This is really about "at home first" work rather than remote work. The prevailing model seems to be "don't come to the office unless we want you there" as opposed to "work from anywhere". I understand the reasons for why companies want you at home but local rather than remote, just saying it's very different that real remote working.
Why do the reasons for it matter? There's an office for the company and you don't actually do work there. You work remotely for the company vs in-office. The whys do not matter in the definition of you working remotely from the office do they?
Even if you’re forced to go to the office 1-2 days a week that allows you to be much wider range of housing options. A 30 minute commute 5 days a week is the equivalent of a 100 minute commute 1.5 days a week. Granted that’s still a limited area, but it can easily make the difference between a high rise and having a yard.
"Work at your home office" culture still expects you to be in a predictable location and working predictable hours. Very similar to showing up to an office everyday.
"Remote" is closer to, "your location doesn't matter as long as you can perform your job".
It partially dictates how the company communicated with its’ employees. A remote first company is going to engage with its employee base differently, invest in benefits that respect that population more and create channels that enable an optimization of that environment. A non-first organization doesn’t need to necessitate any of that. Oftentimes remote work is the lesser of two evils; the other evil being less competitive in the job market place.
There are so many different flavors of remote (and remote-ish) work. Lots of people (especially those who don't do remote work) think of remote work as "work wherever you want, whenever you want", but in reality there are often limitations.
Employers generally care about what jurisdiction you live in so they can comply with tax law, etc. Some employers don't care where you're at as long as your long-term residence is in one of their approved jurisdictions. Some will keep tabs on your location and pay you differently depending on where you live.
Some employers mandate a set of core hours, while others limit employee home locations by time zone, wanting workers to be approximately on the same schedule.
I've heard of some US Government workers who are allowed to work from home, but only from home. Ostensibly for cybersecurity reasons, they aren't allowed to work from hotels, cafes, airports, WeWorks, etc.
Then yeah, there's this sliding scale of hybrid remote/office work. "We're remote for now, but hope to get back to the office eventually". "We think 50/50 will be our new normal, but that's subject to change". "You can typically work from wherever you want, but we expect you to be available to come into the office for big meetings, etc".
I've never heard of USG jobs where you had to work specifically from home, but I don't doubt they exist nor that the USG would be so asinine. I'd hate the condition of having to be specifically at home. Would probably set up a VPN to house or something just out of principle and then run away to hawaii for a week (assuming odds of being randomly called in were slim but you could always claim potential covid exposure, I guess).
> I've heard of some US Government workers who are allowed to work from home, but only from home. Ostensibly for cybersecurity reasons, they aren't allowed to work from hotels, cafes, airports, WeWorks, etc.
I first thought that this didn't make so much sense, because you could just use a VPN. But this might be only partly because of network insecurity. It could be more because you have so little control over your neighbors and physical environment in public and semipublic spaces, and people who know you're there can easily arrange to be nearby you in order to try shoulder-surfing or higher-tech attacks.
For example, it might be challenging to get close enough to someone's home office to carry out an attack like this, but not so difficult in comparison in a café.
I have wondered about the idea of shared rent-a-workspace, and what that does to security and regulatory compliance and how many CIOs have conniptions over it.
Would you feel OK if you called up your bank to sort out a problem with your account, and they were opening all your account details on a laptop in a coffee shop or WeWork office shared with all sorts of people? If you were a normal employee raising an issue with HR and they were doing that? If you were Apple, or high up in a company behaving like them and trying to keep projects secret and your employees were doing that?
I just spoke to somebody today and their strategy is to hire within a geographic region. Everybody will be default remote but they will be getting the team together 4-6 times a year on site for planning and social stuff. I could see this being the strategy for a lot of small and mid size companies.
"don't come to the office unless we want you there"
I work full time remote but this is the approach I would take as a company. Once your team is distributed across timezones a lot of things get really hard.
I think it’s not just shitty ISPs it’s also pretty bad corporate VPN or “security” features that really just break the internet for home working people… we encounter one network that is like a proxy of sorts… it times out all connections after like 4 minutes- a really shitty feature for voice applications
I absolutely love when the corporate middleboxes make websockets fail, webrtc fail (which is used by virtually all conferencing software), HTTP3 fail, HTTP2 fail, QUIC fail, long lived connections drop automatically
Penetration tester here. While my company was concerned about business at the beginning of the pandemic, we quickly saw a large uptick in business from corporate customers who were integrating remote employees into their new norm.
I think the hybrid model is just because of inertia. Working fully remote will be the norm for most software companies. Not sure about other industries.
Just got approved for permanate remote last week. The thought of going back to a multi-hour commute and having my physical location dictated by a job just sounds absurd at this point. Never again.
Not at liberty to post PII, but we operate many web properties you've heard of.
TBH, they've been really fantastic about everything from the very beginning of covid. I think as more large companies get on board with this, we're reaching a tipping point where the B tier organizations are starting to realize they can use remote as a powerful bargaining chip to lure talent away from FAANG.
Most companies don't need the "intensive in-person collaboration", or whatever nonsense reasoning that FAANG is using to avoid full remote. They just need skilled efficient engineers to churn out CRUD work and move Jira tickets, which can be done from anywhere with minimal interaction.
That’s one thing that I am so curious about. I’m just not sure what problems Facebook engineers have to deal with. I hear all these stories about the hiring process and people being asked to implement wildcard regex matching or something. The projects I work on are like “here’s seventy five different databases go figure out how to individualize the members from these datasets oh and data x, y, and z must be anonymized before it’s commingled.”
Multi hour commute is, truly, insane. But that’s more a comment about our collective housing and transportation choices than something inherent to showing up at work.
Most cities used to have all the industry located in the centre. It led to huge slums (because there was insufficient supply and massive demand) and everyone leaving the city when the slums got cleared.
Even if you have great transportation (Tokyo, London, New York), the commute is still pretty brutal.
The only real "solution" that was ever presented to this problem was to create smaller garden cities that would have their own industries...this never worked out because everyone had to be in the city (perhaps coincident with more service-based economies, manufacturing did move out of big cities).
It is an extremely hard problem (and to be blunt, the solution of most planners has been: make me emperor, I will allocate the resources...it is a huge political/social/everything problem) but remote working is a very legitimate solution...although the response of any company towards better conditions for workers is always suspicion (if the workers are happier, don't we lose...somehow?).
(An extremely nerdy comparison is with proto-industry in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution...a lot of the intermediate production in textiles was done in homes by, what we would call today, independent contractors...as the capital intensity of the textile industry increased and new technology was developed so...to put it bluntly...that you could employ children to do the work then you saw industry move into city centres and slums appear. But before this time, you had people working in their own homes and on their own machines, and it was far more decentralised...although these people were often localised geographically as there was a whole supply chain. Definitely indicates that things don't really need to be the way they are.)
>Most cities used to have all the industry located in the centre. It led to huge slums (because there was insufficient supply and massive demand) and everyone leaving the city when the slums got cleared.
I had this realization recently. Our entire society and work culture is structured around the laws of thermodynamics. In the industrial age, you had a mill or a forge, or a steam engine that was running 24/7 and necessitated high concentration of the workforce purely for reasons of thermodynamic efficiency of operating said equipment. Everyone had to "gather around the fire" so to speak because having disparate smaller works would be incredibly inefficient. In a world where information work now dominates, these constraints have become meaningless and are only perpetuated via institutional inertia.
Slum is a comment about the quality of the structures. That happens when your civilization is poor and a typical worker’s wages don’t buy much building material. Marginal structures are a thing in rural settings too, only there it’s “rustic” instead of “slum.”
Anyway, we are not that fledgling economy anymore. Contemporary high-rise apartments are really nice! Even the mass-produced 5+1s are perfectly comfortable and dignified homes.
No, it is a comment about overcrowding. The point is: there was no way to move lots of people into these areas to do work and maintain living standards. Buildings also cost labour to produce, now that society is rich, can everyone just buy infinite building materials?
Correct, the ones we have now that only rich people can buy and which exist during a shortage of housing. Assuming that this can just scale up to house millions of people makes no sense (and has never occurred anywhere, the reason why public transit systems are so important is because it has never been possible to economically build enough housing within cities).
This "assumption" is called Manhattan, where in fact 1.6 million people live in apartments, no more than a few blocks from a train that comes every few minutes. The economic conditions to reproduce this model are in several other places. The only reason it's not happening is our decision to ban it.
>the solution of most planners has been: make me emperor, I will allocate the resources...it is a huge political/social/everything problem
One thing that I've found absolutely fascinating is looking at the Soviet sphere when it comes to residential housing. A lot of housing got destroyed in WWII, and the soviets realized that the best way to house a lot of people in a hurry was to build apartment blocks. These blocks were designed to have everything one needed, shops, schools, etc, within reasonable walking distance. The commute to work was handled with public transport.
Now, I'm not saying everything was perfect, but I do find it interesting as an approach to residential design, mandating a mix of essential services within walking distance of housing is unheard of here in the US, and really only exists in cities that existed pre-car.
I think it depends on what your commute is. I find that very few people choose their location by taking commuting pleasure (and not only time) into account.
Before the pandemic, I chose to live in the countryside but at walking distance from a train station.
Coworkers always seem surprised I’m living « that far ». But now I’m equally happy to work from home or to take my refreshing 25min train trip through the countryside.
I sometimes have to endure full train, but at least it’s never in the morning. And sometimes I have to exceptionally take my car, and im hating it, but it’s rare enough to have no impact on my well-being.
You're lucky, or chose well. For me, I would have to commute 50 minutes, 35 minutes of which is by train, and I have to change once. The rest is walking and waiting time. And 50 minutes is the best case scenario. Add rain, snow and other delays and we're looking at upwards of an hour just so I can get into work.
On the other hand I have my desk at home with the coffee machine in the kitchen. I do enjoy going to the office but being forced to do it wouldn't sit well with me.
25 minutes is a pretty short commute though. Especially if you can just walk to the train station.
If I were to go into our city office, I'd only have about a 5 minute drive to the train station. But between leaving some slack to park and pay, the train ride, and either the subway or a longish walk on the other end, I'm still more than 90 minutes door to door--and that's with good transport links.
tl;dr I guess what I'm saying is that even though I'm in the office, having the choice to be there makes all the difference.
I've been going into the office a few days a week because my infant's daycare is nearby and it makes logistical sense. I am also double-vaccinated and wear a real mask with care. On most days I am the only person within 36 feet. I have repositioned myself near an air vent to take advantage of a positive pressure zone around my workspace.
I say this not to argue for the office but against it, I have personal space and I'm making this decision because its a rational one for my family and productivity and carefully mitigate my risks with my behavior. I think I'd immediately be unhappy if my employer compelled people to return, particularly before I am able to vaccinate my infant. In a giant open-plan building, it's suddenly possible to do intense focused work because it's an an appropriate occupancy level.
I always see a lot of hemming and hawing in these threads but it's impossible to underscore just what a HUGE boon remote work is for people who don't want to or can't live in Tier 1 cities like SF or NYC. My career has taken on an entirely new trajectory. Prior to the pandemic I worked at two different companies over 6 years. Since the start of the pandemic I've changed jobs 3 times and my TC has almost tripled.
There are definitely downsides to it no doubt. I'm a social person and I miss shooting the shit with coworkers and in-person interaction. But I have to laugh when I see statistics in the article like "workers view being forced to be in the office full-time as equivalent to a 5% pay cut". 5%? Are you serious? For me, being asked to come into the office = I must physically live near my employer = I take more like a 70% pay cut. For 70% I'll find another social outlet!
I was forced to torpedo a previous career because a relative got sick, and then I got sick...moving to the city wasn't a good idea but the only choice in that industry, so I had to move on (I grew up in the city in question, utter hellhole, commutes are horrendous, I would have moved because I loved the work but that was all).
Obviously, I have a biased perspective but what frustrated me wasn't the loss to my own career. I just got on with it, retrained, moved on. But the fact that I had useful skills, had spent years developing them, and the most rational thing for me to do was to literally start from zero in an industry that was more accommodating...which seems a bit silly.
So I wouldn't even frame this as a personal thing. The reason the career development opportunity is so large is because the opportunity for employers is so large...and, ofc, they are the ones resisting this.
My wife has a chronic, expensive, difficult to manage, and unpredictable health condition. Having to leave her to be in an office when I’ve been doing great work from home is a show stopper for me. And I’m always upfront about that with employers, I get some companies have an on-prem mentality and I’m respectful of that. But it doesn’t work for me, so I’m not trying to waste their time or mine. And my current employer while I regularly complain about the logistics of working in a gigantic enterprise has been very respectful of our situation and hasn’t once ever made me feel like I’m slowing down or underperforming because of it. So long as I keep making the company money and they keep paying me, neither of us cares where the other sits.
Yep, my TC is 3x what it was 2 years ago and my career feels like it's on a new trajectory as well because I now have access to a much larger, much better pool of companies to work for.
where I work at theres a beautiful, cool and collaborative office. friendly people overall. But I much prefer work at home or whatever I want. Just need a good ISP. If they ever tell us we need to go to the office in an arbitrary frequency, then im out.
Everyone should keep in mind that water seeks its own level. And think of this on a global scale.
I've been working remotely for almost a decade as a senior software engineer. Now, post-Covid, almost everyone realizes they can do the same.
Salaries are going to drop in the "rich world", and it's not just because people are now fleeing places like SF/SV to lower cost of living areas.
We are also beginning to compete globally, far more than ever before with the ease of remote work. Qualified engineers can be found for 1/10th of the price with "near shore" companies in the "rich world".
I know because I've worked with them throughout various roles, both as peers and as a PM/Team Lead.
The money may start flowing from the "rich world" to the "poor world" soon, no need for H1B visas or anything else.
Younger people speak English but it depends what you want to do. People are friendly so they will normally try to help you out anyways.
Let me know if you need any advice:
guillermog|at|netnotion|dot|com
I'd be curious to know as well, but I'm guessing he means Europe. I used to work with other Data Scientists based in Europe and was always shocked to learn how little they got paid, usually less than 50% of american counterparts. And for work like DS where objectives are more abstract and harder to specify, Europeans have enough cultural and literal fluency to be able to fully replace someone from the US. This is in comparison to the situation as I understand it for India-based pure software development, where communication/cultural barriers requires tighter management to use the talent effectively (this is going off what I've heard, I have no personal experience here. so feel free to correct me if my understanding isn't accurate).
So previously being able to utilize offshore talent was basically a skill unto itself. Now you did two interviews with similarly skills candidates and one wants 50% less pay, they just have a british accent.
> I'd be curious to know as well, but I'm guessing he means Europe.
Other commenters have addressed this, but the term is normally used for teams within +/- the same timezone but at far lower rates for (hopefully) good engineering quality.
So if you are US EST, there are "near shore" companies in the US that will coordinate you with South American teams.
They generally have a PM in the US and developers outside.
Near-shoring usually refers to someone on the same timezone or nearby physically, like South America or Mexico for the US, or Eastern Europe for Western Europe.
In terms of European talent being paid less, yes I agree they are, but there are hidden costs in terms of taxes and compliance that means that companies would rather go to countries which promise an order of magnitude cheaper resources rather than just 50% off.
It’s corporate language for hiring in a similar timezone but less expensive country. Instead of hiring in the U.S. you put people in Mexico or South America.
Another term is “best shoring”, which is code for wherever you can find talent capable of doing the job for the least amount.
>> We are also beginning to compete globally, far more than ever before with the ease of remote work. Qualified engineers can be found for 1/10th of the price with "near shore" companies in the "rich world".
Yep. I've said it many times here and basically anywhere I can: Clamoring for remote-only work, maximum-introvert, never fly somewhere, don't value in-person communication/meetings/etc is a dangerous game to be playing. People vastly overestimate how talented they are and how hard the problems they are solving may be.
Not today, and not tomorrow. But if face to face communication, meetings, and the other sociable stuff goes away, it won't take long for domestic management to realize where the cost savings could come from, and international management to realize they need to upskill their people in English and code quality to earn "huge" [0] salaries consistently.
[0] Huge salaries to them being a high-five figure salary.
> Yep. I've said it many times here and basically anywhere I can: Clamoring for remote-only work, maximum-introvert, never fly somewhere, don't value in-person communication/meetings/etc is a dangerous game to be playing.
What's interesting is that I flew in for a meeting with my company recently, the first I've had since I've been hired.
This took hours upon hours of my time. Time I could have spent working.
We spent it between a conference room and at restaurants, and much of the time was spent discussing things with the larger team that were not relevant to me. So I spent that time on my laptop fixing bugs, in the conference room.
There was zero benefit to any of this outside of a solid handshake and getting to "meet people in person".
However, I have 3 meetings a week with the entire team on HD video, so I already knew exactly who I was meeting and what their mannerisms and personalities were.
