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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

#391

Post by drawfloat »

booleandilemma wrote: post #228
Communitivity wrote: post #38

True, 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 p…

You don't, it's the same psycho advice US tech people have been giving each other nervous breakdowns about for two decades now. Thousands of people have solid jobs that pay well where they can learn at a normal pace, do interesting work and put it down at 5/6pm.

If it's true that America really is that way, my advice is look abroad because life is not about your job.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#392

Post by renewiltord »

dmitriy_ko wrote: post #381
renewiltord wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should we? I don't see why one guy making $70k and two guys making nothing is superior to three guys making $20k.

Economy is not a zero-sum game. There's no reason you can't have everyone making $70K.

Sure. And that's a no-brainer. We'd all agree on that. The interesting part is when there are trade-offs. So that's my position on the trade-off.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#393

Post by gregkerzhner »

ilaksh wrote: post #383
gregkerzhner wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are around 5 million software developers in China. Are you really sure it makes sense to assume that they all suck? I'm sorry but that is a silly prejudice. You worked with one group.

China has the 7th lowest english speaking rate in the world. I doubt that they are going to be a large outsourcing hub to English speaking people any time soon. If you speak Mandarin though, its a great place to hire cheap developers - just look at Zoom.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#394

Post by sequoia »

> If you’re working on Wi-Fi at home, that means your job is literally up in the air.

This statement is hyperbolic and meaningless enough that I'm comfortable calling it "stupid." I've been working remotely for a long time and guess what? I moved to a big city to be closer to jobs. I am a US citizen and well qualified but I can tell you from experience most employers do not want to hire remotes.

Anyone who thinks you can just replace your colocated North American dev team with lower-cost employees across Asia must not have tried doing this. I've worked with highly qualified, competent programmers in India whom I respect and admire, and communication & timezones were still major issues. How do you establish the rapport you need to resolve disagreements and come to compromises with someone you've never met? How to you collaborate with a team 13.5 hours apart from you in time?

Furthermore, having worked in highly cross-cultural and international teams for a good amount of time (even colocated in an office) I can tell you that language/English proficiency is not some non-issue, it can be a big issue. I went into a recent job with the attitude of "language issues are no big deal! We can make it work" but over a couple years of running a team it became clear that having a team comprised of people with varied levels of English abilities and from different countries is a big deal. Think of how difficult it can be to resolve interpersonal conflicts and miscommunications with your coworkers, then imagine the two parties don't share a native tongue and multiply the number of miscommunications by 10, then multiply that by the number of non-native speakers/learners on the team. [content warning: bad metaphor] It's like carrying around a beanbag chair–it doesn't seem hard for a few minutes but do it all day for a week and I promise it will become exhausting.

As a side-note, hiring in South America for North American teams is cheaper & can still be same timezone (and easier to fly in!); I think there's a lot of growth potential there.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#395

Post by INTPenis »

This is a loaded topic.

On one hand I do work for a large European enterprise with a branch in India. I know for a fact that it adds a lot of social and cultural overhead to co-operate with a remote branch who barely speak English.

They're great for specific tasks, like 24/7 ops and monitoring. As long as there are clear instructions.

On the other hand I'm an idealist at heart who believes that borders should go away and we should work together as one world.

But it might be a bit too naive to think that utopia is around the corner just because IT techs are working remotely.

So I'd have to say that OP is wrong. For more than one reason. We're also contractually obliged to hire citizens for certain private sector clients. And in some cases we have to go even further and security rate them.

But regardless of my experiences there will always be people who shine and hopefully get picked up by a remote employer who treats them well. Our branch might be ~60 people, I've worked with only a handfull of them for 3 years and still managed to meet one or two who really went above and beyond to show that they cared about their work.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#396

Post by blaser-waffle »

eloff wrote: post #160
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…

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…

Trust, overlap of working hours, language, and culture are huge -- and often insurmountable.

Having dealt with Tata, Cap Gemini, Genpack, CTS, HCL, and a handful of smaller groups in the Philippines, I'd avoid offshore workers if at all possible. Would absolutely hire qualified Indians and Filipinos in the US, but outsourcing is dicey.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#397

Post by djannzjkzxn »

subhobroto wrote: post #368
Avicebron wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I won't claim to be the thought leader on this, however I'm happy to look at some hypothetical ideas. To be clear I'm not looking to reverse globalization completely or stop it. Rule 1: International trade deals forbid offshoring of manufacturing. Example, cars from Ford can't be made in Mexico for 1/10th the price. This is universal and enforceable by dissolution of companies that don't comply. Rule 2: Stringen…

> cars from Ford can't be made in Mexico for 1/10th the price Sure, but then the buyers of said cars from Ford has to pay the premium. The heavy growth of Amazon, Walmart has proven that the U.S. customer does not care about well paid workers, their benefits or their health - why would they agree to pay more for cars? > but take advantage of US infrastructure for the rest of their business. Fair enough. This point is…

When people say they want to break up the big tech companies they are not talking about making them do a stock split. They are talking about dividing them into separate entities. This comment seems to conflate these two actions. Amazon or BRK could do a stock split if they thought it would raise their market cap, and it wouldn’t be a big political controversy. It would increase the number of shares but not change the corporate structure or affect any monopoly concerns.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#398

Post by mnm1 »

eloff wrote: post #331
clarry wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Even remote companies can only consider so many applicants. In our last three job searches that number started at 100 or so, was whittled down using resumes to 40 or so who were whittled down to a dozen or so by tech screens and finally we interviewed less than ten. One hour interview followed by a take home for the top three. We chose one of the three. No stupid whiteboard. No long ass interviews. The take home was an hour or two at most and the people doing it knew they were finalists. We're a small company. A bigger company will have a bigger pool. The irony is, they won't get better candidates and if they have a shit hiring process, they'll get much worse. Other than problems with a couple of people's background which would have been immediately flagged had we done a proper check, our hires have been great developers.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#399

Post by gregkerzhner »

dougmwne wrote: post #277
blululu wrote: post #162

Earlier 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.

Actually if you look at cost of living data, the USA is in quite an interesting position. It contains both some of the most expensive and cheapest cost of living in the developed world. Salaries in some areas are some of the highest in the world, and in other places are closer to Eastern Europe or South America once you've accounted for things like taxes and healthcare. There's a seriously huge gap in pay when lookin…

Exactly. Although if the Buckeye was motivated, he could currently get a remote gig and make 100k. It wouldn't be SF rates, but it would still be higher than the local shops. It will be interesting to see how such arbitrage gets affected by more remote companies entering the field.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#400

Post by [deleted] »

ghaff wrote: post #236
tomg wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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