The world is finally flat (again!)
Colocation used to remove frictions. Being physically together in an office was an efficient and effective way to communicate with colleagues, exchange ideas, and generate new ones.
Now, colocation is the friction. Digitization, ubiquitous high-speed internet, affordable access to high-quality training and education, and, most recently, the vast Covid-19-induced WFH experiment have shown that distributed work arrangements at a global scale can work and, in fact, do work. This gives rise to enormous opportunities and challenges.
The search space for talent has become truly global. While talent has always been equally distributed, access to opportunities has not. This changes now. And it opens up opportunities for organizations to hire (or rent) the right talent without much friction.
A quick look at Upwork, the largest platform for on-demand work with 18 million registered freelancers, provides clear evidence of this change. If we search for a data scientist with experience in Python and Machine Learning with a good reputation and a history of successfully completed projects, we find hundreds of freelancers from all over the world. The striking thing is that data scientists from Egypt, Armenia, Cambodia, Russia, and India ask for the same USD 50 per hour as do their peers from Belgium, Canada, or the US.
The consequences of this trend for economies, (cost and) quality of living, and workers in developed and developing countries are important. Let’s look at workers in developed countries: Historically, a median (or "average") worker was protected by geography and still able to earn an above-global-average salary. Now, that this geographic advantage breaks away, the compensation of that worker will slowly but surely move towards below-global-average.
The world has finally flattened and the myth of the flat earth becomes a fact.