Ask HN: WFH – will I be outsourced?

On another point, the standards of quality in developing countries where wages are lower are not that great.

For a person in one of these countries, its normal for things to not work. The electricity goes down, the internet goes down. Maybe a government website goes down for an hour each night under heavy load.

We actually have it quite good in the developed world in that we expect most things we rely on to work. An important government website going down for an hour is unacceptable.

Because these things are considered more expected and normal and this type of mindset can creep into the mind of an engineer. If their code breaks or has a lot of bugs, its not much different to what they are used to with the services they rely on every day.

Lets say your orders stop processing for an hour because the engineer didn't follow standards and write tests? You might loose more than you gained in wage savings

I think the risk is low, for the following reasons:

1. Many (if not most) companies still prefer even WFH jobs to be in the same or nearby time zones.

2. There are jobs that cannot be outsourced to other countries for legal reasons, e.g. if you have govt contracts, some in healthcare, etc.

3. If your company doesn't already have a legal entity in the other country, then managing payroll is a bit of a hassle.

If your company has not already embraced a globally fully remote culture, I'd say the chances of your job being outsourced are pretty low.

Even without outsourcing the existence of the foreign talent opens US companies up to harsh competition anyway.

It depends, a lot of modern companies (perhaps even most) have lost the ability to see workers as people. Turns out when you treat people like objects, they won't like you and will leave the moment someone comes along that treats their "property" better. This is less of an issue for the rare companies that still see you as a person to be investing in.

I spent just about 2 years WFH at my job with FedEx, shortly after I left to join TrueNorth they went permanent WFH for my former office, I highly doubt they outsource that.

I'm also WFH with TrueNorth, again I see zero reason why they would replace me. I'm already arguably quite cheaper than people in HCOL cities, I'm competent, I'm proving I can work largely autonomously and deliver quality work and I don't have a job role that simply doesn't require me to be in person for anything, what meetings I do have work fine with Zoom as they often involve screen sharing and might use all of the allotted time or a fraction of the allotted time.

WFH is going to be the new norm going forward for a lot of roles, roles like mine that don't involve a lot of heavy in-person discussion.

Will you get replaced by someone better qualified in another geographic area that may or may not be cheaper? Maybe, but the same can be said for in-person roles you're just competing against a much smaller pool of people for a given role.

Will you get replaced by someone in another country, that can work for a fractional amount of what you can? Probably not, there's a myriad of tax implications as well as time zones and general reliability to deal with. It's much harder to vet people in a country that's going to make economic sense to outsource to, there's usually a language (or at least considerable accent) barrier, cultural differences (Based on Reddit and HN, Europe for example generally finds the bulk of what Americans experience at work to be absolutely unacceptable, things like a 40+ hour work week with a half hour unpaid lunch, being expected to be actively working all 40+ hours) the tax implications in both countries, data laws might be different in the second country which could become a royal pain, etc.

And if you do lose your job to outsourcing to increase company profits, did you really want to be working there anyway?