Exploitation has never changed.

This isn't very different from the downsizing of the 90's, every time we go through this song and dance they find new ways to screw us, because often we've legally fought for the previous ways to be denied. They'll do anything to pay the least. They don't actually care about remote or in-office at all based on this comment over at hackernews:

They've also begun heavily pivoting hiring for dev roles to India now as well. I have cousins who attended no name universities in India getting SWE roles in Amazon - something that was unimaginable 5 years ago - and expanding Dev offices to lower CoL cities like Hyderabad while slowly pivoting away from Bangalore.

Addendum:

Also, the Indian branches (edit: of companies that aren't Amazon) are fairly remote work friendly. Now you have people earning $20-40k/yr living in their ancestral towns and villages where median incomes might be $3-5k

This is why I warned HN that remote first will make tech more competitive.

They're happy to replace US workers with cheaper workers from other countries, they don't care that they work remote.

Anyway, I don't disagree, it makes me want to give up and I believe the system is broken, and it's been broken since before I was born.

If these people could still own other people as slaves: They would.

I'm of the position that if we allow companies to be international, then they have to pay every employee worldwide at the same payscale just so they fucking stop doing shit like this! If a US worker is worth $100K for a position, don't pay an Indian worker $20k-$40k for the same fucking work! They have the same value, they're not worth different things because they're in a different fucking geographic location!