Remote work means anyone can take your job | Hacker News Reader

Remote work means anyone can take your job

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Seems like this article ignores the gigantic wave of out-sourcing throughout IT that already happened in previous decades and in many cases returned to near-shore / onsite work.

What you actually see if you look at remote work job boards is many (if not most) companies in say, the USA, want remote people from the USA (or at least the same timezone as the USA). I think this is what will happen in other countries too.

In my totally unscientific assessment of remote job boards, US companies seem to be the only ones requesting US-only applicants, and I have no insight as to why this happens.

In my -South American- country the trend is to look outwards if you're hiring remotely; European countries seem to fit this description too.

I've made the same observation. Does it have something to do with US tax or other regulations?

Yes, recent changes in the tax code made it less enticing for US companies to offshore US jobs. The company can potentially end up losing a lot of (otherwise legitimately acquired) tax benefits.

With respect to R&D, for example, the US no longer allows foreign R&D activities to qualify for the R&D tax credit.

>> With respect to R&D, for example, the US no longer allows foreign R&D activities to qualify for the R&D tax credit.

From what I've seen, many companies will shoehorn regular product development into the R&D category. I'm not sure if it's supposed to cover next iteration of existing products that most company should be doing anyway.

If there's anything innovative in the new version of the product, I don't see why not.

That would be the development part of R&D.

That's fine, as long as the R&D work is done in the US.

R&D doesn't require something to be socially innovative; it's evaluated at a per-company level. It's intended to incentivize companies to recreate wheels in-house (if it is otherwise financially reasonable to do so).

Companies should not need a financial incentive to develop new products. They already have an existential incentive to do so. This also creates a barrier to entry for small companies that don't have the resources to ensure compliance and claim the benefit. It also subsidises product development engineers - a profession that is doing well already. I'm an engineer so I appreciate the artificial wage inflation, but if I take that hat off I don't think it's appropriate for the government to subsidize us.

You're missing the context. The point of the R&D credit is for companies to engage in R&D activities in the US as opposed to other countries. Additionally, it was introduced in reaction to other countries introducing R&D credits to steal R&D work from the US.

It does not create a barrier to small companies. If you're not big enough to handle the paperwork for the R&D credit, you're not spending enough to derive meaningful benefit from the credit anyways. And generally, there exist plenty of accounting firms that will prepare the R&D documentation on a % basis (of the allowable R&D credit identified).

It also subsidises product development engineers - a profession that is doing well already

In the software world, sure. There are plenty of industries where product development staff (many of whom aren't engineers) don't make anywhere close to 6 figures.

I did the R&D tax credit this last year and it seems to me the savings for offshoring would drastically make up for the loss in R&D tax credits in most cases.

Also, some states, like CA, are very unfriendly which regard to the extra costs required for employees in terms of benefits, wages (salary exempt) and classification of employees with the ABC test [1], so the wins that states make for employees incentivizes many employers to look elsewhere instead.

In a more remote work culture, even ignoring offshoring/nearshoring, this is going to be really bad for people in certain states. And it will be bad for those states themselves.

The increased competition among states to attract higher income workers will be interesting. States like Tennessee, North Carolina, etc have a massive opportunity in front of them as they were already pretty well poised to attract younger professionals.

[1] https://www.labor.ca.gov/employmentstatus/abctest/

> Also, some states, like CA, are very unfriendly which regard to the extra costs required for employees in terms of benefits, wages (salary exempt) and classification of employees with the ABC test [1], so the wins that states make for employees incentivizes many employers to look elsewhere instead.

This is exactly right.

People seem to think all these regulations are doing them a favor and increasing their freedom but what's actually happening in reality is pretty much the opposite.

It's now literally cheaper even after accounting for delivery risks to hire people from Tennessee, North Carolina, etc.

This explains why so much R&D happens in CA. Because it's too expensive to do it in this state...

The reason R&D happens in CA is because any company that wants to sell to CA is already going to be subject to CA taxation anyway, however they try to apportion their state income. If you develop R&D in another state and use that to sell to CA, you've just added an additional state to your tax compliance burden. Moreover, if you generate the R&D in say, Nevada, but the overwhelming majority of your income is CA sales, CA can (edit: changed from will) simply disregard your chosen allocation as fraudulent.

I did the R&D tax credit this last year and it seems to me the savings for offshoring would drastically make up for the loss in R&D tax credits in most cases.

This was true...before GILTI and BEAT were passed in the TCJA in 2017. It's no longer true. And as a downside, you must also contend with transfer pricing requiring your offshored entity to show a profit, and thus pay foreign taxes which likely would not be recoverable in the US under the GILTI regime.

Do you need an entity to contract offshore? If you are merely contracting the resources without a foreign entity it's just an expense no?

I do know that certain countries limit what you can send them as far as $ each month as part of anti-money laundering regulations. And it's a pain.

What other implications are there? Is it because some of the offshoring countries force you to register there to conduct business?

Or is it because they want to create a separate P&L for tax and/or liability purposes? Or to park IP?

We're starting to get into the sort of advice I charge $$$ for...

You don't need an entity to contract offshore, but if you're doing foreign R&D you're savings generally would be less than you would get back with the R&D credit. If for some reason your savings are greater with fully-offshored R&D, you need to ask yourself serious questions about why it's so much cheaper--including the likelihood that your R&D is being shared with the contractors' other clients if you're using an Indian or Chinese contractor.

You're also going to have IP valuation issues due to those risks, meaning that the IP simply won't be worth much, if anything, to a US or EU buyer, compared to the same IP generated anywhere by a subsidiary.

From a GILTI perspective, your IP is now foreign-generated IP, so you're looking at potentially paying the GILTI tax if you sell resulting products outside of the US.

There are additional legal considerations that apply to outsourced R&D development as well.

It's my understanding that if a US company wants to hire someone outside of the US to work remotely from outside of the US; they must treat the employee as an independent contractor.

Additionally, the US company would have to abide by any local labor laws / tax laws in the country they are hiring in.

>It's my understanding that if a US company wants to hire someone outside of the US to work remotely from outside of the US; they must treat the employee as an independent contractor.

Depends on what legal structure they've established within the country where the employee resides (and the laws regarding such things).

European countries are outliers due to EU regulations. Any EU "citizen" can work anywhere in the EU, so pragmatically speaking, why would you only want to hire Spanish people instead of opening the door to French, Italian or German candidates? It comes at literally zero cost to the company.

Some industries are heavily regulated in the US and having non-US based employees can become a real headache for US companies. A lot of US companies have background check as part of their hiring process, pretty hard to do for someone not US-based.

Also, if you target only the continental US you're already talking about companies that may be spread across 4 major timezones. If you start including Europe you're now dealing with people that are gonna be more than 6 hours removed from your HQ's timezone.

> European countries are outliers due to EU regulations. Any EU "citizen" can work anywhere in the EU, so pragmatically speaking, why would you only want to hire Spanish people instead of opening the door to French, Italian or German candidates? It comes at literally zero cost to the company.

The employer needs to pay social contributions in the employee's residence country. And more often than not, the employee cannot just become a freelancer or incorporate a single-person company and bill only one customer, as this is considered disguised employment. So no, it's not necessarily trivial for an EU company to hire a remote worker somewhere else in the EU, unless they have a local presence already.

It’s the same in the US to hire someone in a different state.

Every state has their own tax scheme. Every new employee in a new state is a big set up cost and ongoing maintenance.

Why so? I though all payroll/tax details are outsourced to the accounting firms and very straightforward in fact.

The payroll taxes can likely be taken care of easily by your payroll provider/accountancy firm, but there's potentially local business licensing requirements[1] you become subject to as well. If you have an office, you generally do all of that based on the location of the office, and the employee's home address doesn't come into play. But if the employee is officially a work from home employee, some states/municipalities treat that as a presence subject to business licensing or permitting requirements with the local authorities, as well as potentially triggering sales tax collection requirements that have to be accounted for within your sales/invoicing processes.

[1] https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/04/remote-employee-complianc...

My understanding from people who have done it is that:

-- Yes, you can outsource most of the payroll-related headaches to someone like ADP but

-- There are still a lot of other state by state details that can't just be handed off to a third party and told "Make it so." It's not a particularly big deal for a larger company, but it can be a fair bit of overhead for a small employer adding a new remote employee in a state with lots of paperwork.

To add to this, in over 17 states there are also city or county level income taxes[1] that you have to be set up to handle.

Then there's the potential for each employee's address to be considered a nexus, since each of their homes becomes a de-facto company presence. Potentially subject to local registration, licensing and taxation by local municipal authorities, in addition to just the state level requirements. If you have a presence in the state, and your employee's official work location is that location, then you only have to deal with that local registration once wherever the presence is located. But if you don't have a location the state, or you have employees who are officially designated as work from home (rather than unofficially working from home while being designated as assigned to an office), then this quickly scale into a giant mess of regulation to navigate[2].

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/local-income-taxes-city-and-county...

[2] https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/04/remote-employee-complianc...

Disguised employment laws end at the national border. Yes, for the EU/EEA member states too.

If you disregard international companies with English as the company language, most of the companies usually have a local language requirement. So still, you want to hire Spanish/French/German/Italian speakers in the EU market.

The US has 330m people, you generally (emphasis, as there are certainly exceptions) don't need to look beyond its labor base to find what you're looking for.

If you're in Estonia and looking to hire a software engineer for remote work, maybe you end up hiring someone from Poland or Spain. That's still EU hiring in the EU, more akin to what you're referring to with the US. On average the smaller the country, it probably increases the odds that more of the labor you're looking for is going to be outside of your own borders.

Its about finding it cheapest, not about finding it. The argument you are making can be said for doing imports of any kind as well.

From what I've seen, European countries often require applicants to be in European time zones.

A lot of software companies’ customer contracts specify that only U.S. employees can access customer data, also. Ops, customer support engineering, and many kinds of bug fixes all require that access.

> European countries seem to fit this description too.

No I don't think so. They look with within EU.

Agreed. Sometimes, when reading articles/comments about out-sourcing, I question my own sanity. We've done it before, am I the only one remembering it? It failed miserably.

If companies want to relocate work to India, or China, or Eastern Europe, they can already do it.

It actually worked in manufacturing but it had some negative externalized long term negatives for the US. The long term negative is that the country lost innovation ability in those areas. The countries that manufacturing was outsourced to are gradually or have become the innovators in those areas.

For higher end companies, it wasn’t outsourcing. It was remote offices. The expertise still does move to those countries.

In the first wave of outsourcing, companies saw that the contract organization provided more or less equivalent results at substantially reduced cost.

What they failed to realize is what they outsourced were their bottom tier workers, the unproductive people. They got excited by the reduced cost with minimal reduction in effectiveness.

When they try to outsource their better talent that’s where they failed to recognize good talent is costly everywhere. You might save some salary but it’s offset by lots of other things from time shift to organizational culture.

> [...] what they outsourced were their bottom tier workers, the unproductive people.

That might be true to some extent, but I think there's a problem with that line of thought.

People are a "moving target". What may be a bottom-tier worker now, could very well be a valuable employee in 5-10 years. Many folks have built their career by starting at a low level and then getting promoted and upskilled over time through hard work and commitment. Starting at a low position and advancing is becoming, sadly, a rare thing.

The "first wave" and subsequent waves of outsourcing have to a large extent eliminated paths of career advancement for many workers. At first it was unskilled laborers and now it has been creeping up to virtually all technical job descriptions. The wet-dream of MBA's who promote this stuff is corporations consisting of a few C-level people and their board, and then a layer of fab-less product and operations people who just manage supply-chain and services stuff with external vendors. It's an ugly picture but that's what the global supply chain people want.

