Can be outsourced. Not will or should be outsourced.
If outsourcing were only an issue of money, then every all-remote company would exclusively hire in places like the Phillippines, where there seem to be an abundance of extremely low-cost, English-proficient workers.
Money isn't the only issue, of course. Language skills, culture, educational background, security clearance, tax laws, infosec, time zones, law enforcement, etc. are all also factors.
Thank you. Anyone who has worked extensively with offshore teams knows that there are always trade-offs involved. You can save money, but often at the cost of lower quality, lower maintainability, increased lag times due to time differences and miscommunications, added PM overhead, etc. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't.
it actually seems like the off-shoring craze has died down a bit in the U.S. I think companies realized its not as easy to get right as they thought. I've been working continuously with a team 10 hours away for the past 2-3 years, and it takes some accommodation on both sides....
That has generally been my experience as well -- the concrete benefits in terms of lowered OpEx (aka paying less for a worker) is offset by the intangible inefficiencies. It's a lot harder and a lot more chaotic than people realize.
Plus automation is eating away at the lower level stuff.
ML and infosec comes to mind. They are always in demand and companies pay top salary for those skills, but as those skills are hard to master, the supply pool is still limited even after all these years.
If you want to outsource-proof yourself, develop your soft skills. Consciously practice your technical and business writing, team management, mentorship, sales, presenting, etc.
Don't just practice. Find opportunities to leave your comfort zone and get expert feedback (perhaps from someone more senior in your company) about what you did well and what you still have to work on.
Great advice. For better or worse, being able to talk a good game and schmooze often matters more than technical skill. (Or is a technical skill, if you like.)
Not a terrible idea, but keep in mind that those pools are probably small for a reason. For starters, there may also be very little demand for the skills.
Certainly don't neglect your general skills while you're focusing. And if at all possible, get someone to pay you to acquire specialized skills.
Yeah, although I think we'll still see more "local offshoring" from city to city or state to state. Market rates are cheaper to hire a developer from somewhere in Ohio who doesn't want to move than one in New York
I don't see how that follows. If I can do X in any location, that doesn't mean X is something that is a target for automation.
Offshoring and automation are partially orthogonal. Offshore the jobs that can't be automated, automate the jobs that can't be done elsewhere, retain the humans for high-skill or high-touch jobs that resist the first two threats.
This comment is flippant, arrogant, and low-effort, but it's true that there are countless companies who have replaced key talent with cheaper, often offshored, substitutes that eventually create disaster for the products they build.
My experience working in New York on a small team with the rest of the organization in Mountain View is that I got 10x the communication work done when I travelled to Mountain View. Some things are just better sitting around in your cubes or gathering for lunch, versus setting up a video conference, booking rooms, writing an agenda, etc. People can veer off topic. People you didn't invite can show up. People are at their primary workstations with their work open. Collaboration actually happens, rather than a mere "here is a question that will unblock my next day of work".
I was an IC with a very small team (who were in New York), so I didn't really need to meet with other teams on a daily basis. But every couple months, I did need to fill the pipeline with future work, and it was much easier to do that in person.
I am not sure what this means for a world beyond COVID-19, but right now I feel like everyone is in a holding pattern and are just tweaking their day-to-day applications, rather than planning the next big thing. That is sustainable for a few months, but it will be interesting to see if it's sustainable for longer than that.
(Do people ever co-found a startup with someone they've never met in person? Has anyone ever had a summer internship in college remotely? I am very interested in seeing how these things work.)
I've worked with non-native English speakers my entire career. Time zones just aren't as big of a problem as you think. You have to learn asynchronous communication. That means writing which, by the way, is by far the best way to perform complex communication.
I agree on the time zone thing...
But I really prefer voice comms when possible. The rest of my team is 10+ hours away, so we do a skype 'standup' at the start of my day, end of theirs.
Bigger issues tend to be around language and culture...
I don't really understand the response. I'm not talking from a position of ignorance here; time zones are exactly as big of a problem as I think, because what I think has been informed by my experience working across time zones. There are certainly mitigation strategies, which improve the situation far beyond the naive solution of "let's pretend they're locals who just never come to the office". But no mitigation will make communication with someone you've never met in Shanghai as easy as it is with your buddy in the desk across the hallway.
I've worked across time zones too. Your problem is that you try to fight their existence and want it to be like "your buddy across the hallway". But it's not. If you accept that then you can find effective ways to communicate with them.
A tangent, but what tradeoffs could be made to make it easier to understand if more work was put into it? Could some of this additional work be outsourced?
I'd become numb to the distinction at this point, but yes, now that you reminded me it's bothering me too. Similar story with "disclaimer" and "disclosure", "third world" and "developing world", etc.
People are focusing on the good side of working from home but the fact is that a job from home can be done anywhere in the world. Why would a company limit it self to the U.S? Work from home jobs are going to go to the people that are can do the work and are willing to work for the least compensation.