That included walking through an office where people jumped out of the cubicles and offices when they saw me and said "hey! Great to finally see you in person!" without a second thought. They knew exactly who I was without having ever met me.
Is this really necessary? This was a huge waste of company money that I could have spent working.
>> This took hours upon hours of my time. Time I could have spent working.
What engineers and people on this site seem to not grasp is that "working" is not a strict definition that maps to "writing code" to management, business operations, marketing, sales... basically every non-engineering department.
If that concept starts to take root in the mind, then it becomes a bit more clear why people like the office. Engineers on HN seem to be incapable of considering that the social aspect of work is important to most non-introvert non-engineers in an office and that a lot of "work" is forming bonds, developing relationships, and yes, "playing politics" to some extent.
I don't doubt that the 10x engineer is well-represented on this site and that their worth is quite high for their work output. Lesser engineers and developers who work on glorified CRUD apps and mobile adware can easily be replaced, and the issue is that often they think they are also elite 10x engineers who have the same type of nobility and don't have to play the office game.
Time will tell if they're right, but I'm betting not. Especially since I know a lot of hiring managers exploring outsourcing during the Great Resignation and Remote Work Only craze and finding results being... quite good.
> Engineers on HN seem to be incapable of considering that the social aspect of work is important to most non-introvert non-engineers in an office and that a lot of "work" is forming bonds, developing relationships, and yes, "playing politics" to some extent.
I do this all day in private Slack communications, 1-1 video conferences, and everything else.
This "watercooler effect" myth may seem important to some, but I know my team members closely because I am talking to them all day, whether we're staring at each other face to face or not. I already know their kids are in college, or the sports teams they are interested in, or the typical company rumor mill.
I'm 2+ decades in this game and I am familiar with the office. I spent 10 years driving an hour-each-way commute to spend 10+ hours in an office to help start a company with one other person. Which ended up growing to 20+ employees.
What is the purpose of "in person"? I have friends and a life outside the office. That doesn't make me an "introvert", it makes me a person who wants to spend the company's money wisely, especially against tight deadlines.
They need me writing code, or architecting a project, or leading a team.
> This "watercooler effect" myth may seem important to some, but I know my team members closely because I am talking to them all day, whether we're staring at each other face to face or not. I already know their kids are in college, or the sports teams they are interested in, or the typical company rumor mill.
That doesn't just happen. I'm glad your company/team has apparently figured it out; mine certainly hasn't.
Think about how you can make it happen directly around you, don't wait for "the company" to get it - be the agent that propagates it. If you spend the time and the energy to make it happen at least with your direct network, you'll create a competitive advantage for yourself, your team, and get a valuable set of skills.
I think it's fair to say that HN can be a bit myopic. Both about this and other topics, there is a lack of understanding of the mindset of "the general population".
There can be a lot of ideas that a stated in way that makes it seem like most people would totally agree, like that "socializing at the office is obviously a chore that's a waste of time", that "work is about maximizing your programming output", or that "managers want employees back at the office is because they feel insecure about their value and don't trust their employees to get work done". But I don't think the vast majority of the workforce would necessarily agree to those ideas. As much as HN types like to make fun of MBAs and their bean-counting, there's the feeling that in their own heads the primary directive is to try to maximize the throughput of neatly parceled work units and would deride those who disagree as "time wasters".
The risk with this kind of thinking is that you end up not being nearly as objective as you think you are, and worse, you will fail to predict how things are going to happen. If you were reading Reddit during the 2016 and 2020 democratic primary; you would have been sure that Bernie was going to be the nominee. My workplace surveyed whether people want to do full-remote, hybrid, or full-office. Reading HN, you'd think the obvious top choice would have been full-remote, since most of us could actually work fully remote. As it turns out, it was not the winner. (Before saying that management fudged the numbers: The outcome was supported by my informal questioning of my coworkers as to how they voted.)
Considering slightly broader aspect of why the work is done in the first place – to bring profits to the company – people should also factor in the creative part of work, and nonlinearity of individual contributions to that case.
It's one thing if your job is to stay at the assembly line punching holes in metal sheets 40 hours a week. And another thing if you have the capacity for improving the overall process (and profits), while still spending 10 hours punching holes part-time because it brings you joy. From management perspective, it's those 10 hours that are wasted.
Or if you're taken out of your dear assembly line and flown to the other part of the country in business class, to attend a week-long series of meeting with a customer. Somehow that ends up helping to secure a huge contract, just because your presence affected the customer's perception. From your perspective, that might look like the company has wasted a fine week of your work on useless meetings and communication. From company's perspective, just with that they have made more money than you'd bring them in a two years otherwise.
Depends on the work, of course. But for me, software is a team sport.
My current job is 100% remote; I've never met my coworkers or my users. I love not commuting, but the lack of personal bonding and the need for all communication to be 100% intentional is a real drawback. I think it's especially limiting for people that I don't work very closely with. E.g., I can't just go hang out with users and watch them work. Which makes it much harder to build relationships where I say, "Hey, let me show you something."
So... what you like is making it harder for other people to work by forcing them to pay attention to you according to your whims. I much prefer a coworker reaching out to me on Slack and saying "When you have time, let me show you something." And then I get back to them when I've finished what I am working on.
Again, it depends on the company. For in-house software, which is quite a lot of the software out there, the people I need to show it to are not developers, but users. Given that I specified users, it seems pretty obvious we're talking about the whole company.
You clearly want other people to show empathy and try to honor the way you like to work. So I'll repeat icelander's question: Do you have empathy towards 90% of the remainder of a company who doesn't like that?
I’m doing something similar with my team in a few weeks, and I’d measure our in person value on a different scale than just what we produce in person together. I don’t know if this is naive, but I still feel like it’s important to celebrate our accomplishments together and if we have a chance to do that in person, even if velocity suffers and some money is spent, we get something out of that shared experience together that helps us grow and understand each other that is sometimes lost when we’re just on video calls.
Is it necessary? Definitely not. But I have the opportunity and I think it’s great to do, and great to plan together.
We are finishing up a major project right now. At the last zoom meeting the business lead excitedly suggested that we should all get together in real life once it is totally completed for a celebration. All of us engineers slacked each other and said that we had less than zero interest in this and wondered how we could tell the business person thanks, but no thanks. I've been in the industry for 20 years and I still don't understand the desire of business people to go get a beer together or go eat together or whatever. I do have friends I'd like to do those things with, but that is not you. Please don't make this awkward.
Some people connect better in person. I felt closer to my team, and more like friends, after having spent a few days with them in person, especially outside of a work setting. If it improves collaboration or retention in any way - maybe subconsciously I’m less pedantic in code review, friendlier in chats, more willing to do extra work to help a colleague, discussing with a team I didn’t normally talk to before, or hesitate a few weeks longer before switching companies - it’s worth it to the company.
If I were advising you, I might note that your post is all about you.
Consider how you define yourself, and where you see your life going over the long term.
Different strengths/reservoirs of energy and motivation are needed to "make it happen" in the real world.
How can you ensure your team will be there when you need them?
The irony of writing this doesn't escape me, as I weigh the frankly-more-time-efficient-for-me working at home I have now, versus the team-efficiencies of being in the office.
Since I was forced to work remotely due to Covid lockdowns I "waste" much more of my time in meetings now then I did when I was working on site in an office.
When there was friction involved in organizing a meeting (Needing to gather participants all in one place, book conference room, get projector working etc.) people were reluctant to call trivial meetings.
Now it feels like everyone has discovered Microsoft Teams and people feel obligated to call meetings for all manner of things that would have previously been solved by email or 'water cooler conversations'.
The volume of meetings I find myself attending now has skyrocketed compared to how often I'd be physically present in meetings when I worked in office. The only saving grace is you can mute yourself and alt-tab which is much more difficult when you are physically present at a meeting.
From my 20+ years of experience working the spectrum from fully remote to fully in-office - there seems to be something primal that happens when you make a real human connection with someone. In person > zoom > phone > email.
It doesn't matter much in the good times when everything is going smoothly. But when the crap hits the fan and you don't have that connection - things tend to get contentious a lot faster. If you're the only one on the team without a human connection to the rest of the team, you're set up to be the scapegoat when things go wrong. It's just human nature.
> "[0] Huge salaries to them being a high-five figure salary."
CheckSalary.co.uk puts the average salary for "a programmer" in the UK at £43K, Reed.co.uk says £41k, Glassdoor says £35K, Payscale says £31K... maybe devs here should upskill in English?
Russian remote programmer here. The language is a small part, cultural difference is the most painful one. Americans never give direct negative feedback and expect this from you, for example. Many US companies hire only people from US and pay them more b/c cultural and timezone difference is another hidden cost and not every company wants to pay it - they rather pay 200k more in $. But personally for me that's fine, even miserable salary by US standards is great, and it has grown significantly in the past year thanks to covid. Some companies offer salaries close to 100k$/yr which was unreachable 5 years ago.
This is an issue not just with Russians, but with differences between mainland Europe and Anglo-Saxon culture in general (UK too). Funny enough, it gets worse the better at English you get: if you're obviously not very good at English then people tend to give you the benefit of the doubt. If you're reasonably good at English in such a way that it's not obvious you're not a native speaker at a glance then people tend to be less forgiving. And the whole passive-aggressive culture also means they won't actually tell you, so it can be quite hard to learn and improve.
Of course, attitudes differ wildly from individual to individual, but the average can be quite hard to work with. It took me a few years to really adjust.
The Germans and people from eastern Europe are usually straightforward in their communications. There might have been a shift towards conflict-avoidance in younger generations (< 30 yo) though.
> The Germans and people from eastern Europe are usually straightforward in their communications.
May be, Germans (and most Europe) are "straightforward" from an American perspective. I find Europeans with their own shade of "subtlety" which you could only learn if you were part of the culture. Otherwise, they are "subtle" and "measured" too.
German and Dutch straightforwardness only goes one way. Try talking to them back with the same straightforward way they talk to you, and see how they react.
I use straightforwardness as a proxy for rudeness, which is what it usually is in these cases. Its like the famous "brusque New Yorker" style or "Berliner schnauze". If you talk to them the same way they talk to you they get pissed because this brusqueness is not how they talk to an equal, but rather an outsider.
Strong disagree with that one; I think it's the exact opposite in fact. The more direct communication is, the easier it is to avoid and/or quickly clear up misunderstandings and the like.
Some email that was sent and misunderstood? Your entire project can go off-rails. People can hold grudges over something that was not intended at all. Etc. You're much more likely to catch these things early in face-to-face communication due to body language, tone of voice, etc.
Text communication is pretty hard to get right in general and text communication in a non-native language is even harder, doubly so when you're talking to a native speaker and there's an asymmetry in language skills, which there often is, even with fairly proficient non-native speakers. Add to that cultural differences on what is or isn't "appropriate" or different interpretations on various things and it can become quite tricky to communicate effectively.
Honestly, I doubt much will be considerably different for most US based companies. In SV firms, maybe, but in corporate America it will be years before they would even consider another run at mass off shoring. Lots of corporations are still dealing with the fall out of the off shore/consultant boom of the early to mid 00s.
Group video chat makes an enormous difference. And most of the early to mid 00s offshoring was to India, perhaps also places like Russia or China, where the time difference to US can make things exceedingly painful. Now, though, I've worked with many super talented developers in Central and South America where the time difference is minimal.
> domestic management to realize where the cost savings could come from
Management has been looking at off-shoring whatever they can for the past decades already. Having a bigger pool of talent willing to work remotely is a boon, but most of the new influx is not from lower level countries (they already were 99% ok with full remote), and more from places with high level salaries.
Management will find cheaper people, but only marginally, and not that different from the people they already had. Except most of the people they will find will be the ones playing the full-remote "dangerous game" you warn about
>> Management will find cheaper people, but only marginally, and not that different from the people they already had.
This is a dangerous assumption rooted in past failures. I can personally tell you that I have a lot of evidence that points to it no longer being true. Eastern European developers are good enough to do CRUD and basic work that is massively overpaid here in the US, and speak English quite well.
I am not sure what you see as past failures, in the last decade I've already seen first hand long term outsourced projects with Romanian teams and Vietnamese team, and we weren't even their main clients.
I don't think engineers in France or London (and I assume the US) are getting paid big bucks for actual basic work, that ship has long sailed IMO.
How do you define CRUD? Most Cloud/Web based companies we hear about are CRUD. Shopify/Github/Square/Twitter/Stripe it's all CRUD in different scales. What I mean is that 90% of their programmers write software in high level languages that talk to a database and the end product is usually some html/json.
The current "modern" web stack isn't that much easier than writing C/C++ imo, it's just different.
What seems missing from this discussion are the social connections remote workers pursue in the absence of water cooler conversations and company social events.
For many office workers, their co-workers are their main source of social interaction.
For remote workers, it's a deliberate decision to keep their social lives separate from work. They very well may be extroverts in their personal social activities.
Same for tech giants. No need to rent an office to compete anymore. Global small teams can form overnight, grow and shrink dynamically. Entrepreneurs paradise.
I think time zones and tax laws may slow this a little. I find it a real pain to work with people whose time zones are 10 hours away from the company timezone. When things need to get done quickly or a problem can only be resolved by talking directly somebody has to work late in the evening or night. I guess the companies don't care but it's very hard for the workers in the long term.
In my company it's also very difficult to hire a full time employee in another country due to all kinds of regulations and the overhead they entail.
My prediction is that in the long run a lot of companies will still prefer people who are close. Managing remote people effectively is very difficult. A lot of managers will fail doing so. And a lot of people are also not cut out for remote work and need interaction at the office.
I remember when offshoring became popular in the 90s it looked all work would go to India but this didn't happen either.
This time zone difference can also be an asset if your business is 24/7.
"When things need to get done quickly or a problem can only be resolved by talking directly"... and that problem occurs at night in my timezone, a team mate who's awake can deal with it with a rested head and no burnout in her or his day.
Admittedly, there are many companies who don't need 24x7 business continuity and are perfectly content with 10x5. For them, this is unnecessary complexity.
> When things need to get done quickly or a problem can only be resolved by talking directly somebody has to work late in the evening or night.
On the other side of this, I feel like I'm seeing I'm seeing "leverage time zone differences to accelerate the development process" in hardware engineering job postings with increasing frequency. I can definitely see where there's an efficiency gain for heavily sequential tasks like PCB design bring-up to have teams working in shifts without anybody losing brain power by working outside of normal hours.
I work at a very small remote-only (purely as a result of COVID) company in the United States. We only hire people who live in our state because the burden of complying with tax and labor laws in other states just doesn’t interest us right now.
As long as we can find good enough people in our state, it’s just not worth the hassle to add more HR challenges than we have to.
Communication is still a gigantic issue to overcome. So is managing teams and availability during the work day.
If anything, it might push more really smart people to start their own companies instead of working for someone else to achieve a lesser level of prosperity.
> Communication is still a gigantic issue to overcome. So is managing teams and availability during the work day.
Communication is huge but I can assure you I've worked with teams on the opposite side of the globe asynchronously without issue. The concept of "workday" can be tossed aside if we are thinking 9-5 M-F.
Global teams can adjust schedules and work effectively. I know because I've managed teams like this in very complex software projects and it has worked.
100% agree. Before my current job I worked with tons of remote teams and it was great. Even now, the majority of my interactions are with people on the west coast or offshore teams in India. My boss is in the mid west and his boss is in the south east. And so far we’re doing great.
I kind of agree, especially with regards to smaller companies who maybe only have one office and struggle to hire locally. being able to recruit across the whole US, let alone the whole world, is a major game changer for them.
on the other hand, it's interesting to take note of what the big tech companies are doing. for the most part, they seem to have developed an increase tolerance for WFH, but continue to invest heavily in building new offices. not sure what that says long term.
even pre-COVID, big tech companies had offices outside the US. if you could already find enough engineers worth hiring to set up an office in brazil, how much does full remote change things? either way, talent is pretty densely clustered in the biggest cities to begin with.
I've been hearing this argument for 20 years. I was doing ASP/Perl programming while I was in high school in 2000, and I remember being told that I need to move into management because soon all the jobs would be offshored to India.
Then in 2008 when the economy crashed I had one bizdev guy tell me that pretty soon everyone was going to be able to code with these new 'no code apps' and that I was going to be a fossil and I should move into management.
Then in 2012 people talked about how many brilliant chinese programmers there were and how all the jobs were going to be outsourced to china.
I think about this sometimes, because while I did have a successful stint as a team lead, now i'm just a senior SWE. Things have turned out pretty well so far. I've only seen salaries go up.
> I think about this sometimes, because while I did have a successful stint as a team lead, now i'm just a senior SWE. Things have turned out pretty well so far. I've only seen salaries go up.
