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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

#131

Post by jorblumesea »

Anyone who has ever worked with off shore teams or international engineering offices knows that it's not technical skill, but things like communication, cultural norms, expectations, requirements, project management. So while it's true that "anyone can take your job" the reality is that it's harder than you think.

Companies have already had the ability to outsource talent for decades. It's proven much less beneficial than anticipated. Everyone has had "that email" from an overseas office where it makes little to no sense. Or, that code review that completely misses the feature request. Remote work will not change that significantly. Companies might be more distributed, if they can make the organizational structure work. But moving to a "remote focused" organizational is an incredible amount of work and hard to execute properly.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#132

Post by gregkerzhner »

Real time, remote communication through tools like zoom, slack, and lucidchart (in my humble opinion) has been solved. It might take some getting used to, but in the right environment a group of properly motivated individuals can achieve the same productivity as their peers in a conference room.

Asynchronous communication across timezones has not been solved, and I struggle to see how it would be. A lot of collaboration requires a conversation and instant feedback from another party. You can't collaborate like this when there is a delay of 8 hours instead of 8 seconds between responses.

So "anywhere" is a bit of a stretch. That being said, absolutely this will happen across the United States. There is nothing that makes developers in San Francisco more talented than their counterparts living in Tennessee, so if those can be gotten cheaper, I can see how the overall price would go down.

Presumably though, such an effect would also cause rents and property values to go down in big cities. I can see how the natural evolution of such an idea is that wealth will be more evenly spread out throughout the country, instead of being concentrated in cities.

I still think the Facebooks and Googles will pay a lot more - someone has to be the "top dog" attracting the top talent. The question is, how much more?

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#133

Post by the_svd_doctor »

jedberg wrote: post #107
rb808 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone can already take your job, as long as they are willing to relocate, This where immigration restrictions make a difference. A Brazilian developer has trouble working in SV, but no trouble working remote.

You vastly underestimate the tax and legal implications of an American company hiring and paying a Brazilian in Brazil.

That really seems like something that can be figured out, especially if the result is 3x less in wages. Unlike immigrating to the US, which is sometimes plain impossible.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#134

Post by ghaff »

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…

And it's not really the same as a globally distributed company either. Plenty of companies have large software development offices in places like Eastern Europe which is a very different situation from outsourced call centers (cost is still one of the drivers, though not the only one).

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#135

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#136

Post by ed25519FUUU »

gregkerzhner wrote: post #132

Real time, remote communication through tools like zoom, slack, and lucidchart (in my humble opinion) has been solved. It might take some getting used to, but in the right environment a group of properly motivated individuals can achieve the same productivity as their peers in a conference room. Asynchronous communication across timezones has not been solved, and I struggle to see how it would be. A lot of collaborat…

> Real time, remote communication through tools like zoom, slack, and lucidchart (in my humble opinion) has been solved. It might take some getting used to, but in the right environment a group of properly motivated individuals can achieve the same productivity as their peers in a conference room.

What is not solved, of course, is how a remote-only employee can build trust and relationships with peers.

In my opinion that’s the reason a lot of remote work is working well right now. Everybody already knows each other.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#139

Post by Noos »

I think you can see this in something like commission art. If you wanted to draw commission artwork for a book cover or what have you, you now compete with almost everyone in the world; there are plenty of russian or south american artists for example who have both stunning quality and lower prices.

If the job is something that is task-based and doesn't really require as much real-time communication on demand, yeah I can see this happening. I think HN always tends to focus on being the best, and much less on "it's good enough."

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#140

Post by globular-toast »

No they can't. They don't have the experience that I have. They can't possibly have it because they don't already work for the company I work for.

I think some people in "the valley" are starting to brick it knowing that they'll be competing with people with far lower salary demands from around the world. But really the only think you'll have to worry about if your job goes remote is having to move somewhere more affordable.

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