Legal risk, unfamiliarity with the remote job market, cultural differences.
Some companies might no have the internal legal frameworks to hire remote in the US or far less outside the US, as an anecdote a company I used to work for was fully remote but only hired remote on some specific states, this because of tax laws that would vary in each state would complicate their operations. This was a smallish company, less than 40 people.
> Money isn't the only issue, of course. Language skills, culture, educational background, security clearance, tax laws, infosec, time zones, law enforcement, etc. are all also factors.
So this is essentially protectionism. I mean if engineers outside the US are just as talented and productive, why should a company only use US engineers, especially if their marketplace is global.
They should. The concern US developers have is that devaluation doesn’t always occur in sanitary ways.
Let’s say you have the same talent elsewhere, it’s likely a company will pay considerably less, and may also take advantage of other factors due to that person’s desperation - overwork, given less input/influence, less career growth/trajectory, more contract based, less full-time, less or no benefits, less laws, etc.
So the quality of life for the US developer will not only come down in terms of pay, but also for all those other reasons. The worst part about it is that the off shore workers won’t regain those improvements for awhile (as in, until their standards go up over time - higher pay, etc).
It’s a regression on more fronts than compensation, with the enemy not necessarily being developers (where ever they are), but more so the ruthless market mechanisms.
Because the big craze to offshore everything about 10 years ago, failed spectacularly? Pretty much every coder/manager that was around for that can tell you horror stories.
These might (probably?) have had nothing to do with the quality of the coders - A lot of it was due to cultural and language issues. Things like not realizing what the holiday schedule for a given region is, and 'suddenly' finding out you have a 2-4 week holiday in the middle of your production rollout...
Some manual work - e.g. some (some!) surgeon work - can be done via tele-presense. I mean, it's being done already. Some others kinds of manual work don't have good (or any) examples - human's hand is a beautifully complex machinery, we aren't close to replicating all its abilities yet.
Caregivers - many aspects of that are done remotely. Checking status? Remote communications? Reminders, some diagnostics, scheduling of various help - from medical to lawn mowing. Again, not all - but we do have examples.
Security. Come on, we have remote sensors of all kinds for decades. We have electronic passes, we have door control. Yes, someone need to show up when things are getting too interesting - we somehow hesitate to give robots the armed weapons. Mostly. But - we have non-trivial examples.
Retail. Ah, that's interesting. I'd imagine those tele-presence tools, a screen on a stick on a moving platform, which can help with navigating the store, answer questions, show some information. There perhaps are better ideas, but some seem to be hanging relatively low.
Service industry in general is quite big - would you, for example, consider working on a visual effects for a movie remotely an example of service - entertainment - industry? - but we do have many examples of that happening remotely.
So... A good question, leads to interesting thoughts, where we have some good starts in some places and missing parts in others.
Yeah I find the dismissive attitude towards outsourcing, in particular in tech hilarious. Disruption is not so fun if you're the person being disrupted.
Bringing down employment borders would be one of the most transformative things we could do to raise global standards of living. Everyone should go and read Bryan Caplan's recent book on open borders.
It's not only the hopefully temporal inconvenience of being replaced. There is a finite amount of resources. If more people have the means to access them, less is available for those who currently consume them.
Having 9 billion people sharing the earth will lead to huge improvements in replaceable resources. E.g. movies will be better, appliances will be better, etc. However, if you want to see the Mona Lisa, it's most likely that you will never get close.
Uncontrolled immigration has all the attributes of invasions.
Simply put, the folly of open borders is evident with a simple example
Would you make an open invite for thanksgiving, so that anyone, inclusing perfect strangers, could walk in?
And what if you did, would you be OK with our own family not getting to eat turkey because other guests had their bite?
Thus this reveals a fundamental flaw in the approach for open borders.
Thus, at its core, open borders is immoral because it fails the ethical notion of symetry.
Open borders work if and only if the number of people who want to go come in to USA from say, China, equals those leaving US, wanting to go into China.
Do not do to others what you don't want them to do to you. This is NNT's Silver Rule
It's not 'dismissive' it's just a bit more cautious now. Off-shoring has been a 'thing' for over 20 years, and so far wipro and friends haven't put us all out of work.
The particular vulnerability of programming jobs to outsourcing and offshoring has been well known for a long time. And yet we feign surprise that people would rather do medicine or law or other jobs that can’t be.
I've spent a lot of time working with people in London and Asia. I'm based in New York.
I can't speak to other professions, but for programming it's extremely difficult to work with people on the other side of the Earth. The 10-12 hour time difference makes any small issue or missing files/data that should take 20 minutes instead take a day to get resolved.
Working with people in Europe isn't as bad, you can sync up all morning. But the same applies to any issue that happens in the New York afternoon.