This is different because Covid-19 has shown to everyone that they can do their jobs remotely.
And if they can do their jobs remotely, why can't an equally skilled engineer in a country with a cost of living 1/10th of the "rich countries" do the same?
They are realizing they can, and handing this off.
I too was around in 2000, writing applications in C# beta before 1.0.
This is not so different as one might believe. Those exact arguments about off-shoring and remote work already existed back then. Even your first argument was pretty much the same in all those other events as “has been shown that every code monkey can do their job remotely”. Turned out pretty soon that Software engineering is much more than just churning out code.
Successful off-shoring isn’t about enabling a bandwith-hungry HD cam streaming your team in 4K. Neither back then nor nowadays. The right communication tools for the job existed back then but that wasn’t the reason why it didn’t work out in 2000 or in 2009. Management isn’t dumb and would happily off-shore to the cheapest remote workers all those last years where nothing of that was a major issue but the problems aren’t primarily about tooling, protocol or bandwith.
> Management isn’t dumb and would happily off-shore to the cheapest remote workers
I've had my share of severe pushbacks with "management" over the years.
They've often been burned by shopping projects out to the lowest bidder and suddenly realize you need competent engineers to make it happen.
The problem is you can find competent engineers now across the planet for far less than what you would pay a US-based engineer, forget about whatever is going on in SF/SV.
A lot of people would like to stick their fingers in their ears and say "nah nah nah" rather than realize what is going on, but I deal with it daily.
So in 20012, when Skype was huge, why didn't this take over? It's not like it didn't happen, people have been poaching rockstars across the globe forever.
But are you really saying that it's only in 2020 that people put effort into outsourcing to cheaper foreign talent?
Or that the technology of remote work is now what makes it possible? I dispute that as well, good remote collaboration has been happening in open source for forever. People who can make it work make it work. It's not the issue and never has been.
> And if they can do their jobs remotely, why can't an equally skilled engineer in a country with a cost of living 1/10th of the "rich countries" do the same?
I'm an American expat and one of the things that I quickly discovered when I left and started traveling is that skilled engineers (and designers, etc.) in countries with significantly lower costs end up figuring out how much they're worth to employers/clients in richer countries. When they do and they have enough of a track record to prove their worth, their rates go up.
So if you think you're going to take your freelance developer in the US who charges $150/hour and replace him with an equally skilled freelance web developer in, say, Brazil for $15/hour, good luck. Any such developer in the Brazil will eventually discover that he's able to command much more. Except in a few rare instances it won't be $150/hour, but when you factor in time zones, cultural differences and language, there is far less of a difference in cost than you'd think.
Anecdotally, I have a few friends that run companies in the US that have expanded their hiring to consider remote candidates outside of the US and Canada and they still struggle to find suitable candidates even though the rates they're offering are based on qualifications, not location. In other words, they're willing to pay $100+/hour to the right people no matter where they live. Good people are in demand everywhere, and they know it.
I’ve observed this as well, good workers are generally smart people and will figure out their worth.
I think people underestimate the demand for talent and think that globally we can fill that hole. We can’t, yet. Humans don’t scale well enough and eventually automation will be the real problem. (But I also think that is further away than currently advertised, but different topic.)
> And if they can do their jobs remotely, why can't an equally skilled engineer in a country with a cost of living 1/10th of the "rich countries" do the same?
Same reasons as last decade. Time zone difference, language/culture barrier, the legal complications of hiring across jurisdictions. I don't see how any of it has been addressed by recent events or incremental improvements to remote working tools.
I think it came up in a previous thread on the topic that the non-US workers that can overcome these barriers but aren't interested in immigrating, still demand competitive US rates when working with US companies (through consultancies, iirc).
“Everyone remote” works right now because everyone has pre-existing relationships. Double your team with everyone having never met in person and I guarantee the cracks will start to show and the culture will suffer.
I’m dealing with a company that decided to try outsourcing for a second time starting just before covid hit and it’s just as miserable as it was the last time they tried in 2009. “But video conferencing” doesn’t bridge cultural friction and timezones.
But all big companies knew already that they can offshore, and in fact they have been doing it for decades. Intel and Microsoft were offshoring already in the 90s and perhaps even earlier. The only real "news" here is that you can have high functioning fully remote software teams. But the phenomena of offshoring has been happening for a long long time.
Just in case anyone misreads my point, I want to emphasize I've worked (and continue to work with) brilliant, great, Indian and Chinese programmers, both immigrants and remote.
It's just that good people aren't cheap, even remote ones. And they're hard to find.
Ok so we’re back to offshoring as a silver bullet. Consider me extremely skeptical having lived through the last offshoring scare.
I do think the global best engineers are about to get a big raise though.
> I do think the global best engineers are about to get a big raise though.
It really does feel like there is a gigantic competency bubble that is about to pop.
The amount of people who are willing to learn the hard systems and businesses is dwindling by the day. You think its difficult to find airline pilots and truckers? Try to find a developer with both the domain knowledge and technical skills to fix a custom piece of code in a community bank's core system that was written in 1994. Oh, and we need it fixed before close of business or our fedwire files are going to be totally fucked...
The amount of money they will have to offer to capture the appropriate talent to keep their businesses running is going to become astronomical. The executives sometimes try to take a quick path out of this hell and usually wind up with 1 additional reason they have to stay. The most common mistake is attempting a full vertical swap-out, followed by paying some firm to explain that your shit sucks by way of installing some middleware in your infrastructure and telling you things you already know.
This doesn't seem to be the case in Australia. The lack of migrant workers coming into the country has made it incredibly difficult to recruit skilled employees in 'office roles' and the market is insane for pretty much every industry. This sure doesn't reflect companies having an appetite for global employees.
I've spoken to a lot of recruiters over the last year and they're primarily indicating that a hybrid 2 days in the office model is the preference.
Integrating new staff is hard at the best of times, let alone half fully-remote and half hybrid.
Exactly. Poor countries have huge problems other than low salaries. Corruption, crime, lack of freedoms, bad infrastructure, poor investment options, etc. As much as many Americans like to think their country sucks, it’s a literal dream land for a large percentage of the world population.
Yep. We used to hire remotely in Nigeria, and that was almost always the case. The ones that we wanted to keep always got to richer countries and multiplied their prices.
I can’t count the times how often i’ve heard this story in some variation over the decades. It never happened. You can replace Covid with any other catastrophic event, the story always read almost the same including the remote worker cliche.
It could have been done before COVID so it would’ve already been done. Business people aren’t dumb and if they could have offshores development, they would have (and they also have been doing this for years anyway).
So why would they hire workers in their own country? People in this thread already have said it.
Time zones, cultural business norms and understanding, native communication ability, tax and legal issues regarding employment (already annoying enough to hire employees in other states in the US for example), ability to connect with clients in the same locale, etc.
Now I’ll give you that this MIGHT shift things to a degree. I don’t think it’ll be the race to the bottom you and others are saying.
I doubt it (even though I run a dev shop w/ Vietnam based engineers). US companies will continue hiring US based engineers. And when Covid is over people will go to the office again.
And they were right. Mid-income people in the rich world were the losers of globalization. There are fewer jobs now where you can buy a house and support a family by working 40 hours/week. Especially for those with no specialized skills.
The same may hit some highly-paid professionals in the future. If tech keeps making things easier while the rest of the world grows wealthier and more competitive, they may find that their skills are no longer in demand. The job is not as demanding as it used to be, and there are more people in the market capable of doing it just as well.
Those at the top are safe, but the top is slowly getting narrower.
> Those at the top are safe, but the top is slowly getting narrower.
This has been happening for decades. It is an inherent property of technology AIG automation driving down marginal costs and increasing yields, all benefiting owners of capital or those who have the ability to help automate.
Maybe in the "rich world", but not globally :-) I've been hearing lots and lots of stories of growing salaries across places that were historically underpaid (Brazil, Portugal, Berlin, etc) - maybe we'll have a thousand gold rushes, as the water level rises to meet the "rich world" levels!
True. 2 years ago $5000/month was super rare, now it's the lowest bound for a senior role. Still nothing compared to the "rich world" but not complaining at all :)
I believe many are missing the fact that for us not in the SV-Bubble earning 30.000$/month, sure we would be happy getting the same paycheck but on the other side our wages are also rising and we are often the top-earners for senior roles in the respective country.
> We are also beginning to compete globally, far more than ever before with the ease of remote work. Qualified engineers can be found for 1/10th of the price with "near shore" companies in the "rich world".
Sounds familiar... I think you still get what you pay for.
There are certainly a lot of products where it doesn't matter at all, but in other areas you really need to be careful with what you send to the contractor and what you do in-house.
> The money may start flowing from the "rich world" to the "poor world" soon, no need for H1B visas or anything else.
The gold rush days may be over.
You seem to believe there are no political dynamics to this situation. On a small scale, sure. On a large scale I think you’ll find the political stability that executives in the US have come to rely on will quickly disappear. The 2016 elections were already a reflection of the general populace growing tired of offshoring jobs. When that hits the middle and upper middle class as well, shit will hit the fan globally.
It's more than that. It's one thing to offshore some shoe factory to China while keeping most of the quality jobs and R&D at home. It's another story completely if 70% of U.S tech will be off shored; the knowledge escapes, the patents, sometimes IP can be stolen etc etc. Slowly but surely the competitive edge the U.S has will disappear.I'm pretty sure there will be political objection to it and laws to make it less appealing to offshore if that is the case.
Like others have said, this story has been repeated numerous times in some variation in the past and has never panned out.
I think the reason is that many people conflate "remote" with "asynchronous". Having a company go fully remote is one thing, having a company move to a culture of asynchronous work is something completely different.
Some tech companies will be able to do this, but the problems really arise for companies that have to keep "business hours" here in the US. Take a major chain store, a healthcare company, a <insert traditional buisness> software provider.
These businesses have to balance and on-shore workforce with an off-shore workforce. There will be people that work on the ground, and they will obviously have to be on-shore, so will upper management most likely. What about the other layers in the organization. From a high level it sounds simple but when you dive down into which teams support which teams and report to which managers and yada yada yada, where you draw the line all of a sudden becomes much harder and fuzzier.
Most companies that will do what you are talking about have already done so. The reason the water hasn't leveled off more to other parts of the world like you are saying is either due to existing business constraints or risk aversion to possible constraints an offshore team may impose.
Asynchronous is the real difficult part. A lot of companies already have offices in locations with good engineering talents and they usually work as a independent unit. It’s just really hard to coordinate a project when you have 0-1h of possible overlap time for meetings
But for big tech companies at least I don't think money is really a significant concern. It's probably better for them to pay 10x for an engineer if that engineer has twice the chance of being a very strong performer than the one they could hire for 1x.
that is true but there is regulation that has been set to protect that type of offshoring. realistically though, we will get to a point of one of the goals of capitalism, and that is equilibrium. whatever that looks like, i am an optimistic, (some would view it as pessimistic), but work or work as which we know it will cease to be relevant in a post human production society. nearly 8 billion people connected is new, i know we are all not connected yet, but to assume or pretend that will never happen is only operating at half consciousness and the experience it has to offer. i believe in work, it will exist for awhile but our interpretation of work will at some point change.
yeah, no. Salaries are going to rise all over the world, especially if you talk about salaries. Is it true that a junior dev can have $240k/y in US for example? screw decades of my experience, imma be a junior dev :D
You also have to take into account that working for US company is not that desirable because of the employer culture, for example. Some of us like worker protection laws, for example, or government-mandated guaranteed vacation time or double pay for overtime or some weeks off when you have a newborn on your hands. Or be informed months in advance about your lay-off and be compensated hansomely for that (if the company isn't folding).
In the US these things are under the employers' discretion, and it's considered something amazing and impossible, like ambulance rides that don't cost more than your kidney on black market.
And lose that over 1/10th of what you guys get? Hahaha, oh wow, you're insane. If I have no guarantees, I want to be compensated accordingly! So don't get your knickers in a knot and perpetuate the "omg remote is killing workers" meme. Remote is better for everyone.
Oh and by the way, you know what protects you from %worker apocalypse reason%? UNIONS. There's a reason the bald fuck's afraid of them.
I have worked with remote developers from Poland, Romania, and Portugal, each making approx $20-50/hr, producing code of far higher quality than stuff I’ve seen from $500k/year software engineers here.
Also, their English was almost indecipherable from a native speaker.
To be fair, 50$/hr is considered in those countries the absolute top-tier pay of almost any profession. You don’t wanna know how much a physician earns in poland or romania…
I get the feeling as well. Mid and high tier Eastern Europeans or even Portugal are entirely different from cheapest Indians. And they likely aren't even going to try to sell those. Or if they sell it is same as USA based company. With still cheaper prices.
I don’t see it. Cultural barriers and lost in translations are huge, I’m surprised anyone who’s worked with foreign teams doesn’t think so. It’s not cheap or easy to collaborate with people you have a hard time communicating with.
You may be right or you may be wrong, and it will depend on supply and demand as it always has. You are implying that globalization will suddenly bring top notch talent into the reach of American software companies, but hasn't that always been the case thanks to outsourcing and H1-B visas? I understand your fear as a fellow older software engineer, but I do not share your pessimism. I am much, much more afraid of technologies which will make programmers 50% more efficient than I am of foreigners depressing my wages. If you are at the lower end of the skills distribution then sure, I can understand your worry. Talented engineers don't have much to fear, however.
As someone that has worked remotely for the last 10 years I hate to break it to you but skill levels just aren't the same. The reason I moved from Australia to San Francisco was because there were no companies in Australia that could reasonably stretch my skillset anymore (that I wanted to work at atleast, there was local Google office and Atlassian).
I moved back when I reached a point where my skills were good enough that I could secure a job remotely due to social proof/references.
The thing people are missing here is that not everyone that is living everywhere in the world is equally good and those that are 10x as good get paid between 4-5x as much (it should be more but the world is inefficient, overpays for poor quality, underpays for high quality in many cases).
I'm not worried that increasing remote hiring will affect my compensation.
Now the developed world will compete with the developing world to lower wages in the developed world. The high salaries and perks for many USA tech jobs may not last much longer.
No need for companies to pay more for premium locations / perk offices.
No need for companies to deal with the hassle of H1B visas.
From a company perspective, why pay someone in the USA $165k/year to work from home in Trendyville when an Indian engineer is $35k/year in Bangalore?
Have you worked with someone in Bangalore? No offense my Bangalore homies, but I’ve only had bad experiences. Same with Bulgaria. Weird communication issues and bad work. This was especially the case in customer facing work.
Ive had better experience with people in the NL but still obvious communication issues, bad experiences with Australia and Asia.
For better or for worse(I think worse) engineering culture is heavily footed in North American language and culture.
The problem is, most companies who offshore are being cheapskates, and go bottom barrel. Then we Americans who work with them are thinking 'wow, people from country X are terrible programmers.'
But not universally true. Amazing talent exists in India for example, but they command much higher prices.
Why don't they compare to work from cheapest almost finished boot camp graduates doing freelancing work in USA... And then extend that performance to describe your average USA based developer...
Fair and interesting point. I've been a programmer for a long time, and I'd say 90% of 'bootcampers' I've encountered are similarly awful. I think we're on like our 7th interviewee now and yet to find one that can write a single function compilable code on the fly.
To answer your question, it's because most people aren't. You typically work with one or two brilliant people, a buncha midrangers, then ... those.
However, when you get folks from other countries, it's typically only because your company is trying to cut costs and hires some really cheap body shop. So we don't meet the brilliant people from other countries, and are lucky to encounter the midrangers. And they don't stick around long.
I was once so excited that a person we got from said body shop
offshore was truly brilliant. Like,
a person hired as Java but happened to know C and ASM and the inner workings of the linux kernel. He asked if he could help me with a couple (harder) things I was working on, and was amazing. As you may imagine, he stayed for about a month before moving to better things. I begged my company to poach him, but our contract forbid it.
For sure. And it works the other way too. I was consulting on project building a microfinance accounting system. All the initial target users were in India. Having the developers there made sense because they understood the context better and could easily go visit users. I found it frustrating to try to be useful from the US and the time zone differences were a giant pain, so I eventually just went there for a few weeks. Same deal for the product manager; she was US based but would go there for something like 1 week in 4.
Communication issues are inherently a two way street. Unfortunately for workers in Bangalore, Bulgaria, etc the vast majority of my customers are in the US, UK, or Canada.
Have you considered the thought that perhaps the problem could be on your end?
Especially implying that there's less of an engineering culture in a country that brought us ASML - the company behind the machines used by TSMC to produce the Apple M1?
It's not like outsourcing wasn't possible before. You still have to deal with all the HR issues of hiring someone in a foreign country -- zoom does not change that. You will still need to set up at least a small office there, too.
