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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

#441

Post by davedx »

rb808 wrote: post #81
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 many cases returned to near-shore / onsite work Do you have any examples? I dont see this at all.

A large telco I worked for (owns a significant % of global cable TV assets and programming) used to outsource all hardware and software development. While I worked there as a contractor from 2013-2018 I saw them replace this with large onsite teams in their HQ in the EU and nearshore teams in Belarus and Ukraine.

I've encountered some of these nearshore companies in E. Europe multiple times over the last decade, business is booming for them.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#442

Post by tluyben2 »

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 think anything that takes years to learn properly (and of which the knowledge is not neatly packed into a book); communication skills, using vertical-specific language/terms correctly, integrating complex systems etc. Things you cannot take a book, read and do without countless failure, retry, mentors etc. Anything you can pick up quickly, probably anyone can pick up quickly... You cannot learn production firmware coding fast; sure you can pick up ARM c/assembly, you can read books, watch videos, but when you get a totally strange device that has 20kb (kilobytes!) of usable memory, you won't be able to get a factory ready implementation without years of experience. The same with a lot of other niche areas; sure you can learn it, sure you can probably get 80% there (wasting a lot of time on learning) but delivery is not reachable without the place burning down after.

Things that are not hard necessarily, but just a lot of work to learn to do well. Again, and again, i'm not critiquing the tech here, just the niche-ness of it; I hate frontend work and yet it took me 2 days to learn react native well enough to make a production app. If I can do that, too many other people can do that as well and I do not believe that's a viable longterm strategy. But if it works for someone then glory to them; I am older and know it will likely be gone in 10 years; most of everyone (by far) won't be millionaires by then even though they aspire to it now, so you need something for after 10 years. Go into management is an option, but I like remote work, coding and tech, so I had to find another way.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#443

Post by mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE »

jedberg wrote: post #107
rb808 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone can already take your job, as long as they are willing to relocate, This where immigration restrictions make a difference. A Brazilian developer has trouble working in SV, but no trouble working remote.

You vastly underestimate the tax and legal implications of an American company hiring and paying a Brazilian in Brazil.

I know a first-world company hiring third-world people. All the taxes are handled by the contractor himself. There are no legal issues to speak of, you only need an invoice from the contractor, or from an intermediator company, such as fiverr.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#444

Post by mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE »

crazygringo wrote: post #237
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 th…

I worked at a company that had a New York office and a remote country office. People basically sat in a videochat all day long. I'd say it is more efficient, because you don't need to be in the room all the time, and you can do other things while people are talking about subjects that are not interesting to you.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#445

Post by mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE »

antishatter wrote: post #144
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…

When I was at Intel, they had outsourced graphics driver development to Panang. Within a year they had created a large number of US jobs for folks who had to rebuild the work from Panang and validate/test/fix any new working coming back from Panang. There is a difference between a cheap foreign engineer without formal training and a trained domestic engineer. Anyone who thinks every type of labor can be outsourced to…

This is nothing but racism. Foreign engineers are no inherently worse than "domestic" born and raised. For proof, just visit any Silicon Valley company office. You will see nothing but foreign born engineers.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#447

Post by MagnumOpus »

josho wrote: post #156
y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #129

I had this same fear a few years back. I don't have any notable personal projects on GitHub and my skills are pretty standard (Full Stack .NET) these days. I don't even have a degree. Nothing really stands out in my resume that screams "hire this person". I figured I would hardly get a response when applying to remote companies let alone an offer. The competition is surely way more qualified than I am. Furthermore I…

I appreciate your short term perspective, and agree with you that today remote work doesn't have these fears. However, the author is thinking about a longer time horizon. As an example, with agreements between Canada/US and similar culture it would be very easy for your company to start hiring remote workers in Canada. Suddenly due to currency differences their salaries are 30% cheaper, and with a strong social safet…

> I'm starting to feel globalization is a race to the bottom for everyone but the owners

And the people in Canada who can get paid twice as much - or the people in Ukraine who can get paid ten times as much as before. It flattens the competitive landscape globally, so it is a loss for those who were the highest earners previously without much competition (US, Switzerland, London) but a gain for people everywhere else.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#448

Post by thewarrior »

joncrane wrote: post #375
thewarrior wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

Interesting. What aspects of AWS do you think will grow further ?

What other technologies do you have your eye on ?

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#449

Post by pnutjam »

sgt101 wrote: post #327
Avicebron wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one deal with a culture of decreasing vertical mobility within a particular organization. They may suck at their job and be shuffled between the bottom tiers of increasingly flat management structures. If there is no room for growth this model fails, many older people did move vertically but this practice has been almost deliberately been removed from corporate life.

Junior employees must have deliberate exposure to responsibility and challenge in a structured environment that supports them if the are to grow. This is the job of middle management, who are the first target of every MBA driven reorg. Hence the end of development.

My dept is a bunch of Linux Admins, of varying skill level; but all at least mid-grade or higher. There are no junior admins. They are paying top wages so we can do paperwork, create accounts, and manage file permissions.

Then they can't understand why projects fall behind.

Re: Remote work means anyone can take your job

#450

Post by temporama1 »

BubRoss wrote: post #318
temporama1 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Please send details on how we surely implement the microservices.

First, start by making a giant empty class heirarchy in java. Once you have created a dozen classes that inherit from each other, but not yet made any variables or functions, send it right over, your work is done my man.

First we make the Spring Boot with the common package yes? Ok. Please reply immediately.
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