I think this just means employers will still have incentive to hire people to be employees (as then they benefit from the employee's growth), rather than contract out work to firms which may reassign or replace the (now valued, experienced) employee. When you contract out instead of hire, you're giving an incentive to a firm to get the work done as cheaply as possible, and that's not always the right trade-off.

The earlier waves of outsourcing were about shifting things like management responsibility out of the company, and I think that was shown to have unintended negative consequences for a lot of firms. I don't think there's much reason why an employer wouldn't be excited about hiring good, talented people from cheaper labor markets now.

This. Not to mention it has become much easier for anyone motivated to learn valuable skills online-- now there will be more opportunities to apply them.

Someone in the Philippines learning Python on Khan Academy today could very well be competitive for a senior engineering job in 10 years if the career path were possible.

I've met countless skilled technical people who could not a get job at XYZ company simply due to visas, not qualifications. Now working for these companies can be a real possibility.

You forgot to account for domain knowledge. You can be better than me at python, but I know my area and customers. When I'm given a half complete spec I can make good choices for the most part and get done without getting clarification. I can guess what version 2.0 will need well enough that most of the time those features will drop in quickly while major refactoring is required to get them into the better programmers 2.0.

Of course there are tradeoffs. A programmer who is much better than me has advantages in quality (assuming you are much better, in my biased opinion I'm great)

Domain knowledge isn't always valued the same by those writing the checks, whereas 50% cheaper is far easier to quantify.

You're probably right about this, but I'm betting we'll see political parties in countries all over the world start putting up roadblocks to this sort of thing.

It's already happening to a degree. There a number of what you might call "reluctant Trump voters" where I work. The most frequent (and often only) argument you'll hear from them in favor Trump is around immigration and H1-B visas. You'll also notice that the Democrats in the U.S. who are surprisingly quit around Trumps efforts to reduce H1-B issuance.

I'd be willing to bet that unrestricted competition for a limited number of high-paying jobs in the developed world would fuel the Nationalist parties and movements that we've been seeing more of in the U.S. and Europe.

My opinion has been that it's good for US workers if foreigners immigrate and become citizens, because even if they make less than most Americans, they make more than they did in their prior country, which means they are improving the global market for labor, from the point of view of workers.

But having classes of people who live in the country but have special restricted rights and never become full citizens worries me.

I wish we could move away from the idea that citizenship is a reward for following the rules and instead consider that making people citizens is a benefit for (maybe even vital to preserving) society.

Yeah, and the posters thinking that this will help wealth inequality (either among the general population or just among tech workers collectively as a whole) are hopelessly naive. It is practically guaranteed to make wealth inequality worse, and now tech workers will start to feel a lot of pain, more like the general US population has.

This is going to happen faster than other times when offshoring has occurred in various industries historically too. Just think about it. You can bet contract work is going to be commonplace, and you can kiss your benefits goodbye. If you do not think this will happen to you, well, you’re next on the chopping block.

Work will become hyper competitive for benefits and for full time status. A good employee will be someone who answers emails 24/7 and within minutes of it being sent, night or day. The work will never end. Surveillance technologies for remote work will remove any semblance of freedom when you work from home. This is all very unlikely to be made illegal in the US in the foreseeable future. Also. populism uprisings that occur in a respective country last on average for 30 years, so you better be thinking in the very long-term for how bad this could actually be.

I'm confused. Perhaps you could clarify how honing your skills to be valuable as a remote worker is somehow the gateway to the rich eating all of us.

My personal experience with remote work is that it allows me to be present as a father in my children's lives and also to be more productive. I'm not saying everyone will have that experience, but for me it's an excellent fit.

As far as productivity, if we look at productivity increases since 1950, we should be working half as much for the same productivity/pay (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20766443). With voices like Andrew Yang trying to shift social values to valuing the underappreciated like stay-at-home mothers through a UBI, this seems like a positive path forward.

I know things seem dark right now, but in my powerless position, I choose to believe there is a better, more positive path forward, and I put my energy into pursuing it.

Frankly, I've never met a rich guy whose nose I couldn't bloody. I've rarely met one whose spirit I couldn't cut deeply in less than 15 minutes of conversation.

The entrenched economic powers will (as they always do in these economic transitions) capture a disproportionate share of any productivity gains resulting from a mass change to remote work. And their spirits don't care if you win a low stakes battle. They are winning the war. (Just a metaphor, folks!)

They have their hands on the levers. The have the resources to arbitrage or withhold or defect or take hostages (economic!) until they get what they think they can get.

Same thing will happen with self-driving cars.

The peons will capture just enough value so the new life seems a bit better than the old life.

(Long long time remote worker, since before my 17 year-old was born. Love being at home with my kids, love the efficiency and flexibility.

Doesn't change the ultimate macro outcome.)

I hear you. The good will and love of your children is something even death can't take, though. Money can't be banked beyond the grave. No religion. Just Pascal's wager in effect.

I'm hardly an abused slave ready for violent revolution. My life is pretty good if it's just meaningless. Naval gazing at some rich person doesn't help me at all. However, I do believe that guns in the hands of America's peaceful fathers are the best deterrent to the tyranny that everyone here just seems to accept as unavoidable.

An additional problem MBAs sometimes miss is that when you export jobs to contract orgs is that this accumulated institutional knowledge is lost—it’s no longer held in-house. Conversely it contributes to the expertise of the contract org. But not all orgs think long term. Or they get enthralled by “core competency”.

I don't think this is really missed by the MBAs, HN's favorite punching bag. These types of opportunity costs are absolutely a part of the make/buy decision process (but maybe undervalued?). I think it has much more to to with the "enthralled by core competency" aspect.

I'm confused by your use of "enthralled by core competency". I think if an MBA is actively dissembling the structures that brought a successful product together and exerting destructive control over any further research they absolutely deserve some criticism.

There is a huge incentive for the management to find core competency in the cheapest item on the balance sheet.

Some executives stay long term, some build portfolios, guide companies through a given stage and jump to the next. They can then say they “saved” this and that by offshoring. What happens 5 years after they leave is of little consequence.

Institutional knowledge informs why a solution works better than a shiny. The contract org will push through what works best for them, more than what’s best for your org long term. Contract orgs like checking off Hundreds of NIST or CIS controls as if that in and of itself means anything substantive.

And how many companies today are managing costly, legacy software solutions that they built in-house years (decades) ago? Every one I have ever seen.

The same logic could be used to justify duct tape software across the enterprise. There is some point where the cost-benefit leans in favor of outsourcing. Institutional knowledge may be under-priced by today's business execs, that is certainly possible. But we also shouldn't build a homegrown solution for every problem.

> An additional problem MBAs sometimes miss is that when you export jobs to contract orgs is that this accumulated institutional knowledge is lost—it’s no longer held in-house.

This. I have seen consulting companies keeping consulting contract only because the only guy that knew their system inside out was this single consultan that had been there so long that he became the effective sysadmin with the last word on everything related on the subsystem that he had been managing for years.

This is 100% spot on. Organizations build up value over the long-haul by learning things and then building on top of those things, learning some more, building on that, and so on.

Look what happened to G.E. They outsourced everything they possibly could and had a decade or two of unparalleled profitability. But, over time the well of ideas and competencies for products and services dried up and they went from being a powerhouse to a cautionary tale.

Don't export knowledge or know-how to save a few bucks. It always comes back to bite you.

This may well apply to countries as well. Due to the scales involved, it takes longer to notice the deleterious effects, and is much harder to reverse course.

I'd say it's already happened in the U.S. We're just starting to realize that you can't fully divorce the development and design process from the actual manufacturing process and expect to stay competitive for that long.

accumulated knowledge, isn't just applicable to orgs. but to the individual workers too. old school org's such as HP n IBM recognized this early. & had policies in place that they would never lay off anyone ever. some countries from what I heard in Japan that policy is still going on. i.e company man

> People are a "moving target". What may be a bottom-tier worker now, could very well be a valuable employee in 5-10 years. Many folks have built their career by starting at a low level and then getting promoted and upskilled over time through hard work and commitment. Starting at a low position and advancing is becoming, sadly, a rare thing.

I think the validity of this point depends on how you understand "bottom tier". When I read "bottom tier"[1] I tend to read that as a combination of "people who suck at their jobs" and "people who are doing things that are highly commoditized or commoditizable". The former interpretation in particular has nothing to do with seniority.

[1] And I'm reading it this way probably because I'm back-projecting based on experience of working with some outsourced/offshored workers who sucked at their jobs.

People who suck at their job can learn, and become better. Not all, but everyone was bad at something before they leveled up. Highly commoditized positions are also a great way to learn about less commoditized work. How many old rich people used to say they started in the mailroom.

How does one deal with a culture of decreasing vertical mobility within a particular organization. They may suck at their job and be shuffled between the bottom tiers of increasingly flat management structures. If there is no room for growth this model fails, many older people did move vertically but this practice has been almost deliberately been removed from corporate life.

Junior employees must have deliberate exposure to responsibility and challenge in a structured environment that supports them if the are to grow. This is the job of middle management, who are the first target of every MBA driven reorg. Hence the end of development.

My dept is a bunch of Linux Admins, of varying skill level; but all at least mid-grade or higher. There are no junior admins. They are paying top wages so we can do paperwork, create accounts, and manage file permissions.

Then they can't understand why projects fall behind.

I was out of work a couple years ago and I applied to work in a mailroom. It turned out that the company whose mailroom it was, was not the hiring entity - it was outsourced. So, no working your way up anywhere.

Furthermore, the interviewer spent the entire interview complaining about how she mostly couldn't even get people who would show up, let alone act maturely. We discussed the starting date, but within a day or two she reneged, presumably because I had dressed formally for a minimum wage job and was overqualified.

Another thing that comes to mind is the janitorial duties were outsourced in the building I used to work in.

This sort of thing is why I think it's dumb whenever I read something about a progressive company having a minimum wage of whatever for their employees - it's purely a statement about who they keep on their books and who they use indirectly.

The "moving target" problem is significant for countries (or geographic regions in the case of large countries or open borders). However, for an individual company, it is a tragedy of the commons situation.

Why should a company A pay more to train a bottom tier worker into a high tier worker, when said worker will then be able to move to company B who offshore's its low tier workers. In effect, company A is subsidizing company B's training program.

Attrition significantly drops if you treat people right. Many of the ones that leave run right back.

> The "first wave" and subsequent waves of outsourcing have to a large extent eliminated paths of career advancement for many workers. At first it was unskilled laborers and now it has been creeping up to virtually all technical job descriptions. The wet-dream of MBA's who promote this stuff is corporations consisting of a few C-level people and their board, and then a layer of fab-less product and operations people who just manage supply-chain and services stuff with external vendors. It's an ugly picture but that's what the global supply chain people want.

This is how Microsoft operated for a while. Entire support ecosystems were built around Redmond, from non-core competency support (design, boutique marketing, food services, maintenance) to core competency augmentation (vendor, off shore, near shore, local). They still employ that model but to a lesser extent. They've moved away from it based on labor market trends and local competition (more companies have moved to the greater Seattle competing for resources). So I don't know if its a universal doctrine or model that will be employed, but it does seem to have a time and a place.

Yea, it's already happened to some extent in the life science industry. It's part of the reason our biotech industry is in shambles. Many of the companies I work with dream of "going virtual", doing research at an unaffiliated lab, taking credit, moving that research to a massive CMO, then dissolving any physical assets, layoffs, and then there is a just a board, execs and profit. It's totally destructive to actual human progress.

I don't think outsourcing manufacturing is destructive of human progress. You got huge companies like AMD and NVIDIA , who certainly contribute to human progress, who outsource all their manufacturing to TSMC because only a few companies worldwide can make those kinds of semiconductors.

