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Tell HN: Don't root for WFH, it might destroy well-paying jobs

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71–80 of 165 posts

Re: Tell HN: Don't root for WFH, it might destroy well-paying jobs

#71

Hot take: if you're a mediocre dev, maybe be worried; if you're in a niche and have deep expertise you'll be fine.

That’s what barrel makers told the horseshoe fitters :) From Wikipedia In some countries, such as the UK, horseshoeing is legally restricted to people with specific qualifications and experience

> That’s what barrel makers told the horseshoe fitters :)

I'm not following - can you explain the analogy?

Re: Tell HN: Don't root for WFH, it might destroy well-paying jobs

#72
post #8

Your post seems more nationalist than anything else. I’ve worked at a geo-distributed company for a long while and let me tell you: The diversity of viewpoints and experiences will make your teams stronger, happier and more resilient. That culture needs to be consciously built though. That won’t happen in and of itself. But it’s so, so worth it. To anyone else reading this: Don’t buy into the "us versus them" rhetori…

Your post is all sorts of wrong.

- It’s nationalistic to defend the income of your fellow Americans? If it is, then everyone should be a nationalist.

- Geo diversity improves the company? How come? Language barriers, cultural barriers, time zone barriers, in person location barriers, the list goes on.

You just threw in some buzz words without any substance.

Re: Tell HN: Don't root for WFH, it might destroy well-paying jobs

#73

If jobs start going to other countries we should bring them back by investing in education and producing the best devs in the world. If we can't compete, good for whoever beats us. Trying to hoard the jobs won't work in the long run anyway.

The US does produce the best devs in the world already; of course many of those devs are students of the top American universities from other countries. Furthermore, many of those students are not poor in their home countries and come from privileged backgrounds.

Re: Tell HN: Don't root for WFH, it might destroy well-paying jobs

#74
Want to fight that? Unless you're part of the donor class and can contribute to one or both of the dominant US political parties, don't bother with protectionism.

Globalization did not end US manufacturing. It Just made it easy to move low-skilled (and dirty) jobs to other countries. The manufacturing sector here in America is highly specialized and thriving now. Try turning software into real engineering to get the same benefit.

Not donor class and not up to being an engineer? Well even non-engineers can organize. Unionize your workplace.

Don't like those ideas? The mere fact that there are more responses than mere protectionism suggests that there may even be more possibilities.

Re: Tell HN: Don't root for WFH, it might destroy well-paying jobs

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you think that is akin to starving the entire US population so my country can live like Sheikhs, I feel like that's on you. Talk about jumping 27 places in terms of drawing artificial conclusions. I got to see, up close, what deindustrialization looks like, during the 1980s and 1990s in the US. Its consequences are intensely negative on the population it affects. Allowing the US tech industry to be outsourced to…

>I got to see, up close, what deindustrialization looks like, during the 1980s and 1990s in the US. I don't have the same experience so I can't argue it. > Allowing the US tech industry to be outsourced would be an identical repeat of the stupidity of what the US intentionally allowed to happen to its industrial empire And yet it seems to me that you're doing rather well as an economy all these years later. Wasn't th…

They keep changing the narrative on that. It depends who benefits and where they can move their money and industry.

Re: Tell HN: Don't root for WFH, it might destroy well-paying jobs

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You conveniently misrepresented an opinion and then ran it to the most illogical conclusion possible. Saying the most highly paid US workers take a 10% pay cut if it means other economies rose above the poverty line is absolutely fine in my opinion. If you think that is akin to starving the entire US population so my country can live like Sheikhs, I feel like that's on you.

> If you think that is akin to starving the entire US population so my country can live like Sheikhs, I feel like that's on you. Talk about jumping 27 places in terms of drawing artificial conclusions. I got to see, up close, what deindustrialization looks like, during the 1980s and 1990s in the US. Its consequences are intensely negative on the population it affects. Allowing the US tech industry to be outsourced to…

The very fact that we're talking about remote work undercuts the comparison to deindustrialization. When a factory closed in a U.S. town and a new one opened in China, those displaced workers had no option to compete for those jobs at the new factory. They were lucky if they could compete for any related jobs without moving across the country. To work in a factory you simply have to live next to the factory; there's no way around that.

Whereas in software, the very mechanism that opens the job market to people in other countries ensures that it stays open for people in the U.S. We're not going to see a gutting, we're going to see a balancing. The door won't be shut on the way out. If cost of living makes it hard for U.S. workers to compete, it will probably also come down quite a bit, seeing as tech workers have been one of the huge drivers of its recent increase in the first place.

Re: Tell HN: Don't root for WFH, it might destroy well-paying jobs

#77

People have been worried about this since the 90s. But it hasn't stopped compensation from increasing dramatically. Demand for software work is only increasing. The more software we create, the more valuable marginal software becomes. The total number of software engineers has doubled every 5 years for a long time. Of course that won't continue forever but there's no reason to think it will stop very soon either. For…

“People have been worried about this since the 90s. But it hasn't stopped compensation from increasing dramatically.”

Software devs a few years out of university in places like Atlanta and Boston made 100k 20 years ago. How much more do they make now? Not much more. You must be thinking like a myopic Silicon Valley FAANG fan.

Re: Tell HN: Don't root for WFH, it might destroy well-paying jobs

#78
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s that gotta do with this discussion?

WFH -> less cars on the street?

Disagree. More Americanization and consumption spread to the rest of the world will devastate the environment.

Re: Tell HN: Don't root for WFH, it might destroy well-paying jobs

#79
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WFH -> less cars on the street?

Disagree. More Americanization and consumption spread to the rest of the world will devastate the environment.

How did we suddenly go from WF to Americanizing the world and increasing consumption? WFH is an American thing now??

Re: Tell HN: Don't root for WFH, it might destroy well-paying jobs

#80
Its really not that easy to build teams in dramatically different geographic locations. Ignoring all the legal waters you have to navigate you typically slow down output while your management complexity explodes. Not saying it can't be done. Just that in my experience it typically doesn't have the effect people initially think it will.
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