Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Remote work means anyone can take your job

marker.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 458 posts

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#61

Post by ghaff »

beager wrote: post #19

The implication from this litter of thinkpieces on HN is that proximity to a tech hub (SV/NY) is your only competitive advantage as a knowledge worker—your butt is close to their chair. This runs counter to the other prevailing wisdom about SV/NY, which is that those areas are hubs—and essential to the tech industry—because the world's top talent is drawn to it. So which is it?

It can be both. Prior to the current situation, many/most companies preferred people who could/would commute to a company office. Which gives more options to people willing to work near one of those hubs and mostly work in an office.

At the same time, many people prefer to live near one of those hubs whether because they just like NYC, Boston, Austin, Bay Area, Seattle, etc. or because they believe it gives them more flexibility in changing employers. (And/or being in proximity to many like-minded individuals.)

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#62

Post by new2628 »

ReticentVole wrote: post #24
popotamonga wrote: post #2

It also means i can take someone else's job. It balances out.

You drive a car, I use a bus. You eat meat, I eat potatoes. You fly to Disneyworld, I take the train to the seaside. You live in a big house, I live in a small apartment. You pay American income taxes, I don't. You demand clean air and water, I tolerate pollution. There are some fundamental factors which make labour in other parts of the world much cheaper, and people willing to accept a much lower quality of life an…

Funnily, except for the pollution part, most of your items on the right seem more attractive from a quality-of-life point of view than those on the left. Flying to Disneyworld sounds like a nightmare I would never (willingly) do, but a trainride to the seaside is always nice.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#63

Post by quxpar »

Pre-remote, I was afraid of a random person walking in off the street and doing my job. I don't think I ever worked for a successful company that wasn't continually hiring people in my role.

I don't think the author realizes that large businesses that rely on software see tech as a team sport, in which camaraderie plays a huge role. Subconsciously, they're willing to pay another $40k for a better social/emotional experience.

Who is a theoretical startup hotshot going to prefer? Option A, who is also in San Francisco, who talks about concerts and cool events they went to every weekend, who stays up late hacking on fun side projects, etc etc. Option B, ives in Omaha, nice enough person but pretty much always logs off at 5pm. Has 3 kids screaming in the background of every Zoom call. Likes board games.

That's not to say B has zero chance of employment. In my experience, B can existed at a company but has to have some seriously strong technical chops, know the higher-ups really well, AND be an integral part of the company in terms of how critical infra is maintained.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#64

Post by tluyben2 »

As someone who basically never worked in an office since I began working as a dev in the early 90s; you have to protect yourself and carve out niches and knowledge that takes actual time and elbow grease to catch up to. Sure many people anywhere in the world can do what I do, but with the deep knowledge I have about some subjects (banking/payments/insurances backends & production firmware), it is not very likely to get a better deal as I speak the same language of all parties involved and I did it many times already. So it is not trial and error. It simply takes actual time to sit down and suffer for years/decades. You can hire entire teams cheaply with great looking resumes and fail because some of these things are not hard/difficult per-se but you have to have done them before to succeed fast.

But yes, if you shoot with hail and focus on the latest and greatest, you might be easily replaced. I am surprised how cheap (embarrassingly so) I can find good react/node devs; that tells me it is really bad to specialise in that...

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#65

Post by roosterdawn »

cameronbrown wrote: post #11

There'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…

> Edit: Wow. Downvote in five seconds. Really makes you think how much effort people are putting into processing the words I wrote.

What is there to process besides you making a strawman and injecting flat politically polarized tropes and adding nothing but pollution to a discussion? You are arguing in bad faith with shoddy arguments and should be downvoted:

- False equivalence between blue collar and white collar outsourcing -- what makes you think knowledge work isn't substantially different from blue collar work for them to be apples and oranges?

- Putting words in someone else's mouth -- no one here ragged on Trump voters who "didn't see any other way out" -- you perceived that and projected it into a space inappropriately. This is a giant forum with a variety of people and political opinions. Don't flatten that into a single viewpoint and expect to not get heat for it.

- Misunderstanding of labor pricing. Employers pay the minimum they can, but saying "salaries are high right now because of concentration of talent" misses the network effect of concentration of talent. If you don't understand the nonlinear effect of that, I think it is a little bit misguided to suggest that others do not understand "basic economics"

Please, rethink how you worded your post and how you can say what you were trying to say in a more factually grounded and less inflammatory way. I promise you will get better responses with this approach.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#66

Post by csours »

Nobody can take my job because they couldn't pay someone enough to do my job. That said, my job could simply go away, and I'm working hard to make that happen. When my job goes away, hopefully the value I demonstrated in doing that will be enough for me to get another job.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#67

Post by LockAndLol »

That's a nice sentiment. Every country is looking for skilled IT workers. The amount of positions isn't going to magically decrease to create an overflow of ITers. There'll still be a shortage.

Having personally seen the quality of outsourced code and the effort needed to clean up the mess in order to make the product stable, companies are going to be in for a nice surprise if they think that short-changing devs and simply going remote will work in their favor.

Interesting times are ahead.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#68

Post by Lio »

betimsl wrote: post #27

Very true for parasite employees. But to employees who actually work and have a basic understanding of self fulfillment, it means nothing more than environment change.

“Parasite employees” is a somewhat unfortunate phrase.

I would imagine that any employer who thinks of their staff like that is already outsourcing or planning to outsource anyway.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#69

Post by adventured »

vcanales wrote: post #40
davedx wrote: post #7

Seems 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.

The US has 330m people, you generally (emphasis, as there are certainly exceptions) don't need to look beyond its labor base to find what you're looking for.

If you're in Estonia and looking to hire a software engineer for remote work, maybe you end up hiring someone from Poland or Spain. That's still EU hiring in the EU, more akin to what you're referring to with the US. On average the smaller the country, it probably increases the odds that more of the labor you're looking for is going to be outside of your own borders.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#70

Post by anpago »

popotamonga wrote: post #2

It also means i can take someone else's job. It balances out.

The employers can also balance out the wages.

Your saving on travel, they save on building, building services and location adjusted wages.

With huge savings being made by all businesses and less costs on the balance sheet.

Wages will come under intense scrutiny.

Post reply on HN