What it might change for the outsourcing market is reducing office space if people from India can work from home, too. That would allow them to lower costs, just as US firms can lower costs for domestic workers by shedding office space. I'm not sure why those office reductions would be greater in India than in the U.S.
Beyond that, firms have been outsourcing wherever they could for the last twenty years already. Every major tech company has some offices in India already. What's left in the U.S. are those jobs that can't be transferred because productivity is more important than lowering costs. At this point, the differentiator between the 200K job and the 60K job is productivity, not geography.
I see four main tiers: 1 - 9-5 in office (business as usual), 2 - semi-remote (part of week in the office), 3 - fully remote with fixed hours, 4 - fully remote outcomes-based (no fixed hours but may also be 'on call').
The title of this article perhaps indicates a move from 1 to 3 or 4 but its content discusses 2. All the information I've seen is that business are definitely moving more to 2 than 3 or 4, though some do see this a just a first step.
Its a big difference for the future of cities as 2 is more 'coastal historic town just outside the city', 3 is more 'small town in the same part of the world' and 4 is more 'move to thailand'.
2 is still a local workforce with visas and taxation where 4 is a global workforce available anywhere with a base level of infrastructure, and little taxation for service-based business until there is greater international cooperation.
Going from any of these items to 4 requires an extra special leap of faith. I personally see anything short of a full 4 as essentially being office work theater.
Our company operates as a 4 tier and I've been here for going on 7 years now. We still have to get on a daily standup call at a fixed time every day, and I still have to participate in other scheduled obligations (mainly tech calls with customers), but the rest of the time is mine to allocate as I see fit.
Also, there are consequences with "no fixed hours" that lots of humans are incapable of dealing with. The amount of discipline it requires to manage this freedom is not insignificant. This said, I am not against multitasking. If you can have something rolling while you get your work done, fuckin awesome. I don't care. I am more worried about the individual lounging on their couch, halfway through a 6 pack of IPA getting in some of that game of thrones re-watch, while the rest of the team is mopping up a shitty merge to master wondering where that individual may be at 11am on a Tuesday.
Are you really worried about a co-worker drinking beer and dicking around instead of helping with a busted merge? Did you make a bad hire? That's the kind of hyperbole managers use to rein everyone in.
Yes, GP is a really disingenuous comment. What if it was a parent needing to take the child to the doctor at 11am on a Tuesday? Or they had taken vacation? Other than that, if hours are flexible and the team member communicated that they would be unavailable from 11am to 2pm and will make it up, then it is their right to do what they want with their time.
Better scenario is the worker is outside mowing their lawn at 11am or grocery shopping or something. They basically 'disappear' for an hour and nobody can get ahold of them.
> I am more worried about the individual lounging on their couch, halfway through a 6 pack of IPA getting in some of that game of thrones re-watch, while the rest of the team is mopping up a shitty merge to master wondering where that individual may be at 11am on a Tuesday.
I've had these scenarios in a 9-5 office job - eg. someone merged in some shit that broke migrations, CI takes forever to run so they don't catch it, the next day they are off and now I'm there touching systems I know little about just to revert my setup to a working state.
I think if you can't rely on people in your team to be professional/competent it's going to be shit no matter where you work. That being said managing flexible work hours is really hard, it's especially hard if you're bad at estimating how much is acceptable to deliver in some time frame. If you always give estimates based on what you're capable at your ideal 8 work hours you're going to sink a lot more time than 8 hours a day - especially if you allow yourself to be distracted. I try to give my estimates based on 4 productive hours per day.
Define fixed hours? Fixed hours sucks when people live in 4 or more different timezones.
I'm trying to figure out if my current remote job is fixed hours. Nobody has ever asked me or said anything about the hours I work, but I am expected to be present for meetings, which usually occur in the middle of the day for me. Is that tier 3 or 4?
Same situation as you here. We have our standup mid-afternoon to make sure everyone can attend.
I'd say we're 4s more than 3s. I would say that an agreed upon, regular meeting doesn't dictate your set hours--just a single obligation that you all agreed to.
In my view of the world that's closer to tier 4 than 3, but I acknowledge there's a lot of grey area between. Maybe 3 and a half. At the start of the tier 3 side (maybe I should call it 3.0) there are solid 9-5 workers who log timesheets with 8 hours per day, are expected to answer the phone between 9 and 5 but not outside, etc.
OP missed a category really. If there are any consistent sync points in the day with the whole team, that creates “core hours” where everyone is expected to be in during those, but otherwise the hours are whenever you want. Maybe call it 3.5?
Also of note: you can have in-office work with the same flexible hours schemes.
One of the teams I'm on is mostly split between US East Coast and Europe and we generally have calls ~9-11am ET which is reasonable for everyone and don't generally expect anyone to be available outside of "normal working hours." That ~6 hour delta is probably about the largest that can easily be handled without someone being up early or working late though.
I suspect that the "coastal historic town just outside the city" (or other pleasant location that is within a 1 to 2 hour drive of an urban metro office--which is often not actually in the city) is probably fairly sticky. Even if a lot of people in the US don't want to make the tradeoffs to live in an urban core, for all sorts of reasons they may want to live within striking distance of a US city as opposed to moving to some small mountain town much less a beach in Thailand.
I am very happy where I am, but if I'm asked to start going at any arbitrary rate to the office (even if only once a week), I'll give them an ultimatum.
Personal/Family life always comes before work, and I'm not risking that.
Is that objectively true or do you feel it’s true? Not being snarky, but I see this viewpoint a lot and it’s never backed up with numbers. Companies are quick to cite science when sending people to WFH, but the rigor is not there when claims are made about how being in an office makes for a more effective workforce.
I agree, it's vastly more difficult to do it over call or video due to the talking over each other. Ideally that'll never happen, but it's just natural in conversations and it really kills the flow.
However, I still think we've achieved a "good enough" state and the cons are no longer enough to stop WFH.
I think you're absolutely right to bring up the importance of communication, but I'm not sure it's as simple as "that will draw people back [to the office]".
I think it will just set up a different selector for who continues to get paid well. I would guess that people who can operate well in all-remote organizations will probably continue to earn high salaries. People who can't get a handle on contributing well, consistently, for an all-remote organization will struggle to take advantage of these changes.
It's one thing to start working with an in-office team, and then continue contributing reasonably well because everyone went remote during the pandemic. It's another thing to get hired for an all-remote team, get your bearings in that organization, start to contribute well, and continue to contribute well.
I think this might go for founders as well. Some people will be able to build and lead an all-remote team. Some people will need the bulk of their people to be in an office in order to build an effective team.
In my experience, the office crowd generally struggles with communication. They rely on conveying the same information in a myriad of ways, over an excruciating amount of time, to get their point across. I'll admit, it is difficult to do that without the bandwidth that face-to-face provides.
When you watch effective communicators, they can write a terse comment and everyone straight up understands without any more fuss. Once you have been on that kind of team, you will never want to communicate about work any other way. Remote work is very efficient under this model.
I think everyone can be an effective communicator, but it is a learned skill. A skill those who have spent their career in an office never had to learn. Those who were recently thrust into remote work without those skills have struggled, but...
What if this forced period of remote work has tipped the scales in favour of the critical mass learning how to communicate effectively? Anecdotally, I have seen significant improvement in the formerly office-going team I have been a part of since March 2020. We have a ways to go before we match what I have witnessed earlier in my career when I was lucky enough to work with some highly effective people, but if this carries on for a sufficient amount of time I think we might just get there.
Would that it were but in my experience long meetings have been replaced with longer zoom meetings. You squeeze in more work because you're already at your desk but the communication has gone down because there's even less focus.
Of course it varies from team to team. I don't see any evidence of widespread improvement in skill. Although I think there's been some value in higher slack adoption so the barrier between offices has lowered while intra-office is worse. At least that's what I've personally seen.
Open source community has been successfully creating high quality and complex products for years without ever meeting, let alone having a shared physical space to work from.
I love Linux but I can think of two quite popular OSes developed by companies with centralized offices/campuses. Linux also has a lot of contributions that were written in an office, I'm sure.
All this just to say I don't think its all that valid of a argument.
Has the experiment of highly skilled, same-city / same time-zone, all-remote (not just some segmented piece of the team) been done before? I think you're understating the novelty (or overstating the similarity of previous experience) significantly.
outsourcing has been going on for two decades, what's this so different other than more difficult to manage?
big company will not find individual one by one, an employee overseas is hard to certify and might steal IP then disappear so there is more risk, language barrier, management challenging, time zone difference, not a total rosy picture for me.
but yes for those really outstanding developers they will land a job with USA pay-scale easily, but will this turn into a trend for a global workforce(for ordinary developers) in a flat world remains to be seen.
You raise some good points about IP theft and credibility. It indeed makes things harder when wanting to recruit in 2nd world countries like India or Russia where rule of law is lacking.
Agreed. I work for a large US pharma. We tried outsourcing 10-15 years back and learned two things: 1) you will lose IP by the bucketsful if you outsource to certain countries, and 2) you will have a tough time retaining any kind of institutional memory from outsourcers since their staff moves around onto tasks for other companies or change jobs too fast to even build basic memory of your company's needs or infrastructure.
In the end, we opened offices of our own in less expensive parts pf the US and the world where wages were lower. But since then, wages have risen substantially in several of those sites, making even this strategy largely pointless. Not to mention other challenges like distributing workgroups and communications across 5 time zones, some of which are 12 hours apart from our HQ.
I'm not sure where we go next, since outsourcing and out-officing have both failed to live up to expectations. Regardless, I don't see remote work as solving these problems. Unless those wages are dirt cheap, remoting more staff will only make our past problems worse.
Is this large US pharma ludicrously profitable like many pharmaceutical companies? Why can’t they just hire employees closer to home base and pay them a better salary?
All you need to do is work with a near on-shore team or an offshore team to dispel you of any notion of remote work being the death of high salaries. Maybe domestic remote work brings salaries down within the US, but the notion that everything is going to Eastern Europe is not accurate if you've ever worked in the field with that setup.
India (and a lot of the rest of the 3rd world more accepting of English) could leapfrog China (and other my language only, no thanks English countries), with remote first work.
As a big fan of India, I've been waiting and hoping for them to leapfrog China.
But I realized it's not happening, because for some reason they don't seem so have the same state capacity to act. It's a bunch of individuals, thousands of little groups suspicious of each other, struggling to provide even basic infrastructure in their largest cities. And constant brain drain to the West.
I really wish India well, and hope one day they will overcome this. A democratic, friendly, yet independent minded counterweight to China would be very nice, and the Indians deserve effective governance.
You are underestimating the scale at which infrastructure is being built in India. The bureaucracy, at least at the higher levels is much faster. Having said that, I do not believe we will leapfrog but maintain consistent growth rate. China is almost 6x our economy. I hope we reach at least a third to half their GDP in 25 years given that our populations are quite similar.
> You are underestimating the scale at which infrastructure is being built in India. The bureaucracy, at least at the higher levels is much faster.
That is good news. Do you attribute this to Modi or something else? Do you think it has been institutionalized to last after the current administration leaves?
I wish we wouldn't allow upvoting here of articles behind a paywall, this just wastes everyone's time. And yes someone might post a link to get around the paywall but this is hurting our news industry so I cant support this as a workaround.
Give the devs some credit - maybe they know about this and are not closing the loophole because they want it to stay open? The majority of readers won't take advantage of it and those who will likely wouldn't have paid anyway.
It's not hurting the news industry... maybe. It's polluting the HN newsfeed... maybe.
I for one won't subscribe to paywalled sites i only occasionally get links to on HN or other news aggregators just because they're linked here.
Funny enough, I am subscribed to a site that gets linked on here semi regularly. Not paywalled, ads or pay for no ads/tracking. But I've been reading it longer than I've read HN.
At very least my office is going to have to improve my working conditions for me to go back a significant portion of time. Crowded noisy open plan space with constant interruptions aint gonna cut it any more. Give me private space (office or not), stop interrupting me, and give me my 3-monitor setup I have at home and we can talk :-)
I have a cubicle which is much maligned in corporate buzz as "cubicle hell" but I have to say I really love it! It's big enough to do yoga inside and has high walls that you can't see over and also a sliding door. I love my cube. The ability to concentrate, take a quick meeting at your desk and take calls is so much better than open office. Also, I appreciate the ability to scratch my face or check if I have lettuce in my teeth without the entire office watching.
I have 2x 27" 1440p IPS screens at home, which is just perfect for coding. The single 24" 1080p screen is not going to cut it at the office.
At home I'm also using my desktop (rysen-based + nvme) pc for work and it feels about 10x faster than the macbook air they supply (which I haven't done real work on for the last year). I'm also using a Logitech G815 + Logitech G102 with a massive mouse pad. My desk has been lowered (I've cut the legs shorter to an exact height) to a point where my knees/legs are in the air to allow blood flow. I also have an electric foot warmer for the winter months (pet heating pad in a nice cover). Other than that, nicer headphones + speakers + studio microphone and overall desk aesthetics...So I want to see them replicate my very comfortable setup that I have at home vs the office. Also having fiber at home without silly restrictions.
I strongly agree. I'm remote for the next few years because family has taken me outside a big metro area. But when I move back I'm gonna be open to working in an office, just so long as it's actually good. If I have to be a sardine in a deskfarm then I'd rather WFH; if the office has flexible spaces and enough desks and good equipment then maybe.
Not mentioned enough on this topic: not all engineers are software engineers and not all software engineers never need to touch hardware.
If you plan to work on/with web frameworks, advertisements, data science, or pure CS topics for your whole career, then there's probably no excuse to force you to come into the office 5 days a week. But good luck doing that as a software engineer at a company like SpaceX, Tesla, Intel, AMD, defense contractors, etc., let alone as any other kind of STEM professional. I think it's an important distinction to make. For me personally, some of the coolest work I can imagine doing is likely going to be done in the office/lab for the foreseeable future.
Yep. I do control systems for 20+ tonne hydraulic robot arms (among other things). 90% of the work I don’t have to catch a plane for can be done at home.
Actually you are probably right. And it's not just building the environment: also unit testing, simple baseline algorithms, etc... We have a tendency to skip them.
Whatever you build, you will need to change, as this is the nature of SW projects. Being able to make changes fast will be life saving at some point
> We don't even have nearly enough hardware to give every engineer access.
This is the problem I always run into too. An emulator should be standard on any system development program that has software interacting with hardware.
I think you are overestimating the requirement to touch the hardware by few order of magnitude for a software engineer there. Just yesterday I was reading a linkedin post from some senior electrical engineer in Apple M1 division and how they achieved everything remotely. For a fabless company, I don't think most of the engineers would need to touch the chip. Similarly for Tesla and SpaceX, they had great two years when almost all software engineers were working remotely.
Yep, I read lots of Verilog nowadays. I think the implication is that you need to be on site to mess with experimental hardware. But that's not true. It's all colocated and cloud-based nowadays, even for companies that are otherwise paranoid.
I worked on flight software for cargo dragon, and one time I got an email asking for my help inside one of the capsules. I had to ask where the capsule was, and everybody lol'ed.
It was a fun day; I got to wear a bunny suit and a headset and climb around inside a space ship.
One of those things is not like the other things (it's the one where you build things that are explicitly designed to kill human beings). Not sure if you were calling that the coolest work, I certainly wouldn't call it that.
Those things are also insurance against being killed. Are you supposed to just hope the bad people don't pick you? No, you invest in offense so you can have a better defense.
I know man, I know. I'm not so naive as to say that if a country was enlightened enough to disband their military, then other countries would leave them be. They would be a seen as a ripe fruit, and they would be picked.
I just wish it wasn't like this. I wish we didn't have people engaged in the business of enabling industrial scale murder. I wish it wasn't profitable. I wish the citizenry would see through the propaganda and hold their leaders to account. I wish it wasn't the nation's poorest who were sent to die for the benefit of the nation's richest.
The war machine is a rotten, gruesome system, and I acknowledge it's not going away any time soon. But the least we can do is agree not to actively contribute towards it.
Modern warfare is much less likely to involve the nation’s poorest dying for the sake of the richest. There’s a recent article about how the average American soldier is now better educated than the average civilian. The specialist weapons we’re talking about shift the balance towards capital and away from labour in the killing production function.
Is that a good thing? I’m not so sure. The age of mass armies was also the age of democratisation. If war is waged by defence firms and brilliant technocrats, then maybe defence firms and brilliant technocrats will run the country.
Understand, there's a lot of distance between 'we don't need a military', 'we need a military to defend American soil', and what we have today.
I am strongly in the 'we only need to defend American soil' camp. I'm not sure how much that costs, but considering we're a nuclear power, we have two relatively friendly neighbors and thousands of miles of ocean between us and our nearest peer enemies, it wouldn't surprise me if we could get away with spending a miniscule fraction of the 700B we do today.
