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Remote work means anyone can take your job

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Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#121

Post by dannypgh »

crispyambulance wrote: post #99
mc32 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the first wave of outsourcing, companies saw that the contract organization provided more or less equivalent results at substantially reduced cost. What they failed to realize is what they outsourced were their bottom tier workers, the unproductive people. They got excited by the reduced cost with minimal reduction in effectiveness. When they try to outsource their better talent that’s where they failed to recogni…

> [...] what they outsourced were their bottom tier workers, the unproductive people. That might be true to some extent, but I think there's a problem with that line of thought. People are a "moving target". What may be a bottom-tier worker now, could very well be a valuable employee in 5-10 years. Many folks have built their career by starting at a low level and then getting promoted and upskilled over time through…

I think this just means employers will still have incentive to hire people to be employees (as then they benefit from the employee's growth), rather than contract out work to firms which may reassign or replace the (now valued, experienced) employee. When you contract out instead of hire, you're giving an incentive to a firm to get the work done as cheaply as possible, and that's not always the right trade-off.

The earlier waves of outsourcing were about shifting things like management responsibility out of the company, and I think that was shown to have unintended negative consequences for a lot of firms. I don't think there's much reason why an employer wouldn't be excited about hiring good, talented people from cheaper labor markets now.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#122

Post by briandear »

quxpar wrote: post #63

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 exp…

I work for a FANG company and we literally don’t care what “cool” concert you went to and some of our top folks have “kids screaming in the background” of calls. We do have some really interesting people on the team but I never found out how interesting until after they had been on the team for awhile. Hiring people because they are “cool” is an amateur move. Even screening for “coolness” is a bit ridiculous.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#123

Post by jkaplowitz »

phkahler wrote: post #84
gamblor956 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, recent changes in the tax code made it less enticing for US companies to offshore US jobs. The company can potentially end up losing a lot of (otherwise legitimately acquired) tax benefits. With respect to R&D, for example, the US no longer allows foreign R&D activities to qualify for the R&D tax credit.

>> With respect to R&D, for example, the US no longer allows foreign R&D activities to qualify for the R&D tax credit. From what I've seen, many companies will shoehorn regular product development into the R&D category. I'm not sure if it's supposed to cover next iteration of existing products that most company should be doing anyway.

If there's anything innovative in the new version of the product, I don't see why not.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#124

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

Let’s flip this around. If [anyone] can take [your] job, then it stands to reason that remote work means I can take someone else’s job.

But what would this mean for me? First off it would mean doing all the same work to prepare myself as a candidate. Take Machine Learning for example, which is my area. I need to prepare my resume based on my current projects. I need to brush up for nauseating leet-code hazing trivia dumb shit (probably on a virtual whiteboard now). I need to research companies that have roles I’d be interested in.

Now I do all that, let’s say I do well in the interview.

Am I going to take less money to take the job? No. In fact, I’ll probably want more money than I am earning now if I am going to risk switching jobs.

Am I going to accept my salary to be adjusted by geographic region or cost of living data? No. My compensation is about the value I add to your company. It has nothing to do with where I live.

If I want to do lifestyle arbitrage on my high salary, that’s purely my business and is a private matter my employer does not get to know about or consider.

Given this, how many employers are really likely to want to hire me? I’m going to demand a NYC salary no matter where I live. They won’t get to replace their existing NYC-salary-person with a cheaper competitor, because nobody is cheaper, and a lot of people are more expensive.

In essence, supply went up if you can hire from anywhere, but the price for that supply did not go down, it’s just permanently higher.

I think if companies are looking to trade employees for a cheaper model, they are going to be surprised that hiring remote doesn’t facilitate this at all. The people from rural Kansas who can do the same job are not idiots happy to take 1/2 the pay because of where they live. It’s stupid to expect they would be.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#125

Post by hellisothers »

yusufnb wrote: post #94
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.

Remote work is not the same as out-sourcing. Out-sourcing was a necessary evil and only worked for large/mature companies with carved out business processes that could be offloaded. These companies were never remote-first. With companies being forced to modify their internal processes to be remote-first, what they will realize is that remote does work once they align to it. And once they realize that, there is no sto…

Can you provide an example where this worked for a large scale company? I’ve heard this at smaller companies but nowhere big

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#129

Post by y-c-o-m-b »

I had this same fear a few years back. I don't have any notable personal projects on GitHub and my skills are pretty standard (Full Stack .NET) these days. I don't even have a degree. Nothing really stands out in my resume that screams "hire this person". I figured I would hardly get a response when applying to remote companies let alone an offer. The competition is surely way more qualified than I am. Furthermore I was applying on StackOverflow where talent pools are endless. I applied anyway.

Well, I was wrong. I've had many interviews from that platform and so my last two jobs have been fully remote companies. The compensation has been even better than what I get locally (Portland, OR). It seems there is still a strong desire for experienced professionals and cultural fit; both of which many candidates don't posses. Despite the immense number of applications these companies received, they still complained that good talent and good personalities are hard to come by. What that tells me is even an average Joe like me doesn't need to worry about "anyone taking my job" because there's always a demand for it somewhere that's not being fulfilled.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#130

Post by danielfoster »

crispyambulance wrote: post #99
mc32 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the first wave of outsourcing, companies saw that the contract organization provided more or less equivalent results at substantially reduced cost. What they failed to realize is what they outsourced were their bottom tier workers, the unproductive people. They got excited by the reduced cost with minimal reduction in effectiveness. When they try to outsource their better talent that’s where they failed to recogni…

> [...] what they outsourced were their bottom tier workers, the unproductive people. That might be true to some extent, but I think there's a problem with that line of thought. People are a "moving target". What may be a bottom-tier worker now, could very well be a valuable employee in 5-10 years. Many folks have built their career by starting at a low level and then getting promoted and upskilled over time through…

This. Not to mention it has become much easier for anyone motivated to learn valuable skills online-- now there will be more opportunities to apply them.

Someone in the Philippines learning Python on Khan Academy today could very well be competitive for a senior engineering job in 10 years if the career path were possible.

I've met countless skilled technical people who could not a get job at XYZ company simply due to visas, not qualifications. Now working for these companies can be a real possibility.

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