Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same was said about offshoring and so far it worked out.
Tell that to 80s coal miners and factory workers.
It's not a great comparison. Coal mining isn't knowledge work.
Remote work means anyone can take your job
31–40 of 458 posts
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#32The economic incentives to out-source development to India have been there for decades. In the 2000s, "everyone" (i.e., the media) was sure that soon there would be no high-paying programming jobs left in the Western world. Well, how did that pan out?
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#33There's some serious irony that traditionally globalist brogrammer types are now whining about outsourcing (to "poorer" areas, or other countries). You guys didn't care when it was happened to blue collar workers, and then go and rag on Trump voters who didn't see any other way out. Then there's the other faction that doesn't understand basic economics and expects Bay Area pay from Bangladesh so they can live like a…
Stereotyping is not cool.
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#34Everyone duck! At the median age of 28, millennials just woke up to off-shoring :-)
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#35> What globalization did to manufacturing jobs, remote work will do to many service jobs.
This is bait. It's taken as a given rather than a hypothesis to be proven, which invalidates most of this post for me.
Issues with the analogy:
- Offshoring existed before remote work was popularized. For the many of "your jobs" up to be "taken" that shift has already occurred.
- Outsourcing is not a magic bullet. Timezone gaps, communication style, expert knowledge, and legal compliance are all issues that previous outsourcers to call centers have already discovered.
- Significant gaps remain between "tier-1" and "tier-2" support. Effective deployment of offshoring requires using the two to complement one another, not trying to use the latter to replace the former.
No matter what it is that your company is selling, tricky situations will come up that needed to be escalated to an experienced customer success team, whether that's the founder or a dedicated team. Being able to recruit globally doesn't magically make building that team any easier.
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#36It also means i can take someone else's job. It balances out.
The more highly qualified you are the more at risk to offshoring your job is. A long time ago, Albany Molecular, a contract research organization, highlighted they were based in Albany, NY. A shithole, yes, but a shithole with cheap cost of living. Nowadays, the PhD jobs are based in Shanghai, Szeged and Hyderabad. The only thing that's left stateside is regulatory functions and support. You don't need a PhD for that…
Do you have any proof for that? Everything I know says that more qualified people congregate, in general in the places with the highest cost of living...
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#371995 wants their article back.
The horse is out of the barn there. I remember working with HP, Microsoft and IBM people in 1999 whose management chains were in South Dakota, Phoenix, etc.
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#38True, but...
Anyone can already take your job, as long as they are willing to relocate, or your company opens a new office near them.
It is more important than ever to differentiate yourself. To do that you need to find something to do that you love, and then find (or more often make) a niche in that that that you become one of the top ten people in within your context.
By context I mean you don't need to be the best in the world, you can be the best at X within the Y industry, or within defense consulting, or in the U.S. And you don't need to be the best (though see the quote about being the only), but at least in the top 10.
There are two quotes I am fond of that say similar things much better than I can:
"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it." - Steve Jobs
"You do not merely want to be considered just the best of the best. You want to be considered the only one who does what you do." - Jerry Garcia
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#39There's some serious irony that traditionally globalist brogrammer types are now whining about outsourcing (to "poorer" areas, or other countries). You guys didn't care when it was happened to blue collar workers, and then go and rag on Trump voters who didn't see any other way out. Then there's the other faction that doesn't understand basic economics and expects Bay Area pay from Bangladesh so they can live like a…
Would be curious for you to expand on what you mean by "traditionally globalist brogrammer types."
It's a generalisation to be sure.
But many programmers (from Silicon Valley in particular) or other middle class workers like finance, law, etc.. are in this weird bubble totally isolated from reality. The working class has been complaining about outsourcing for decades and I just find it hypocritical that this bubble is only just starting to complain because now it affects them with remote work.
It's elitist attitude and my number one complaint about our industry.
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#40Seems like this article ignores the gigantic wave of out-sourcing throughout IT that already happened in previous decades and in many cases returned to near-shore / onsite work. What you actually see if you look at remote work job boards is many (if not most) companies in say, the USA, want remote people from the USA (or at least the same timezone as the USA). I think this is what will happen in other countries too.
In my totally unscientific assessment of remote job boards, US companies seem to be the only ones requesting US-only applicants, and I have no insight as to why this happens.
In my -South American- country the trend is to look outwards if you're hiring remotely; European countries seem to fit this description too.