Could you kindly mind share some insight in how you evaluate a candidates resume & portfolio (e.g open source contributions, type of projects). Didn't go to a great school, just trying to boost my chances.
Also usually people outsource as cost savings primarily and you get what you pay for even in Asia. IMO you can save 30-50% if you're lucky for equivalent skill levels, below that and you are introducing chaos monkey bots in to your system.
I normally work in the middle of four time zones my team is spread amongst.
Yes, it can be a pain. Sometimes you have a 6am meeting and sometimes an 11pm meeting and sometimes both in the same day. You have to have your shit together enough to deal with day-long lag for non-urgent stuff, and you have to care enough to jump on urgent stuff at all hours.
Even if you might rather have a chummy relationship with your colleagues, you have to be a bit more distanced and professional in order to accommodate the time difference.
But if you have a good team, you also should ask yourself: is the convenience of collocation worth losing the team?
At the risk of veering OT: there’s a pretty good business in arbitrage around these cultural blockers. For instance there are thousands of people working for Indian companies in Central-Eastern Europe because (mostly) German companies are a lot more comfortable if they can meet the dev manager on any given day and fly home for supper.
> Sometimes you have a 6am meeting and sometimes an 11pm meeting and sometimes both in the same day.
I think we need to find a better way to deal with timezone-distributed teams. I personally would never find a 6am or 11pm meeting to be acceptable. If you require me anywhere from 9am to 5pm in my local time I'll be there; anything outside that must be strictly optional. And I mean actually optional, not "optional but we'll see you as not a team player if you don't show up".
I'm in Europe and some of my coworkers are in NZ. There is a 12H difference. The entire 9 to 5 section of one is outside the 9 to 5 section of the other.
Many regular jobs are outside of the 9-5 interval so having a different schedule is not exploitative per se. In this case many people would probably appreciate the flexibility to actually have leisure and see their families in daylight hours.
Of course, in the end it is all about personal preferences.
Ok, that’s fine, and there are lots of places you can work if you’re good.
I’m not trying to virtue-signal about schedule flexibility, but if you have part of your team in SF and part in Bangalore somebody will have to work weird hours sometimes.
I fundamentally don’t accept that it should always be the non-western side, and if you have a good team you will find a way to do this respectfully, without destroying anyone’s private life.
Also, FWIW, during the 2/3 of my career I worked on site, a 9am to 5pm requirement would have been an absolute nonstarter for me. Biorhythms are diverse.
>Sometimes you have a 6am meeting and sometimes an 11pm meeting and sometimes both in the same day. You have to have your shit together enough to deal with day-long lag for non-urgent stuff, and you have to care enough to jump on urgent stuff at all hours.
This sounds extremely unhealthy and the complete opposite of having one's shit together to me.
Do you mean the hours are unhealthy? I mean maybe they are but lots of people have similar hours, think of your barista or your waiter or the non-employee staff that cleans your office.
What about dealing with multiple time zones and schedules in a professional manner strikes you as the opposite of having your shit together?
Having lived this life for over 10 years I’m genuinely curious.
There are many other small drawbacks besides time zone differences, such as different cultures (different holidays to work around, different expectations and values) and different languages. There will always be companies which value those conveniences more, and companies which value cheaper labor or a wider hiring pool.
What about night-owls? Maybe they are more suitable. Say a night-owl who lives in Jakarta, Indonesia, which has 12 hours difference to New York. The night owl can work synchronously with the team in NY, right?
I actually do this, except I'm the night owl...
When I actually need to work with my team (as opposed to just status updates), I work from midnight till whenever and sleep the next day.
I do this, exactly 12 hours differences with my team on the US (except when dst applies which totally confuses me). Most of the time I’m the night owl, but now that we all have babies, our working hours become even more random and sometimes the us guys would work on the wee hours instead. Also I’m supposed to sleep right now but.. yeah
I work from Japan and my colleagues are in the UK. I agree that it's very difficult. Having a few hours of overlap almost every day is crucial. Usually I work until 8 or 9 pm (sometimes later). Probably for someone who has a shifted time schedule (gets up at noon) it would be absolutely ideal, but I'm a morning person :-) Still, I've adjusted to it.
There are a couple of things you need. First, meetings have to be at times where everyone is available. That can be an inconvenience for some people, but it is what it is. Sometimes it means that some people in the UK have to get up early, sometimes it means that I have to stay up late. But if you are sensible, nobody has to take the full burden.
To combat time-zone-Conway's-law I often do a hand-over work with my colleagues. I work on something in my afternoon. We pair for a couple of hours and then they work on it for the rest of the day. They leave me notes and I carry on. It takes practice and trust to do it, but when it works it is actually incredible. I would say it's my favourite way of working. However, when it doesn't work it's terrible :-). The biggest thing is developing trust, relaxing and just going with the flow. Your colleague is going to go in directions you didn't expect. You need to be magnanimous and keep going in that direction, even if it sometimes makes you uncomfortable. On the plus side, I've found that it's stretched me as a programmer and I've learned a lot.