Back then, Commodore had an advantage over the competition because they had MOS Technologies as a subsidiary and could rapidly iterate on hardware design. Same in the life sciences business. Nothing is easier than dreaming up a compound, but then you encounter reality, some compounds may be difficult to access synthetically, there are unexpected interactions, and these issues are best sorted out when synthetic chemistry, crystallographic support and the life sciences people are all in the same building. Fabless just doesn't work well outside semiconductors.

Which is why the trend with Apple is to do everything in-house (SoC, etc). Tight vertical integration facilitates difficult software-hardware technologies.

This reminds me of Standard Oil back in the 19th century. They had so much cash floating around that they could build big integrated refineries, railroad and pipeline infrastructure which contributed heavily to efficiency. The price of Kerosene dropped 80% during the history of the company.

Admittedly there's something to be said for outsourcing MFG to someplace like TSMC. But they still employ engineers to design the chips and maintain deep technical talent.

I was thinking more along the lines of companies that are little more than a layer of product managers and operations folks just managing vendors and service providers that do ALL the work.

Biotech startups are usually formed around a drug or biological to hedge the risk of preclinical and early trial work. These are usually developed with some kind of novel process. Usually you get a small early IPO if things work out at that stage to raise working capital. This happens because most traditional VCs won’t fund this type of biotech. That’s changing somewhat. Then the company sells to a major pharma or biotech if the product works out.

Also sometimes these biotechs, if they have novel approaches, are sought by big pharma because they’re more agile. So they buy them out as their R&D labs or invest in them for their IP.

The "big bet" is on the phase 3.

The day before they graduate, a Harvard college student will work on your research project or startup for $0/mo, if it’s interesting enough. The day after, Facebook is ready to pay them $10,000/mo+.

They’re the same human being before and after graduation day. Just as talented the day before as the day after. It’s the pedigree variable that explains the vast majority of the salary.

You’re saying something similar, it’s just that you’re getting distracted by the red herring of the out sourced worker. You should be analyzing the difference between a Harvard and a UC Irvine student, whose average salary difference is as large as the difference between an average US programmer and Accenture contract off shore programmer. It’s got nothing to do with time shifts and organizational culture. You’re looking at this way too logically, along with many other commenters. Indeed I think hardly anyone, including the people who actually say work for Facebook, understand really why one person is paid more or less than another, at their own companies or elsewhere.

That aside you’re onto something with low skilled workers being replaced. The net result of hoovering up low paying programming jobs and sending them to another statistical group (not in this country) is that programming salaries appear to rise. Which is exactly what happened. So if you are of the opinion that programming salaries rising reflects increase in demand, so you should get into programming boot camp, you’d be like 200% wrong. You’re chasing a low salary programming job that doesn’t exist. Which again, is sort of exactly what happened.

There are plenty of bootcamp grads across the companies I've worked and they all make 100k+ (and some are established senior engineers).

Like you are implying: status signaling from degree mills is pretty useless compared to actual competency.

My subjective experience is that boot camp grads are not as successful in the interview and job acquisition process.

Whether or not that’s due to differences in education or purely signaling behavior is something I have yet to fully make up my mind about.

I've had a similar experience at my job and I think it's actually both things.

On one side you have people that managed to claw their way through the boot camp but didn't actually pick up any of the skills; they memorized enough to get through instead of actually learning stuff. On the other side, you have people that did learn but aren't confident in their skills and so flub the interview when their confidence gives out.

I've watched the latter happen on more than one occasion and I really wish I knew how to handle it as an interviewer.

Some companies pay their Harvard interns >$10k/month, so this is not really true.

The rabbit hole goes deeper: some early stage VCs and angels only invest in Harvard or Stanford dropouts.

It is inviting to believe this. It helps me feel as though I'm too good to be outsourced.

...but it's really just a comfortable lie we tell ourselves.

I am in LA and a friend tells me he can't hire good in house engineers locally. When I suggest Vietnam/etc he indeed mentioned tradeoffs regarding timeshift/culture. I guess you can't have it both ways.

>I am in LA and a friend tells me he can't hire good in house engineers locally.

Presumably he means that he can't hire them for the amount he's willing to pay.

>they outsourced were their bottom tier workers, the unproductive people

I don't think that's correct. They outsourced lower-skill jobs that could be done remotely to regions with lower labor costs.

> in many cases returned to near-shore / onsite work

Do you have any examples? I dont see this at all.

What happened is that most IT never returned but the work that IT was doing is now done by cloud service providers. Because of immense software scaling, it made sense to pay for quality workers.

You can sell each additional software product at very high margins so it makes sense to spend a bit more on the worker for a slightly better product that will result in many more high margin sales.

Sometimes they found that it was more effective to do low cost work in cheaper US locations (American South, etc...) than India.

A large telco I worked for (owns a significant % of global cable TV assets and programming) used to outsource all hardware and software development. While I worked there as a contractor from 2013-2018 I saw them replace this with large onsite teams in their HQ in the EU and nearshore teams in Belarus and Ukraine.

I've encountered some of these nearshore companies in E. Europe multiple times over the last decade, business is booming for them.

Remote work is not the same as out-sourcing. Out-sourcing was a necessary evil and only worked for large/mature companies with carved out business processes that could be offloaded. These companies were never remote-first.

With companies being forced to modify their internal processes to be remote-first, what they will realize is that remote does work once they align to it. And once they realize that, there is no stopping them. Since the benefits of having a remote first company well aligned to working efficiently far out-weigh the benefits of a co-located team.

Can you provide an example where this worked for a large scale company? I’ve heard this at smaller companies but nowhere big

One business process that is generally carved out well is customer support. Many large corps have offshore support centers. A sector that comes to mind is mobile-comm companies (e.g. T-Mobile).

And it's not really the same as a globally distributed company either. Plenty of companies have large software development offices in places like Eastern Europe which is a very different situation from outsourced call centers (cost is still one of the drivers, though not the only one).

I think that's splitting hairs.

For example a few years ago I worked with a programmer from India who was part of a "remote consulting company" based in the Netherlands. The experience of working with her was identical to working with the larger offshore companies based in India. As in, time zone, cultural and communication barriers were substantial and disruptive to our productivity.

Communication and cultural differences become significant drags on velocity. Time zone differences exacerbate resolving issues. More importantly, it’s tough communicating technical issues in your non-native language.

It’s also hard to build an engineering culture when you don’t engage with your coworkers often. You have to build credibility so you can work through difficult issues - that’s hard to do when your primary medium of communication is Slack.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

We're in what I'll call the third wave of offshoring now. There are pockets of offshore developers who are actually interchangeable with US-based teams; but the cost difference is more like 25-50% less than the previous waves that were promising 90% cost savings.

My last company ended up outsourcing from Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay and Argentina with good results. We often didn't tell clients they were offshore and billed US rates for them and pocketed the difference. Over the course of about 5 years we had let go our US-based teams because they were just too difficult to hire and retain for the marginal increase in quality.

How did you decide which clients could use offshore labor? If you did that in financial or defense industries you could be opening yourself up to significant legal liability

Fortunately, the vast majority of clients are not in those industries!

It's usually spelled out in the terms of an MSA. You're right, there are plenty of companies you can't offshore work for, and they'll make sure that language is in your MSA. Bill rates adjust accordingly.

Have been using Upwork for years, even when it was called something else...I forget the name.

Useful for CERTAIN types of jobs, especially recurring ones

It was called Odesk.

Elance

Also, companies will realize that doing business in new jurisdictions (possibly with less sophisticated legal systems) has a cost.

> Seems like this article ignores the gigantic wave of out-sourcing throughout IT that already happened in previous decades and in many cases returned to near-shore / onsite work.

Agreed.

> What you actually see if you look at remote work job boards is many (if not most) companies in say, the USA, want remote people from the USA (or at least the same timezone as the USA). I think this is what will happen in other countries too.

Which realistically they cannot enforce, merely incentivize; I'm pro-remote work, mainly because it can free up roads and reduce emissions for more critical infrastructure and needs in the Market, all while offering people the ability to re-locate to less populated areas and ideally help under development, and boost there local economies there. That includes International/Non-US based countries.

Seems like a win-win to me.

True, but...

Anyone can already take your job, as long as they are willing to relocate, or your company opens a new office near them.

It is more important than ever to differentiate yourself. To do that you need to find something to do that you love, and then find (or more often make) a niche in that that that you become one of the top ten people in within your context.

By context I mean you don't need to be the best in the world, you can be the best at X within the Y industry, or within defense consulting, or in the U.S. And you don't need to be the best (though see the quote about being the only), but at least in the top 10.

There are two quotes I am fond of that say similar things much better than I can:

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it." - Steve Jobs

"You do not merely want to be considered just the best of the best. You want to be considered the only one who does what you do." - Jerry Garcia

> Anyone can already take your job, as long as they are willing to relocate,

This where immigration restrictions make a difference. A Brazilian developer has trouble working in SV, but no trouble working remote.

You vastly underestimate the tax and legal implications of an American company hiring and paying a Brazilian in Brazil.

You vastly underestimate the difficulty of immigrating to the United States (or even just _visiting_ it legally).

That really seems like something that can be figured out, especially if the result is 3x less in wages. Unlike immigrating to the US, which is sometimes plain impossible.

It is only worth it for companies beyond a certain size. Smaller companies will always opt for visas vs. figuring out remote taxes.

Interesting, what are they?

They don’t hire that Brasilian to be their employee. The Brasilian is a one-man company. They contract the company to render whatever service. The Brasilian company does whatever Brasiliantaxes and procedures are necessary.

I know a first-world company hiring third-world people. All the taxes are handled by the contractor himself. There are no legal issues to speak of, you only need an invoice from the contractor, or from an intermediator company, such as fiverr.

Relocation is a big barrier to those already married, and even more if they have kids. That's a large portion of senior guys.

Most of the senior people will have already relocated during their junior years though.

Anyone can already take your job, but currently they require local level wages to live with your local cost of living.

Outsourced people can take your job, for much less money.

...and then find (or more often make) a niche in that that that (sic) you become one of the top ten people in within your context

Whatever happened to just getting a normal job and putting in an honest day’s labor?

Now we’re expected to become “one of the top ten”... what exactly? How is that supposed to work? What about those of us with families for goodness sake. We can’t all be super Linus Torvalds ninja hackers putting out code 12 hours a day.

What happened is that it turned out that there are two billion people who can put in an honest day's labour and it no longer matters where they live.

But shouldn't we account for that and adjust accordingly so we aren't ruining society in a race to the bottom? It's all choices, we don't HAVE to allow it to happen.

Should we? I don't see why one guy making $70k and two guys making nothing is superior to three guys making $20k.

Economy is not a zero-sum game. There's no reason you can't have everyone making $70K.

Sure. And that's a no-brainer. We'd all agree on that. The interesting part is when there are trade-offs. So that's my position on the trade-off.

This is getting into a discussion of Universal Basic Income, which I am a big fan of.

But I'd posit that salaries are not a zero-sum game, in the microcosm or the macrocosm.

Within a company each department head likely gets a certain amount of raises to distribute within their department, maybe enough to give most people X%, but also enough to give 2 or three 1.5X%. The company itself has a limited amount it can spend on labor costs.

Within a country there is the monetary supply. There is approximately $1.5 trillion physical currency in circulation. That equates to about $5k per person. Yes there is money that is not backed by physical currency, but the more of that you create (or the more physical currency you create) the higher inflation goes. If we want UBI then we need to back it with something. The Saudis backed it with their annual oil profits, Alaskans the same, and the Norwegians straight out created an investment fund from oil surplus profits. Getting to a workable UBI is not going to be a stopgap fix, and will likely take around 50 years to implement correctly.

