The unintended consequences of working from home
smh.com.au
smh.com.au
I can't speak to other professions, but for programming it's extremely difficult to work with people on the other side of the Earth. The 10-12 hour time difference makes any small issue or missing files/data that should take 20 minutes instead take a day to get resolved.
Working with people in Europe isn't as bad, you can sync up all morning. But the same applies to any issue that happens in the New York afternoon.
It pretty much guarantees your software will become architected around time zones due to Conway's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
It's trivial to pay them the highest end salary and the take home for them will be far better than Microsoft/Google/etc.
I'm in 'Burta and consider relocating there all the time. Heard mixed things about not speaking French, though.
Yes, it can be a pain. Sometimes you have a 6am meeting and sometimes an 11pm meeting and sometimes both in the same day. You have to have your shit together enough to deal with day-long lag for non-urgent stuff, and you have to care enough to jump on urgent stuff at all hours.
Even if you might rather have a chummy relationship with your colleagues, you have to be a bit more distanced and professional in order to accommodate the time difference.
But if you have a good team, you also should ask yourself: is the convenience of collocation worth losing the team?
At the risk of veering OT: there’s a pretty good business in arbitrage around these cultural blockers. For instance there are thousands of people working for Indian companies in Central-Eastern Europe because (mostly) German companies are a lot more comfortable if they can meet the dev manager on any given day and fly home for supper.
I think we need to find a better way to deal with timezone-distributed teams. I personally would never find a 6am or 11pm meeting to be acceptable. If you require me anywhere from 9am to 5pm in my local time I'll be there; anything outside that must be strictly optional. And I mean actually optional, not "optional but we'll see you as not a team player if you don't show up".
Of course, in the end it is all about personal preferences.
I’m not trying to virtue-signal about schedule flexibility, but if you have part of your team in SF and part in Bangalore somebody will have to work weird hours sometimes.
I fundamentally don’t accept that it should always be the non-western side, and if you have a good team you will find a way to do this respectfully, without destroying anyone’s private life.
Also, FWIW, during the 2/3 of my career I worked on site, a 9am to 5pm requirement would have been an absolute nonstarter for me. Biorhythms are diverse.
This sounds extremely unhealthy and the complete opposite of having one's shit together to me.
What about dealing with multiple time zones and schedules in a professional manner strikes you as the opposite of having your shit together?
Having lived this life for over 10 years I’m genuinely curious.
There are a couple of things you need. First, meetings have to be at times where everyone is available. That can be an inconvenience for some people, but it is what it is. Sometimes it means that some people in the UK have to get up early, sometimes it means that I have to stay up late. But if you are sensible, nobody has to take the full burden.
To combat time-zone-Conway's-law I often do a hand-over work with my colleagues. I work on something in my afternoon. We pair for a couple of hours and then they work on it for the rest of the day. They leave me notes and I carry on. It takes practice and trust to do it, but when it works it is actually incredible. I would say it's my favourite way of working. However, when it doesn't work it's terrible :-). The biggest thing is developing trust, relaxing and just going with the flow. Your colleague is going to go in directions you didn't expect. You need to be magnanimous and keep going in that direction, even if it sometimes makes you uncomfortable. On the plus side, I've found that it's stretched me as a programmer and I've learned a lot.
I would take timezone co-lacated (or rather coworker, preferred working times co-located) if I could, but you can make it work otherwise.
On the other hand the 10-hour difference between my time and the West Coast would be a lot harder to manage, those 3 extra hours do matter.
Those problems can be solved pretty easily with better communication and processes. Gitlab is remote-first and they are working quite well. Maybe your team-lead and project manager should have a look at how other companies are doing it. It's their job after all
But this interacts poorly with many other expectations and processes. For example, my team's standups have become completely useless over the past few months, because we're all making 20% incremental progress on 5 things instead of completing 1 thing. When customers are breathing down my PM's neck for a new feature, he doesn't want to hear that it's 4 person-hours to implement and merge but those 4 person-hours will be spread over the next week.
If outsourcing were only an issue of money, then every all-remote company would exclusively hire in places like the Phillippines, where there seem to be an abundance of extremely low-cost, English-proficient workers.
Money isn't the only issue, of course. Language skills, culture, educational background, security clearance, tax laws, infosec, time zones, law enforcement, etc. are all also factors.
Plus automation is eating away at the lower level stuff.
