> Let’s say you hire me for your company in San Francisco and pay me $150K … [blah blah blah, I provide that much value ...] But now if I decide to move to Tulsa, OK, you want to cut my pay and reduce it to 90K, because of “cost of living”.

There's that really big missing piece in the middle: When you took that job, your bargaining position was "I am willing to accept $150,000 at my talent level and my competition is other folks who are willing to arrive at this office in San Francisco every day."

I've turned down a job very similar to that, twice, for much less money to work remotely. I like Sushi, but my wife makes good Italian and I get to eat with my family.

But now that $150,000 job is all-remote! And even if I was at 80% "San Francisco" pay, I'd be doing incredibly well where I live, so if I started negotiating salary for that job, my '20% above ADP-reported' is going to be a whole lot more palatable to the hiring manager, and he doesn't care that the next town over's name ends in "tucky". Worst part of it is that last time I checked, I live in an area that lands around the 5th highest cost of living.

I would accept a salary adjustment due to a move, personally, with research/negotiation to ensure that my new salary truly takes into account real costs that I will experience. And if I cannot accept my employers terms, there are now a whole lot of other companies who are hiring remotely. Like, almost all the companies. So I'll find one that does.

These kinds of programs will exist for a while, I bet -- some great employers will probably attract employees by offering a program like this (along with non-discriminatory policies around ... allowing you to move from a really cheap place to a really expensive place while compensating you accordingly).

But the vast majority who go "all remote" are simply going to start hiring wherever the cheapest talent to fill the need exists. If a 30-something mom/dad in North Dakota is just as capable of joining Teams calls/performing a mid-level QA job (you know, for the cloud-based web/mobile app...), but will do it at $36,000. Well, ...

Think "Off-shoring" at closer geographies/more common cultures (ok, maybe; some of ya'll city-folk ... need sunlight or something). Companies are good at not learning from past mistakes, so expect whole technology teams at some shops to be brought into a (virtual conference) room with HR reps while they sort out the details of their transition and training of their replacements.

Your "available talent pool" is ... big. And it now includes my wife. She left the workforce when she had children. She didn't return when they went to school -- it didn't make sense. Factor in child-care/extra car/insurance/fuel/non-optimal meals, 40 hr/wk equating to 7:00A-6:00P with commute and the "extra money left over" wasn't worth losing what we felt was basically the reason we work in the first place. And forget about landing one of those coveted remote jobs when you've been out of the work-force since before the iPhone came out.

Welp, that ended last month.

So dispensing with the doom and gloom, humanity has always figured it out in the past, we will again:

In my mind, this is "the first sign of what's to come". The whole equation on hiring/employment has been undergoing a lot of change, but I think the explosion in remote work stands to be the biggest disruption of my lifetime. If companies steadfastly refuse to adjust for cost of living, and only hire where it's cheap, expect people to move from cities. And it might be as simple as "rent goes down, people move back in". While many/most jobs cannot be performed remotely (manufacturing-related in particular), by moving all that can to remote-only the impact of "a large employer leaving a city" on a city -- in theory -- is far less.

You are prevented from living in certain places if you like certain kinds of work, today. Suddenly, for a lot of jobs, that's no longer the case. Staffing is the #1 cost for companies -- for a reason, it is a company ... it's entire value -- optimizing that cost (by reducing what you are paying people to do work -- I'm not trying to spin here). Maybe an extra hire can be made for the next project? Maybe, over time, the cost savings are so much (real-estate, etc) that it might make sense to take some of these other jobs that aren't very easy to do remotely and figure out how we can do them remotely, too? Maybe everyone stays home in their pajamas and rots away, we all die and fall into the dark ages, again?

It's been ... interesting? seems wrong ... being a part of all of this. The place I work handled things superbly; we continue to work remotely and ... everyone, as far as I can tell, is actually working. I hear about employers installing weird monitoring apps and such on their employees phones/work PCs and I think: sell the stock; clearly a lot of staff with nothing to do. My deadlines/expectations didn't disappear simply because the office did. I feel like I'm working a lot less some days -- I'm working more, I'm just spending no time on the road. Prior to my current job I had been remote for over a decade; I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed the benefits.

[0] I'm assuming that my area and the vast majority of the US, like Tulsa, would have paid $90,000 for said job.

[1] If I were paid San Francisco-equivalent salary for my work where I live, which isn't terribly low cost of living to begin with. ... I'd have my own lake house up north. Certainly wouldn't get out of time-share presentations so quickly and easily.

[2] We enrolled our kids in a charter all-virtual school when it appeared our district was going to go virtual. We figured a school with employees that had been doing this for the last ten years would fare better than our district's thrown together-in-a-week plans. Very few decisions ever end up in the "100%-the-right-choice" category, but that one sure did!