It's doable from a technical perspective, in a number of ways. I worry about the political perspective. Our parties are divisive and one party can tear down any of the works of a past administration. So what is to prevent the UBI investment fund being repurposed, similar to Social Security's outcome.

if everyone is making $70k, everything simply becomes more expensive (so it doesn't matter if they make $70k or $700k)

But if the model is built to support this then it isn't an issue. If you see my earlier post about hypothetical improvements we can make to our global economy. If everyone is making more and industry is growing within the country then more classical economics applies (e.g. the pie is growing). In this scenario it's not an issue. It's only when there isn't positive growth that inflation is a huge issue.

> so we aren't ruining society in a race to the bottom

Nope.

What is going on here is the person from India gets to now enjoy a much higher quality of life (because 50% of a U.S. salary gets you a lot in India) while the person from California sees their effective take home pay decrease (because their costs continue to grow but not their salary)

Definitely not a race to the bottom but it sucks to be the person from California.

On the other hand, the person in India will relocate thousands of miles for practically any job, while the person in California will pretend that life is hard because of someone else's doing instead of moving to a place they can afford better.

So in short what you're saying is yay globalism? Bring everyone down to a lowest mean existance possible, we shouldn't protect our interests?

> So in short what you're saying is yay globalism

globalization is happening whether we want it to or not.

> we shouldn't protect our interests

I made no comments either way.

... but, sure, let's think about this.

If you were to pass rules and regulations to stop globalization from happening, what would the top 3 be?

Well I won't claim to be the thought leader on this, however I'm happy to look at some hypothetical ideas. To be clear I'm not looking to reverse globalization completely or stop it.

Rule 1: International trade deals forbid offshoring of manufacturing. Example, cars from Ford can't be made in Mexico for 1/10th the price. This is universal and enforceable by dissolution of companies that don't comply.

Rule 2: Stringent regulations to prevent Tax and location based gaming of Rule 1. Ford doesn't get to pay taxes in Tahiti, incorporate a mailbox in Mexico so they can make their cars there, but take advantage of US infrastructure for the rest of their business.

Rule 3: Companies reaching a monopoly size will be broken up into relatively equal sized companies, importantly those companies will be competing in similar regions. It's not like AWS and Amazon. It's like two Amazons. I'm sure figuring out the codebase and IP will make many jobs for lawyers and engineers. Maybe less for the MBA's.

EDIT: For rule 3 I forgot to add that the break up forces innovation as similar companies are competing now in the same market. It's an engine of growth built into the system.

> I'm sure figuring out the codebase and IP will make many jobs for lawyers and engineers.

This is the broken window fallacy.

> cars from Ford can't be made in Mexico for 1/10th the price

Sure, but then the buyers of said cars from Ford has to pay the premium.

The heavy growth of Amazon, Walmart has proven that the U.S. customer does not care about well paid workers, their benefits or their health - why would they agree to pay more for cars?

> but take advantage of US infrastructure for the rest of their business.

Fair enough. This point is basically Ford gaming the system by taking more out (take advantage of US infrastructure) than what they put in (taxes, local worker compensation)

> Companies reaching a monopoly size will be broken up into relatively equal sized companies

You and I can do this already.

You and I can get together today and force Google or Amazon to be broken up.

However, a broken up Google or Amazon is more powerful than Google or Amazon itself.

There's a practical limit to how expensive a share can get before majority can't afford it anymore. "NYSE: BRK.A" is not the norm, it's an exception. If BRK split itself up, they would, overnight, become way more valuable.

Google has already broken itself up because of this.

The only reason Bezos has not broken Amazon up is because its tremendously profitable AWS and Amazon's North American retail operations allows it to fund and offset the not so profitable (yet) international retail businesses.

Once those are profitable, Bezos will happily break them up before you or I get to it.

Regulations never help.

It cannot. It can, at best, move issues around.

The day we regulated minimum wage, we removed the only tool an unemployed, untrained but happy-to-be-employed-if-possible person had to entice an employer.

When given a choice between an unemployed, but trained person vs. an unemployed, untrained person both at minimum wage, I know who to choose every time. The unemployed, untrained person cannot even get on unemployment!

When people say they want to break up the big tech companies they are not talking about making them do a stock split. They are talking about dividing them into separate entities. This comment seems to conflate these two actions. Amazon or BRK could do a stock split if they thought it would raise their market cap, and it wouldn’t be a big political controversy. It would increase the number of shares but not change the corporate structure or affect any monopoly concerns.

> Regulations never help.

BIG RED FLASHING CITATIONS NEEDED SIGN HERE

Who is the "our" here? My identified in-group is rootless cosmopolitans, so I am happy to see globalists of any nationality take jobs away from protectionist xenophobes.

Do you recognize that your in-group is not widely represented? It's not xenophobia, you're trying to dog whistle something about my character that is untrue. Can you acknowledge that you're being protectionist of your privileged class?

You're suggesting that we should erect artificial barriers to prevent certain groups from accessing lucrative jobs to protect certain privileged classes from competition. It's morally equivalent to (although more socially acceptable than), e.g., banning the hiring of non-white people or women so that white males can make more money. If you can discriminate on the basis of nationality then why not race and gender and religion also?

> > ...and then find (or more often make) a niche in that that that (sic) you become one of the top ten people in within your context

> Whatever happened to just getting a normal job and putting in an honest day’s labor?

That doesn't sound very interesting.

`an honest day’s labor` never really existed, you were never going to get paid the amount of profit a practically unskilled repetitive job delivers to the person of company you work for.

At the same time, there are plenty of jobs (in the USA) you could do 16 hrs a day and still not make enough money to provide for your basic needs.

I don't think people have to be top ten or something like that to be useful, but being a meat-based robot is hardly compelling for either side anymore. You need to have at least some skill and you need to make sure you keep developing as the world around you also develops. With human expansion the rate of change itself has changed, and not even a luddite would be unaffected by that.

You can put in a normal amount of effort if you want, but then you don't have the right to demand a more than a normal amount of compensation (~$50k/household in the US). I don't think it's unreasonable to demand extra effort for a FAANG salary.

An honest day's labor only existed in the middle of the 20th century. Before the New Deal you had to work hard on a farm or a factory to make ends meet. After the Great Stagnation in the 1970s, the economy cannot sustain widespread growth in prosperity for all classes of American society. The Post-World War II economic expansion was a 1 time miracle enabled by the picking of several low hanging fruits.

"These figurative "low-hanging fruit" from the title include the cultivation of much free, previously unused land; the application and spread of technological breakthroughs, particularly during the period 1880–1940, including transport, refrigeration, electricity, mass communications, and sanitation; and the education of large numbers of smart people who previously received none."[0]

The party is over. Americans are at the top but they aren't getting any higher, and everyone else in the world is catching up. That means Americans have to compete with the rest of global middle class.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Stagnation

that may be true, but i think the parent posters point still stands regardless:

> We can’t all be super Linus Torvalds ninja hackers putting out code 12 hours a day.

Yes, Cowen's follow up to "The Great Stagnation" is "Average is Over" that follows the same line of thought.

I'd argue you don't need to truly be top ten, you need to be sufficiently good that finding someone better isn't worth the marginal cost (hiring is really expensive!)

Another way of thinking of this: can you be considered top 10 within a pool of 100 applicants?

Also, who is "top ten" is extremely subjective, based on the company, who is evaluating, and niche. I would guess that within a 100 developer cohort there's not a lot of overlap between the top ten embedded c++ developers and the top ten react developers, and even the top ten that can do both c++ AND react.

You don't, it's the same psycho advice US tech people have been giving each other nervous breakdowns about for two decades now. Thousands of people have solid jobs that pay well where they can learn at a normal pace, do interesting work and put it down at 5/6pm.

If it's true that America really is that way, my advice is look abroad because life is not about your job.

Your recommendation to become the top 10 in something is either impossible, or only achievable by narrowing definitions down to inanity. I can easily be the top 10 in <industry> <feature> written in <specific language version> <specific framework version> run on <specific infrastructure>, but who cares? Recommending that people become the top 10 in their industry is an impossible recommendation; as there might be hundreds of people in my company who perform a similar role, let alone within my industry.

It’s a bit like recommending someone become one of the top 10 basketball players to make money; someone will do it, but the chances are so slim that it’s a bad recommendation.

Also, how do you define “top 10”?

'Top 10' is a convenient label. It's more about the answer to the question 'who are the most respected experts in X within the Y', and maybe even make X be instead 'X using Z'. Several careers having been made by being known as a leader using a particular technology, or a co-creator of the technology from the beginning, though it always comes with other things to back it up as well:

* Tim Berners-Lee - the web, W3C

* Peter Saint-Andre - XMPP, messaging RFCs

* DHH - Ruby on Rails

* Martin Fowler - Design Patterns

..and many more.

Yes, getting to the Tim Berners-Lee level of industry recognition is unreasonable to expect for most. But I think it is reasonable to think that this is doable, with the depth of the expertise niche needed to be outstanding being inversely proportional to the talent of the expert. One person might have an expertise niche of messaging, while another has RabbitMQ as their main niche. Both are viable to base a living off of.

At a certain point you’re talking about programmer celebrities and trying to draw general career advice from them, which is silly. We can’t all be celebrities, and any career advice based on that is kind of pointless.

Now talking about having a niche is a fair argument, but that’s literally a completely new argument. “Be in the top 10” and “specialize” are not the same pieces of advice, at all.

>>> And you don't need to be the best (though see the quote about being the only), but at least in the top 10.

Basically, you're saying only the top 1% will be employable.

This is going to be a new experience for a lot of devs in the bay area that have been spoiled with job offers. Those days are over. I'd say it's time to hunker down, save as much as possible because future employment will be scare. And, there's already a vast oversupply of talent. I'd hate to think what it would look like in 5 years time.

In a world where everyone has about the same skills, more or less after some onboarding period, network is everything.

Real time, remote communication through tools like zoom, slack, and lucidchart (in my humble opinion) has been solved. It might take some getting used to, but in the right environment a group of properly motivated individuals can achieve the same productivity as their peers in a conference room.

Asynchronous communication across timezones has not been solved, and I struggle to see how it would be. A lot of collaboration requires a conversation and instant feedback from another party. You can't collaborate like this when there is a delay of 8 hours instead of 8 seconds between responses.

So "anywhere" is a bit of a stretch. That being said, absolutely this will happen across the United States. There is nothing that makes developers in San Francisco more talented than their counterparts living in Tennessee, so if those can be gotten cheaper, I can see how the overall price would go down.

Presumably though, such an effect would also cause rents and property values to go down in big cities. I can see how the natural evolution of such an idea is that wealth will be more evenly spread out throughout the country, instead of being concentrated in cities.

I still think the Facebooks and Googles will pay a lot more - someone has to be the "top dog" attracting the top talent. The question is, how much more?

> Real time, remote communication through tools like zoom, slack, and lucidchart (in my humble opinion) has been solved. It might take some getting used to, but in the right environment a group of properly motivated individuals can achieve the same productivity as their peers in a conference room.

What is not solved, of course, is how a remote-only employee can build trust and relationships with peers.

In my opinion that’s the reason a lot of remote work is working well right now. Everybody already knows each other.

Through projects? I'm working remotely and it's the same as in person. First few months is about everyone feeling each other out once you understand more you give people more trust in those areas.

First few months is often the duration of a project, especially for those working on a contract basis.

Remote and in person can reach the same level of trust and productivity, but I do believe that people reach that level faster in person as opposed to oddly forced zoom happy hours.

It might be false trust. I wouldn't use conversation to judge in person or remotely. Is what is commited into the repo after a week or two what I expected. Is what documentation was produced what I expected?