I would take timezone co-lacated (or rather coworker, preferred working times co-located) if I could, but you can make it work otherwise.
So I tell myself ;-) However, the reality is that it's pretty hard. I live in a rural area of Japan. There are few world-wide remote jobs at the moment and so hanging on to my contracts is pretty important to me. There are times when the client gets it into their head that since I have few other options, it's a good opportunity to get more for less. So balancing the risk of going for a long while without work against a client that is intent on low-balling you is quite challenging. On the whole I'm happy because I love where I live (it's become my home), my wife's family is here and we can help out and it's a good lifestyle. Probably I'd have less stress somewhere else, though. That is to say, I don't really recommend it if you have other options ;-)
I also live in rural Japan (Nagano) and work remotely for an oversea company for the past 4 years. I second that having some daily overlapping hours with the rest of the team is critical. Once me and my family got the hang of the shifted hours, it's a comfortable balance.
I always say, bakers get up at 3 am to go to work. Night club owners work until 3 am. There are lots of jobs in the world that are not 9-5 even if you are working 8 hours a day. There is no particular reason you have to work those hours as a programmer. Though, truth be told, if I had the option I would love to do it ;-)
East Coast to most of Europe is not that bad, for example I live in Eastern Europe and I work with people from the East Coast and the 7-hour difference is quite manageable. Among other things it has changed me into being more productive in the afternoon but I wasn't a morning person anyway so things work out.
On the other hand the 10-hour difference between my time and the West Coast would be a lot harder to manage, those 3 extra hours do matter.
> The 10-12 hour time difference makes any small issue or missing files/data that should take 20 minutes instead take a day to get resolved.
Those problems can be solved pretty easily with better communication and processes. Gitlab is remote-first and they are working quite well. Maybe your team-lead and project manager should have a look at how other companies are doing it. It's their job after all
No matter how good your communication and processes are, they can't solve the fundamental conflict where person X discovers they need some new information and the person Y who has it is asleep. You can accept the conflict, and establish an expectation (as all remote-focused teams do) that you will not be able to synchronously work on most tasks to completion.
But this interacts poorly with many other expectations and processes. For example, my team's standups have become completely useless over the past few months, because we're all making 20% incremental progress on 5 things instead of completing 1 thing. When customers are breathing down my PM's neck for a new feature, he doesn't want to hear that it's 4 person-hours to implement and merge but those 4 person-hours will be spread over the next week.
Thats my experience as well all the places I've worked with teams on all ends of the globe. I'd go so far as to say its even kind of harder than it needs to be between eastern/western timezones. But nothing really compares to the money pit hellstews that seem to result from teams working opposite hours while trying to make deadlines.
Conversely, my 5 person team is distributed across California, Europe, UAE, and India. It's hard for us to all sync together like you mentioned, but we use our overlap times to work together as much as possible and are very diligent about "hand-off" procedures. The upside of this is that we have 24 hour work cycles. I can go to bed and wake up to a bunch of progress being made. I'm actually a huge fan of this "overlapping time zone" style, as opposed to the opposite time zone style that you mention.
I have to say, the gently threatening tone of this article really rubs me the wrong way. And it coincides with "stay in town or take a pay cut" rhetoric that was on my feed earlier today, from Facebook.
(Despite this development, the article doesn't mention it... maybe it will be updated at some point.)
I guess, after reflecting, what I don't like about it is that it tells us to be afraid. Be afraid about a way of working that might work really well for some, or even a lot, of people.
Here's a fun quote from the article:
> But the big challenge is how to safely move thousands of people to and from the suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne and their offices in George or Collins streets.
They're saying this in the context of a population living under pandemic protocols, but it's true all of the other time anyways. It takes a massive amount of engineering and energy to move masses of people from one place to another. Doing it needlessly is insane.
I suspect that what it comes down to is control, or apparent control, of a workforce. Especially in large organizations. We're going to see who is comfortable with giving up control and who isn't, and that's going to be interesting.
It also boils down what should be an accommodation for worksite preference to a sudden demotion to ‘you are no longer worth it on a global scale and that changes everything’.
Companies are what they are, and they will optimize for this. To remain optimistic, we have to continue believing in the startup space to continuously innovate software standards, where users are unwilling to accept substandard software experiences. That will keep this field moving forward versus a wage race to the bottom.
Entrenched corporate companies would love tech to stagnate, that way they won’t ever have to innovate and can cost optimize developers down to the bone.
If the newspapers are to be believed, my job has been in danger of offshoring to countries overflowing with "engineering" talent for 20+ years. This is nothing new.
A job that is done alone at a desk can be outsourced.