I think it's pretty cool. And I think that kind of work needs people who think it's cool, or else it'll only attract evil people.
There's nothing wrong with building weapons for defense. It's arguably the entire purpose of nukes at this point.
Even for offense, other countries are working hard to build out their arsenals.
I'm personally fine with building AI weapons, for example. If a contract opportunity appears, I might take it. After all, where else are you going to see the most advanced weaponry in the history of mankind?
It's arguably the entire purpose of nukes at this point.
That is absolutely not true. There are people in the governments of every nuclear power would use their weapons aggressively given the chance. That's why policies of disarmament are so necessary. As long as humans have nuclear weapons the probability of practically annihilating our species and leaving any survivors living in the stone age again remains higher than zero.
Nuclear war is the single biggest existential threat humanity faces. We can deal with pretty much anything else.
I completely believe humanity can and will deal with climate change. It'll take a few wars, an anti-capitalist revolution in a first world country or two, and a massive shift towards equality and justice for poorer people, but it will happen.
> There are people in the governments of every nuclear power would use their weapons aggressively given the chance.
You're right so far. North Korea and Iran are ideologically opposed to the West, and both have ICBM capabilities. China also, but they have mixed goals (dominate the world, while parasiting off the US financially and technologically, without killing too many only-childs in war, while importing 50% of their energy and food without interruption.)
Chinese politicians have suggested publicly sending two warships for every Western one in the South China Sea, and ramming and sinking each Western one with one of theirs.
Also, Xi has recently threatened to use nuclear weapons against Guam and Japan. It's one thing to own them, but quite another to make specific threats to use them.
> That's why policies of disarmament are so necessary.
Not gonna happen with rogue actors like NK and Iran, or countries like China that won't take no for an answer.
In addition, the US can't disarm since most of the world is under our defense umbrella. Sadly, the weaker that umbrealla gets (ie. Scarborough Shoals scandal), the bigger the arms race in the Indo-Pacific region, as seen in the news currently. Very likely Japan will announce their own bomb in the next year (they've had ICBMs for decades aka NASDA.)
> Nuclear war is the single biggest existential threat humanity faces.
After the Cuban missile crisis, 2021 is the most dangerous time in history.
Note there was a second Cuban missile crisis, as the USSR left behind half of their nuclear missiles under the control of Castro, who the Kremlin slowly realized wanted to actually use them. The USSR used diplomacy to quietly get them back with the precept that it was required under a treaty that Castro had signed (Gromyko engineered that.)
For what it's worth, I agree with you. One of my sneaky reasons for joining the military establishment would be to help make those sorts of changes from within. Or at least that's what I'd like to tell myself while designing devastating weapons.
I really do feel that reasonable people need to join such organizations, though, otherwise only unreasonable people will be in them. I recently found (to my dismay) that Von Neumann argued vehemently in favor of bombing the Russians before their nuclear program could be built, and all I could think was "This isn't the type of scientist that should have a lot of influence."
Defense contracts aren't all weapons - in fact, I'd wager most aren't (by quantity, if not by dollar amount). Due to how the US allocates its budget, a large portion of its publicly funded research goes through DoD contracts. The startup I used to work at had a contract for making prototypes of multi-material 3D printers for creating medical training models (ie artificial cadavers).
Yes, but not all non-software engineers need to _touch_ hardware.
Eg if you are a civil engineer, lots of your work is spent doing calculations and designing things. When you do touch hardware, it's usually 'on site' and not at the office.
Most of my job is working on drivers for hardware that is in lab thousands of kilometers away. I've never been in that lab, I just ssh to system with hardware to interact with it.
I have spent my whole career working at places like AMD and NVidia, either writing systems software or doing computer architecture.
Yes, we work with various forms of pre- and post-silicon devices but you will find that either they can be accessed remotely, or you can send them by courier to whoever needs one.
So, sure, _some_ people need to be in the lab touching the hardware, especially during bringup, but the immense majority of the people, the immense majority of the time, can work remotely.
Works at lesser known places as well :) Courier the boards, remote into a leee-nucks connected to them, work on the soc manufacturer's sample which you can order from anywhere and then remote into the real board. Lots of solutions to do the job from home.
You're right that not all engineers get to WFH but more can than you'd imagine.
I know defense contractors that are working from home. Two of them did so before the pandemic too - remoting into hardware they're not allowed to physically touch even if they were in the lab!
A neighbour is a civil engineer and the huge screens he needed to do his job were only in the office. Now that he's moved that huge screen (and I mean massive, it's like a telly), the office have told him that he only needs to go into the office to meet clients.
I have a product design dear friend who bought himself a Prusa 3D printer and now can pretty much 100% WFH. He prefers it because he no longer has to share resources.
A neighbour is a network engineer and he spent 2020 decommissioning hardware in the server room and moving it into the cloud - something he said was inevitable for his business but the pandemic hastened it. He now WFH pretty much 100% of the time.
I know someone who works for a SSD manufacturer in the states and they WFH most of the week.
All the web/data devs I know WFH pretty much full time - except one but only because his boss is draconian.
Yeah sometimes you do need to touch things that you can't bring home.
But there are people like me, people who do touch hardware.. at home. My desk is full of hardware. Behind me there's another desk with an oscilloscope, lab psu, dmm, electric load, a pile of probes, a soldering station..
It's not like we get new hardware every day, and when we do, it's not a big deal to wait a day or two for the courier to bring a prototype to my home.
The irony is that while you won't do it as their employee, the same companies will happily hire offshoring companies that work just like that from the other side of the planet.
Aside from what others say, there is a trend to 'cloudify' even things like bench work in biology. Companies that allow people to run remote experiments. This will probably change the way university labs teach things
I e done firmware development from home for over a decade. I need help once and a while from someone in the lab to push buttons or make connections or do reworks or whatever. But I have no trouble getting most of my work done from anywhere I have a half decent internet connection. The oscilloscope runs Windows and I can VNC to it. The (very old) logic analyzer runs HP-UX and connects to an X server to present its UI. We have network controlled relays and power supplies. We can get a lot done without physically being there.
There are sibling comments here that mention the same, however, to add my own point here: I'm involved in a complex hardware plus software project which involves designing and doing a board bring-up for an Arm SoC Linux-based device. We need to visit the office only once in two to three weeks. For the board bring-up when we do not have the provision to provide the hardware to our software engineer yet, we have someone in the office connect the UART lines to it and have the typical VPN+SSH set up to perform the board bring-up for it.
Generally speaking, the engineers that are required for the labs would be electrical engineers and mechanical engineers. Also, even for these physical-based engineering disciplines, a lot of design is highly computer based thanks to great CAD, simulation, and future-looking generative design software from the likes of Autodesk, Ansys, etc.
That being said, I personally feel that being in person really can help in the epiphany process for hardware-based projects.
Funny enough, as a guy hiring in house developers deliberately and regularly, I got the impression that salaries in previously "cheap" countries are normalising to what folks earn in US/Europe - which could make offshoring less viable over time.
Employees from the same country OTOH have some tactical advantages: Same culture/language and time zone (I noticed a lot of folks care), less legal/accounting hassle, easier/cheaper to meet occasionally for workshops and stuff.
I think an Indian makes 1/10th an American engineer. A Romanian 1/5. Still a lot of normalizing before we can say things are equal. However since their cost of living is so low maybe the gap isn't that big.
People have been saying this for decades but it hasn’t come true. Remote work can’t make up for the significant challenges caused by differences in time zone and culture.
Brazil is +5h from California. That's the same as the difference between New York and London. Workable for a couple of hours out of every day, but hardly "similar timezones".
My employer keeps hiring more argentinos. It’s a few notches better than India IMO but is not without challenges. It’s still a few hours time difference and the language issues remain. Giving them well capsulated or boilerplate work seems like a slam dunk but if it’s code that we need to work with as well then it sucks.
Yes. There's no room for current American dev salaries in a world where remote-first jobs are a norm.
Sure there are timezone differences, but EST is doable for Europe. 08:00 EST = 13:00 UTC, so working 8h in EST means 13:00-15:00 -> 21:00-23:00 in European timezones. Some people may even prefer it. Europe has a larger population of devs that's underutilized because it's dispersed among multiple countries. India is too shifted for America but doable for Europe, so the natural next step is to move work completely into a much larger European-Indian worker pool that can remotely work together.
I don't expect it to happen very fast, first part this decade, second next decade. First part is going to fully equalize dev wages between Europe and America. Second part between Europe and India.
Alternatively I may underestimate the willingness of Indian devs to live a nocturnal lifestyle for a high enough pay. In which case the global equalization of dev wages with India is going to happen during this decade.
You do realize that what you are describing could have happened any time in the last years or decades for the same reasons but didn’t? The conditions also didn’t really change to make this more true.
Decades? Bandwidth for global scale videoconferencing didn't exist even 10 years ago, especially in poorer parts of the world. Speeds like 8Mbps/1Mbps or even 8/512kbps over ADSL were common. People also had much weaker hardware.
I think the switch to remote work started to really happen just as it actually became practical for a sufficient percentage of people, which is basically now.
This happening. I live in Europe and number of American companies hiring here has skyrocketed over the last 18 months. And it's great. European tech compensation is finally starting to rise. I don't think it will ever match the insanity that is the Bay Area. But a senior engineer making ~€200k total compensation while living in Germany is no longer unheard of.
Anecdotally I've heard from Indian colleagues that wages back home are also rising fast.
In the end I think this will balance out in favor of Europe/India and against the Bay Area. Which is fine by me. But I understand that the $500k/year Palo Alto people are getting nervous...
My peers in Chennai earn now in USD what I earned in 2008 (with reasonable schedules for the most part). My salary has since doubled but the gap is closing.
Something is disrupting the software industry and might cause a drop in salaries, and some people on HN are acting like the sky is falling. This is how taxi drivers felt when Uber and Lyft came for their wages. Or how booksellers felt when Amazon ate their industry. Or how so many other people felt when we cheer for the startups that disrupt lots of other industries. HN is all about this sort of industry-shifting change.
This is not a bad thing. It's just a change that you are potentially on the wrong side of. Work out how to capitalize on it. Figure out an angle, start a company, and profit from it.
I used the shift to remote work to move company and net myself a better, fully remote role and a ~50% raise. And that's the lazy, low risk way to take advantage of it. There is a whole world of opportunity here.
Outsourcing already happened without salaries equalising. To the extent that it can be done, it has been done. For instance, I have a constant stream of people on LinkedIn wanting to sell me projects in eastern Europe and India.
I think the thing to think about is how negotiating positions change. On the face of it you'd think it's bad for Western devs because there's more competition. But it's also bad for hiring managers because there's more of them competing too. I recently had a remote offer gazumped by another one, which would not have happened in the days of "all finance jobs are in a London office".
For people in the low income countries, they have the double edged sword of low cost of living. OTOH they can live like princes on a western salary. OTOH they have to give up some of that because anyone bargaining with them knows they will share a large chunk of the excess in the form of a lower salary. You can cry "same work same pay" all you like, they will agree a lower salary themselves.
There's also a eye of the needle effect. If someone had been a FAANG or similarly hard to get role, people are going to want to pay them more, just because. Similarly if someone hasn't worked in the west and gotten paid in the west, people will negotiate lower pay for them. This is really awesome if you were a FAANG guy whose family is Indian, you'd get a top % of the world income in a middle income country. But for most of the unanointed, it's good but not great.
I've been interviewing lately and what I'm seeing is that companies are indeed hiring more internationally but salaries are also significantly up. What's different is that productivity is also up so people are building billion dollar companies with 10-20 engineers. So there's less room for people that aren't top contributors but compensation for those top contributors is still very good.
Doesn’t seem to have made any downward impact on my yet, at least. If anything, my bargaining power has gone up, given the upped frequency of recruiting emails for fully remote positions.
Is it still called outsourcing if the work stays in the same country or state? Some people on HN probably hope this transfers jobs from high COL trendy cities to low COL remote workers 100 miles away.
There's no going back to the legacy reality. I don't know why some people can't seem to cope with the idea that reality is something that changes over time.
I'm already seeing the opposite. The folks who are coming back to the office are at a distinct communication advantage. This advantage compounds over time. Maybe it works for "remote only" companies, but even there, most such companies are particular business models that work well with remote (i.e software). Most companies aren't software companies.
If we're going to bet on the future, I'm betting on ~all of human history, instead of a 2-year sample of exigent circumstances. Humans are social animals.
What I find offensive is the notion that workers consider a 10-25% increase in hours as commensurate with a 5% pay cut. End commuting. It's unpaid labor.
Yes, commuting is the number one reason to work from home for me. I don't like to spend 1-2 hours a day driving back and forth just to have my ass in a chair at the office.
I've just gone back to an office (I changed jobs) and I'm shocked how maybe 5 out of 8 of my team choose regular office work over hybrid simply because of the free lunches and dinners.
Personally I find standing on a train for 45 minutes each way, and not being able to do small household errands on my breaks, like I can when I work from home, means my entire Mon-Fri is a cycle of sleep-eat-commute-work with no time to tend to anything.
It's a shock to the system.
That said, I switched rolls for twice the money, not 5%, and hybrid work will hopefully be something I can move to in a couple of months.
> I'm shocked how maybe 5 out of 8 of my team choose regular office work over hybrid simply because of the free lunches and dinners.
Some people I know are bachelors who don't cook (weird lifestyle, but it takes all sorts I guess) so employers with canteens are a big attraction for them.
Other people, I suspect, have reasons for getting back to the office that they're a bit shy about. Joking that you're just here for the coffee preserves your status and privacy better than saying you're back in the office because your house is tiny / your kids are uncontrollable / you struggled with mental health issues.
There are definitely people for whom having to deal with food seven days a week was a rude awakening. That said, as you note, I see people with significant commutes coming back into offices on a regular basis for reasons that are clearly not cafeteria related. (We don't have free meals or have dinner at all in my local office; I'm remote.)
As much as I'm ashamed to admit it, my diet suffered when I went totally WFH. I went from eating a healthy salad 4x a week to 'eating out of the pantry' with grocery runs every two weeks or so. You can't keep salad greens around shopping that infrequently. Granted, shopping that infrequently was a consequence of trying to limit exposure in a global pandemic, but my dietary habits are much less healthy now, lol.
I’m the opposite. Lost 20lb during WFH eating healthy meals at home with the occasional takeout cheat meal. Gained it all back once I had to return to the office and resort to eating supposedly “healthy” meals provided by the company. No time to prep at home because frankly after being punched kicked and beaten up by the 800lb gorilla that is the miserable commute I’m in no mood to do so.
Switched jobs that is 100% back to office but quadrupled my pay (and significant boost in company brand name too), otherwise I’d be disgruntled.
The commute into NYC is as miserable of an experience and a huge collective waste of time.
But a lot of my coworkers on my new team love the fact that they can eat breakfast lunch and dinner at the office for free. Then again they are all young and single.
If you consider commuting as labour, you’re creating an incentive for many workers to increase the distance between where they work and where they live. Something comparable has happened in Belgium with the system of company cars. A car with fuel card is considered as a standard part of the salary package, which is advantageous from a fiscal perspective. What you get is more traffic, pollution, urban sprawl and more time wasted sitting in cars.
"you’re creating an incentive for many workers to increase the distance between where they work and where they live"
Having commuted for many many years, I literally cannot fathom how this line of thinking is even considered a reasonable counter. Do some poeple get to commute through a utopic wonderland? Have I been living/working in the wrong places all these years?
The people I know who choose to live outside the city underestimate the impact of commuting on their quality of life, and overestimate the benefits associated to living in the “countryside”. They want a backyard and a dog. Once they’re stuck in their lifestyle, they develop a blindness to alternatives. Their experience of the city is the one of a commuter – a terrible one. They end up really believing that city life has to be terrible too. They have no idea how to manage the amount of stuff sitting in their relatively cheaper house. They forget about parks and alternative means of transportation to cars.
People should realize that comfortable car-centric lifestyles are too expensive for them to afford. I’m talking from the perspective of a Western European country.
Speaking from the perspective of a US commuter, the typical commuter here is probably not living in an urban city core, but rather the outskirts or suburbs due to affordability issues. So they’re not experiencing urban city life anyways to begin with.
I live outside Manhattan, NYC, into which I and countless others commute into for work. An astounding amount of collective hours is absolutely wasted on commuting into and out of Manhattan. The public transit system here is arguably the best in the US, but still utterly horrible compared to the systems in place in many Asian cities and probably European ones too.
The average commute in the US is apparently 27 minutes one-way. That's what people have settled on when they're spending their _own_ time. If you get paid for commute time it incentivizes people to commute even longer so they can get even more square footage per dollar, or whatever they're optimizing for.
