Hacker News Reader

Comment by bryanrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

Ok a question about all this remote work - why hasn't outsourcing generally been that great an experience for companies?

I've worked at a few places that have outsourced and it was not particularly productive.

Funny enough at one place we had some people from India in India, and some people from India in the office. The people from India in the office were generally pretty good and a pleasure to work with, and the people from India in India seemed lower quality.

Why? If the outcome of the great remoting experiment here is that remote work is generally fantastic?

View on HN

Outsourcing is usually done as a cost saving measure, often in the knowledge that they might be getting less than before.

The cost savings are often overestimated and many companies can't evaluate quality well in the first place.

Also outsourcing doesn't always mean remote, lots of companies hiring consultants (developers, or even teams of developers) require them to be on-site.

The problem is often the outsourced and the company doing the outsourcing have incentives which don't line up.

You mean literal "outsourcing" where you send requests to companies whose incentives aren't aligned with yours and expect them to fill the details on your best interest?

Or by "outsourcing" you mean simply hiring remote people? Because comparing with the one above makes little sense, yet I don't think many people use that second meaning.

Outsourcing in the first sense, I think your answer is the best one for clarifying why this is different than the whole outsourcing movement was - and why this seems to be working while outsourcing did not.

> some people from India in India, and some people from India in the office. The people from India in the office were generally pretty good and a pleasure to work with, and the people from India in India seemed lower quality.

There is a massive selection effect occurring here.

Probably, but actually I've had the same situation in a couple places, but I think marcosdumay had a good explanation as to why it would be like that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23301586

> Probably, but actually I've had the same situation in a couple places

? I'm confused how this would impact the selection bias, marcosdumay's comment seems to jive with mine - here what I mean is the average Indian-American who has moved to America for tech jobs is going to be different from the average Indian hired in an outsourcing capacity in India, so you can't compare the two and attribute the differences solely to remote work.

I consulted (from the UK) with a major US bank, placed in a team that was largely based in India. The employees there were uniformly excellent, and their pay (and turnover rate) reflected that. The bank certainly hadn't opened that office to save money; I suspect they were paid more than I (as an employee of an outsourcing consultancy) was.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com