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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

#231

Post by klingonopera »

johnwheeler wrote: post #33
cameronbrown wrote: post #11

There's some serious irony that traditionally globalist brogrammer types are now whining about outsourcing (to "poorer" areas, or other countries). You guys didn't care when it was happened to blue collar workers, and then go and rag on Trump voters who didn't see any other way out. Then there's the other faction that doesn't understand basic economics and expects Bay Area pay from Bangladesh so they can live like a…

Stereotyping is not cool.

Acting like the don't exist either, isn't either.

I coincidentally found this yesterday, and while it is on the topic of racism, you can just as much transpose races for classes, and still be on point: https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/02/colorblindness-adds-to-...

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#232

Post by ashtonkem »

cvlasdkv wrote: post #193
an_opabinia wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The day before they graduate, a Harvard college student will work on your research project or startup for $0/mo, if it’s interesting enough. The day after, Facebook is ready to pay them $10,000/mo+. They’re the same human being before and after graduation day. Just as talented the day before as the day after. It’s the pedigree variable that explains the vast majority of the salary. You’re saying something similar, it…

There are plenty of bootcamp grads across the companies I've worked and they all make 100k+ (and some are established senior engineers). Like you are implying: status signaling from degree mills is pretty useless compared to actual competency.

My subjective experience is that boot camp grads are not as successful in the interview and job acquisition process.

Whether or not that’s due to differences in education or purely signaling behavior is something I have yet to fully make up my mind about.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#233

Post by cl0rkster »

disabled wrote: post #169
crispyambulance wrote: post #99

Earlier 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…

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 va…

I'm confused. Perhaps you could clarify how honing your skills to be valuable as a remote worker is somehow the gateway to the rich eating all of us.

My personal experience with remote work is that it allows me to be present as a father in my children's lives and also to be more productive. I'm not saying everyone will have that experience, but for me it's an excellent fit.

As far as productivity, if we look at productivity increases since 1950, we should be working half as much for the same productivity/pay (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20766443). With voices like Andrew Yang trying to shift social values to valuing the underappreciated like stay-at-home mothers through a UBI, this seems like a positive path forward.

I know things seem dark right now, but in my powerless position, I choose to believe there is a better, more positive path forward, and I put my energy into pursuing it.

Frankly, I've never met a rich guy whose nose I couldn't bloody. I've rarely met one whose spirit I couldn't cut deeply in less than 15 minutes of conversation.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#234

Post by koheripbal »

bachmeier wrote: post #168

> 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…

Coincidentally, I am from Omaha, and moved to San Francisco for IT work. If I could move back, even for lower pay, I would - to be closer to family.

Granted, I am just one data point, but it's hard to imagine I am alone...

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#235

Post by roosterdawn »

dominotw wrote: post #158
roosterdawn wrote: post #35

> What globalization did to manufacturing jobs, remote work will do to many service jobs. This is bait. It's taken as a given rather than a hypothesis to be proven, which invalidates most of this post for me. Issues with the analogy: - Offshoring existed before remote work was popularized. For the many of "your jobs" up to be "taken" that shift has already occurred. - Outsourcing is not a magic bullet. Timezone gaps,…

> Offshoring existed before remote work was popularized. For the many of "your jobs" up to be "taken" that shift has already occurred. This is different though, because those companies weren't 'remote' so offshoring is not viable without that prerequiste. But if company goes 'remote' much more work becomes outsourcing worthy.

> But if company goes 'remote' much more work becomes outsourcing worthy.

Again, there's a difference between "outsourcing worthy" and "can reliably outsourced for enough cost savings for the whole thing to not be ROI negative". And, that's my point. Companies going remote doesn't magically jump start geographic labor arbitrage from zero. That geographic labor arbitrage has been ongoing for a long time.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#236

Post by ghaff »

tomg wrote: post #155
hopia wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've made the same observation. Does it have something to do with US tax or other regulations?

It's my understanding that if a US company wants to hire someone outside of the US to work remotely from outside of the US; they must treat the employee as an independent contractor. Additionally, the US company would have to abide by any local labor laws / tax laws in the country they are hiring in.

>It's my understanding that if a US company wants to hire someone outside of the US to work remotely from outside of the US; they must treat the employee as an independent contractor.

Depends on what legal structure they've established within the country where the employee resides (and the laws regarding such things).

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#237

Post by crazygringo »

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.

Unfortunately, that's not the case.

Remote meetings can be far more frustrating and inefficient because of latency, total lack of turn-taking cues, inability to read emotional expressions of concern or worry on one person or to "read the room", emotional fatigue from lack of cues, and so on. And that's all assuming best-case scenario that your equipment and internet are working well. People pay attention less, speak up less, and so on.

Now, this isn't to say that remote communication isn't useful -- it's obviously far better than not having it at all. And even when you're in the office, many teams are distributed anyways across offices.

But remote communication and meetings have in no way been "solved". They still present elementary problems like when someone asks "who has thoughts?", there's 10 seconds of excruciating silence followed by four people speaking simultaneously, then another 20 seconds trying to figure out which one person will actually speak, where nobody wants to seem like the aggressive bully OR never get to speak.

It's really hard.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#238

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

codingdave wrote: post #202
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. I disagree, at least if we are talking about what tools to use. But many people who are used to being face-to-face aren't used to async. Async communications require patience, foresight, and good writing skills. You need to envision the end result of the collaboration, provide as much of your perspective as possi…

Patience, foresight, and good writing skills don't solve the fundamental problem that a consensus in 3 days is less valuable than a consensus in 30 minutes. Any long sequence of consensus-based decisions becomes infeasible in the asynchronous model.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#239

Post by username90 »

josho wrote: post #203
one2know wrote: post #119

More like anyone can rip off employers. When you are dealing internationally, you are out of the bounds of US law. There is no guarantee that your code won't simply be stolen. You have no recourse except travel twelve time zones to a place you have no power in. No one need worry about outsourcing. It's been proven that the only work going to outsourcing is low risk service labor like phone support.

As a counter example IP laws in Canada are aligned with US and is the same timezone, yet with currency exchange salaries are discounted by 30%.

> yet with currency exchange salaries are discounted by 30%.

It doesn't work that way. Salaries are lower in Canada, but that is not due to the currency exchange.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#240

Post by TACIXAT »

MiroF wrote: post #179
Spooky23 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things that don't make sense tend to get adjusted during bad economic times. I've worked with alot of companies as a customer, and at end of the day, none of the stakeholders are getting bang for the buck. Companies set money on fire, employees are mostly living a middle class lifestyle at an insane level of compensation. I live out in the provinces, and we pay 20-30% of the rate for SV talent. My lifestyle in SV wou…

> NYC is more of a real place and is probably less inflated, alot of the premium there is really about domain expertise. We'll see. I'm betting you're wrong - NYC has nothing on SF in tech expertise and the rest of the country (especially outside of the West coast) doesn't have much on it either.

If by tech expertise you mean knowledge of cloud and large scale web applications, then yes. For security though, and I'm sure this is true for other industries, the Bay Area has very little on the defense industry in Maryland.
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