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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

#331

Post by eloff »

clarry wrote: post #292
eloff wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked for Swiss companies from the west coast of North America (9 hours difference). It's not perfect, but I started early and they kept an eye on slack until late. Most of the time we communicated in the couple hours of overlap we had. It works because as a developer it's a plus to have multiple hours of good focus time with no meetings or interruptions. Plus we can cover each other for pager duty so nobody ha…

> I think remote work greatly increases the circle of people you're competing with. I don't recommend trying to be remote only unless you're world class - because the world is technically your competition. Another perspective, from a remote-only employee away from all the world's tech hubs: there just aren't that many local jobs to choose from. Remote work really makes it possible for me to have a job in this field w…

I've only worked remote, initially for the same reason.

But I think you're better than you assume, because you got the job out of a very large pool of potential candidates. By definition, you must've beat everyone who applied in that hiring round.

Which reminds me of the first rule of finding a job - it's just like dating - is a numbers game. Your chance of success on any attempt might be low, but then you just need to make enough attempts and the limit of P(offer) approaches 1.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#332

Post by arcticbull »

dcolkitt wrote: post #316
arcticbull wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> IMO there's no difference between a trained domestic engineer and a trained foreign engineer. Foreign vs domestic isn't a meaningful difference. This isn't supported by the research. American university graduates have much better knowledge of computer science than their Indian, Chinese and Russian counterparts.[1] [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/116/14/6732

I guess it depends on what you mean by a "trained domestic" engineer. The implication of your paper is "domestically-trained" i.e. the caliber of US universities is higher. "Trained, domestic" implies US person, trained wherever, and "trained, foreign" implies non-US person trained wherever.

For instance, is someone who moves to the US from Malaysia, goes to UIUC, then moves back to Malaysia a "trained foreign", "trained domestic", or "foreign, trained" engineer in your view?

Nuanced, but important, and might be why people are talking past eachother.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#333

Post by vmchale »

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.

Also, companies will realize that doing business in new jurisdictions (possibly with less sophisticated legal systems) has a cost.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#334

Post by eloff »

gregkerzhner wrote: post #209
eloff wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked for Swiss companies from the west coast of North America (9 hours difference). It's not perfect, but I started early and they kept an eye on slack until late. Most of the time we communicated in the couple hours of overlap we had. It works because as a developer it's a plus to have multiple hours of good focus time with no meetings or interruptions. Plus we can cover each other for pager duty so nobody ha…

Ive been on projects like this as well (the other way though - working from Spain for clients in San Francisco). You can definetly make it work, but its far from ideal. As you go through your day, questions inevitably pop up outside of the overlap hours. If you have to wait until the next day to get answers, you either have to pause what you are doing and switch to something else, or continue under assumptions that m…

Yeah, I'm used to having to switch gears into another task. I'm also used to getting very creative with finding a way forward when that's not possible (the site is down and I don't know what to do about it, and the only people who know are unreachable.)

I had a job for a while that I hated where I never knew what my task was. It would seem clear when given to me, but then I would start and questions would come up and there was nobody to clarify. So I'd have to go back to first principles and try to divine what they wanted me to do, and then execute on that. I was over the moon when I got a better gig and was able to leave that one.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#335

Post by pacala »

tharne wrote: post #321
mc32 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

This is 100% spot on. Organizations build up value over the long-haul by learning things and then building on top of those things, learning some more, building on that, and so on. Look what happened to G.E. They outsourced everything they possibly could and had a decade or two of unparalleled profitability. But, over time the well of ideas and competencies for products and services dried up and they went from being a…

This may well apply to countries as well. Due to the scales involved, it takes longer to notice the deleterious effects, and is much harder to reverse course.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#336

Post by wayoutthere »

frockington1 wrote: post #267
wayoutthere wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bil…

How did you decide which clients could use offshore labor? If you did that in financial or defense industries you could be opening yourself up to significant legal liability

It's usually spelled out in the terms of an MSA. You're right, there are plenty of companies you can't offshore work for, and they'll make sure that language is in your MSA. Bill rates adjust accordingly.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#337

Post by subhobroto »

Avicebron wrote: post #326
subhobroto wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so we aren't ruining society in a race to the bottom Nope. What is going on here is the person from India gets to now enjoy a much higher quality of life (because 50% of a U.S. salary gets you a lot in India) while the person from California sees their effective take home pay decrease (because their costs continue to grow but not their salary) Definitely not a race to the bottom but it sucks to be the person from C…

So in short what you're saying is yay globalism? Bring everyone down to a lowest mean existance possible, we shouldn't protect our interests?

> So in short what you're saying is yay globalism

globalization is happening whether we want it to or not.

> we shouldn't protect our interests

I made no comments either way.

... but, sure, let's think about this.

If you were to pass rules and regulations to stop globalization from happening, what would the top 3 be?

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#338

Post by beager »

toyg wrote: post #53
beager wrote: post #19

The implication from this litter of thinkpieces on HN is that proximity to a tech hub (SV/NY) is your only competitive advantage as a knowledge worker—your butt is close to their chair. This runs counter to the other prevailing wisdom about SV/NY, which is that those areas are hubs—and essential to the tech industry—because the world's top talent is drawn to it. So which is it?

There are multiple layers. I think SV will remain a hub from a commercial standpoint, so if you're fishing for VC money that's still where you want to be. From a purely technical standpoint, we'll see, but tbh, as others have said, outsourcing has been happening for decades now and if anything the wave is currently retreating.

VC money being geographically concentrated in SV seems like the kind of ingrained inefficiency that VCs themselves clamor on about disrupting excessively. Dealflow is a solvable problem for distributed futures.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#339

Post by take_a_breath »

mc32 wrote: post #282
take_a_breath wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is really missed by the MBAs, HN's favorite punching bag. These types of opportunity costs are absolutely a part of the make/buy decision process (but maybe undervalued?). I think it has much more to to with the "enthralled by core competency" aspect.

Some executives stay long term, some build portfolios, guide companies through a given stage and jump to the next. They can then say they “saved” this and that by offshoring. What happens 5 years after they leave is of little consequence. Institutional knowledge informs why a solution works better than a shiny. The contract org will push through what works best for them, more than what’s best for your org long term.…

And how many companies today are managing costly, legacy software solutions that they built in-house years (decades) ago? Every one I have ever seen.

The same logic could be used to justify duct tape software across the enterprise. There is some point where the cost-benefit leans in favor of outsourcing. Institutional knowledge may be under-priced by today's business execs, that is certainly possible. But we also shouldn't build a homegrown solution for every problem.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#340

Post by mc32 »

sjg007 wrote: post #325
Avicebron wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, it's already happened to some extent in the life science industry. It's part of the reason our biotech industry is in shambles. Many of the companies I work with dream of "going virtual", doing research at an unaffiliated lab, taking credit, moving that research to a massive CMO, then dissolving any physical assets, layoffs, and then there is a just a board, execs and profit. It's totally destructive to actual h…

Biotech startups are usually formed around a drug or biological to hedge the risk of preclinical and early trial work. These are usually developed with some kind of novel process. Usually you get a small early IPO if things work out at that stage to raise working capital. This happens because most traditional VCs won’t fund this type of biotech. That’s changing somewhat. Then the company sells to a major pharma or bi…

Also sometimes these biotechs, if they have novel approaches, are sought by big pharma because they’re more agile. So they buy them out as their R&D labs or invest in them for their IP.
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