Remote work means anyone can take your job • Hacker News Board

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#161

Post by ravenstine » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:01 PM UTC

Anyone can already take your job.

Since there is a growing number of businesses that are accepting remote work, that means that more potential work is available to remote workers.

Seems like people are trying to justify their preference for working in an office. Not to diss those people, but remote workers know the kind of position they are in if more people work remotely.

Personally, I'd rather live in a world where I'm not so dependent on one particular employer, and where I can change jobs without having to worry about moving away from friends and family. Who cares if someone can "take my job"? Businesses already outsource to other parts of the world where labor is cheap, and they get what they pay for most of the time.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#162

Post by blululu » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:01 PM UTC

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…

I don't think that 'Tennessee' is the correct spelling for Shenzhen. The low cost of living states in the US are still expensive compared to low cost of living countries. There is engineering talent around the world, and I don't see how the rural parts of the US are going to compete with more urban populations in other well educated parts of the world.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#163

Post by elicash » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:01 PM UTC

Remote Work Means Anyone Can Give You A Job

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#164

Post by JacksonGariety » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:02 PM UTC

dnissley wrote: post #137

Any reason someone better suited for it shouldn't be able to take my job?

The idea is that they will accept significantly lower pay and do the job well enough to get by.

Then again, what's wrong with that? Theoretically it just levels the playing field.

The real inequality is higher up the food chain anyway...

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#165

Post by wayoutthere » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:03 PM UTC

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.

We're in what I'll call the third wave of offshoring now. There are pockets of offshore developers who are actually interchangeable with US-based teams; but the cost difference is more like 25-50% less than the previous waves that were promising 90% cost savings.

My last company ended up outsourcing from Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay and Argentina with good results. We often didn't tell clients they were offshore and billed US rates for them and pocketed the difference. Over the course of about 5 years we had let go our US-based teams because they were just too difficult to hire and retain for the marginal increase in quality.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#166

Post by anacleto » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:04 PM UTC

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…

> Asynchronous communication across timezones has not been solved, and I struggle to see how it would be.

By focusing on excellent written communication.

Great written comms is hard, and (like coding) requires lots of deliberate practice and training.

Most people and companies gloss over this, but it makes a world of difference if you're operating across time zones.

Great internal writing is what separate the great companies from the average.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#167

Post by delphinius81 » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:04 PM UTC

Article doesn't cover the fact that many companies are not setup to deal with taxation issues related to payroll for foreign employees. There's opportunity for a payroll company to step in there and make this less painful, but tax reporting will always be a barrier.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#168

Post by bachmeier » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:06 PM UTC

> Now, you can either hire someone from San Francisco and subsidize their obscene rent, or you can hire someone from Omaha. You can get the same work done, but cheaper. What would you choose?

This depends on the assumption that there's a big supply of workers in Omaha that are able to step in and do the job. I'm an outsider, but I'd guess that the people worth $600,000 Facebook salaries are already living there and working for Facebook. And then there's the question of whether those jobs are the ones that can be done remote as well as in a specific location. You have to ask why, if there were such big savings on the table, these companies hadn't already moved in this direction. I don't think it's as clear-cut as many are making this out to be.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#169

Post by disabled » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:06 PM UTC

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…

Yeah, and the posters thinking that this will help wealth inequality (either among the general population or just among tech workers collectively as a whole) are hopelessly naive. It is practically guaranteed to make wealth inequality worse, and now tech workers will start to feel a lot of pain, more like the general US population has.

This is going to happen faster than other times when offshoring has occurred in various industries historically too. Just think about it. You can bet contract work is going to be commonplace, and you can kiss your benefits goodbye. If you do not think this will happen to you, well, you’re next on the chopping block.

Work will become hyper competitive for benefits and for full time status. A good employee will be someone who answers emails 24/7 and within minutes of it being sent, night or day. The work will never end. Surveillance technologies for remote work will remove any semblance of freedom when you work from home. This is all very unlikely to be made illegal in the US in the foreseeable future. Also. populism uprisings that occur in a respective country last on average for 30 years, so you better be thinking in the very long-term for how bad this could actually be.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#170

Post by BubRoss » Thu, May 28, 2020, 4:06 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #153

antishatter wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was at Intel, they had outsourced graphics driver development to Panang. Within a year they had created a large number of US jobs for folks who had to rebuild the work from Panang and validate/test/fix any new working coming back from Panang. There is a difference between a cheap foreign engineer without formal training and a trained domestic engineer. Anyone who thinks every type of labor can be outsourced to…

> There is a difference between a cheap foreign engineer without formal training and a trained domestic engineer. IMO there's no difference between a trained domestic engineer and a trained foreign engineer. Foreign vs domestic isn't a meaningful difference. However. Existing tech hubs got their cachet for having the best and the brightest, which in turn draws in the best and the brightest. Companies have to pay more…

He didn't say there wasn't talented people elsewhere. The title says anyone can take your job, and he drew a line between looking globally to save money and getting what you pay for. You seem to be bringing up counter points to something that wasn't said.