Sounds like a post from r/antiwork but I do understand your point. In fact, when I was working in London it was doing the maths on my "unpaid labour" at the time which made me quit and start my first business.
1.5 hours each way * 5 days a week = 15 hours a week
That's 780 hours a year (not including holidays/sick leave etc)
That's 32.5 24 hour days! One whole calendar month sat in my car each year.
As soon I did that maths it was only a question of time before I quit.
And here's the other side of it: you were ruining the commute for everyone causally tied to their workplace (from baristas to doctors) by adding undue stress to transport infrastructure. Then there's the impact on the environment.
Dropping your commute isn't an entirely selfish idea.
„ workers view being forced to be in the office full-time as equivalent to a 5% pay cut”
They clearly cant do the math. Commute alone costs more than 5%
For obvious reasons people who have long commutes are most vocal about always working from home, but that is just another optimization/choice you have made in your life. For me commute doesn't cost anywhere near 5% of my time, but I have also made a conscious decision to live close to my office.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 321 ms ] thread"Work at your home office" culture still expects you to be in a predictable location and working predictable hours. Very similar to showing up to an office everyday.
"Remote" is closer to, "your location doesn't matter as long as you can perform your job".
Employers generally care about what jurisdiction you live in so they can comply with tax law, etc. Some employers don't care where you're at as long as your long-term residence is in one of their approved jurisdictions. Some will keep tabs on your location and pay you differently depending on where you live.
Some employers mandate a set of core hours, while others limit employee home locations by time zone, wanting workers to be approximately on the same schedule.
I've heard of some US Government workers who are allowed to work from home, but only from home. Ostensibly for cybersecurity reasons, they aren't allowed to work from hotels, cafes, airports, WeWorks, etc.
Then yeah, there's this sliding scale of hybrid remote/office work. "We're remote for now, but hope to get back to the office eventually". "We think 50/50 will be our new normal, but that's subject to change". "You can typically work from wherever you want, but we expect you to be available to come into the office for big meetings, etc".
I first thought that this didn't make so much sense, because you could just use a VPN. But this might be only partly because of network insecurity. It could be more because you have so little control over your neighbors and physical environment in public and semipublic spaces, and people who know you're there can easily arrange to be nearby you in order to try shoulder-surfing or higher-tech attacks.
For example, it might be challenging to get close enough to someone's home office to carry out an attack like this, but not so difficult in comparison in a café.
https://www.tau.ac.il/~tromer/handsoff/
Would you feel OK if you called up your bank to sort out a problem with your account, and they were opening all your account details on a laptop in a coffee shop or WeWork office shared with all sorts of people? If you were a normal employee raising an issue with HR and they were doing that? If you were Apple, or high up in a company behaving like them and trying to keep projects secret and your employees were doing that?
I work full time remote but this is the approach I would take as a company. Once your team is distributed across timezones a lot of things get really hard.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211028100825/https://www.econo...
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“Sorry about that so anyway like I was saying…”
TBH, they've been really fantastic about everything from the very beginning of covid. I think as more large companies get on board with this, we're reaching a tipping point where the B tier organizations are starting to realize they can use remote as a powerful bargaining chip to lure talent away from FAANG.
Most companies don't need the "intensive in-person collaboration", or whatever nonsense reasoning that FAANG is using to avoid full remote. They just need skilled efficient engineers to churn out CRUD work and move Jira tickets, which can be done from anywhere with minimal interaction.
Even if you have great transportation (Tokyo, London, New York), the commute is still pretty brutal.
The only real "solution" that was ever presented to this problem was to create smaller garden cities that would have their own industries...this never worked out because everyone had to be in the city (perhaps coincident with more service-based economies, manufacturing did move out of big cities).
It is an extremely hard problem (and to be blunt, the solution of most planners has been: make me emperor, I will allocate the resources...it is a huge political/social/everything problem) but remote working is a very legitimate solution...although the response of any company towards better conditions for workers is always suspicion (if the workers are happier, don't we lose...somehow?).
(An extremely nerdy comparison is with proto-industry in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution...a lot of the intermediate production in textiles was done in homes by, what we would call today, independent contractors...as the capital intensity of the textile industry increased and new technology was developed so...to put it bluntly...that you could employ children to do the work then you saw industry move into city centres and slums appear. But before this time, you had people working in their own homes and on their own machines, and it was far more decentralised...although these people were often localised geographically as there was a whole supply chain. Definitely indicates that things don't really need to be the way they are.)
I had this realization recently. Our entire society and work culture is structured around the laws of thermodynamics. In the industrial age, you had a mill or a forge, or a steam engine that was running 24/7 and necessitated high concentration of the workforce purely for reasons of thermodynamic efficiency of operating said equipment. Everyone had to "gather around the fire" so to speak because having disparate smaller works would be incredibly inefficient. In a world where information work now dominates, these constraints have become meaningless and are only perpetuated via institutional inertia.
Anyway, we are not that fledgling economy anymore. Contemporary high-rise apartments are really nice! Even the mass-produced 5+1s are perfectly comfortable and dignified homes.
Correct, the ones we have now that only rich people can buy and which exist during a shortage of housing. Assuming that this can just scale up to house millions of people makes no sense (and has never occurred anywhere, the reason why public transit systems are so important is because it has never been possible to economically build enough housing within cities).
One thing that I've found absolutely fascinating is looking at the Soviet sphere when it comes to residential housing. A lot of housing got destroyed in WWII, and the soviets realized that the best way to house a lot of people in a hurry was to build apartment blocks. These blocks were designed to have everything one needed, shops, schools, etc, within reasonable walking distance. The commute to work was handled with public transport.
Now, I'm not saying everything was perfect, but I do find it interesting as an approach to residential design, mandating a mix of essential services within walking distance of housing is unheard of here in the US, and really only exists in cities that existed pre-car.
Before the pandemic, I chose to live in the countryside but at walking distance from a train station.
Coworkers always seem surprised I’m living « that far ». But now I’m equally happy to work from home or to take my refreshing 25min train trip through the countryside.
I sometimes have to endure full train, but at least it’s never in the morning. And sometimes I have to exceptionally take my car, and im hating it, but it’s rare enough to have no impact on my well-being.
On the other hand I have my desk at home with the coffee machine in the kitchen. I do enjoy going to the office but being forced to do it wouldn't sit well with me.
If I were to go into our city office, I'd only have about a 5 minute drive to the train station. But between leaving some slack to park and pay, the train ride, and either the subway or a longish walk on the other end, I'm still more than 90 minutes door to door--and that's with good transport links.
I've been going into the office a few days a week because my infant's daycare is nearby and it makes logistical sense. I am also double-vaccinated and wear a real mask with care. On most days I am the only person within 36 feet. I have repositioned myself near an air vent to take advantage of a positive pressure zone around my workspace.
I say this not to argue for the office but against it, I have personal space and I'm making this decision because its a rational one for my family and productivity and carefully mitigate my risks with my behavior. I think I'd immediately be unhappy if my employer compelled people to return, particularly before I am able to vaccinate my infant. In a giant open-plan building, it's suddenly possible to do intense focused work because it's an an appropriate occupancy level.
There are definitely downsides to it no doubt. I'm a social person and I miss shooting the shit with coworkers and in-person interaction. But I have to laugh when I see statistics in the article like "workers view being forced to be in the office full-time as equivalent to a 5% pay cut". 5%? Are you serious? For me, being asked to come into the office = I must physically live near my employer = I take more like a 70% pay cut. For 70% I'll find another social outlet!
Obviously, I have a biased perspective but what frustrated me wasn't the loss to my own career. I just got on with it, retrained, moved on. But the fact that I had useful skills, had spent years developing them, and the most rational thing for me to do was to literally start from zero in an industry that was more accommodating...which seems a bit silly.
So I wouldn't even frame this as a personal thing. The reason the career development opportunity is so large is because the opportunity for employers is so large...and, ofc, they are the ones resisting this.
We do it through college then stop. Think of it like term limits.
How much of this is really actually technical work and just data entry, sexed up for cashiers that got older?
Isn’t this what automation and division of labor are meant to do?
Good job, we achieved the goals. Go do something else.
I've been working remotely for almost a decade as a senior software engineer. Now, post-Covid, almost everyone realizes they can do the same.
Salaries are going to drop in the "rich world", and it's not just because people are now fleeing places like SF/SV to lower cost of living areas.
We are also beginning to compete globally, far more than ever before with the ease of remote work. Qualified engineers can be found for 1/10th of the price with "near shore" companies in the "rich world".
I know because I've worked with them throughout various roles, both as peers and as a PM/Team Lead.
The money may start flowing from the "rich world" to the "poor world" soon, no need for H1B visas or anything else.
The gold rush days may be over.
So previously being able to utilize offshore talent was basically a skill unto itself. Now you did two interviews with similarly skills candidates and one wants 50% less pay, they just have a british accent.
Other commenters have addressed this, but the term is normally used for teams within +/- the same timezone but at far lower rates for (hopefully) good engineering quality.
So if you are US EST, there are "near shore" companies in the US that will coordinate you with South American teams.
They generally have a PM in the US and developers outside.
In terms of European talent being paid less, yes I agree they are, but there are hidden costs in terms of taxes and compliance that means that companies would rather go to countries which promise an order of magnitude cheaper resources rather than just 50% off.
Another term is “best shoring”, which is code for wherever you can find talent capable of doing the job for the least amount.
Yep. I've said it many times here and basically anywhere I can: Clamoring for remote-only work, maximum-introvert, never fly somewhere, don't value in-person communication/meetings/etc is a dangerous game to be playing. People vastly overestimate how talented they are and how hard the problems they are solving may be.
Not today, and not tomorrow. But if face to face communication, meetings, and the other sociable stuff goes away, it won't take long for domestic management to realize where the cost savings could come from, and international management to realize they need to upskill their people in English and code quality to earn "huge" [0] salaries consistently.
[0] Huge salaries to them being a high-five figure salary.
What's interesting is that I flew in for a meeting with my company recently, the first I've had since I've been hired.
This took hours upon hours of my time. Time I could have spent working.
We spent it between a conference room and at restaurants, and much of the time was spent discussing things with the larger team that were not relevant to me. So I spent that time on my laptop fixing bugs, in the conference room.
There was zero benefit to any of this outside of a solid handshake and getting to "meet people in person".
However, I have 3 meetings a week with the entire team on HD video, so I already knew exactly who I was meeting and what their mannerisms and personalities were.
That included walking through an office where people jumped out of the cubicles and offices when they saw me and said "hey! Great to finally see you in person!" without a second thought. They knew exactly who I was without having ever met me.
Is this really necessary? This was a huge waste of company money that I could have spent working.
What engineers and people on this site seem to not grasp is that "working" is not a strict definition that maps to "writing code" to management, business operations, marketing, sales... basically every non-engineering department.
If that concept starts to take root in the mind, then it becomes a bit more clear why people like the office. Engineers on HN seem to be incapable of considering that the social aspect of work is important to most non-introvert non-engineers in an office and that a lot of "work" is forming bonds, developing relationships, and yes, "playing politics" to some extent.
I don't doubt that the 10x engineer is well-represented on this site and that their worth is quite high for their work output. Lesser engineers and developers who work on glorified CRUD apps and mobile adware can easily be replaced, and the issue is that often they think they are also elite 10x engineers who have the same type of nobility and don't have to play the office game.
Time will tell if they're right, but I'm betting not. Especially since I know a lot of hiring managers exploring outsourcing during the Great Resignation and Remote Work Only craze and finding results being... quite good.
I do this all day in private Slack communications, 1-1 video conferences, and everything else.
This "watercooler effect" myth may seem important to some, but I know my team members closely because I am talking to them all day, whether we're staring at each other face to face or not. I already know their kids are in college, or the sports teams they are interested in, or the typical company rumor mill.
I'm 2+ decades in this game and I am familiar with the office. I spent 10 years driving an hour-each-way commute to spend 10+ hours in an office to help start a company with one other person. Which ended up growing to 20+ employees.
What is the purpose of "in person"? I have friends and a life outside the office. That doesn't make me an "introvert", it makes me a person who wants to spend the company's money wisely, especially against tight deadlines.
They need me writing code, or architecting a project, or leading a team.
That doesn't just happen. I'm glad your company/team has apparently figured it out; mine certainly hasn't.
There can be a lot of ideas that a stated in way that makes it seem like most people would totally agree, like that "socializing at the office is obviously a chore that's a waste of time", that "work is about maximizing your programming output", or that "managers want employees back at the office is because they feel insecure about their value and don't trust their employees to get work done". But I don't think the vast majority of the workforce would necessarily agree to those ideas. As much as HN types like to make fun of MBAs and their bean-counting, there's the feeling that in their own heads the primary directive is to try to maximize the throughput of neatly parceled work units and would deride those who disagree as "time wasters".
The risk with this kind of thinking is that you end up not being nearly as objective as you think you are, and worse, you will fail to predict how things are going to happen. If you were reading Reddit during the 2016 and 2020 democratic primary; you would have been sure that Bernie was going to be the nominee. My workplace surveyed whether people want to do full-remote, hybrid, or full-office. Reading HN, you'd think the obvious top choice would have been full-remote, since most of us could actually work fully remote. As it turns out, it was not the winner. (Before saying that management fudged the numbers: The outcome was supported by my informal questioning of my coworkers as to how they voted.)
It's one thing if your job is to stay at the assembly line punching holes in metal sheets 40 hours a week. And another thing if you have the capacity for improving the overall process (and profits), while still spending 10 hours punching holes part-time because it brings you joy. From management perspective, it's those 10 hours that are wasted.
Or if you're taken out of your dear assembly line and flown to the other part of the country in business class, to attend a week-long series of meeting with a customer. Somehow that ends up helping to secure a huge contract, just because your presence affected the customer's perception. From your perspective, that might look like the company has wasted a fine week of your work on useless meetings and communication. From company's perspective, just with that they have made more money than you'd bring them in a two years otherwise.
My current job is 100% remote; I've never met my coworkers or my users. I love not commuting, but the lack of personal bonding and the need for all communication to be 100% intentional is a real drawback. I think it's especially limiting for people that I don't work very closely with. E.g., I can't just go hang out with users and watch them work. Which makes it much harder to build relationships where I say, "Hey, let me show you something."
So... what you like is making it harder for other people to work by forcing them to pay attention to you according to your whims. I much prefer a coworker reaching out to me on Slack and saying "When you have time, let me show you something." And then I get back to them when I've finished what I am working on.
Do you have empathy towards 90% of the remainder of a company who doesn't like that?
You clearly want other people to show empathy and try to honor the way you like to work. So I'll repeat icelander's question: Do you have empathy towards 90% of the remainder of a company who doesn't like that?
Is it necessary? Definitely not. But I have the opportunity and I think it’s great to do, and great to plan together.
That’s a lot of benefit to me? I like knowing that the person on the other end of the camera actually exists in 3D.
Consider how you define yourself, and where you see your life going over the long term.
Different strengths/reservoirs of energy and motivation are needed to "make it happen" in the real world.
How can you ensure your team will be there when you need them?
The irony of writing this doesn't escape me, as I weigh the frankly-more-time-efficient-for-me working at home I have now, versus the team-efficiencies of being in the office.
When there was friction involved in organizing a meeting (Needing to gather participants all in one place, book conference room, get projector working etc.) people were reluctant to call trivial meetings.
Now it feels like everyone has discovered Microsoft Teams and people feel obligated to call meetings for all manner of things that would have previously been solved by email or 'water cooler conversations'.
The volume of meetings I find myself attending now has skyrocketed compared to how often I'd be physically present in meetings when I worked in office. The only saving grace is you can mute yourself and alt-tab which is much more difficult when you are physically present at a meeting.
It doesn't matter much in the good times when everything is going smoothly. But when the crap hits the fan and you don't have that connection - things tend to get contentious a lot faster. If you're the only one on the team without a human connection to the rest of the team, you're set up to be the scapegoat when things go wrong. It's just human nature.
CheckSalary.co.uk puts the average salary for "a programmer" in the UK at £43K, Reed.co.uk says £41k, Glassdoor says £35K, Payscale says £31K... maybe devs here should upskill in English?
https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/programmer-salary-SRCH_...
Of course, attitudes differ wildly from individual to individual, but the average can be quite hard to work with. It took me a few years to really adjust.
May be, Germans (and most Europe) are "straightforward" from an American perspective. I find Europeans with their own shade of "subtlety" which you could only learn if you were part of the culture. Otherwise, they are "subtle" and "measured" too.
The more you eliminate synchronous communication, in-person interaction, and office work... the less those cultural differences are going to matter.
