lunarhustler

Would you rather get fired or serve time in prison?

man, these lesswrong people sure do have some cool ideas about how to apply GPT

> We're in a situation where the wealth class can literally wait it out for more than a generation for market conditions they prefer to normalize.

It might be there are people who are able and willing to burn money for a long time. Sure as hell it doesn't stop me the startup founder to set whatever salary ranges I believe are efficient.

There are places in e.g. Europe where a young smart person can live like a king on their American tech salary, while still putting off most of it into savings... I assure you the culture and nightlife aren't bad there either.

> Even if everyone works from home, there are advantages to drawing from local talent pools (people know people and can vouch for their work, cultural norms make it easier to work together, there are less labour law difficulties, there is less geopolitical risk of parts of your team being sanctioned because you hired Chinese or Russian programmers, etc, etc)

You could reframe these points so that they look like advantages of global businesses... you'll have someone to vouch for and evaluate people across multiple talent pools (increasing talent supply), the majority of your team will never be sanctioned simultaneously (diversifying that risk), and as for cultural norms, don't we all know that diversity is strength.

Saying there are no advantages to global remote first besides cost is underselling it; there are important advantages, for one

> It starts to make sense when you realise salaries are driven by the cost to replace an employee

asynchronous remote makes documentation and written communication central, which at the end of the day makes it easier to replace employees.

Cost is important too, if you can literally hire 50% more workforce that's one hell of a deal.

Except the market ain't going to bear it, not for a long time anyway.

If I am a CEO of a remote-first company and it truly doesn't matter for me where the employees are located it makes no sense to overpay for labor in high cost of living area.

So if there's a company A that pays $X in high COL area, and $X/3 in a low COL area. And then there's a company B that pays $X/2 everywhere. Then people from the low COL area would go to the company B, and people from the high COL area would go to the company A. As a result, company B gets the same results 2 times cheaper.

Repeat this process enough times and the salaries will be equalized. Of course it's not immediate, there are companies rigidly set in their ways; there are people who won't move no matter what; there is limited supply of both companies and workers; etc, etc. But eventually the market forces will do their thing.

I was under impression that in America you have at-will employment.

Isn't Google able to just perform mass firings then? Or are there some legal barriers / costs to doing that, as opposed to layoffs?