Don't just practice. Find opportunities to leave your comfort zone and get expert feedback (perhaps from someone more senior in your company) about what you did well and what you still have to work on.
Certainly don't neglect your general skills while you're focusing. And if at all possible, get someone to pay you to acquire specialized skills.
I've worked at two previous companies that attempted to offshore coding production, and both times it led to unexpected delays, surprising bugs, badly written code, misunderstandings and cycling through multiple remote programmers.
I certainly don't think I'm a specially talented programmer or that coders in other countries are inferior to my skills (demonstrably untrue), it was just a natural consequence of geographic distance, timezone differences, personal commitment and cultural misunderstanding.
At both companies the experiment ended after just one project. If this is the 'normal' future then the infrastructure needed to really make offshoring work might be put in place, but if past experience is anything to go by, then simple geographic nearness - at least sharing timezone and the realistic ability to turn up in person at least occassionally, together with the personal commitment felt by 'real' employees - means I'm not sure whether distributed workforces are gonna be as productive as some people may hope.
On the other hand, I think truly productive individuals may gain from the situation: if you're a fast and effective 'production unit', then you're going to be a valuable asset wherever you are, and your value will be set accordingly. We'll see which of the two competing economic forces wins out.
The off shore remote devs that will make it work exist but you have to look for them with a functional remote hiring mechanism.
Edit: Friends also include people working in other teams like project managers, marketing, HR, support teams etc.
If you go in with the mentality of "this won't work", well mate, then it won't.
Linux kernel development is an example of this, a global collaboration essentially done over emails. We got magnificent tools like git because of the need to streamline this kind of remote works.
I don't know if others agree but during the Pandemic I've felt that the quality of TV news programming has gone down considerably because of the people interviewed or the reporters are behind a zoom etc. connections of questionable quality. It is often hard to understand what they say and it is not so pleasant trying to listen to them over the lo-fi connection.
So I think that until the tech of virtual meetings improves considerably there's an extra cost for not being able to communicate in person.
It presents real challenges working with people that you don't already know in person.
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth saving
Then you better start swimmin' or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'
Given the massive incentives for outsourcing and offshoring in the last couple of decades, I think the fact that most of the HN audience has pretty good jobs suggests that much of the tech world is more nuanced than that.
I was an IC with a very small team (who were in New York), so I didn't really need to meet with other teams on a daily basis. But every couple months, I did need to fill the pipeline with future work, and it was much easier to do that in person.
I am not sure what this means for a world beyond COVID-19, but right now I feel like everyone is in a holding pattern and are just tweaking their day-to-day applications, rather than planning the next big thing. That is sustainable for a few months, but it will be interesting to see if it's sustainable for longer than that.
(Do people ever co-found a startup with someone they've never met in person? Has anyone ever had a summer internship in college remotely? I am very interested in seeing how these things work.)
To be fair you can have that with remote meetings as well. There is even a name for it: zoom-bombing.
Bigger issues tend to be around language and culture...
Some companies might no have the internal legal frameworks to hire remote in the US or far less outside the US, as an anecdote a company I used to work for was fully remote but only hired remote on some specific states, this because of tax laws that would vary in each state would complicate their operations. This was a smallish company, less than 40 people.
> Money isn't the only issue, of course. Language skills, culture, educational background, security clearance, tax laws, infosec, time zones, law enforcement, etc. are all also factors.
So this is essentially protectionism. I mean if engineers outside the US are just as talented and productive, why should a company only use US engineers, especially if their marketplace is global.
Let’s say you have the same talent elsewhere, it’s likely a company will pay considerably less, and may also take advantage of other factors due to that person’s desperation - overwork, given less input/influence, less career growth/trajectory, more contract based, less full-time, less or no benefits, less laws, etc.
So the quality of life for the US developer will not only come down in terms of pay, but also for all those other reasons. The worst part about it is that the off shore workers won’t regain those improvements for awhile (as in, until their standards go up over time - higher pay, etc).
It’s a regression on more fronts than compensation, with the enemy not necessarily being developers (where ever they are), but more so the ruthless market mechanisms.
These might (probably?) have had nothing to do with the quality of the coders - A lot of it was due to cultural and language issues. Things like not realizing what the holiday schedule for a given region is, and 'suddenly' finding out you have a 2-4 week holiday in the middle of your production rollout...
Call centers, office assistants are both getting outsourced to other countries or to AI
> If your job can be done from anywhere, that doesn’t necessarily mean you get to keep your job with the city salary and have a sea change.
