>It's not the perfect medium because it requires living in some of the most expensive real estate markets on the planet.
This applies to the entire United States if everything that could were to go fully remote. Why hire someone for 6 figures in <a US state> when you could hire someone in Brazil to do it for 40% of the salary?
Because they have tried it and failed. There was this whole massive push for outsourcing to India in the 90s and 00s. Customers hated it, communication suffered, and more problems were created than solved. It’s why there has been a massive on-shoring of things like call centers to LCOL parts of the US.
And they continued to pay their US based employees more (including employees relocating from cheaper locales) because CEOs believed (whether rightly or wrongly is irrelevant) that there was a significant advantage to having them physically collocated with their teams in the US.
Essentially, US workers have spent the last 2 years screaming at CEOs that no, they’re idiots, there is absolutely no benefit to physically collocating employees in the US and they should not have paid them anymore.
This applies to the entire United States if everything that could were to go fully remote. Why hire someone for 6 figures in <a US state> when you could hire someone in Brazil to do it for 40% of the salary?