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Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

fortune.com

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Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#51

Post by tester756 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #31

Enjoy the remote work now. It is a bubble. Any job that can be worked 100% remotely can equally be 100% outsourced to a cheaper labor market. Those who had normal jobs pre-covid, and since are totally remote, ride a wave of higher wages. That wave will crash the day employers realize they can find cheaper talent online. If you work remotely then you have to be competative at an international level. Maybe you really a…

>I would also hazard that any job easily done remotely is also ripe for takeover by AI. If your job requires no in-person contact, it might not require a person full stop.

Thats... honestly a bullshit that makes me think that you havent worked in cross-geo projects.

Why would in-person contact be needed if almost all stakeholders for my project are across US/EU/China/India?

You think remote projects are somehow easier or more trivial?

I'd want to remind you that there are countless complex OSS projects that are pushed ahead by remote teams.

Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#52

Post by cj »

moffkalast wrote: post #48
credit_guy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A company with a good product will thrive no matter the policy A different way to say it is "If you found a gold mine, you can afford to do things others can't". 99% of companies don't sit on gold mines like Nvidia.

Maybe they would be able to afford more if they didn't spend so much of the budget on renting out offices, eh? Remote work has gotta be leagues cheaper, even if you own the building you still don't even have to pay people their commute fees.

The biggest cost savings from remote work comes from lower talent cost (read: 20-50% lower salaries) because instead of hiring exclusively in a few cities, you can now stop hiring in expensive cities and hire everywhere else.

Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#54

Post by sandworm101 »

matwood wrote: post #47
sandworm101 wrote: post #31

Enjoy the remote work now. It is a bubble. Any job that can be worked 100% remotely can equally be 100% outsourced to a cheaper labor market. Those who had normal jobs pre-covid, and since are totally remote, ride a wave of higher wages. That wave will crash the day employers realize they can find cheaper talent online. If you work remotely then you have to be competative at an international level. Maybe you really a…

> outsourced to a cheaper labor market Have you hired any contractors outside the US lately? They may not be SV level, but hourly rates that translate into 150k-250k yearly are fairly standard through any contracting firm for people with experience. Can the lone, amazing and cheap person be found? Sure, but that's not how companies operate at scale. Also, I've been told since I was studying CS in the late 90s that go…

>> Have you hired any contractors outside the US lately?

Yup. For a great many people in this world, contractors in the US are often the competitor cheap labor market.

Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#55

Post by WanderPanda »

credit_guy wrote: post #21
hmmmcurious1 wrote: post #5

Remote vs office is just smoke and mirrors. A company with a good product will thrive no matter the policy. Making a big deal of returning your cattle to the farm is just to soothe investors when you have a subpar product

> A company with a good product will thrive no matter the policy A different way to say it is "If you found a gold mine, you can afford to do things others can't". 99% of companies don't sit on gold mines like Nvidia.

It‘s like unions squeezing out more than market rates, it eventually renders the companies uncompetitive

Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#56

Post by [deleted] »

sandworm101 wrote: post #43
dwnvotee wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outsourcing to Indian companies like HCL was a thing way before covid and remote work. Results were varied. I never felt threatened as a remote employee

Everyone looks to india, but that isnt the only cheaper labor market. If you work a tech job in the bay area, the most threatening labor market isnt india or china, but west virginia and alabama. The most direct threat isn't the overseas person willing to work for 10% of your wage, but your drop-in replacement willing to work for 80% of your wage because they are paying 50% less in rent.

[deleted]

Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#57

Post by PeterStuer »

sandworm101 wrote: post #31

Enjoy the remote work now. It is a bubble. Any job that can be worked 100% remotely can equally be 100% outsourced to a cheaper labor market. Those who had normal jobs pre-covid, and since are totally remote, ride a wave of higher wages. That wave will crash the day employers realize they can find cheaper talent online. If you work remotely then you have to be competative at an international level. Maybe you really a…

'Any job that can be worked 100% remotely can equally be 100% outsourced to a cheaper labor market.'

Manufacturing was offshored long before office work, and it wasn't because factory workers 'worked from home' so employers saw the opportunity.

Office work has been off/near-shored routinely and increasingly since the 1990's. The decision to do this has nothing to do with the recent WFH wave.

Same goes for automation. Nothing to do with remote work. It will happen once tech is 'good enough' to take over. No amount of ass-on'chair maratons in the cubicle farm or the 'let's pretend we are working here' open space office plateaus will change that.

Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#58

Post by ghaff »

hipparchus wrote: post #49

Ok, I'll bite the bullet: how do you train interns and/or junior employees in a fully remote environment? I only have two years of experience so I'm still super new, but it's something I'm confronted with this, and I just don't know how to train people in a fully remote environment. It's from little things to catching an intern who doesn't know a couple extremely handy shortcuts with tools that they are still learnin…

I'm sure people will pipe up to say worked fine for me/us but it's definitely one of the specific issues (i.e. not generic culture, energy, etc.) that I've seen raised. I'm sure there are all manner of best practices--some of which a lot of companies don't follow in-person either. But, at the end of the day (absent any in-person time), you probably need to work harder and accept both inefficiency and that it just won't work for some people.

I'd just add that socially I would have found it really difficult to graduate from school and worked from my apartment indefinitely.

Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#59

Post by tintedfireglass »

hipparchus wrote: post #49

Ok, I'll bite the bullet: how do you train interns and/or junior employees in a fully remote environment? I only have two years of experience so I'm still super new, but it's something I'm confronted with this, and I just don't know how to train people in a fully remote environment. It's from little things to catching an intern who doesn't know a couple extremely handy shortcuts with tools that they are still learnin…

Thank god someone feels the same. No one cares when I put this argument forward against remote work especially for me as a junior/beginner dev

Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#60

Post by haswell »

hipparchus wrote: post #49

Ok, I'll bite the bullet: how do you train interns and/or junior employees in a fully remote environment? I only have two years of experience so I'm still super new, but it's something I'm confronted with this, and I just don't know how to train people in a fully remote environment. It's from little things to catching an intern who doesn't know a couple extremely handy shortcuts with tools that they are still learnin…

I experienced this when we brought on junior members and an intern right as COVID hit. The short answer is that you do it like anything else you do remotely.

Zoom, chat, email, regular check-ins. They join the standups and team calls, learn who to reach out to for help, are assigned a buddy, etc.

There can be benefits in terms of teambuilding and camaraderie in a collocated environment, but I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally different about a newer employee. Their lack of experience will be more about what they don’t know about the company, and not a lack of ability to collaborate remotely, a skill that they have most likely learned by now. And if they can’t collaborate remotely, they may not be a good fit for a remote company.

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