Agreed. Also - one benefit of going remote is you can more easily avoid anyone you dislike! So that's a win over the office.

This can also backfire when it's easier to avoid confrontation which if resolved would be a net gain for everyone.

Most confrontations can be resolved beforehand. The confrontation is unnecessary, take small steps to improve relations. Even a firing shouldn't be a confrontation it should be part of a process .

> What is not solved, of course, is how a remote-only employee can build trust and relationships with peers.

You're saying that trust can't be built virtually? I think there are online communities whose members would say they trust each other, and can collaborate and work together just fine. A lot of open source communities certainly work on this basis.

Besides, working remote-only doesn't mean occasional meetups or virtual events (gaming, etc.) couldn't be held to bring the team more socially together, but I don't think this is a requirement.

Of course, trust is subjective, so others will feel differently about what it takes to establish it for all involved, but that applies for physical communication as well.

Trust can be built virtually, but it requires large and conscious effort, whereas in person most people who work closely will automatically develop trust.

When I was at Intel, they had outsourced graphics driver development to Panang. Within a year they had created a large number of US jobs for folks who had to rebuild the work from Panang and validate/test/fix any new working coming back from Panang.

There is a difference between a cheap foreign engineer without formal training and a trained domestic engineer. Anyone who thinks every type of labor can be outsourced to cheaper labor markets has no understanding of the phrase "You get what you pay for".

Sure, the call center guy telling you to reboot can be outsourced trivially, move up the stack and you may be making a large fiscal mistake. This is discounting the much higher fraud rate attached with outsourced labor as well.

> There is a difference between a cheap foreign engineer without formal training and a trained domestic engineer.

IMO there's no difference between a trained domestic engineer and a trained foreign engineer. Foreign vs domestic isn't a meaningful difference.

However. Existing tech hubs got their cachet for having the best and the brightest, which in turn draws in the best and the brightest. Companies have to pay more for talent on average in hubs because the talent has self-selected for a high concentration of great folks.

That doesn't mean there isn't an assortment of great folks elsewhere who just didn't feel like moving, but IMO, more than likely, the majority of the great folks are already in tech hubs. I think the risk is overstated.

He didn't say there wasn't talented people elsewhere. The title says anyone can take your job, and he drew a line between looking globally to save money and getting what you pay for. You seem to be bringing up counter points to something that wasn't said.

Of course there's a difference. A domestic engineer needs great software development skills and decent communication skills. A foreign engineer needs great software skills, great English skills and an extra measure of communications skills to bridge the cultural gap without ever meeting face-to-face. Clearly one of these workers is more highly skilled than the other and would be harder to recruit.

> IMO there's no difference between a trained domestic engineer and a trained foreign engineer. Foreign vs domestic isn't a meaningful difference.

This isn't supported by the research. American university graduates have much better knowledge of computer science than their Indian, Chinese and Russian counterparts.[1]

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/116/14/6732

I guess it depends on what you mean by a "trained domestic" engineer. The implication of your paper is "domestically-trained" i.e. the caliber of US universities is higher. "Trained, domestic" implies US person, trained wherever, and "trained, foreign" implies non-US person trained wherever.

For instance, is someone who moves to the US from Malaysia, goes to UIUC, then moves back to Malaysia a "trained foreign", "trained domestic", or "foreign, trained" engineer in your view?

Nuanced, but important, and might be why people are talking past eachother.

Fun fact, you can get good foreign engineers as good as any SF engineer but they also tend to be as costly as their US counterpart maybe slightly less do to lower living costs.

That's exactly my experience, the foreign talent on par with domestic talent costs about the same or close enough that outsourcing becomes much less attractive.

Exactly, in general you get what you pay for.

I would not say "SF engineer" = "good engineer".

There are excellent engineers in SF, but that's not the standard. It's the result of strict selection processes.

This is nothing but racism. Foreign engineers are no inherently worse than "domestic" born and raised. For proof, just visit any Silicon Valley company office. You will see nothing but foreign born engineers.

>I still think the Facebooks and Googles will pay a lot more - someone has to be the "top dog" attracting the top talent. The question is, how much more?

They will pay more. But Facebook has already announced they'll readjust salaries to people who work from home in lower COL areas.

That’s not quite true. They said they’ll adjust salaries according to the “market rate” of the location they’re hiring in, which doesn’t always line up with cost of living.

This sucks for people living in London, for example, where developer salaries are low but the cost of living is high.

I've worked for Swiss companies from the west coast of North America (9 hours difference). It's not perfect, but I started early and they kept an eye on slack until late. Most of the time we communicated in the couple hours of overlap we had.

It works because as a developer it's a plus to have multiple hours of good focus time with no meetings or interruptions. Plus we can cover each other for pager duty so nobody has to normally wake in the middle of the night.

I think remote work greatly increases the circle of people you're competing with. I don't recommend trying to be remote only unless you're world class - because the world is technically your competition.

That said there are lots of reasons most people in Vietnam or India are not actually in competition with me. Being able to communicate fluently in English and divine requirements from non technical people who don't know what they want is still the most important part of the job. You can be the best programmer in the world, but if you can't do that, you'll just build the wrong things beautifully and ahead of time.

Then there is the trust issue. People need to know they can trust you with their code, customers, and business. That's a challenge if they've never met you in person. It's a bigger challenge if you live in the developing world - maybe that shouldn't be true, but it is. I had more trouble getting jobs when I lived in Panama.

Ive been on projects like this as well (the other way though - working from Spain for clients in San Francisco). You can definetly make it work, but its far from ideal. As you go through your day, questions inevitably pop up outside of the overlap hours. If you have to wait until the next day to get answers, you either have to pause what you are doing and switch to something else, or continue under assumptions that might be proven wrong the next day.

Coming back to the states and being able to collaborate real time throughout the day was always a boost to productivity.

In my digital nomad days, the golden place for a client was always New York. This is because it would allow me to have solid overlap from anywhere in the states, and also good enough overlap in Europe.

Yeah, I'm used to having to switch gears into another task. I'm also used to getting very creative with finding a way forward when that's not possible (the site is down and I don't know what to do about it, and the only people who know are unreachable.)

I had a job for a while that I hated where I never knew what my task was. It would seem clear when given to me, but then I would start and questions would come up and there was nobody to clarify. So I'd have to go back to first principles and try to divine what they wanted me to do, and then execute on that. I was over the moon when I got a better gig and was able to leave that one.

> I think remote work greatly increases the circle of people you're competing with. I don't recommend trying to be remote only unless you're world class - because the world is technically your competition.

Another perspective, from a remote-only employee away from all the world's tech hubs: there just aren't that many local jobs to choose from. Remote work really makes it possible for me to have a job in this field where every other company is complaining about shortage of talent.. and I don't have to leave home & everything behind and move into a big city (I don't like cities btw).

I don't think I'm world class.

I've only worked remote, initially for the same reason.

But I think you're better than you assume, because you got the job out of a very large pool of potential candidates. By definition, you must've beat everyone who applied in that hiring round.

Which reminds me of the first rule of finding a job - it's just like dating - is a numbers game. Your chance of success on any attempt might be low, but then you just need to make enough attempts and the limit of P(offer) approaches 1.

Even remote companies can only consider so many applicants. In our last three job searches that number started at 100 or so, was whittled down using resumes to 40 or so who were whittled down to a dozen or so by tech screens and finally we interviewed less than ten. One hour interview followed by a take home for the top three. We chose one of the three. No stupid whiteboard. No long ass interviews. The take home was an hour or two at most and the people doing it knew they were finalists. We're a small company. A bigger company will have a bigger pool. The irony is, they won't get better candidates and if they have a shit hiring process, they'll get much worse. Other than problems with a couple of people's background which would have been immediately flagged had we done a proper check, our hires have been great developers.

> problems with a couple of people's background

What kind of problems with people's backgrounds did you find relevant to doing a developer job?

Trust, overlap of working hours, language, and culture are huge -- and often insurmountable.

Having dealt with Tata, Cap Gemini, Genpack, CTS, HCL, and a handful of smaller groups in the Philippines, I'd avoid offshore workers if at all possible. Would absolutely hire qualified Indians and Filipinos in the US, but outsourcing is dicey.

I don't think that 'Tennessee' is the correct spelling for Shenzhen. The low cost of living states in the US are still expensive compared to low cost of living countries. There is engineering talent around the world, and I don't see how the rural parts of the US are going to compete with more urban populations in other well educated parts of the world.

Anectodal, but I spent a year on a recent project collaborating with a group of firmware engineers in Shenzhen, and it was an absolute nightmare. Apart from the timezones, the code quality was horrendous and basically never worked correctly. They also ignored all common standards, and made assumptions about things like ordering of fields in JSON. None of their engineers spoke english, so code communication had to go though the project manager who wasn't technical.

I can see how english fluent Mexican, South American and Canadian employees will be in competition - this is already happening, but I think that China might be one of the last places I would higher a developer due to the huge time difference and their poor english speaking ability.

You probably got what your company paid for.

My company has an office in Hyderabad India. My experience is that a US-equivalent developer in India isn't actually that much cheaper, and when you weigh the timezone disadvantage it may not really be worth the hassle.

We still have a thousand developers there and we pay $2500/mo for each of them. There are plenty of nice people, and a few rockstars, but on average this money doesn't buy top talent in India.

Are SV based companies getting what they pay for?

I’ve worked with Chinese developers and their English and programming skills were fine. Just check for English language skills in the interview if it’s important to your company.

Personally I think that non technical project managers are the bigger problem, remote or not.

I wouldn't higher a developer due to their poor English speaking quality either.

There are around 5 million software developers in China. Are you really sure it makes sense to assume that they all suck?

I'm sorry but that is a silly prejudice. You worked with one group.

China has the 7th lowest english speaking rate in the world. I doubt that they are going to be a large outsourcing hub to English speaking people any time soon. If you speak Mandarin though, its a great place to hire cheap developers - just look at Zoom.

He said they were all bad developers.

Offshoring has been a thing for years, we already know how it plays out. There are distinct disadvantages, and a lot of companies have been bringing development back into the US as a result. My company is one of them.

If you really want offshoring to work, you at least have to move 100% of your development staff overseas. Really you need to move 100% of your engineering altogether, and maybe a good chunk of your leadership as well.

Tennessee has a huge advantage over places like China and India simply due to communication. Language fluency, cultural similarity, and a low timezone offset all very much contribute to a successful team.

Actually if you look at cost of living data, the USA is in quite an interesting position. It contains both some of the most expensive and cheapest cost of living in the developed world. Salaries in some areas are some of the highest in the world, and in other places are closer to Eastern Europe or South America once you've accounted for things like taxes and healthcare. There's a seriously huge gap in pay when looking at Rust Belt Ohio vs the Bay Area.

Two kids go to school at Ohio State in the same program. One moves to SF and makes 200k right out of school. The other stays in Ohio and has a starting salary of 55k doing similar work. I don't think you need to worry about the Chinese coming for your tech jobs. In a remote world, the Buckeyes will get there first.

Exactly. Although if the Buckeye was motivated, he could currently get a remote gig and make 100k. It wouldn't be SF rates, but it would still be higher than the local shops. It will be interesting to see how such arbitrage gets affected by more remote companies entering the field.

It will be interesting since I am the "motivated Buckeye" and selfishly, don't want the arbitrage opportunity to go away.

Those salaries are not correct for either location.

> Asynchronous communication across timezones has not been solved, and I struggle to see how it would be.

By focusing on excellent written communication.

Great written comms is hard, and (like coding) requires lots of deliberate practice and training.

Most people and companies gloss over this, but it makes a world of difference if you're operating across time zones.