Some email that was sent and misunderstood? Your entire project can go off-rails. People can hold grudges over something that was not intended at all. Etc. You're much more likely to catch these things early in face-to-face communication due to body language, tone of voice, etc.
Text communication is pretty hard to get right in general and text communication in a non-native language is even harder, doubly so when you're talking to a native speaker and there's an asymmetry in language skills, which there often is, even with fairly proficient non-native speakers. Add to that cultural differences on what is or isn't "appropriate" or different interpretations on various things and it can become quite tricky to communicate effectively.
This table is a good example of this: https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2014/02/angl...
Management has been looking at off-shoring whatever they can for the past decades already. Having a bigger pool of talent willing to work remotely is a boon, but most of the new influx is not from lower level countries (they already were 99% ok with full remote), and more from places with high level salaries.
Management will find cheaper people, but only marginally, and not that different from the people they already had. Except most of the people they will find will be the ones playing the full-remote "dangerous game" you warn about
This is a dangerous assumption rooted in past failures. I can personally tell you that I have a lot of evidence that points to it no longer being true. Eastern European developers are good enough to do CRUD and basic work that is massively overpaid here in the US, and speak English quite well.
I would tread lightly. It's still very early.
I don't think engineers in France or London (and I assume the US) are getting paid big bucks for actual basic work, that ship has long sailed IMO.
What seems missing from this discussion are the social connections remote workers pursue in the absence of water cooler conversations and company social events.
For many office workers, their co-workers are their main source of social interaction.
For remote workers, it's a deliberate decision to keep their social lives separate from work. They very well may be extroverts in their personal social activities.
It's actually more or less the market rate.
This is freakishly hard to manage effectively. Sounds good in theory but most will fail trying.
In my company it's also very difficult to hire a full time employee in another country due to all kinds of regulations and the overhead they entail.
My prediction is that in the long run a lot of companies will still prefer people who are close. Managing remote people effectively is very difficult. A lot of managers will fail doing so. And a lot of people are also not cut out for remote work and need interaction at the office.
I remember when offshoring became popular in the 90s it looked all work would go to India but this didn't happen either.
"When things need to get done quickly or a problem can only be resolved by talking directly"... and that problem occurs at night in my timezone, a team mate who's awake can deal with it with a rested head and no burnout in her or his day.
Admittedly, there are many companies who don't need 24x7 business continuity and are perfectly content with 10x5. For them, this is unnecessary complexity.
On the other side of this, I feel like I'm seeing I'm seeing "leverage time zone differences to accelerate the development process" in hardware engineering job postings with increasing frequency. I can definitely see where there's an efficiency gain for heavily sequential tasks like PCB design bring-up to have teams working in shifts without anybody losing brain power by working outside of normal hours.
As long as we can find good enough people in our state, it’s just not worth the hassle to add more HR challenges than we have to.
Communication is still a gigantic issue to overcome. So is managing teams and availability during the work day.
If anything, it might push more really smart people to start their own companies instead of working for someone else to achieve a lesser level of prosperity.
Communication is huge but I can assure you I've worked with teams on the opposite side of the globe asynchronously without issue. The concept of "workday" can be tossed aside if we are thinking 9-5 M-F.
Global teams can adjust schedules and work effectively. I know because I've managed teams like this in very complex software projects and it has worked.
The US tech worker is about to get NAFTA'd.
on the other hand, it's interesting to take note of what the big tech companies are doing. for the most part, they seem to have developed an increase tolerance for WFH, but continue to invest heavily in building new offices. not sure what that says long term.
even pre-COVID, big tech companies had offices outside the US. if you could already find enough engineers worth hiring to set up an office in brazil, how much does full remote change things? either way, talent is pretty densely clustered in the biggest cities to begin with.
Then in 2008 when the economy crashed I had one bizdev guy tell me that pretty soon everyone was going to be able to code with these new 'no code apps' and that I was going to be a fossil and I should move into management.
Then in 2012 people talked about how many brilliant chinese programmers there were and how all the jobs were going to be outsourced to china.
I think about this sometimes, because while I did have a successful stint as a team lead, now i'm just a senior SWE. Things have turned out pretty well so far. I've only seen salaries go up.
This is different because Covid-19 has shown to everyone that they can do their jobs remotely.
And if they can do their jobs remotely, why can't an equally skilled engineer in a country with a cost of living 1/10th of the "rich countries" do the same?
They are realizing they can, and handing this off.
I too was around in 2000, writing applications in C# beta before 1.0.
Still here but noticing the trends.
Citation needed.
We're on HN, a technology site.
Many of us have realized we can do our jobs the exact same way as we did before.
I'm not talking about construction workers, police, fast food, etc.
I'm not sure this needs a citation.
"Many of us" with decades into this career and who have managed such teams would disagree.
This is far different than then.
In 2000, remote work was almost an impossibility... between bandwidth, protocols and everything else.
These days it's as easy as enabling your built-in HD cam and mic and getting to business.
I've had my share of severe pushbacks with "management" over the years.
They've often been burned by shopping projects out to the lowest bidder and suddenly realize you need competent engineers to make it happen.
The problem is you can find competent engineers now across the planet for far less than what you would pay a US-based engineer, forget about whatever is going on in SF/SV.
A lot of people would like to stick their fingers in their ears and say "nah nah nah" rather than realize what is going on, but I deal with it daily.
But are you really saying that it's only in 2020 that people put effort into outsourcing to cheaper foreign talent?
Or that the technology of remote work is now what makes it possible? I dispute that as well, good remote collaboration has been happening in open source for forever. People who can make it work make it work. It's not the issue and never has been.
I'm an American expat and one of the things that I quickly discovered when I left and started traveling is that skilled engineers (and designers, etc.) in countries with significantly lower costs end up figuring out how much they're worth to employers/clients in richer countries. When they do and they have enough of a track record to prove their worth, their rates go up.
So if you think you're going to take your freelance developer in the US who charges $150/hour and replace him with an equally skilled freelance web developer in, say, Brazil for $15/hour, good luck. Any such developer in the Brazil will eventually discover that he's able to command much more. Except in a few rare instances it won't be $150/hour, but when you factor in time zones, cultural differences and language, there is far less of a difference in cost than you'd think.
Anecdotally, I have a few friends that run companies in the US that have expanded their hiring to consider remote candidates outside of the US and Canada and they still struggle to find suitable candidates even though the rates they're offering are based on qualifications, not location. In other words, they're willing to pay $100+/hour to the right people no matter where they live. Good people are in demand everywhere, and they know it.
I think people underestimate the demand for talent and think that globally we can fill that hole. We can’t, yet. Humans don’t scale well enough and eventually automation will be the real problem. (But I also think that is further away than currently advertised, but different topic.)
Same reasons as last decade. Time zone difference, language/culture barrier, the legal complications of hiring across jurisdictions. I don't see how any of it has been addressed by recent events or incremental improvements to remote working tools.
I think it came up in a previous thread on the topic that the non-US workers that can overcome these barriers but aren't interested in immigrating, still demand competitive US rates when working with US companies (through consultancies, iirc).
I’m dealing with a company that decided to try outsourcing for a second time starting just before covid hit and it’s just as miserable as it was the last time they tried in 2009. “But video conferencing” doesn’t bridge cultural friction and timezones.
It's just that good people aren't cheap, even remote ones. And they're hard to find.
It really does feel like there is a gigantic competency bubble that is about to pop.
The amount of people who are willing to learn the hard systems and businesses is dwindling by the day. You think its difficult to find airline pilots and truckers? Try to find a developer with both the domain knowledge and technical skills to fix a custom piece of code in a community bank's core system that was written in 1994. Oh, and we need it fixed before close of business or our fedwire files are going to be totally fucked...
The amount of money they will have to offer to capture the appropriate talent to keep their businesses running is going to become astronomical. The executives sometimes try to take a quick path out of this hell and usually wind up with 1 additional reason they have to stay. The most common mistake is attempting a full vertical swap-out, followed by paying some firm to explain that your shit sucks by way of installing some middleware in your infrastructure and telling you things you already know.
I've spoken to a lot of recruiters over the last year and they're primarily indicating that a hybrid 2 days in the office model is the preference.
Integrating new staff is hard at the best of times, let alone half fully-remote and half hybrid.
The rich countries still prefer to hire in rich countries, because of:
* similar timezone/working hours
* similar work culture
* less language barriers
* rich countries still got better skilled workers
* less legislative overhead with employments, payments, firing
* if you get a really good person in third world, he will in the end cost similarly as good person in first world
Inevitably. Because a person like that will very quickly move to the first world.
Maybe not in 100 years, but right now that's how it is.
Stop going to work.
Switch to open source projects.
Let social media crash.
K8s clusters with Kilo hosted on laptops, desktops.
We have the tools to blackout the web and bring a whole huge part of the economy down.
Zuckerberg could be Pauperberg if the internet gathered round chanting “this is the new way”.
I mean you know DC has no clue how anything works beyond quid pro quo.
So why would they hire workers in their own country? People in this thread already have said it. Time zones, cultural business norms and understanding, native communication ability, tax and legal issues regarding employment (already annoying enough to hire employees in other states in the US for example), ability to connect with clients in the same locale, etc.
Now I’ll give you that this MIGHT shift things to a degree. I don’t think it’ll be the race to the bottom you and others are saying.
People have been saying this since the 1990's
The same may hit some highly-paid professionals in the future. If tech keeps making things easier while the rest of the world grows wealthier and more competitive, they may find that their skills are no longer in demand. The job is not as demanding as it used to be, and there are more people in the market capable of doing it just as well.
Those at the top are safe, but the top is slowly getting narrower.
This has been happening for decades. It is an inherent property of technology AIG automation driving down marginal costs and increasing yields, all benefiting owners of capital or those who have the ability to help automate.
Maybe in the "rich world", but not globally :-) I've been hearing lots and lots of stories of growing salaries across places that were historically underpaid (Brazil, Portugal, Berlin, etc) - maybe we'll have a thousand gold rushes, as the water level rises to meet the "rich world" levels!
Sounds familiar... I think you still get what you pay for.
There are certainly a lot of products where it doesn't matter at all, but in other areas you really need to be careful with what you send to the contractor and what you do in-house.
You seem to believe there are no political dynamics to this situation. On a small scale, sure. On a large scale I think you’ll find the political stability that executives in the US have come to rely on will quickly disappear. The 2016 elections were already a reflection of the general populace growing tired of offshoring jobs. When that hits the middle and upper middle class as well, shit will hit the fan globally.
I think the reason is that many people conflate "remote" with "asynchronous". Having a company go fully remote is one thing, having a company move to a culture of asynchronous work is something completely different.
Some tech companies will be able to do this, but the problems really arise for companies that have to keep "business hours" here in the US. Take a major chain store, a healthcare company, a <insert traditional buisness> software provider.
These businesses have to balance and on-shore workforce with an off-shore workforce. There will be people that work on the ground, and they will obviously have to be on-shore, so will upper management most likely. What about the other layers in the organization. From a high level it sounds simple but when you dive down into which teams support which teams and report to which managers and yada yada yada, where you draw the line all of a sudden becomes much harder and fuzzier.
Most companies that will do what you are talking about have already done so. The reason the water hasn't leveled off more to other parts of the world like you are saying is either due to existing business constraints or risk aversion to possible constraints an offshore team may impose.
You also have to take into account that working for US company is not that desirable because of the employer culture, for example. Some of us like worker protection laws, for example, or government-mandated guaranteed vacation time or double pay for overtime or some weeks off when you have a newborn on your hands. Or be informed months in advance about your lay-off and be compensated hansomely for that (if the company isn't folding).
In the US these things are under the employers' discretion, and it's considered something amazing and impossible, like ambulance rides that don't cost more than your kidney on black market.
And lose that over 1/10th of what you guys get? Hahaha, oh wow, you're insane. If I have no guarantees, I want to be compensated accordingly! So don't get your knickers in a knot and perpetuate the "omg remote is killing workers" meme. Remote is better for everyone.
Oh and by the way, you know what protects you from %worker apocalypse reason%? UNIONS. There's a reason the bald fuck's afraid of them.
Jesus.
That's not how global economics works.
Also, their English was almost indecipherable from a native speaker.
I moved back when I reached a point where my skills were good enough that I could secure a job remotely due to social proof/references.
The thing people are missing here is that not everyone that is living everywhere in the world is equally good and those that are 10x as good get paid between 4-5x as much (it should be more but the world is inefficient, overpays for poor quality, underpays for high quality in many cases).
I'm not worried that increasing remote hiring will affect my compensation.
No need for companies to pay more for premium locations / perk offices.
No need for companies to deal with the hassle of H1B visas.
From a company perspective, why pay someone in the USA $165k/year to work from home in Trendyville when an Indian engineer is $35k/year in Bangalore?
Ive had better experience with people in the NL but still obvious communication issues, bad experiences with Australia and Asia.
For better or for worse(I think worse) engineering culture is heavily footed in North American language and culture.
The problem is, most companies who offshore are being cheapskates, and go bottom barrel. Then we Americans who work with them are thinking 'wow, people from country X are terrible programmers.'
But not universally true. Amazing talent exists in India for example, but they command much higher prices.
To answer your question, it's because most people aren't. You typically work with one or two brilliant people, a buncha midrangers, then ... those.
However, when you get folks from other countries, it's typically only because your company is trying to cut costs and hires some really cheap body shop. So we don't meet the brilliant people from other countries, and are lucky to encounter the midrangers. And they don't stick around long.
I was once so excited that a person we got from said body shop offshore was truly brilliant. Like, a person hired as Java but happened to know C and ASM and the inner workings of the linux kernel. He asked if he could help me with a couple (harder) things I was working on, and was amazing. As you may imagine, he stayed for about a month before moving to better things. I begged my company to poach him, but our contract forbid it.
And they did anyway.
Have you considered that you are the one who is a poor communicator? You wouldn't be the first:
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20161028-native-english...
Especially implying that there's less of an engineering culture in a country that brought us ASML - the company behind the machines used by TSMC to produce the Apple M1?
What it might change for the outsourcing market is reducing office space if people from India can work from home, too. That would allow them to lower costs, just as US firms can lower costs for domestic workers by shedding office space. I'm not sure why those office reductions would be greater in India than in the U.S.
Beyond that, firms have been outsourcing wherever they could for the last twenty years already. Every major tech company has some offices in India already. What's left in the U.S. are those jobs that can't be transferred because productivity is more important than lowering costs. At this point, the differentiator between the 200K job and the 60K job is productivity, not geography.
The title of this article perhaps indicates a move from 1 to 3 or 4 but its content discusses 2. All the information I've seen is that business are definitely moving more to 2 than 3 or 4, though some do see this a just a first step.
Its a big difference for the future of cities as 2 is more 'coastal historic town just outside the city', 3 is more 'small town in the same part of the world' and 4 is more 'move to thailand'.
2 is still a local workforce with visas and taxation where 4 is a global workforce available anywhere with a base level of infrastructure, and little taxation for service-based business until there is greater international cooperation.
Our company operates as a 4 tier and I've been here for going on 7 years now. We still have to get on a daily standup call at a fixed time every day, and I still have to participate in other scheduled obligations (mainly tech calls with customers), but the rest of the time is mine to allocate as I see fit.
Also, there are consequences with "no fixed hours" that lots of humans are incapable of dealing with. The amount of discipline it requires to manage this freedom is not insignificant. This said, I am not against multitasking. If you can have something rolling while you get your work done, fuckin awesome. I don't care. I am more worried about the individual lounging on their couch, halfway through a 6 pack of IPA getting in some of that game of thrones re-watch, while the rest of the team is mopping up a shitty merge to master wondering where that individual may be at 11am on a Tuesday.
I've had these scenarios in a 9-5 office job - eg. someone merged in some shit that broke migrations, CI takes forever to run so they don't catch it, the next day they are off and now I'm there touching systems I know little about just to revert my setup to a working state.
I think if you can't rely on people in your team to be professional/competent it's going to be shit no matter where you work. That being said managing flexible work hours is really hard, it's especially hard if you're bad at estimating how much is acceptable to deliver in some time frame. If you always give estimates based on what you're capable at your ideal 8 work hours you're going to sink a lot more time than 8 hours a day - especially if you allow yourself to be distracted. I try to give my estimates based on 4 productive hours per day.
I'm trying to figure out if my current remote job is fixed hours. Nobody has ever asked me or said anything about the hours I work, but I am expected to be present for meetings, which usually occur in the middle of the day for me. Is that tier 3 or 4?
I'd say we're 4s more than 3s. I would say that an agreed upon, regular meeting doesn't dictate your set hours--just a single obligation that you all agreed to.
Also of note: you can have in-office work with the same flexible hours schemes.
Personal/Family life always comes before work, and I'm not risking that.