Given the massive incentives for outsourcing and offshoring in the last couple of decades, I think the fact that most of the HN audience has pretty good jobs suggests that much of the tech world is more nuanced than that.
I think if working-from-home becomes the new normal, a lot of companies will try off-shoring or outsourcing as a way to cut costs, but I'm not sure the results will match expectations.
I've worked at two previous companies that attempted to offshore coding production, and both times it led to unexpected delays, surprising bugs, badly written code, misunderstandings and cycling through multiple remote programmers.
I certainly don't think I'm a specially talented programmer or that coders in other countries are inferior to my skills (demonstrably untrue), it was just a natural consequence of geographic distance, timezone differences, personal commitment and cultural misunderstanding.
At both companies the experiment ended after just one project. If this is the 'normal' future then the infrastructure needed to really make offshoring work might be put in place, but if past experience is anything to go by, then simple geographic nearness - at least sharing timezone and the realistic ability to turn up in person at least occassionally, together with the personal commitment felt by 'real' employees - means I'm not sure whether distributed workforces are gonna be as productive as some people may hope.
On the other hand, I think truly productive individuals may gain from the situation: if you're a fast and effective 'production unit', then you're going to be a valuable asset wherever you are, and your value will be set accordingly. We'll see which of the two competing economic forces wins out.
Well, if the main issue is Time Zone and you're American, American companies can simply hire across America. That's a gigantic talent pool that wasn't available before.
But I think at first it will just move from SF / New York to cheaper U.S states. After a few years of gaining experience in managing remote work, we'll probably see more hiring across the world.
Note that only rather big scale ups can afford to do that, hiring from a different country is an accounting headache. So young startup workers aren' likely to be hit.
I think it's not an issue with off shoring per se but with hiring. For some reason when off-shoring companies use a different hiring process. As if they were doing this to cut costs so they already start with a lower expectation and no longer look for the perfect match.
The off shore remote devs that will make it work exist but you have to look for them with a functional remote hiring mechanism.
There was a big push to off-shore everything about 10ish years ago...US Programmers thought it was the end of the world. As mentioned, companies found out it requires an entirely different approach to get quality projects out of these teams. And often times, the time zone difference was the least of the issues. Cultural and language barriers can have a much larger impact then time zones.
Sounds like the writer is scared that their bullshit job is on the line.
People have tried outsourcing programming forever. The last visible result was planes falling out of the sky. These jobs are highly paid not because they are done in the CBD, but because they require traits most people don't have.
There are difficulties in communicating over the phone and video.
I don't know if others agree but during the Pandemic I've felt that the quality of TV news programming has gone down considerably because of the people interviewed or the reporters are behind a zoom etc. connections of questionable quality. It is often hard to understand what they say and it is not so pleasant trying to listen to them over the lo-fi connection.
So I think that until the tech of virtual meetings improves considerably there's an extra cost for not being able to communicate in person.
Even on a fairly high quality connection, you still lose a significant proportion of the non-verbal communication on a video call. The fidelity just isn't the same when you're looking at the slightly laggy image of a person on a small screen vs being able to see them in real life.
It presents real challenges working with people that you don't already know in person.
The submitted title ("A job that can be done from home, is a job that can be outsourced") broke the site guidelines by editorializing. Accounts that do that eventually lose submission privileges, so please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and please don't do that.
For a tech oriented site, I feel like some old hats need to drop some knowledge on the first age of outsourcing. How did it go down, what were the results?
The fundamental problem is a misalignment of incentives. Noone has yet figured this out and there is no technological solution to it - it may actually be impossible and it ALWAYS bites the company that outsources on the arse eventually.
If your "trusted solutions provider" bills by the hour... they will seek to maximise billable hours. If they charge per ticket, they will drown you in paperwork for the most trivial changes. Anything that your in-house staff used to do that isn't explicitly stated in the contract, they either won't do or will charge a punitive rate for. If your needs change faster than the length of the contract, well you are stuck on the old contract. If you need some code written the spec you will need to write will be so detailed that it might as well be the code.
And after a few years you will have lost the capability to take the work back in-house and they will hold you to ransom, because they can, and because that was the plan all along...
But the short-term incentives to do it are strong, as a manager in a large corporation or a government department, you can sign that outsourcing deal and it will look good enough in the first year to win you your next promotion, or a guaranteed sinecure in the outsourcing company when you retire, by the time the truth comes out you will be long gone .
Speaking only for myself, most of my friends (from after university) are people I have worked with. And these are the people I usually get a coffee with, brainstorm ideas on whiteboards, go out for drinks or talk tech with them. WFH permanently would definitely impact this. Even though I might get along great with another dev from 100+ miles away, I cannot possibly do most of the things I mentioned above with them.
Edit: Friends also include people working in other teams like project managers, marketing, HR, support teams etc.
