Help a small rich group?

And there are lots of engineers for whom working remotely would increase their salary, however it decreased the cost for their employees. If anything, I'd say that (on a global scale) economic incentives are firmly on the side of solving the remote working problem rather then perpetuating it.

I don't disagree with the grandparent: there are people who would do it, but I think for engineers right now the incentives are aligned against it.

And I agree with you, for employers it's definitely in their interests, they just need to get over the inertia of "bums in seats means work is getting done".

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