Great internal writing is what separate the great companies from the average.

No. Not even for a second.

Suppose you have two engineers, one in America, one in India. PRs cannot be merged without an approval. Suppose the average PR requires 3 back-and-forth comments before it gets merged.

In the same timezone this gets merged in an hour. In a different timezones its days.

> someone has to be the "top dog" attracting the top talent

As I said in my comment, this is the big shift I would be looking for. The shift in the top dogs. The top dog could become a Chinese company snagging US expertise rather than the other way around. That could then create effects where US workers are applying to jobs abroad.

The real competition might not be positioning yourself as the talent. The real competition of the future might be attracting the talent. Once you get _that_ shift, then this conversation takes a totally different turn.

I can't imagine any of my US coworkers every working for a Chinese company. The non-zero chance of being sent to a 're-education camp' if you ever have to travel is a big concern

It's a BIG concern? Really?

No US worker is going to get set to a re-education camp for a 2-5 day set of business meetings in Shanghai. Bug your phone or capture all your internet traffic? Maybe. Arresting a foreign national working for a Chinese firm? Unlikely.

Anyone who is 'unreliable' enough for the Chinese government to arrest them isn't going to get hired by a Chinese firm -- doubly so because the largest firms in CN are state-owned.

>Asynchronous communication across timezones has not been solved

True, but the workaround is I'm willing to adjust my work hour to fit my team. In a big city, life can still be 'lively' during the night.

> Asynchronous communication across timezones has not been solved, and I struggle to see how it would be.

I disagree, at least if we are talking about what tools to use. But many people who are used to being face-to-face aren't used to async. Async communications require patience, foresight, and good writing skills. You need to envision the end result of the collaboration, provide as much of your perspective as possible without writing a wall of text, and ask good questions. Then, in 8 hours, your coworkers do the same. And over a few days, consensus arrives.

Easier said than done, I admit. It takes time and deliberate practice to do this well. It is not how people are used to collaborating. But that does not mean it doesn't work - it means people only succeed when they put in the effort learn new communication skills.

Patience, foresight, and good writing skills don't solve the fundamental problem that a consensus in 3 days is less valuable than a consensus in 30 minutes. Any long sequence of consensus-based decisions becomes infeasible in the asynchronous model.

You may be trying to make all scenarios fit the same model. I did not mean to imply that. When you need quick answers, get on a video call and get real-time answers. When you don't, go async. Knowing when to use each method is again just a matter of learning communication skills.

As you improve, you'll also find that the urgency of decisions often isn't what it appears to be. That is where the patience comes in. If you truly constantly need consensus on problems within 30 minutes to prevent your business from crashing, then I'd suggest your organization may have deeper problems that need resolution.

> When you need quick answers, get on a video call and get real-time answers

Having worked with a distributed team (13 hours time difference) working on the same product under the same deadlines, it's not possible to just hop on a call because e.g. someone accidentally changed a config on a development API which I don't have direct access to because it would knock us out of SOC2 compliance. This is an issue which needs to be resolved immediately and blocks any further work on my end, which means I can't do my work until they wake up and get into the office.

> If you truly constantly need consensus on problems within 30 minutes to prevent your business from crashing, then I'd suggest your organization may have deeper problems that need resolution.

When you're overextended, working under an intense deadline to deliver a product to a client, tight turnaround is absolutely necessary. In theory all of this could be fixed with proper management, but small- to mid-size startups don't usually have the time or resources to do that.

> There is nothing that makes developers in San Francisco more talented than their counterparts living in Tennessee

I think there's more to this. There's a "network effect" of living in a place like SV. I felt that the bar was much higher in the West Coast due to the high density of companies and talent attracted.

> Asynchronous communication across timezones has not been solved

The company I work for has offices in Europe an throughout the US and Canada. We span 11 time zones, and we are absolutely able to make it work. My team has 7 people and only 2 are in the same office.

The trick is to have multiple communications channels, good collaboration tools, and to hire excellent communicators.

I agree from experience that straight outsourcing, where you throw a language barrier in with the time zone issue, is not a solved problem, but purely working across timezones is very doable,

> Real time, remote communication through tools like zoom, slack, and lucidchart (in my humble opinion) has been solved.

Unfortunately, that's not the case.

Remote meetings can be far more frustrating and inefficient because of latency, total lack of turn-taking cues, inability to read emotional expressions of concern or worry on one person or to "read the room", emotional fatigue from lack of cues, and so on. And that's all assuming best-case scenario that your equipment and internet are working well. People pay attention less, speak up less, and so on.

Now, this isn't to say that remote communication isn't useful -- it's obviously far better than not having it at all. And even when you're in the office, many teams are distributed anyways across offices.

But remote communication and meetings have in no way been "solved". They still present elementary problems like when someone asks "who has thoughts?", there's 10 seconds of excruciating silence followed by four people speaking simultaneously, then another 20 seconds trying to figure out which one person will actually speak, where nobody wants to seem like the aggressive bully OR never get to speak.

It's really hard.

There's another side to this coin where remote meetings have some benefits. In my experience people tend to schedule fewer pointless meetings and are more likely to get the info they need over slack/email. I don't have to feel like I have to hide my emotional queues, like I can make a "WTF" face any time without fear of reprisal. I can even mute and say really fucked up things out loud to help me get through stupid things that are happening. Many shy people are more comfortable typing what they want to say into a group chat than they are saying it out loud, so in this way text based meetings can be more inclusive.

I suspect after an adjustment period that we'll reach an equilibrium similar to what we had before as far as effectiveness.

There is an interesting social phenomenon going on here which I think is often missed. The old world was designed around the preferences of the most extroverted people. Those people are losing that privilege, and I understand how difficult it must be. Honestly, I'm extremely introverted, and somewhat autistic, enjoy isolation, etc. So if this whole thing has bothered me a little bit, I understand it must feel like torture for someone on the other end of the introvert/extrovert spectrum. Hopefully we'll settle one a better medium that is more amenable to the median person than what we had before.

And there is one unspoken piece. Real decisions happen in person, and then may be just repeated via email for CYA purposes. Remote communication may be solved, but the reality of making hard decisions was not.

My hunch though is that virtual meetings don't necessarily add new types of problems to real meetings, they just highlight the problems which already exist.

If you have a meeting with 12 people, and most of them are not engaged, the problem isn't necessarily the video call, its more like the majority of those people shouldn't be in the meeting at all, and would just benefit from a written summary.

If you have a meeting where 4 people are jumping in to share an opinion on one topic, that sounds like too many cooks in the kitchen, not a video call problem.

From my experience with remote meetings, the ones that work the best are those between two or three people where everyone is informed and the subject of discussion is concrete. These kinds of meetings are just as productive as the real thing. The kinds of meetings that tend to not be productive are the ones that have a dozen people in the call, with a few people talking and the rest watching the clock until the hour is over. These kinds of meetings are a drag in the real world as well.

Yes, 1-1 or 1-1-1 remote meetings are not too bad, especially for 1-1-1 if you can view both other participants simultaneously and latency is not too bad (e.g. New York to SF, not New York to Japan.)

But my comments are assuming, say, a 12-person meeting that has to happen. For reviews/approvals of a project with 10 stakeholders, it simply has to happen. And I never said anyone wasn't engaged -- participants usually are.

And 4 people having an opinion is the norm, absolutely not too many cooks. Just think -- a small feature idea is presented for approval in order to start work, a designer sees a potential problem, the user researcher realizes a use case was left out, the engineer is worried about feature creep, and marketing doesn't know if it'll be easy to explain. All of these have to be addressed.

So I'm highlighting that even when everything about the meeting is necessary and otherwise awesome and productive, the limitations of remote participation can add substantial difficulties to running it effectively. And that in this sense remote meetings are in no way "solved" yet.

If one needs to read the room or care about facial expressions in one's meetings rather than believing and trusting one's coworkers' actual responses, one is a shitty manager / executive. The video part of remote meetings is equivalent to micromanaging work except now one's micromanaging the meeting. The goals and outcome are the same. Doubly so for anything involving building software as it's clearly possible and often desirable to work almost completely asynchronously for most tasks as much of the open source community does.

I worked at a company that had a New York office and a remote country office. People basically sat in a videochat all day long. I'd say it is more efficient, because you don't need to be in the room all the time, and you can do other things while people are talking about subjects that are not interesting to you.

> What globalization did to manufacturing jobs, remote work will do to many service jobs.

This is bait. It's taken as a given rather than a hypothesis to be proven, which invalidates most of this post for me.

Issues with the analogy:

- Offshoring existed before remote work was popularized. For the many of "your jobs" up to be "taken" that shift has already occurred.

- Outsourcing is not a magic bullet. Timezone gaps, communication style, expert knowledge, and legal compliance are all issues that previous outsourcers to call centers have already discovered.

- Significant gaps remain between "tier-1" and "tier-2" support. Effective deployment of offshoring requires using the two to complement one another, not trying to use the latter to replace the former.

No matter what it is that your company is selling, tricky situations will come up that needed to be escalated to an experienced customer success team, whether that's the founder or a dedicated team. Being able to recruit globally doesn't magically make building that team any easier.

> Offshoring existed before remote work was popularized. For the many of "your jobs" up to be "taken" that shift has already occurred.

This is different though, because those companies weren't 'remote' so offshoring is not viable without that prerequiste.

But if company goes 'remote' much more work becomes outsourcing worthy.

> But if company goes 'remote' much more work becomes outsourcing worthy.

Again, there's a difference between "outsourcing worthy" and "can reliably outsourced for enough cost savings for the whole thing to not be ROI negative". And, that's my point. Companies going remote doesn't magically jump start geographic labor arbitrage from zero. That geographic labor arbitrage has been ongoing for a long time.

> Now, you can either hire someone from San Francisco and subsidize their obscene rent, or you can hire someone from Omaha. You can get the same work done, but cheaper. What would you choose?

This depends on the assumption that there's a big supply of workers in Omaha that are able to step in and do the job. I'm an outsider, but I'd guess that the people worth $600,000 Facebook salaries are already living there and working for Facebook. And then there's the question of whether those jobs are the ones that can be done remote as well as in a specific location. You have to ask why, if there were such big savings on the table, these companies hadn't already moved in this direction. I don't think it's as clear-cut as many are making this out to be.

> I'm an outsider, but I'd guess that the people worth $600,000 Facebook salaries are already living there.

Myopic

Yup, all these op-eds reek of FUD.

I also think people are overestimating the impact that FAANG going full remote will have on the tech world. I know that they're trend setters, but a lot of companies have already been operating full remote/remote friendly and offering perfectly fine wages.

I really only see net-positive from this cultural shift. Frankly its obscene that location matters more than talent currently.

Within software at least, there are simply more people that have significant 'clock time' working within well run software companies in San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, etc.

It's no different than college football players that spend their four years in well run systems that run pro style offenses. Sure, there may be a kid that has insane athletic ability that is playing at Calhoun Community College, but someone like Jerry Juedy ( wide receiver for Alabama ) is the player that the Denver Broncos will choose if they can get him.

There simply aren't as many well run software companies in Omaha as there are in Seattle. And one could argue that the best free agents are going to be the ones coming out of those cities who can command higher market rates because companies believe there is higher ROI.

Yes, exactly. I've learned much more in the last two years working at a big tech co than I did at a small software company in the midwest, making me a much stronger engineer.

I've traveled to a lot of customer sites throughout the Midwest and to a couple dozen of their offshore plants in Mexico and China. Some of those customers are giant automotive OEMs and Tier 1 manufacturers with brand new glassy R&D labs with brand name equipment and Ivy League engineers making salaries well into the 6 figures. But some are tiny, self-taught, rural mom-and-pop outfits working from their garage with used equipment who might make more money as a line worker in the former shops.

