71–80 of 117 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The only way I can see that working is if QA and the dev team are in separate timezones.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
About half the US lives in the eastern time zone - so if the product manager wants to talk to an Indian programmer at 430PM India time, he has to start the meeting at 730AM Eastern time. This is the most convenient time to have the meeting usually. Another 28% of the US is in the central time zone, but that just shifts this meeting to 830AM for the product manager. The working hours don't overlap. On top of various o…
If there was easy cheap labor standing by to replace you, it would have happened already regardless of WFH. In reality what a company gains by way of salary savings it has to spend several times over in inefficiency, communication issues, difficulties in management, loss of quality and lots more. This is exactly why the outsourcing boogieman hasn't caught up to the industry despite being talked about nonstop for lite…
I’m not worried that highly talented US devs will be harmed by the ripples from that test, but there are a lot of developers in the middle of the bell curve of value delivery who will feel increased competition from a broader pool of devs also perfectly capable to hit that broad middle of the curve at a higher RoI, once the (perceived) constraint of living in commuting distance of the office is removed.
I will never fire a productive developer and try to hire a cheaper replacement somewhere else. That’s a fool’s errand. But when I’m seeking to hire, I’m absolutely looking at the RoI with as many factors as I can manage to take into account. I doubt I’m alone in the market in thinking this way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I have had multiple occasions where our India team was stuck for weeks on something despite sending daily messages back and forth. Then I called them late a night my time and could resolve the issue in a few minutes. It's funny that the same management that thinks collaboration needs everybody to sit in the same open office has no problem having workers in a timezone 12 hours off where you can never talk directly.
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…
Commuting daily to some horrific open-office and sitting there with your headphones on isn't going to save you when the beancounters see that they can get an engineer at the same level in [cheap country] for 1/3 of what you cost. Even if having an employee sitting 30ft away is worth something, as you said, is it worth being able to 'hire 2-3 engineers' for the same price?
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…
The thing I never understood about this argument is that it seems to imply that working from the office makes one immune to the same outsourcing. Maybe it was kickstarted by the pandemic or maybe videoconference/remote tools finally hit the inflection point, but if outsourcing is easy enough now and is really the quality-for-cheap deal it proports to be, nobody is safe. Commuting daily to some horrific open-office an…
They key is the lack of friction. If all the employees are in the office, your one remote outsourced person is the outlier and teams will get annoyed having to deal with that person. If everyone is already remote, then there's no pushback at all from having another remote person -- and if they're already remote, why not hire from somewhere cheaper?
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…
The thing I never understood about this argument is that it seems to imply that working from the office makes one immune to the same outsourcing. Maybe it was kickstarted by the pandemic or maybe videoconference/remote tools finally hit the inflection point, but if outsourcing is easy enough now and is really the quality-for-cheap deal it proports to be, nobody is safe. Commuting daily to some horrific open-office an…
Communication patterns matter.
In the office, much communication is implicit or at least not committed to electronic format: "hey, can we grab an hour to whiteboard some stuff?"
In a fully remote environment, everything should be captured in an async friendly format. As other comments have mentioned, it's much easier to scale that communication mechanism to employees from different areas of the globe.