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Ask HN: WFH – will I be outsourced?

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Re: Ask HN: WFH – will I be outsourced?

#41

Post by PragmaticPulp »

tinyhouse wrote: post #36
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #22

I worked for a company that embraced remote, distributed work long before COVID. WFH doesn’t automatically lead to outsourcing, but it does move it a lot closer. Once the company dynamic has shifted to all communications and interactions being online, it’s very easy to add someone from a different country as long as the time zones aren’t too far apart and the logistics of employing and paying them aren’t too onerous…

This is exactly my experience and I work at a very known tech company. As a manager I was told I can hire more people outside the US and was recommended to only hire in the US if I find someone who we really don't want to pass on. In other words, top talent would be OK, everyone else would have problems. I actually don't call it outsourcing as people think about outsourcing as a way to get cheap labor in places like…

> As a manager I was told I can hire more people outside the US and was recommended to only hire in the US if I find someone who we really don't want to pass on. In other words, top talent would be OK, everyone else would have problems.

This is exactly what it turned into for us. We were encourage to hire most people outside of the US but to leave space for exceptional US candidates.

It’s a hard incentive to ignore when you can hire twice as many people within the same budget by going international remote.

Re: Ask HN: WFH – will I be outsourced?

#42

Post by Mave83 »

We from croit.io hire worldwide with work from everywhere. Since COVID-19 we see a huge increase in salaries of usually low labor cost countries. It's still cheaper, but there are reasons to get more expensive employees as well.

For example we have a hard time to find Linux System Administrators / DevOps that want to support our global customer base. We even need to get more US engineers onboard to fulfil requirements of large companies or governmental customers.

What you can expect, is a way more competitive environment in the future. We made quite good experience with our stuff and it brings a lot of value into a company to have a team with total different ways of thinking and viewing things. Just don't worry, be flexible, learn everyday, keep yourself ahead of others and you wont have to fear to be jobless. But if you are lazy, under average skilled and unflexible, prepare your self to get in trouble some day in the future.

Re: Ask HN: WFH – will I be outsourced?

#43

Post by idunno246 »

x3n0ph3n3 wrote: post #27
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #22

I worked for a company that embraced remote, distributed work long before COVID. WFH doesn’t automatically lead to outsourcing, but it does move it a lot closer. Once the company dynamic has shifted to all communications and interactions being online, it’s very easy to add someone from a different country as long as the time zones aren’t too far apart and the logistics of employing and paying them aren’t too onerous…

I think you are overly discounting time zone. Someone working remotely, but within 3 time zones, is much easier to collaborate with than someone 9-12 timezones away.

outsourcing doesnt necessarily mean india/eastern europe. we had great luck with south america and they were able to work the same time. this was a few years ago, the contracting company thought we were a little abnormal at the time, but everyone put on our project went through a regular interview so they were talented, and were treated as a member of the team instead of some remote contractor.

Re: Ask HN: WFH – will I be outsourced?

#44

Post by engineerDave »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #41
tinyhouse wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly my experience and I work at a very known tech company. As a manager I was told I can hire more people outside the US and was recommended to only hire in the US if I find someone who we really don't want to pass on. In other words, top talent would be OK, everyone else would have problems. I actually don't call it outsourcing as people think about outsourcing as a way to get cheap labor in places like…

> As a manager I was told I can hire more people outside the US and was recommended to only hire in the US if I find someone who we really don't want to pass on. In other words, top talent would be OK, everyone else would have problems. This is exactly what it turned into for us. We were encourage to hire most people outside of the US but to leave space for exceptional US candidates. It’s a hard incentive to ignore w…

Yup. Let's birth that baby by throwing more mothers at it.

Re: Ask HN: WFH – will I be outsourced?

#45

Post by viraptor »

xeromal wrote: post #17
daviddever23box wrote: post #3

Don’t believe the propaganda. If you CAN be outsourced, work-from-home has little or nothing to do with any motivations to start that process.