It also means a “you” will get a chance at a remote job that you didn’t have access in your region
The fundamental problem is a misalignment of incentives. Noone has yet figured this out and there is no technological solution to it - it may actually be impossible and it ALWAYS bites the company that outsources on the arse eventually.
If your "trusted solutions provider" bills by the hour... they will seek to maximise billable hours. If they charge per ticket, they will drown you in paperwork for the most trivial changes. Anything that your in-house staff used to do that isn't explicitly stated in the contract, they either won't do or will charge a punitive rate for. If your needs change faster than the length of the contract, well you are stuck on the old contract. If you need some code written the spec you will need to write will be so detailed that it might as well be the code.
And after a few years you will have lost the capability to take the work back in-house and they will hold you to ransom, because they can, and because that was the plan all along...
But the short-term incentives to do it are strong, as a manager in a large corporation or a government department, you can sign that outsourcing deal and it will look good enough in the first year to win you your next promotion, or a guaranteed sinecure in the outsourcing company when you retire, by the time the truth comes out you will be long gone .
(Despite this development, the article doesn't mention it... maybe it will be updated at some point.)
I guess, after reflecting, what I don't like about it is that it tells us to be afraid. Be afraid about a way of working that might work really well for some, or even a lot, of people.
Here's a fun quote from the article:
> But the big challenge is how to safely move thousands of people to and from the suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne and their offices in George or Collins streets.
They're saying this in the context of a population living under pandemic protocols, but it's true all of the other time anyways. It takes a massive amount of engineering and energy to move masses of people from one place to another. Doing it needlessly is insane.
I suspect that what it comes down to is control, or apparent control, of a workforce. Especially in large organizations. We're going to see who is comfortable with giving up control and who isn't, and that's going to be interesting.
Companies are what they are, and they will optimize for this. To remain optimistic, we have to continue believing in the startup space to continuously innovate software standards, where users are unwilling to accept substandard software experiences. That will keep this field moving forward versus a wage race to the bottom.
Entrenched corporate companies would love tech to stagnate, that way they won’t ever have to innovate and can cost optimize developers down to the bone.
Cultural (mostly with eastern Europe) which introduces additional overhead due to cultural things not being equal especially for custom software for things like school districts as an example. You have to specify more which you assumed was common knowledge. Also things like meeting hours are somewhat more flexible in other places than in N/W Europe.
Timezones: many things have been said about it but it didn't work for most companies combining Europe with (South)-East Asia. Ukraine and Russia was not a problem.
Management capability: a managerial job locally is not the same remotely and most could not adapt or required more people offsetting the cost savings. This tended to count more for smaller businesses.
Emotional: lack of affinity with the product, remote workers are counting just hours spend and thus the TCO was ignoring the hours local people spend in their own time working on the product. This is not a given for all but was one of the reasons companies switched back.
These are just some examples. Most companies, especially the smaller ones, switched back to local hiring. Some made it work but not at the expected savings. The most successfull were the bigger businesses and my guess would be they had/took a longer time to prepare and hired the correct people for the job instead of relying on already hired employees which is not something you can always do in smaller businesses due to continuity.
I really wonder what is going to be the effect this time as everybody is forced at least to train all the soft skills like remote communication and scheduling.
- implement world beating virus testing and tracking - invest so heavily in child care and education it makes your head swim - build out offices for rent and look at your building codes
Now start saying you are a remote work friendly area.
My wife and I choose to sit in London's metro area for one main reason - kids schools. A second one is the health system. Nothing to do with commute times (god no) or access to job choices.
Want to replace tourism as an industry - focus on office based remote workers.
Edit: my work here is done.
Zoom meetings where everyone is on a separate camera/mic make that basically impossible, which keeps the meeting more focused.
Bringing down employment borders would be one of the most transformative things we could do to raise global standards of living. Everyone should go and read Bryan Caplan's recent book on open borders.
Having 9 billion people sharing the earth will lead to huge improvements in replaceable resources. E.g. movies will be better, appliances will be better, etc. However, if you want to see the Mona Lisa, it's most likely that you will never get close.