Definitely not with that attitude. I've seen people organize virtual parties with video conferencing software, have personally played games with my team members while having drinks, had brain storming sessions with digital whiteboards or a shared screen, and talked tech with friends for hours in one-on-ones.
If you go in with the mentality of "this won't work", well mate, then it won't.
My experience working remote for 10 years is the opposite of yours. I found that email is a really great communication tool for work. People tend to talk a lot and unfocused during face to face meeting, but when forced to use email only, they’ll spend more time to write down their thoughts to make sure the other people can understand their points without wasting their time. Email is asynchronous so you don’t need to drag people out of their routine just to discuss stuff that can be done over emails. Meeting is reserved only for absolutely important stuff that can’t be done over email, which is surprisingly rare.
Linux kernel development is an example of this, a global collaboration essentially done over emails. We got magnificent tools like git because of the need to streamline this kind of remote works.
140 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threadIf outsourcing were only an issue of money, then every all-remote company would exclusively hire in places like the Phillippines, where there seem to be an abundance of extremely low-cost, English-proficient workers.
Money isn't the only issue, of course. Language skills, culture, educational background, security clearance, tax laws, infosec, time zones, law enforcement, etc. are all also factors.
Plus automation is eating away at the lower level stuff.
Don't just practice. Find opportunities to leave your comfort zone and get expert feedback (perhaps from someone more senior in your company) about what you did well and what you still have to work on.
Certainly don't neglect your general skills while you're focusing. And if at all possible, get someone to pay you to acquire specialized skills.
Offshoring and automation are partially orthogonal. Offshore the jobs that can't be automated, automate the jobs that can't be done elsewhere, retain the humans for high-skill or high-touch jobs that resist the first two threats.
Until then, good luck finding another me.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/21/graveyards-full/
I don't technically need my foot. But I suspect my life is a lot easier with the one I have.
I was an IC with a very small team (who were in New York), so I didn't really need to meet with other teams on a daily basis. But every couple months, I did need to fill the pipeline with future work, and it was much easier to do that in person.
I am not sure what this means for a world beyond COVID-19, but right now I feel like everyone is in a holding pattern and are just tweaking their day-to-day applications, rather than planning the next big thing. That is sustainable for a few months, but it will be interesting to see if it's sustainable for longer than that.
(Do people ever co-found a startup with someone they've never met in person? Has anyone ever had a summer internship in college remotely? I am very interested in seeing how these things work.)
To be fair you can have that with remote meetings as well. There is even a name for it: zoom-bombing.
Bigger issues tend to be around language and culture...
Some companies might no have the internal legal frameworks to hire remote in the US or far less outside the US, as an anecdote a company I used to work for was fully remote but only hired remote on some specific states, this because of tax laws that would vary in each state would complicate their operations. This was a smallish company, less than 40 people.
> Money isn't the only issue, of course. Language skills, culture, educational background, security clearance, tax laws, infosec, time zones, law enforcement, etc. are all also factors.
So this is essentially protectionism. I mean if engineers outside the US are just as talented and productive, why should a company only use US engineers, especially if their marketplace is global.
Let’s say you have the same talent elsewhere, it’s likely a company will pay considerably less, and may also take advantage of other factors due to that person’s desperation - overwork, given less input/influence, less career growth/trajectory, more contract based, less full-time, less or no benefits, less laws, etc.
So the quality of life for the US developer will not only come down in terms of pay, but also for all those other reasons. The worst part about it is that the off shore workers won’t regain those improvements for awhile (as in, until their standards go up over time - higher pay, etc).
It’s a regression on more fronts than compensation, with the enemy not necessarily being developers (where ever they are), but more so the ruthless market mechanisms.
These might (probably?) have had nothing to do with the quality of the coders - A lot of it was due to cultural and language issues. Things like not realizing what the holiday schedule for a given region is, and 'suddenly' finding out you have a 2-4 week holiday in the middle of your production rollout...
Call centers, office assistants are both getting outsourced to other countries or to AI
> If your job can be done from anywhere, that doesn’t necessarily mean you get to keep your job with the city salary and have a sea change.
It also means a “you” will get a chance at a remote job that you didn’t have access in your region
Any job or task can be outsourced, but there are tradeoffs involved. It’s nothing new.
Why would I bother going on? Sloppy comments like yours have no place here.
Some manual work - e.g. some (some!) surgeon work - can be done via tele-presense. I mean, it's being done already. Some others kinds of manual work don't have good (or any) examples - human's hand is a beautifully complex machinery, we aren't close to replicating all its abilities yet.
Caregivers - many aspects of that are done remotely. Checking status? Remote communications? Reminders, some diagnostics, scheduling of various help - from medical to lawn mowing. Again, not all - but we do have examples.
Security. Come on, we have remote sensors of all kinds for decades. We have electronic passes, we have door control. Yes, someone need to show up when things are getting too interesting - we somehow hesitate to give robots the armed weapons. Mostly. But - we have non-trivial examples.