One critical thing to I've really come to experience in my travels is that all humans are basically the same. Those Ivy League engineers are no more intelligent or hard-working or creative than the guy in his garage or the site engineer from the Mexican or Chinese state university, instead it's often the opposite. If they're able to use the people, tools, and budget their position affords them, they can be more productive, but on the spot without those aids if anything they're less productive.

The only differences are social connections, credentials, resources, the value multiplier from the volume that goes through their business, and the fraction of that value they're able to extract.

The former three factors stack up against the engineer from Omaha. The last two mean that Facebook or Ford can easily afford those higher salaries while the Omaha garage cannot.

> I'd guess that the people worth $600,000 Facebook salaries are already living there and working for Facebook.

Yes! I think this is true. However, the more interesting development to me is what happens 10 years from now. The engineers who are making $600k in SF are typically 10 years into their career (if not more). This is the biggest knock against expanding into places like Omaha- there's plenty of entry-level talent, but little, if any, mid-level to senior talent.

In Edmonton (Canada), where I'm from, there's an awesome university that graduates tons of CS grads who immediately head to the Bay Area, because they can make 4x more there. As such, most of the work in town isn't sophisticated- there's lots of web development shops, but not many jobs doing sophisticated engineering at the level of, say, Facebook or Google.

As a result, you're right, there's not many people who could get a $600k offer from Facebook. But! If these companies start supporting remote work, we could see tech ecosystems developing, and we could see new grads staying in these places, and building ecosystems around them.

To answer your question about:

"why, if there were such big savings on the table, these companies hadn't already moved in this direction."

I think the answer is as follows:

1. New grads need more experienced talent to help mentor them and ensure that they're seen as productive.

2. All of the companies' offices have historically been in certain locations, so we either need to a) have the new grads move to somewhere we have experienced talent, or b) need to have experienced people move to where the new grads are.

We see both of these- companies regularly will start new offices once they can get sufficiently experienced people to move there, but only when they can get that. This is the main reason (aiui) why many of the large tech cos in the Bay Area are concentrated in the Bay- there are no senior level people who are interested/willing to move.

Big IT does not care, they make bank despite bleeding stupid money. Reorg after reorg, projects canceled left and right, expensive consultants onboard not pulling their weight, cloud costs through the roof, the list goes on and on and on.

Before covid most companies were hiring like crazy, it is not either/or, they want all those workers, both the people in SF and in Omaha too.

Coincidentally, I am from Omaha, and moved to San Francisco for IT work. If I could move back, even for lower pay, I would - to be closer to family.

Granted, I am just one data point, but it's hard to imagine I am alone...

I left New York to move and be closer to family about 4 years ago. The local market does not pay well for software developers, but I've managed to find steady contracting work and with the lower cost of living have been saving more money.

If you can find decision-makers and demonstrate quality work to them, and start planting the seeds that you would be available for contracting, there is a good chance you can make your move back to Omaha within a year.

just as a counter point, and using a throwaway because I don't want to leak net worth stuff. I'm in a flyover state (started in SoCal, not remote). Not a FAANG. Base salary is 200k and I have about $200k per year in RSU, not to mention the IPO that gave me about $1M. I'm a distributed systems developer working on multi-tenant systems for hundreds of thousands of paying customers doing multiple billions of calls from customers that multiplex into larger internal load on our DCs. I've grown with a company from a couple dozen employees to thousands. Through IPOs and acquisitions (from both sides). This gives me some more perspective on working in different sized orgs with long time scales and a deep understanding of operations and maintaining software while switching out legacy code for new code (the proverbial changing out wings on a plane in flight).

I'm sure there is not a big supply of folks like me anywhere, and most of us are probably doing work at FAANGs and such. Truth is, FAANGs can't afford me because I'm not jumping ship for anything less than full time remote with good people on a product I think is worthwhile for anything under $600k/yr. I'd actually like to start something around edtech, so maybe I'll look into that if I lose my golden gig.

The implication from this litter of thinkpieces on HN is that proximity to a tech hub (SV/NY) is your only competitive advantage as a knowledge worker—your butt is close to their chair. This runs counter to the other prevailing wisdom about SV/NY, which is that those areas are hubs—and essential to the tech industry—because the world's top talent is drawn to it.

So which is it?

The same set of people aren't saying both things. The people who believe SV and NY have top talent are exactly the ones who think remote work is great. I'm excited about the trend; a bigger pool of talented engineers for me to work with means I'll be able to accomplish more and have to compromise less on my career goals.

The people who worry that remote work will be a disaster are the ones who never believed SV engineers were more talented in the first place.

> The people who worry that remote work will be a disaster are the ones who never believed SV engineers were more talented in the first place.

Or that technical talent does not really contribute to success as much as the prevailing theories believe?

If someone says SV engineers are talented, but only in some technical way that doesn't really matter, I'd classify that as a claim that they're not really talented.

Why can't it be both? Companies locate where the talent is; the talent goes where the companies are. Your standard positive feedback loop.

There are multiple layers. I think SV will remain a hub from a commercial standpoint, so if you're fishing for VC money that's still where you want to be.

From a purely technical standpoint, we'll see, but tbh, as others have said, outsourcing has been happening for decades now and if anything the wave is currently retreating.

I can count three VCs in my immediate circle of contacts that are expanding up and down the West Coast at least.

The NIMBYs in SF are going to get their wish: shrinking the city and collapsing its major industry. As another poster stated: things that don't make sense get adjusted in bad economic times. Things like paying 7-10X for real estate when you're in a digital industry...

I was just reading another piece that suggested the current crisis is likely to accelerate a number of trends that were already happening to some degree. I certainly don't expect the Bay Area to empty out or for Google to move their HQ to Omaha. But a lot of big tech companies were already shifting more of their hiring to new offices in areas removed from their HQ even if they don't make a big deal of it like Amazon did. And, anecdotally, I hear of a lot more people in my circles leaving the Bay Area than moving to it.

VC money being geographically concentrated in SV seems like the kind of ingrained inefficiency that VCs themselves clamor on about disrupting excessively. Dealflow is a solvable problem for distributed futures.

Both?

As someone who is unable to move to California due to family, I've always seen the biggest benefit I am missing to be not applying to jobs close by, but being the proximity to people I can connect with who can help me (and my ideas) grow.

It's an old cliche, but true, that if you surround yourself with people smarter/better than yourself then you will likely get better yourself; conversely, if you are the smartest person in the room on X (no one is the smartest in the room on everything), then there is no forcing function driving you to get better other than one you artificially create for yourself.

"The room" has lost most of its meaning, hasn't it? You're no longer limited to working with people who live within driving distance of yourself, you can now meet super smart people from all over the world on lots of websites, talk to them, work with them, learn from them, get inspired by them.

> "The room" has lost most of its meaning, hasn't it?

I don't think so. Trust and sense of shared purpose and ability are still largely built in person. The continued productivity people claim during the pandemic lockdown is mostly coasting off what was largely established in person before.

Websites, chat-rooms, and video calls are no substitute for the environment created by the physical agglomerations of people found in industry hubs.

That's not specific to the tech industry, either. It's true for any industry whose progress is dictated by hubs of creativity, including health, energy, entertainment, and transportation.

Oh sure, for networking and contacts etc, in person is still the thing. I meant for the "being the smartest person in the room" thing.

Before the internet, you had to go live in a metropolis to even know of these other people that were also interested in what you like, much less talk to or work with them. That has changed dramatically, and you absolutely can work with very bright people on very advanced things while you live somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

Don't get me wrong, it's still nice to meet people in person, but if you can't find a community online where people are smarter than you and/or better than you in whatever you do, you're either a super genius or you're not looking.

> I meant for the "being the smartest person in the room" thing.

I find the preoccupation over chasing the vaguely defined, but often bandied definition of "smart" a bit dull.

What matters more in my opinion is being in an intellectually stimulating and also psychologically safe environment. Other "smarter" people than me have made this observation too.

I'm not saying it has to be SF, NYC, or London, but the environment matters immensely, and it can turn a motivated person who might not appear "smart" in another context into a much more creative person.

> Oh sure, for networking and contacts etc, in person is still the thing.

It's for far more important things than just yukking it up with people and trading business cards.

> if you can't find a community online where people are smarter than you and/or better than you in whatever you do, you're either a super genius or you're not looking.

I personally have yet to see an purely online community that fosters creativity without some fundamental anchoring in creative communities in the real world. The only exception I can think of are online game-building communities and competitions (i.e. Ludum Dare), but that's an unusual case. Is it impossible to find more example that? No. But I'd argue that strictly or even primarily online creative communities are unusual, and the online part is more about networking and cross-pollinating between in-person creative communities.

It can be both. Prior to the current situation, many/most companies preferred people who could/would commute to a company office. Which gives more options to people willing to work near one of those hubs and mostly work in an office.

At the same time, many people prefer to live near one of those hubs whether because they just like NYC, Boston, Austin, Bay Area, Seattle, etc. or because they believe it gives them more flexibility in changing employers. (And/or being in proximity to many like-minded individuals.)

Things that don't make sense tend to get adjusted during bad economic times. I've worked with alot of companies as a customer, and at end of the day, none of the stakeholders are getting bang for the buck. Companies set money on fire, employees are mostly living a middle class lifestyle at an insane level of compensation.

I live out in the provinces, and we pay 20-30% of the rate for SV talent. My lifestyle in SV would require 7x the compensation without me being any smarter or skilled than I am. NYC is more of a real place and is probably less inflated, alot of the premium there is really about domain expertise.

> NYC is more of a real place and is probably less inflated, alot of the premium there is really about domain expertise.

We'll see. I'm betting you're wrong - NYC has nothing on SF in tech expertise and the rest of the country (especially outside of the West coast) doesn't have much on it either.

If by tech expertise you mean knowledge of cloud and large scale web applications, then yes. For security though, and I'm sure this is true for other industries, the Bay Area has very little on the defense industry in Maryland.

Security is a small part of the overall tech industry. I live near Bethesda and I would hardly call the region a tech hub on par with any of the ones in the West coast.

While I agree that DC is not on the standard with SF or Seattle (what are the other West Coast tech hubs), DC is definitely a tech hub in it's own right.

The problem with DC is that the talent pool is extremely diluted by disillusioned, rent-seeking government contractors who get a certification, claim a bunch of stuff on their resume, and get bid as part of a 20-person team on a contract that really only requires 5-6 committed (for the sake of argument, "SV caliber") people.

The problem is, hardly anyone that is "SV caliber" wants to work on pokey gov't contracts, but enough people on that team care enough about the mission, the project, or their company to allow the freeloaders to get away with it.

There's no incentive to firing them because a) the client understands that govt work is extremely inefficient so they tolerate it b) the freeloaders are very good at not pissing anyone off (they are very friendly and dress well, etc) and c) their employer literally loses money if they are removed.

So the cycle continues.

Having said all that, in amongst the chaff there is a significant kernel of wheat in the DC area, both in the contracting as well as private sector space.

Capital One has a really good engineering culture and hires a lot of very smart kids straight out of school and trains them very well. Many of them don't stay in DC, however, and go on to work at GOOG, MSFT, AMZN, etc for big salaries after their 2-year stint at COF is over.

Great comment.

NoVa definitely has some strong talent and you're correct in highlighting Capital One specifically (they recruit heavily at my alma mater and I know a number of talented people who work there). You're also correct about talent dilution - I worked for a brief stint at a government agency doing tech work and I would say the majority of contractors are unfortunately, quite untalented and love to hide behind buzzwords.

> what are the other West Coast tech hubs

I would say the Bay is several different tech hubs rolled into one, Portland has a fair bit of tech work, and LA is overlooked but increasingly becoming a big one.

