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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

#371

Post by mywittyname »

ReticentVole wrote: post #24
popotamonga wrote: post #2

It also means i can take someone else's job. It balances out.

You drive a car, I use a bus. You eat meat, I eat potatoes. You fly to Disneyworld, I take the train to the seaside. You live in a big house, I live in a small apartment. You pay American income taxes, I don't. You demand clean air and water, I tolerate pollution. There are some fundamental factors which make labour in other parts of the world much cheaper, and people willing to accept a much lower quality of life an…

Those properties lead to inefficiencies for the workforce. Pollution negatively impacts the health of a population, including mental health. Lower taxes lead to less reliable infrastructure. And there are probably other non-obvious benefits to having a workforce living in a developed country.

Western Europe and the USA have maintained a huge advantage over the world. I wouldn't be so confident about that advantage disappearing. Much like wealthy people today are much more likely to have ancestors who were wealthy, I think people born in developed western nations are going to continue to enjoy competitive advantages over others for many more generations.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#372

Post by bluekite2000 »

mc32 wrote: post #47
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.

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…

I am in LA and a friend tells me he can't hire good in house engineers locally. When I suggest Vietnam/etc he indeed mentioned tradeoffs regarding timeshift/culture. I guess you can't have it both ways.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#374

Post by danans »

luckylion wrote: post #313
Communitivity wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both? As someone who is unable to move to California due to family, I've always seen the biggest benefit I am missing to be not applying to jobs close by, but being the proximity to people I can connect with who can help me (and my ideas) grow. It's an old cliche, but true, that if you surround yourself with people smarter/better than yourself then you will likely get better yourself; conversely, if you are the smart…

"The room" has lost most of its meaning, hasn't it? You're no longer limited to working with people who live within driving distance of yourself, you can now meet super smart people from all over the world on lots of websites, talk to them, work with them, learn from them, get inspired by them.

> "The room" has lost most of its meaning, hasn't it?

I don't think so. Trust and sense of shared purpose and ability are still largely built in person. The continued productivity people claim during the pandemic lockdown is mostly coasting off what was largely established in person before.

Websites, chat-rooms, and video calls are no substitute for the environment created by the physical agglomerations of people found in industry hubs.

That's not specific to the tech industry, either. It's true for any industry whose progress is dictated by hubs of creativity, including health, energy, entertainment, and transportation.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#375

Post by joncrane »

thewarrior wrote: post #329
tluyben2 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we were talking about work-from-home/remote people and for me that is ‘earth’; I can find really good people for next to nothing because everyone jumped on the bandwagon. And this is not a stab at the technology; it is saying that it is a not a niche; I have maintained an yoy upward income for over 25 years by picking things that are valuable always. And, in line with this article, if I can have excellent rea…

So what kind of skills would you recommend ? What have you picked up over the years ?

I don't think it's one skill; it's having your antennae up at all times and sensing what the next big thing might be, as well as actually liking that thing.

For me it was AWS. About 7 years ago I was sitting in "Architecting on AWS" and I had an epiphany that this wasn't a game changer, this was a game redefiner. I was jazzed about it and have been pursuing AWS jobs and expertise every since. AWS isn't the end-all and be-all, and it's abused more often than not, but it has provided an extremely lucrative career for me. Also, as much shit as Amazon gets, AWS is a very, very good product, or suite of products. It only gets more complicated every year and my idea of it evolves every year as well.

It's still going strong, but I do have my eye on other technologies and am making sure I don't become a dinosaur.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#376

Post by MiroF »

joncrane wrote: post #361
MiroF wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security is a small part of the overall tech industry. I live near Bethesda and I would hardly call the region a tech hub on par with any of the ones in the West coast.

While I agree that DC is not on the standard with SF or Seattle (what are the other West Coast tech hubs), DC is definitely a tech hub in it's own right. The problem with DC is that the talent pool is extremely diluted by disillusioned, rent-seeking government contractors who get a certification, claim a bunch of stuff on their resume, and get bid as part of a 20-person team on a contract that really only requires 5-…

Great comment.

NoVa definitely has some strong talent and you're correct in highlighting Capital One specifically (they recruit heavily at my alma mater and I know a number of talented people who work there). You're also correct about talent dilution - I worked for a brief stint at a government agency doing tech work and I would say the majority of contractors are unfortunately, quite untalented and love to hide behind buzzwords.

> what are the other West Coast tech hubs

I would say the Bay is several different tech hubs rolled into one, Portland has a fair bit of tech work, and LA is overlooked but increasingly becoming a big one.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#377

Post by varjag »

Avicebron wrote: post #278
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.

I'm confused by your use of "enthralled by core competency". I think if an MBA is actively dissembling the structures that brought a successful product together and exerting destructive control over any further research they absolutely deserve some criticism.

There is a huge incentive for the management to find core competency in the cheapest item on the balance sheet.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#378

Post by kube-system »

ReticentVole wrote: post #24
popotamonga wrote: post #2

It also means i can take someone else's job. It balances out.

You drive a car, I use a bus. You eat meat, I eat potatoes. You fly to Disneyworld, I take the train to the seaside. You live in a big house, I live in a small apartment. You pay American income taxes, I don't. You demand clean air and water, I tolerate pollution. There are some fundamental factors which make labour in other parts of the world much cheaper, and people willing to accept a much lower quality of life an…

It goes both ways:

* I'm online at the same time as my coworkers, you don't respond until the next business day.

* I can travel to any business location next day, you need a visa application.

* Your continued employability is subject to geopolitical risk, but California isn't sanctioning Ohio any time soon.

* I can handle sensitive data and technology, your country is subject to export controls.

* I develop rapport with customers, you don't understand the slang used in support tickets.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#379

Post by TACIXAT »

MiroF wrote: post #249
TACIXAT wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Security is a small part of the overall tech industry. I live near Bethesda and I would hardly call the region a tech hub on par with any of the ones in the West coast.

In terms of getting work, I would say there are fewer security research jobs available in the Bay Area than scattered around the beltway. My last search, there were a ton of jobs asking how to authenticate servers to each other when what I want to talk about is how to fuzz or instrument code.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#380

Post by testbot123 »

codingdave wrote: post #246
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You may be trying to make all scenarios fit the same model. I did not mean to imply that. When you need quick answers, get on a video call and get real-time answers. When you don't, go async. Knowing when to use each method is again just a matter of learning communication skills. As you improve, you'll also find that the urgency of decisions often isn't what it appears to be. That is where the patience comes in. If y…

> When you need quick answers, get on a video call and get real-time answers

Having worked with a distributed team (13 hours time difference) working on the same product under the same deadlines, it's not possible to just hop on a call because e.g. someone accidentally changed a config on a development API which I don't have direct access to because it would knock us out of SOC2 compliance. This is an issue which needs to be resolved immediately and blocks any further work on my end, which means I can't do my work until they wake up and get into the office.

> If you truly constantly need consensus on problems within 30 minutes to prevent your business from crashing, then I'd suggest your organization may have deeper problems that need resolution.

When you're overextended, working under an intense deadline to deliver a product to a client, tight turnaround is absolutely necessary. In theory all of this could be fixed with proper management, but small- to mid-size startups don't usually have the time or resources to do that.

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