I'm not really sure what other people think the long term effect of shifts to remote work will do, but to me it seems like, long term, tech salaries will be lower. It doesn't really make sense to me to pay the same Silicon Valley wages when people can be working from anywhere. Why would I pay an extremely high wage to someone living in the Bay Area when I could instead pay a lower salary to someone in India who speaks perfect English and is willing to work CA timezone hours? In the short term, companies might keep salaries where they are to avoid disruption, but long term I'm not so sure.

Obviously, companies have to compete with other companies from all over the world for tech talent, but the ratio of tech money to tech talent is much higher in certain parts of the U.S. than pretty much anywhere else in the world. As a result, if that money gets to shop for talent around the entire world then the 'price' for that talent seems like it will go down. But maybe there is something I am missing.

And maybe all the people who want to go full time remote are ok with that, but depending on how big the pay cut is, maybe not. Presumably, if companies now see less benefit in having in-office engineers, then everyone including in-office workers will get pay cuts due to the globalized market for talent. So perhaps, selfishly, we should want companies to put a high value on being in person, but I guess we will have to wait and see.