It is indeed. It's quite a risky hand to play at a time where
- cynicism about the tech industry has never been higher
- there's a magnifying glass on the inequality wrought by the hands of hardheaded capitalism in the West
- globalism is being rejected
- million of jobs have been lost
- everything is being propped up with fiscal stimulus, in the coming months the true cost of the financial damage on the economy will come to fruition
But if Tobias Lutke, Zuckerberg, etc. want to be the face of moving jobs out of the US and Canada in these times then by all means they can go ahead. Hopefully, if there's consequences to bear then it'll be on their heads too, and not the staff they've decided to drag along for the ride.
- cynicism about the tech industry has never been higher
Exactly. That's why I don't think the average American is going to care about 250K a year jobs in Silicon Valley moving somewhere else. I don't see a lot of empathy to the millionaire class in the U.S
Developed at a time where they could feasibly say there just wasn't the volume of talent in the US to support their ambitions. With all the startups going bust, big companies laying people off, etc. the same argument won't be feasible. In my eyes at least.
>Exactly. That's why I don't think the average American is going to care about 250K a year jobs in Silicon Valley moving somewhere else. I don't see a lot of empathy to the millionaire class in the U.S
That's one way of looking at it. Another is that FB and others moving the work away will directly impact the large swathes of people who work for these companies not in tech roles, and also decimate the local economy around their offices by dropping demand for local goods, services and by extension the jobs that exist to provide and fulfill the same.
All it takes is a couple of Democratic figureheads to get on TV and say that Zuckerberg et al's actions will dis-proportionally throttle the lives of minorities and the socially disadvantaged, which is true, and presto, you further the ire toward them at a time when they can least afford it.
Any job or task can be outsourced, but there are tradeoffs involved. It’s nothing new.
I'm not worried about jobs being outsourced across the world to places like India. It's just not going to happen en masse. I'm sure some companies will try it and learn the same lessons others have previously about engaging in this behaviour.
It would also be political suicide, if not worse, if world leaders saw their companies trying to move locally held jobs outside their borders and did not drop the hammer on the companies involved. We're already in a time of mass unemployment, in which:
- many were already heralding the death of globalism
- we've learned very dear lessons about outsourcing the supply chain
- people are become so much more aware of the risen inequality that even formerly hardline capitalist media are running headlines about the billionaires profiting massively off the pandemic while millions register for unemployment checks
So if the leaders want to prevent large scale social unrest, a gun which I believe we're already looking down the barrel of, then they would be wise to keep a very close eye on the movements carried out by companies within their governance.
That said, I do foresee some significant, lasting consequences should there be a mass shift to working from home or even a 4 days at home / 1 day in the office situation:
- Today's cities face a real threat of ending up as Detroit did.
-- People will flee for better pastures immediately. Why live in a shoebox in the sky when your money gets you far better elsewhere?
-- Commercial real estate, and nearby residential real estate, has the potential to collapse and rapidly so. If I were living in Toronto, working for Shopify and owned a condo now I would likely be putting it on the market ASAP.
-- Taxes, be it through indirect sales taxes or VAT, land transfer taxes, property taxes, etc. would crater leaving a massive hole in public funding through which no reasonable measure will fill.
-- Public transit fare revenue will evaporate.
-- Small businesses, restaurants, retail etc. will be wiped out with the lack of casual foot traffic
When the above potentially happens, those who wanted to live in a city for the benefits of living in a city would also likely flee.
- A permanent, wide scale loss of jobs in retail, food & beverage, etc.
You could argue that those jobs will be replaced by new demands for new supply in the new areas previous city dwellers move to, but if everyone is WFH I would imagine they won't be frequenting such stores in anywhere near the volume that was provided previously.
Given the above I believe it's pretty self-centered and reckless of large companies to be making such announcements as Shopify, Facebook et al. have made at a time where cities and countries are merely trying to ward off a pandemic and are already facing an employment and budget crisis as a result of it. They're essentially doing one of the most damaging, potentially impactful things they could be by doing so right now.
These announcements, for me personally and despite my previous hopes of seeing more remote opportunities become available over time, are only furthering my cynicism toward this industry in general at this point.
People have tried outsourcing programming forever. The last visible result was planes falling out of the sky. These jobs are highly paid not because they are done in the CBD, but because they require traits most people don't have.
Offshoring and automation are partially orthogonal. Offshore the jobs that can't be automated, automate the jobs that can't be done elsewhere, retain the humans for high-skill or high-touch jobs that resist the first two threats.
Until then, good luck finding another me.
I don't technically need my foot. But I suspect my life is a lot easier with the one I have.