It's really not propaganda though. WFH's job pool is at least your entire state, if not your entire time zone, if not your entire country. When it's in person, it's people within commuting distance. Simple as that. That being said, people overestimate the will of management to replace current employees. WFH is really more of a problem in the hiring process, not the firing process.

For larger companies the pool is already the whole state anyway. People move within the state for a good job - there's likely only 1-2 tech hubs per state anyway.

Re: Ask HN: WFH – will I be outsourced?

#46

Post by KerrAvon »

x3n0ph3n3 wrote: post #27
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #22

I worked for a company that embraced remote, distributed work long before COVID. WFH doesn’t automatically lead to outsourcing, but it does move it a lot closer. Once the company dynamic has shifted to all communications and interactions being online, it’s very easy to add someone from a different country as long as the time zones aren’t too far apart and the logistics of employing and paying them aren’t too onerous…

I think you are overly discounting time zone. Someone working remotely, but within 3 time zones, is much easier to collaborate with than someone 9-12 timezones away.

Properly managed, a team with members in multiple time zones can be enormously productive if the work is such that it can be handled in shifts. Software can actually be done this way. You have to be culturally willing to do it.

Re: Ask HN: WFH – will I be outsourced?

#47

Post by lmeyerov »

Depends --

As a remote team, once we have someone, we don't want to lose them: we are mutually invested. Likewise, overlapping timezones help, esp for our more R&D areas. So if you are good, you are good. At the same time, we are trying to grow our team in ways that that reflect our customers: over half North America (gov, finance, enterprise, tech) but now growing intl too.

And... #hiring #visual #graph #ai: js, webgl, sales/solutions engineers esp for graph neural nets / pydata / BI :)

Re: Ask HN: WFH – will I be outsourced?

#48

Post by KerrAvon »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #41
tinyhouse wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly my experience and I work at a very known tech company. As a manager I was told I can hire more people outside the US and was recommended to only hire in the US if I find someone who we really don't want to pass on. In other words, top talent would be OK, everyone else would have problems. I actually don't call it outsourcing as people think about outsourcing as a way to get cheap labor in places like…

> As a manager I was told I can hire more people outside the US and was recommended to only hire in the US if I find someone who we really don't want to pass on. In other words, top talent would be OK, everyone else would have problems. This is exactly what it turned into for us. We were encourage to hire most people outside of the US but to leave space for exceptional US candidates. It’s a hard incentive to ignore w…

But that also means you have the administrative headache of dealing with tax laws and other personnel regulations in other places — is your company large enough that it’s not a problem, or do you outsource the payroll/accounting/HR aspects?

Re: Ask HN: WFH – will I be outsourced?

#50

Post by webmaven »

charcircuit wrote: post #19
webmaven wrote: post #6

In theory, perhaps. But first consider whether the company gains value from workers sharing a time zone, language, cultural context, etc., all of which push against replacing employees with "cheaper" ones from abroad. In many ways the ideal remote first company manages to address and eliminate these constraints (eg. by adopting async communication channels) to truly enable employees to come from and work from anywher…

Cross time zone asynchronous communication is not better. Things can get delayed by days since you can fall into the trap of only being able to send a single message to them per day.

Yeah, "ask a question via email, wait for a response" while using a nominally async channel isn't really adopting async processes (neither is your manager emailing you at 7pm your time and expecting a reply in less than 14h). At the minimum, that email should be going to an internal mailing list where some other knowledgeable employee can answer, and in any situation where that one Q is actually blocking and there is no other work that can be done in the interim, there ought to be a root cause analysis done, at least informally, to prevent that from happening in the future (probably resulting in some docs being updated or expanded).

Other async tools and channels: bug and issue trackers, kanban boards, wikis, forums, pull/merge requests, version control commit messages, annotation/commenting systems like hypothes.is, even NNTP.

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