The article also ignores the legal and tax implications of outsourcing work. At least currently, you can't just hire individuals from other countries indiscriminately.
Remote work means anyone can take your job
181–190 of 458 posts
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#182Real 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…
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…
Fun fact, you can get good foreign engineers as good as any SF engineer but they also tend to be as costly as their US counterpart maybe slightly less do to lower living costs.
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#183It also means i can take someone else's job. It balances out.
Salaries are set by supply and demand. Looming economic collapse aside, we can assume a move to remote work doesn't necessarily mean an increase in global supply or demand.
Salaries will even out but workers will have the ability to change jobs more easily. Companies will want to keep talent. Top tier salaries might go up as companies are now competing for talent globally.
I wonder if we'll see brain drains (without emigration) as a country's talent is bought out by a wealthier country. Would you want your country to have the salaried workers or the executives and corporate revenues(or maybe that goes into the modern incarnation of double dutch)?
Should be interesting.
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#184Seems 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.
Have been using Upwork for years, even when it was called something else...I forget the name.
Useful for CERTAIN types of jobs, especially recurring ones
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#185Earlier 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…
An additional problem MBAs sometimes miss is that when you export jobs to contract orgs is that this accumulated institutional knowledge is lost—it’s no longer held in-house. Conversely it contributes to the expertise of the contract org. But not all orgs think long term. Or they get enthralled by “core competency”.
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#186> 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 w…
Yup, all these op-eds reek of FUD.
I also think people are overestimating the impact that FAANG going full remote will have on the tech world. I know that they're trend setters, but a lot of companies have already been operating full remote/remote friendly and offering perfectly fine wages.
I really only see net-positive from this cultural shift. Frankly its obscene that location matters more than talent currently.
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#187[deleted]
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#188Pre-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…
A company that hires people for those reasons is rotting itself from the inside. I don't buy things based on how hip the employees are.
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#189It 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.
> Wages will come under intense scrutiny.
What's going to drive that scrutiny? Shareholders won't demand it, they'll be happy to keep the additional margin. Employees may demand more, but that will only accelerate hiring from lower wage regions.
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#190"Everyone would have to sit two meters apart, which means two times the square feet, which means two times the rent."
Ugh. If the office isn't already sitting me 6 feet apart from someone then I don't want to work there.