Remote work turns every hiring into a national competition

An interesting article in The Wall Street Journal tells how the balance of work and the recruitment of the best brains are shifting in the field. Starting with a small online interior design startup, Havenly, which until recently managed to select excellent technological talents for its geographical location in the Rocky Mountains and for its outdoor lifestyle. Since the pandemic has prompted major tech companies to embrace smartworking policies, this advantage is fading rapidly. Now that a software engineer or marketing guru can work from a riverside cabin while they continue to generate income for companies like Facebook or Salesforce, smaller companies away from the shores are starting to experience increasing difficulties. For Havenly, finding new hires now means competing with companies across the country that offer an average of 20% salary increases and no obligation to relocate. The tech job market has never been as geographically distributed as it is today, and it forces local companies to raise wages to keep up with the offers coming in from big cities in California, Seattle or New York. All of this seems to make it easier for workers themselves who can save on living costs in large centers, and for companies in coastal centers who can pay less than a San Francisco salary but more than a local salary. While many large tech companies have opened offices in smaller cities in recent years, most jobs and venture capital are still concentrated in coastal centers, with San Francisco Bay: between 2010 and 2018, the Bay Area accounted for nearly 18% of US digital services employment growth. While for decades getting some of the most desirable tech jobs meant having to move and live there, facing exorbitant housing costs and long commutes, the pandemic has moderately rebalanced the cards: “of the nine tech companies that shared transfer data with According to the Wall Street Journal, about 9 percent of employees living in the Bay Area moved permanently from the region during the pandemic. Companies, including Twitter Inc., Slack Technologies Inc., and Dropbox Inc., had a total of over 9,000 workers in the area in early 2020 ”.