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

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

#81

Post by corobo »

cudgy wrote: post #68
bugmen0t wrote: 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…

Are you willing to give up some of your salary to hire people in other poorer countries than where you live? Would you rather your neighbors and family get good jobs and/or training for good jobs? Or would you rather those jobs go to people in another country? Are you a “dirtball nationalist” going down a “dark path” for wanting people in your community to get these jobs?

Personally most of my neighbours have jobs that can't be outsourced due to the fact they're physical jobs.

Yes I'd love it if they had the training to get good jobs, and the great news there is -- they've already been there and done it! :)

Yes I'd absolutely give up some of my salary, assuming it's a fair question and not "haha well you wouldn't give up half of your salary to hire someone so I'm right" yea I don't give up half my salary to pave the roads either, it's a group effort!

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

#82

Post by elp »

cratermoon wrote: post #25

Good. If lots of US companies with lots of money start competing for tech workers worldwide, in places like Mexico or India, and they have to start paying more, well... that's the Free Market (tm). And good news for workers in those places.

Its not that simple. To make it as a one percenter here in South Africa you have to take home a little over $40k a year. The CEO's of most of the smaller tech firms probably take home less than the starting salary of a US FAANG developer.

There is a limit to how much those salaries can increase before the company goes out of business.

The company I work for has lost a good few staff to EU companies recently. I presume their staff have been moving to US ones.

I fully agree its the Free Market and I'm not sure I would change it if I could but that doesn't mean it isn't painful for everyone.

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

#83

Post by RestlessMind »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #12

Well at least it'll curb some entitlement from the current IT crowd. A lot of IT people making 4x more than people of other professions assume that they are the cream of the crop and sincerely believe that their work is so hard that they deserve to have a 4 hour working day (because it is 'impossible' on being productive for a longer period of time in a day). No. People in other areas work just as hard, or harder, it…

We should pull other professions up, not pull IT down. Else we will close more doors to a middle class life.

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

#84

Post by RestlessMind »

hangonhn wrote: post #26

If someone can do what I do here in SV for half the price or less but do it just as well or even better but else where in the world, I don't feel how I'm entitled to my current salary. It's a bit hypocritical for us to bemoan this when software engineers in SV also automated people in other industries out of jobs. People outside of SV, outside of tech, and the US are people too. Don't they also deserve a chance at pr…

> I don't feel how I'm entitled to my current salary

No one is entitled to anything. It is purely about protecting your bargaining power. Tech peeps should learn from Doctors/AMA. If you aren't vigilant about your privilege, others will be too happy to take that power away from you and enrich themselves. See who benefited from outsourcing manufacturing to China - only the outsourcing companies and Chinese middle class, but at a great loss to American middle class. While I completely understand Chinese middle class to fight for improving its lot, I don't understand why American middle class has to surrender its power so easily.

> We were drowning in work before and now we have some extra help. I don't see this as a bad trend.

LOL we might as well be working at the same company. Wait until you see the proportion of your foreign colleagues increasing. Again, same thing happened with manufacturing. "Oh but we are just seeing cheaper goods in our stores" was what they said in the beginning. And it was too late by the time capital owners established manufacturing elsewhere and drained out all those middle class jobs.

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

#85

Post by RestlessMind »

blazespitfire wrote: post #34

If someone earning half your salary is able to satisfy everything that you offered to the company, I think the problem is not what you mentioned but it is a reflection of inflated salaries in the valley. I think it is a good thing if this happens. This salary inflation has made it impossible for anyone else to afford living there. It will also help curb the entitlement that valley IT employees carry around thinking t…

If this problem was only narrowly applicable to SV, then yes, you might have a point. I am talking about a majority of new hires being in other countries. At that point, to spite SV rich techies, you are rooting for destruction of a good pool of middle class jobs for the entire US. Is that really what you want?

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

#86

Post by RestlessMind »

malwrar wrote: post #33

I think one reason why wages might not decrease is communication speed. My team works with folks in Europe and Singapore, and while the asynchronous communication works and we love our teammates the time delay can be killer. Worse, if you do need to speak realtime you need to hop on meetings at odd hours. Who wants to do that? It might be cheaper, but if cost reduction was a factor I feel like we’d already have done…

I am not worried about Europe or Asia. But I am seeing a lot of headcount being placed into other countries in Americas - Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia... at that point, someone in Colombia is far cheaper than someone in Kansas (I know, I have seen the salaries offered for both).

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

#87

Post by RestlessMind »

Yeri wrote: post #14

I don't see how this is not already happening pre-WFH: most big tech companies have offices in Ukraine, Belarus, India, China, etc with "low cost" tech workers.

Because a lot of talent was in office and when a majority of your team is in office and a small minority remote, that remote minority has no chance of catching up to the productivity of in-person team. Be it SV vs Atlanta or SV vs Budapest. I saw that first hand in my 15+ years in this industry.

But with WFH, it is an even playing field. As long as everyone is in a similar timezone and logging in from their home and collaborating via Zoom or Slack, productivity differential vanishes. Why do you think you are seeing a sudden flood of biggish companies going fully remote now?

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

#88

Post by zozbot234 »

RestlessMind wrote: post #85
blazespitfire wrote: post #34

If someone earning half your salary is able to satisfy everything that you offered to the company, I think the problem is not what you mentioned but it is a reflection of inflated salaries in the valley. I think it is a good thing if this happens. This salary inflation has made it impossible for anyone else to afford living there. It will also help curb the entitlement that valley IT employees carry around thinking t…

If this problem was only narrowly applicable to SV, then yes, you might have a point. I am talking about a majority of new hires being in other countries. At that point, to spite SV rich techies, you are rooting for destruction of a good pool of middle class jobs for the entire US. Is that really what you want?

> I am talking about a majority of new hires being in other countries.

That would be no different from the mid-2000s outsourcing trend, which never really worked out either. There were just lots and lots of horror stories where quality and productivity would take a nosedive whenever those outsourced teams were involved.

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

#89

Post by RestlessMind »

mssundaram wrote: post #9

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.

This has a flywheel effect where once you start gathering critical mass in a place, the original experts lose their edge eventually. See what happened to manufacturing, where China is leaps and bounds ahead of Western nations.

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

#90

Post by RestlessMind »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #54

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…

See my other comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27697067
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