Retail. Ah, that's interesting. I'd imagine those tele-presence tools, a screen on a stick on a moving platform, which can help with navigating the store, answer questions, show some information. There perhaps are better ideas, but some seem to be hanging relatively low.
Service industry in general is quite big - would you, for example, consider working on a visual effects for a movie remotely an example of service - entertainment - industry? - but we do have many examples of that happening remotely.
So... A good question, leads to interesting thoughts, where we have some good starts in some places and missing parts in others.
Edit: my work here is done.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23269061
Bringing down employment borders would be one of the most transformative things we could do to raise global standards of living. Everyone should go and read Bryan Caplan's recent book on open borders.
Having 9 billion people sharing the earth will lead to huge improvements in replaceable resources. E.g. movies will be better, appliances will be better, etc. However, if you want to see the Mona Lisa, it's most likely that you will never get close.
Simply put, the folly of open borders is evident with a simple example
Would you make an open invite for thanksgiving, so that anyone, inclusing perfect strangers, could walk in?
And what if you did, would you be OK with our own family not getting to eat turkey because other guests had their bite?
Thus this reveals a fundamental flaw in the approach for open borders.
Thus, at its core, open borders is immoral because it fails the ethical notion of symetry.
Open borders work if and only if the number of people who want to go come in to USA from say, China, equals those leaving US, wanting to go into China.
Do not do to others what you don't want them to do to you. This is NNT's Silver Rule
https://www.spencerfernando.com/2018/07/02/taleb-rips-the-vi...
I can't speak to other professions, but for programming it's extremely difficult to work with people on the other side of the Earth. The 10-12 hour time difference makes any small issue or missing files/data that should take 20 minutes instead take a day to get resolved.
Working with people in Europe isn't as bad, you can sync up all morning. But the same applies to any issue that happens in the New York afternoon.
It pretty much guarantees your software will become architected around time zones due to Conway's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
It's trivial to pay them the highest end salary and the take home for them will be far better than Microsoft/Google/etc.
I'm in 'Burta and consider relocating there all the time. Heard mixed things about not speaking French, though.
Yes, it can be a pain. Sometimes you have a 6am meeting and sometimes an 11pm meeting and sometimes both in the same day. You have to have your shit together enough to deal with day-long lag for non-urgent stuff, and you have to care enough to jump on urgent stuff at all hours.
Even if you might rather have a chummy relationship with your colleagues, you have to be a bit more distanced and professional in order to accommodate the time difference.
But if you have a good team, you also should ask yourself: is the convenience of collocation worth losing the team?
At the risk of veering OT: there’s a pretty good business in arbitrage around these cultural blockers. For instance there are thousands of people working for Indian companies in Central-Eastern Europe because (mostly) German companies are a lot more comfortable if they can meet the dev manager on any given day and fly home for supper.
I think we need to find a better way to deal with timezone-distributed teams. I personally would never find a 6am or 11pm meeting to be acceptable. If you require me anywhere from 9am to 5pm in my local time I'll be there; anything outside that must be strictly optional. And I mean actually optional, not "optional but we'll see you as not a team player if you don't show up".
Of course, in the end it is all about personal preferences.
I’m not trying to virtue-signal about schedule flexibility, but if you have part of your team in SF and part in Bangalore somebody will have to work weird hours sometimes.
I fundamentally don’t accept that it should always be the non-western side, and if you have a good team you will find a way to do this respectfully, without destroying anyone’s private life.
Also, FWIW, during the 2/3 of my career I worked on site, a 9am to 5pm requirement would have been an absolute nonstarter for me. Biorhythms are diverse.
This sounds extremely unhealthy and the complete opposite of having one's shit together to me.
What about dealing with multiple time zones and schedules in a professional manner strikes you as the opposite of having your shit together?
Having lived this life for over 10 years I’m genuinely curious.
There are a couple of things you need. First, meetings have to be at times where everyone is available. That can be an inconvenience for some people, but it is what it is. Sometimes it means that some people in the UK have to get up early, sometimes it means that I have to stay up late. But if you are sensible, nobody has to take the full burden.
To combat time-zone-Conway's-law I often do a hand-over work with my colleagues. I work on something in my afternoon. We pair for a couple of hours and then they work on it for the rest of the day. They leave me notes and I carry on. It takes practice and trust to do it, but when it works it is actually incredible. I would say it's my favourite way of working. However, when it doesn't work it's terrible :-). The biggest thing is developing trust, relaxing and just going with the flow. Your colleague is going to go in directions you didn't expect. You need to be magnanimous and keep going in that direction, even if it sometimes makes you uncomfortable. On the plus side, I've found that it's stretched me as a programmer and I've learned a lot.
I would take timezone co-lacated (or rather coworker, preferred working times co-located) if I could, but you can make it work otherwise.