I don’t doubt that some people will be remote - but the ones that get ahead will be local - and that will draw people back.
However, I still think we've achieved a "good enough" state and the cons are no longer enough to stop WFH.
I think it will just set up a different selector for who continues to get paid well. I would guess that people who can operate well in all-remote organizations will probably continue to earn high salaries. People who can't get a handle on contributing well, consistently, for an all-remote organization will struggle to take advantage of these changes.
It's one thing to start working with an in-office team, and then continue contributing reasonably well because everyone went remote during the pandemic. It's another thing to get hired for an all-remote team, get your bearings in that organization, start to contribute well, and continue to contribute well.
I think this might go for founders as well. Some people will be able to build and lead an all-remote team. Some people will need the bulk of their people to be in an office in order to build an effective team.
When you watch effective communicators, they can write a terse comment and everyone straight up understands without any more fuss. Once you have been on that kind of team, you will never want to communicate about work any other way. Remote work is very efficient under this model.
I think everyone can be an effective communicator, but it is a learned skill. A skill those who have spent their career in an office never had to learn. Those who were recently thrust into remote work without those skills have struggled, but...
What if this forced period of remote work has tipped the scales in favour of the critical mass learning how to communicate effectively? Anecdotally, I have seen significant improvement in the formerly office-going team I have been a part of since March 2020. We have a ways to go before we match what I have witnessed earlier in my career when I was lucky enough to work with some highly effective people, but if this carries on for a sufficient amount of time I think we might just get there.
Of course it varies from team to team. I don't see any evidence of widespread improvement in skill. Although I think there's been some value in higher slack adoption so the barrier between offices has lowered while intra-office is worse. At least that's what I've personally seen.
I think open source software is a testament the the idea that software does not require physical collaboration most of the time.
All this just to say I don't think its all that valid of a argument.
big company will not find individual one by one, an employee overseas is hard to certify and might steal IP then disappear so there is more risk, language barrier, management challenging, time zone difference, not a total rosy picture for me.
but yes for those really outstanding developers they will land a job with USA pay-scale easily, but will this turn into a trend for a global workforce(for ordinary developers) in a flat world remains to be seen.
In the end, we opened offices of our own in less expensive parts pf the US and the world where wages were lower. But since then, wages have risen substantially in several of those sites, making even this strategy largely pointless. Not to mention other challenges like distributing workgroups and communications across 5 time zones, some of which are 12 hours apart from our HQ.
I'm not sure where we go next, since outsourcing and out-officing have both failed to live up to expectations. Regardless, I don't see remote work as solving these problems. Unless those wages are dirt cheap, remoting more staff will only make our past problems worse.
But I realized it's not happening, because for some reason they don't seem so have the same state capacity to act. It's a bunch of individuals, thousands of little groups suspicious of each other, struggling to provide even basic infrastructure in their largest cities. And constant brain drain to the West.
I really wish India well, and hope one day they will overcome this. A democratic, friendly, yet independent minded counterweight to China would be very nice, and the Indians deserve effective governance.
That is good news. Do you attribute this to Modi or something else? Do you think it has been institutionalized to last after the current administration leaves?
This means two things:
1) If you disable JavaScript, the paywall goes away.
2) If you can quickly ctrl + a, ctrl + c the entire article you can read it on your IDE.
We need to tell economist.com developers to patch this.
https://myaccount.economist.com/s/contact-us
Reporting costs money. Free news is generally paid for by the funder. Given the above, how is paywalled content hurting the news industry?
I for one won't subscribe to paywalled sites i only occasionally get links to on HN or other news aggregators just because they're linked here.
Funny enough, I am subscribed to a site that gets linked on here semi regularly. Not paywalled, ads or pay for no ads/tracking. But I've been reading it longer than I've read HN.
I have 2x 27" 1440p IPS screens at home, which is just perfect for coding. The single 24" 1080p screen is not going to cut it at the office.
At home I'm also using my desktop (rysen-based + nvme) pc for work and it feels about 10x faster than the macbook air they supply (which I haven't done real work on for the last year). I'm also using a Logitech G815 + Logitech G102 with a massive mouse pad. My desk has been lowered (I've cut the legs shorter to an exact height) to a point where my knees/legs are in the air to allow blood flow. I also have an electric foot warmer for the winter months (pet heating pad in a nice cover). Other than that, nicer headphones + speakers + studio microphone and overall desk aesthetics...So I want to see them replicate my very comfortable setup that I have at home vs the office. Also having fiber at home without silly restrictions.
If you plan to work on/with web frameworks, advertisements, data science, or pure CS topics for your whole career, then there's probably no excuse to force you to come into the office 5 days a week. But good luck doing that as a software engineer at a company like SpaceX, Tesla, Intel, AMD, defense contractors, etc., let alone as any other kind of STEM professional. I think it's an important distinction to make. For me personally, some of the coolest work I can imagine doing is likely going to be done in the office/lab for the foreseeable future.
90% of the software I write works just fine in an emulator. We don't even have nearly enough hardware to give every engineer access.
As it should be. Investing some effort in my development environment has paid back every time.
(Only slightly tongue in cheek. At the margin, some of your efforts should fail.)
Whatever you build, you will need to change, as this is the nature of SW projects. Being able to make changes fast will be life saving at some point
This is the problem I always run into too. An emulator should be standard on any system development program that has software interacting with hardware.
You dont need to be anywhere specific to read a data sheet
I think you are overestimating the requirement to touch the hardware by few order of magnitude for a software engineer there. Just yesterday I was reading a linkedin post from some senior electrical engineer in Apple M1 division and how they achieved everything remotely. For a fabless company, I don't think most of the engineers would need to touch the chip. Similarly for Tesla and SpaceX, they had great two years when almost all software engineers were working remotely.
It was a fun day; I got to wear a bunny suit and a headset and climb around inside a space ship.
One of those things is not like the other things (it's the one where you build things that are explicitly designed to kill human beings). Not sure if you were calling that the coolest work, I certainly wouldn't call it that.
I just wish it wasn't like this. I wish we didn't have people engaged in the business of enabling industrial scale murder. I wish it wasn't profitable. I wish the citizenry would see through the propaganda and hold their leaders to account. I wish it wasn't the nation's poorest who were sent to die for the benefit of the nation's richest.
The war machine is a rotten, gruesome system, and I acknowledge it's not going away any time soon. But the least we can do is agree not to actively contribute towards it.
Is that a good thing? I’m not so sure. The age of mass armies was also the age of democratisation. If war is waged by defence firms and brilliant technocrats, then maybe defence firms and brilliant technocrats will run the country.
I am strongly in the 'we only need to defend American soil' camp. I'm not sure how much that costs, but considering we're a nuclear power, we have two relatively friendly neighbors and thousands of miles of ocean between us and our nearest peer enemies, it wouldn't surprise me if we could get away with spending a miniscule fraction of the 700B we do today.
There's nothing wrong with building weapons for defense. It's arguably the entire purpose of nukes at this point.
Even for offense, other countries are working hard to build out their arsenals.
I'm personally fine with building AI weapons, for example. If a contract opportunity appears, I might take it. After all, where else are you going to see the most advanced weaponry in the history of mankind?
That is absolutely not true. There are people in the governments of every nuclear power would use their weapons aggressively given the chance. That's why policies of disarmament are so necessary. As long as humans have nuclear weapons the probability of practically annihilating our species and leaving any survivors living in the stone age again remains higher than zero.
Nuclear war is the single biggest existential threat humanity faces. We can deal with pretty much anything else.
You're right so far. North Korea and Iran are ideologically opposed to the West, and both have ICBM capabilities. China also, but they have mixed goals (dominate the world, while parasiting off the US financially and technologically, without killing too many only-childs in war, while importing 50% of their energy and food without interruption.)
Chinese politicians have suggested publicly sending two warships for every Western one in the South China Sea, and ramming and sinking each Western one with one of theirs.
Also, Xi has recently threatened to use nuclear weapons against Guam and Japan. It's one thing to own them, but quite another to make specific threats to use them.
> That's why policies of disarmament are so necessary.
Not gonna happen with rogue actors like NK and Iran, or countries like China that won't take no for an answer.
In addition, the US can't disarm since most of the world is under our defense umbrella. Sadly, the weaker that umbrealla gets (ie. Scarborough Shoals scandal), the bigger the arms race in the Indo-Pacific region, as seen in the news currently. Very likely Japan will announce their own bomb in the next year (they've had ICBMs for decades aka NASDA.)
> Nuclear war is the single biggest existential threat humanity faces.
After the Cuban missile crisis, 2021 is the most dangerous time in history.
Note there was a second Cuban missile crisis, as the USSR left behind half of their nuclear missiles under the control of Castro, who the Kremlin slowly realized wanted to actually use them. The USSR used diplomacy to quietly get them back with the precept that it was required under a treaty that Castro had signed (Gromyko engineered that.)
I really do feel that reasonable people need to join such organizations, though, otherwise only unreasonable people will be in them. I recently found (to my dismay) that Von Neumann argued vehemently in favor of bombing the Russians before their nuclear program could be built, and all I could think was "This isn't the type of scientist that should have a lot of influence."
Eg if you are a civil engineer, lots of your work is spent doing calculations and designing things. When you do touch hardware, it's usually 'on site' and not at the office.
Yes, we work with various forms of pre- and post-silicon devices but you will find that either they can be accessed remotely, or you can send them by courier to whoever needs one.
So, sure, _some_ people need to be in the lab touching the hardware, especially during bringup, but the immense majority of the people, the immense majority of the time, can work remotely.
I know defense contractors that are working from home. Two of them did so before the pandemic too - remoting into hardware they're not allowed to physically touch even if they were in the lab!
A neighbour is a civil engineer and the huge screens he needed to do his job were only in the office. Now that he's moved that huge screen (and I mean massive, it's like a telly), the office have told him that he only needs to go into the office to meet clients.
I have a product design dear friend who bought himself a Prusa 3D printer and now can pretty much 100% WFH. He prefers it because he no longer has to share resources.
A neighbour is a network engineer and he spent 2020 decommissioning hardware in the server room and moving it into the cloud - something he said was inevitable for his business but the pandemic hastened it. He now WFH pretty much 100% of the time.
I know someone who works for a SSD manufacturer in the states and they WFH most of the week.
All the web/data devs I know WFH pretty much full time - except one but only because his boss is draconian.
But there are people like me, people who do touch hardware.. at home. My desk is full of hardware. Behind me there's another desk with an oscilloscope, lab psu, dmm, electric load, a pile of probes, a soldering station..
It's not like we get new hardware every day, and when we do, it's not a big deal to wait a day or two for the courier to bring a prototype to my home.
There are sibling comments here that mention the same, however, to add my own point here: I'm involved in a complex hardware plus software project which involves designing and doing a board bring-up for an Arm SoC Linux-based device. We need to visit the office only once in two to three weeks. For the board bring-up when we do not have the provision to provide the hardware to our software engineer yet, we have someone in the office connect the UART lines to it and have the typical VPN+SSH set up to perform the board bring-up for it.
Generally speaking, the engineers that are required for the labs would be electrical engineers and mechanical engineers. Also, even for these physical-based engineering disciplines, a lot of design is highly computer based thanks to great CAD, simulation, and future-looking generative design software from the likes of Autodesk, Ansys, etc. That being said, I personally feel that being in person really can help in the epiphany process for hardware-based projects.
This leads straight to outsourcing.
Employees from the same country OTOH have some tactical advantages: Same culture/language and time zone (I noticed a lot of folks care), less legal/accounting hassle, easier/cheaper to meet occasionally for workshops and stuff.
Sure there are timezone differences, but EST is doable for Europe. 08:00 EST = 13:00 UTC, so working 8h in EST means 13:00-15:00 -> 21:00-23:00 in European timezones. Some people may even prefer it. Europe has a larger population of devs that's underutilized because it's dispersed among multiple countries. India is too shifted for America but doable for Europe, so the natural next step is to move work completely into a much larger European-Indian worker pool that can remotely work together.
I don't expect it to happen very fast, first part this decade, second next decade. First part is going to fully equalize dev wages between Europe and America. Second part between Europe and India.
Alternatively I may underestimate the willingness of Indian devs to live a nocturnal lifestyle for a high enough pay. In which case the global equalization of dev wages with India is going to happen during this decade.
I think the switch to remote work started to really happen just as it actually became practical for a sufficient percentage of people, which is basically now.
https://www.submarinenetworks.com/news/global-bandwidth-pric... "Carriers reached an impressive 67Tbps of capacity on their international internet, private and voice networks in 2011"
https://www2.telegeography.com/hubfs/assets/Ebooks/state-of-... "Total international bandwidth now stands at 618 Tbps"
(note it's from the same company)
That's an increase of 9.2x.
We used icq and private irc servers. What's now sold as Slack. Starting 22 years ago.
By poorer parts of the world you mean the suburban US? :) I hear they can't get the bandwidth I can get for 10 eur/month at any price.
Anecdotally I've heard from Indian colleagues that wages back home are also rising fast.
In the end I think this will balance out in favor of Europe/India and against the Bay Area. Which is fine by me. But I understand that the $500k/year Palo Alto people are getting nervous...
This is not a bad thing. It's just a change that you are potentially on the wrong side of. Work out how to capitalize on it. Figure out an angle, start a company, and profit from it.
I used the shift to remote work to move company and net myself a better, fully remote role and a ~50% raise. And that's the lazy, low risk way to take advantage of it. There is a whole world of opportunity here.
I think the thing to think about is how negotiating positions change. On the face of it you'd think it's bad for Western devs because there's more competition. But it's also bad for hiring managers because there's more of them competing too. I recently had a remote offer gazumped by another one, which would not have happened in the days of "all finance jobs are in a London office".
For people in the low income countries, they have the double edged sword of low cost of living. OTOH they can live like princes on a western salary. OTOH they have to give up some of that because anyone bargaining with them knows they will share a large chunk of the excess in the form of a lower salary. You can cry "same work same pay" all you like, they will agree a lower salary themselves.
There's also a eye of the needle effect. If someone had been a FAANG or similarly hard to get role, people are going to want to pay them more, just because. Similarly if someone hasn't worked in the west and gotten paid in the west, people will negotiate lower pay for them. This is really awesome if you were a FAANG guy whose family is Indian, you'd get a top % of the world income in a middle income country. But for most of the unanointed, it's good but not great.
I wrote about this a while ago: https://medium.com/management-matters/going-back-to-work-no-...
If we're going to bet on the future, I'm betting on ~all of human history, instead of a 2-year sample of exigent circumstances. Humans are social animals.
Personally I find standing on a train for 45 minutes each way, and not being able to do small household errands on my breaks, like I can when I work from home, means my entire Mon-Fri is a cycle of sleep-eat-commute-work with no time to tend to anything.
It's a shock to the system.
That said, I switched rolls for twice the money, not 5%, and hybrid work will hopefully be something I can move to in a couple of months.
Some people I know are bachelors who don't cook (weird lifestyle, but it takes all sorts I guess) so employers with canteens are a big attraction for them.
Other people, I suspect, have reasons for getting back to the office that they're a bit shy about. Joking that you're just here for the coffee preserves your status and privacy better than saying you're back in the office because your house is tiny / your kids are uncontrollable / you struggled with mental health issues.
Switched jobs that is 100% back to office but quadrupled my pay (and significant boost in company brand name too), otherwise I’d be disgruntled.
The commute into NYC is as miserable of an experience and a huge collective waste of time.
But a lot of my coworkers on my new team love the fact that they can eat breakfast lunch and dinner at the office for free. Then again they are all young and single.
Having commuted for many many years, I literally cannot fathom how this line of thinking is even considered a reasonable counter. Do some poeple get to commute through a utopic wonderland? Have I been living/working in the wrong places all these years?
People should realize that comfortable car-centric lifestyles are too expensive for them to afford. I’m talking from the perspective of a Western European country.
I live outside Manhattan, NYC, into which I and countless others commute into for work. An astounding amount of collective hours is absolutely wasted on commuting into and out of Manhattan. The public transit system here is arguably the best in the US, but still utterly horrible compared to the systems in place in many Asian cities and probably European ones too.
1.5 hours each way * 5 days a week = 15 hours a week That's 780 hours a year (not including holidays/sick leave etc) That's 32.5 24 hour days! One whole calendar month sat in my car each year.
As soon I did that maths it was only a question of time before I quit.
Dropping your commute isn't an entirely selfish idea.
If the extra pay for the extra commute is offensively low, don't take the offer.
(That said, I'm happy remote-first is getting more common.)
Because they can? It’s not complicated.
For obvious reasons people who have long commutes are most vocal about always working from home, but that is just another optimization/choice you have made in your life. For me commute doesn't cost anywhere near 5% of my time, but I have also made a conscious decision to live close to my office.