Means I can take anyone's job.
Remote work means anyone can take your job
221–230 of 458 posts
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Anectodal, but I spent a year on a recent project collaborating with a group of firmware engineers in Shenzhen, and it was an absolute nightmare. Apart from the timezones, the code quality was horrendous and basically never worked correctly. They also ignored all common standards, and made assumptions about things like ordering of fields in JSON. None of their engineers spoke english, so code communication had to go…
You probably got what your company paid for.
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#223Oh the irony.
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
> [...] 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 t…
You forgot to account for domain knowledge. You can be better than me at python, but I know my area and customers. When I'm given a half complete spec I can make good choices for the most part and get done without getting clarification. I can guess what version 2.0 will need well enough that most of the time those features will drop in quickly while major refactoring is required to get them into the better programmers 2.0.
Of course there are tradeoffs. A programmer who is much better than me has advantages in quality (assuming you are much better, in my biased opinion I'm great)
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#225Real 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
The company I work for has offices in Europe an throughout the US and Canada. We span 11 time zones, and we are absolutely able to make it work. My team has 7 people and only 2 are in the same office.
The trick is to have multiple communications channels, good collaboration tools, and to hire excellent communicators.
I agree from experience that straight outsourcing, where you throw a language barrier in with the time zone issue, is not a solved problem, but purely working across timezones is very doable,
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#226> 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…
Within software at least, there are simply more people that have significant 'clock time' working within well run software companies in San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, etc. It's no different than college football players that spend their four years in well run systems that run pro style offenses. Sure, there may be a kid that has insane athletic ability that is playing at Calhoun Community College, but someone like J…
Yes, exactly. I've learned much more in the last two years working at a big tech co than I did at a small software company in the midwest, making me a much stronger engineer.
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#227Earlier 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…
> 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 hard work and commitment. Starting at a low position and advancing is becoming, sadly, a rare thing.
I think the validity of this point depends on how you understand "bottom tier". When I read "bottom tier"[1] I tend to read that as a combination of "people who suck at their jobs" and "people who are doing things that are highly commoditized or commoditizable". The former interpretation in particular has nothing to do with seniority.
[1] And I'm reading it this way probably because I'm back-projecting based on experience of working with some outsourced/offshored workers who sucked at their jobs.
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#228True, but... Anyone can already take your job, as long as they are willing to relocate, or your company opens a new office near them. It is more important than ever to differentiate yourself. To do that you need to find something to do that you love, and then find (or more often make) a niche in that that that you become one of the top ten people in within your context. By context I mean you don't need to be the best…
...and then find (or more often make) a niche in that that that (sic) you become one of the top ten people in within your context
Whatever happened to just getting a normal job and putting in an honest day’s labor?
Now we’re expected to become “one of the top ten”... what exactly? How is that supposed to work? What about those of us with families for goodness sake. We can’t all be super Linus Torvalds ninja hackers putting out code 12 hours a day.
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#229Earlier 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…
The "moving target" problem is significant for countries (or geographic regions in the case of large countries or open borders). However, for an individual company, it is a tragedy of the commons situation.
Why should a company A pay more to train a bottom tier worker into a high tier worker, when said worker will then be able to move to company B who offshore's its low tier workers. In effect, company A is subsidizing company B's training program.
Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job
#230Lets see everyones release schedules so far this year. And this is with your A-team.
No doubt hiring out cheaper will bring the synergy and velocity organizations pine for. We should all be writing stuff like this to kneecap our competitors.