On the other hand the 10-hour difference between my time and the West Coast would be a lot harder to manage, those 3 extra hours do matter.
Those problems can be solved pretty easily with better communication and processes. Gitlab is remote-first and they are working quite well. Maybe your team-lead and project manager should have a look at how other companies are doing it. It's their job after all
But this interacts poorly with many other expectations and processes. For example, my team's standups have become completely useless over the past few months, because we're all making 20% incremental progress on 5 things instead of completing 1 thing. When customers are breathing down my PM's neck for a new feature, he doesn't want to hear that it's 4 person-hours to implement and merge but those 4 person-hours will be spread over the next week.
(Despite this development, the article doesn't mention it... maybe it will be updated at some point.)
I guess, after reflecting, what I don't like about it is that it tells us to be afraid. Be afraid about a way of working that might work really well for some, or even a lot, of people.
Here's a fun quote from the article:
> But the big challenge is how to safely move thousands of people to and from the suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne and their offices in George or Collins streets.
They're saying this in the context of a population living under pandemic protocols, but it's true all of the other time anyways. It takes a massive amount of engineering and energy to move masses of people from one place to another. Doing it needlessly is insane.
I suspect that what it comes down to is control, or apparent control, of a workforce. Especially in large organizations. We're going to see who is comfortable with giving up control and who isn't, and that's going to be interesting.
Companies are what they are, and they will optimize for this. To remain optimistic, we have to continue believing in the startup space to continuously innovate software standards, where users are unwilling to accept substandard software experiences. That will keep this field moving forward versus a wage race to the bottom.
Entrenched corporate companies would love tech to stagnate, that way they won’t ever have to innovate and can cost optimize developers down to the bone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
Given the massive incentives for outsourcing and offshoring in the last couple of decades, I think the fact that most of the HN audience has pretty good jobs suggests that much of the tech world is more nuanced than that.
I've worked at two previous companies that attempted to offshore coding production, and both times it led to unexpected delays, surprising bugs, badly written code, misunderstandings and cycling through multiple remote programmers.
I certainly don't think I'm a specially talented programmer or that coders in other countries are inferior to my skills (demonstrably untrue), it was just a natural consequence of geographic distance, timezone differences, personal commitment and cultural misunderstanding.
At both companies the experiment ended after just one project. If this is the 'normal' future then the infrastructure needed to really make offshoring work might be put in place, but if past experience is anything to go by, then simple geographic nearness - at least sharing timezone and the realistic ability to turn up in person at least occassionally, together with the personal commitment felt by 'real' employees - means I'm not sure whether distributed workforces are gonna be as productive as some people may hope.
On the other hand, I think truly productive individuals may gain from the situation: if you're a fast and effective 'production unit', then you're going to be a valuable asset wherever you are, and your value will be set accordingly. We'll see which of the two competing economic forces wins out.
The off shore remote devs that will make it work exist but you have to look for them with a functional remote hiring mechanism.
People have tried outsourcing programming forever. The last visible result was planes falling out of the sky. These jobs are highly paid not because they are done in the CBD, but because they require traits most people don't have.
I don't know if others agree but during the Pandemic I've felt that the quality of TV news programming has gone down considerably because of the people interviewed or the reporters are behind a zoom etc. connections of questionable quality. It is often hard to understand what they say and it is not so pleasant trying to listen to them over the lo-fi connection.
So I think that until the tech of virtual meetings improves considerably there's an extra cost for not being able to communicate in person.
It presents real challenges working with people that you don't already know in person.
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth saving
Then you better start swimmin' or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'
The fundamental problem is a misalignment of incentives. Noone has yet figured this out and there is no technological solution to it - it may actually be impossible and it ALWAYS bites the company that outsources on the arse eventually.
If your "trusted solutions provider" bills by the hour... they will seek to maximise billable hours. If they charge per ticket, they will drown you in paperwork for the most trivial changes. Anything that your in-house staff used to do that isn't explicitly stated in the contract, they either won't do or will charge a punitive rate for. If your needs change faster than the length of the contract, well you are stuck on the old contract. If you need some code written the spec you will need to write will be so detailed that it might as well be the code.
And after a few years you will have lost the capability to take the work back in-house and they will hold you to ransom, because they can, and because that was the plan all along...
But the short-term incentives to do it are strong, as a manager in a large corporation or a government department, you can sign that outsourcing deal and it will look good enough in the first year to win you your next promotion, or a guaranteed sinecure in the outsourcing company when you retire, by the time the truth comes out you will be long gone .
Edit: Friends also include people working in other teams like project managers, marketing, HR, support teams etc.
If you go in with the mentality of "this won't work", well mate, then it won't.
Linux kernel development is an example of this, a global collaboration essentially done over emails. We got magnificent tools like git because of the need to streamline this kind of remote works.