Thanks for your reply.

In terms of getting work, I would say there are fewer security research jobs available in the Bay Area than scattered around the beltway. My last search, there were a ton of jobs asking how to authenticate servers to each other when what I want to talk about is how to fuzz or instrument code.

So you think every node.js / rails developer that happens to live in SV and work in a startup is the next Linus? Of course they're lots of ordinary developers working and living there. And yes, being born American / European is a huge advantage over 80% of the rest of humanity.

Seriously. There are a ton of wannabes up there (entrepreneurial and technical) just like there are wannabe actors in LA. A lot of incredible talent missing at those companies because people simply have zero desire to live there. I can appreciate the Bay Area but it's just not my style (weather, culture, lack of diversity in industry, etc). I'd bounce to wine country or the forests up north if I lived up there now.

Additinally, Linus created Linux while still living in Finland. He only emigrated to the US after Linux was alteady successful.

immigration doesn't select for the most talented, it selects for the younger, the male, the willing, the otherwise unburdened etc. The intellectual bar to enter SV is not that high. The willingness to relocate, assimilate to the culture etc, is.

As someone who basically never worked in an office since I began working as a dev in the early 90s; you have to protect yourself and carve out niches and knowledge that takes actual time and elbow grease to catch up to. Sure many people anywhere in the world can do what I do, but with the deep knowledge I have about some subjects (banking/payments/insurances backends & production firmware), it is not very likely to get a better deal as I speak the same language of all parties involved and I did it many times already. So it is not trial and error. It simply takes actual time to sit down and suffer for years/decades. You can hire entire teams cheaply with great looking resumes and fail because some of these things are not hard/difficult per-se but you have to have done them before to succeed fast.

But yes, if you shoot with hail and focus on the latest and greatest, you might be easily replaced. I am surprised how cheap (embarrassingly so) I can find good react/node devs; that tells me it is really bad to specialise in that...

try to find cheap react/node devs in the U.S, good luck with that. The cost of skills doesn't always translate to how hard it is to acquire it. I mean, some medical nurses study for 5-10 years and specialise and specialise only to earn 1/2 what a react dev earns in the U.S

I think we were talking about work-from-home/remote people and for me that is ‘earth’; I can find really good people for next to nothing because everyone jumped on the bandwagon. And this is not a stab at the technology; it is saying that it is a not a niche; I have maintained an yoy upward income for over 25 years by picking things that are valuable always. And, in line with this article, if I can have excellent react/node (and Go.. and C# and Java...) people for $1k/mo or less, then that is not for me. It might work well now; I want things to work out longterm. Because, you know, shit happens and they might kick everyone but the bottomline out...

So what kind of skills would you recommend ? What have you picked up over the years ?

I don't think it's one skill; it's having your antennae up at all times and sensing what the next big thing might be, as well as actually liking that thing.

For me it was AWS. About 7 years ago I was sitting in "Architecting on AWS" and I had an epiphany that this wasn't a game changer, this was a game redefiner. I was jazzed about it and have been pursuing AWS jobs and expertise every since. AWS isn't the end-all and be-all, and it's abused more often than not, but it has provided an extremely lucrative career for me. Also, as much shit as Amazon gets, AWS is a very, very good product, or suite of products. It only gets more complicated every year and my idea of it evolves every year as well.

It's still going strong, but I do have my eye on other technologies and am making sure I don't become a dinosaur.

Interesting. What aspects of AWS do you think will grow further ?

What other technologies do you have your eye on ?

#1 Security: no one knows how to secure AWS. But I also really, really hate how the Cybersecurity organizations operate in every job I've ever had so that would feel like selling my soul to the devil.

#2 "Big Data"

#3 Containerization (working with it on AWS specifically)

I think anything that takes years to learn properly (and of which the knowledge is not neatly packed into a book); communication skills, using vertical-specific language/terms correctly, integrating complex systems etc. Things you cannot take a book, read and do without countless failure, retry, mentors etc. Anything you can pick up quickly, probably anyone can pick up quickly... You cannot learn production firmware coding fast; sure you can pick up ARM c/assembly, you can read books, watch videos, but when you get a totally strange device that has 20kb (kilobytes!) of usable memory, you won't be able to get a factory ready implementation without years of experience. The same with a lot of other niche areas; sure you can learn it, sure you can probably get 80% there (wasting a lot of time on learning) but delivery is not reachable without the place burning down after.

Things that are not hard necessarily, but just a lot of work to learn to do well. Again, and again, i'm not critiquing the tech here, just the niche-ness of it; I hate frontend work and yet it took me 2 days to learn react native well enough to make a production app. If I can do that, too many other people can do that as well and I do not believe that's a viable longterm strategy. But if it works for someone then glory to them; I am older and know it will likely be gone in 10 years; most of everyone (by far) won't be millionaires by then even though they aspire to it now, so you need something for after 10 years. Go into management is an option, but I like remote work, coding and tech, so I had to find another way.

100% agree that experience and good communication skills are key. People will happily pay more for somebody that understands them the first time they explain something, that comes back with questions about things they hadn't thought about and has already dealt with similar issues before and can provide guidance. If you're also able to at least manage yourself on the project, you will be loved.

Imho, freelancing on smaller projects is great for learning those skills, because you will either learn them quickly or you will sink like a stone.

The article title is intentionally click-baity.

The extent to which it's true entirely depends on what "your job" is. Routine, non-creative work that can be performed asynchronously, with limited contact with others - the tech equivalent of craft piecework - sure, that can usually be done from anywhere: things like answering (simple) tech support requests, maintaining a static codebase with no new requirements, or implementing a feature for which the requirements and technical design have already been specified by others.

Having myself worked on teams that located such tasks in lower-cost-of-labor regions, I can attest that most of those cost savings have already been realized.

But creative work, like proposing the problems to solve in the first place, facilitating the discussion of how to solve them, and designing the technical and human solution - especially for problems at the intersection of technology and culture - those are not easily shifted to remote work. If the outsourced/remote worker is competent enough to work in that kind of capacity remotely, they will cost as much the non-remote worker.

It also means i can take someone else's job. It balances out.

I think living in the West where dev salaries are best a lot of the readers of this blog article would be concerned about a big change to the status quo. But article is pretty speculative

You’re conflating ‘the West’ with the Bay Area. Most people in European countries, or even smaller American cities, are pretty relaxed about the idea of California job opportunities becoming more widely distributed.

Yea I guess that is true. But that may or may not be mistaken, I mean, depending on the skill of even lower paid devs in other parts of the world. Its hard to say how things will shake out but I would say the better you have it now the more you don't want things to change, even if there are some scenarios where you gain.

You require more wages than someone in a cheaper country (assuming some western area). It balances out, but you're at risk.

The same was said about offshoring and so far it worked out.

Tell that to 80s coal miners and factory workers.

It's not a great comparison. Coal mining isn't knowledge work.

What - why?! Because knowledge work is more important for some reason?

Yes? For a tech company outsourcing software creation is like outsourcing upper management, sure you can do it but then you basically move the whole business. If you want to create an American tech company then the tech needs to be built in America. Indian tech companies are not nearly as successful as American ones, so you probably want to stay an American tech company today. Once India starts cranking out companies that beats out American ones you will probably see more tech companies move their entire HQ there, but until then they will mostly stay in USA.

I mean, it worked out for one side of that equation

Is that just because the total number of jobs that would be considered to be in your field went up by 10x in the last 20 years?

Unless their wage is much lower due to cheaper location.

More competition leads to lower wages.

Lower wages for SV but higher wages everywhere else.

The average developer wage for SV is $100,000 higher than the average where I live.

Except for the owners of the company, they get to pocket the difference...

But of course this is less about tech workers that are already getting outsourced because the, well, workers are more technically savvy anyway so of course it happened sooner.

It is possibly more relevant to people in management, or people like professors and many other random jobs who are discovering that working from home works fine for them. Though sometimes it's questionable whether this is because their work is largely on a computer or just because they didn't do much anyway...

If we don't have permanent UBI in place soon it will continue to be an emergency response to job losses like now. The economy is shifting as surely as the sun sets to one where if you don't own or play a major leadership role you either aren't necessary or can be outsourced.

Floor workers are getting replaced with robots and touchscreens; managers are realizing they too can be outsourced; lawyers are finding that no, the work they do isn't that hard to automate; doctors are finding that machine learning can analyze images better than they can; it's not going to stop... why would it? Why would a business owner want to keep a human with a continually increasing salary around if they can possibly replace you with technology that costs your annual salary once and after that just requires maintenance?

There are cases where that's just not possible, but my imagination for what is possible to swap has definitely gotten bigger. Even if a job isn't entirely replaceable, productivity tools are making the same amount of work take a quarter of the staff.

The more highly qualified you are the more at risk to offshoring your job is. A long time ago, Albany Molecular, a contract research organization, highlighted they were based in Albany, NY. A shithole, yes, but a shithole with cheap cost of living.

Nowadays, the PhD jobs are based in Shanghai, Szeged and Hyderabad. The only thing that's left stateside is regulatory functions and support. You don't need a PhD for that. Political leadership should be concerned about the loss of institutional knowledge and knowledge networks.

Do you have any proof for that? Everything I know says that more qualified people congregate, in general in the places with the highest cost of living...

more qualified people congregate, in general in the places with the highest cost of living

That has to do with short job tenures (in the US) and industry consolidation. In the past, someone might have joined Upjohn in Kalamazoo, Eli Lilly in Indianapolis or Dow in Midland and stayed there their whole careers. Nowadays everyone changes jobs every 5 years and employment is in San Francisco, Boston and San Diego. It's problematic.

>It's problematic.

I'd say that's the understatement of the century.

Mass wealth accumulation and wealth inequality has shifted power so far towards businesses that the general populous requires solving a massive orchestration problem (together) in order to change that imbalance which I'm beginning to believe may not be something that can reach critical mass and a stable state in larger populations as historically peaceful revolutions were capable of.

As such, businesses are calling the shots economically, legislatively/governmentally, culturally, ... and their interests are falling further out of alignment with most peoples' well being.

We're becoming less innovative and working more to chase short-term profit margins for employers that keep us fed and sheltered instead of pursuing societal interests.

From your DOW example and the chemical industry, DOW and those they've acquired used to innovate. In their later years they've turned in an IP portfolio management business, focusing on strategic patent purchases to stiffle competitors and eek our royalties for certain processes.

This isnt unique to the chemical industry, it's happening across the board. In the neverending quarterly optimization search space, we're making tradeoffs that are hurting us more and more leading to instability in society all to inflate a few peoples' pockets and grips on control.

The labor market has always been a target but due to social ramifications, has been largely avoided. We're now seeing more aggressive attacks on optimizing costs in the labor market in order to meet growth expectations and it's really starting to press on people. I'm just wondering at which point enough people will crack or give up instead of continuing to support the madness.

Speaking to web technologies specifically I have found this to be opposite at my prior employers. There is a lot of incompetence in web related technical jobs which makes it hard to trust new candidates/employees and offshore employees tended to be less trust worthy in regards to competency.

At my current employer, though, the offshore developers in India have really found the secret sauce and are really nailing productivity and code quality to the danger of US employees.

Sometimes that secret sauce is simply good local management: they shield their DEVS from noise (not only physical) and are more focused and also more specialized. A small team of focused DEVS is all it takes to maintain a codebase.

Totally tangential: What makes Albany a shithole? It looks like an attractive town to me...

All these rustbelt towns are suffering from 30 years of tax base erosion and high unemployment, with nothing to replace it. It's somehow reminiscent of post-fall Trantor. Further up the I-91 corridor is nicer!

I am from Syracuse, NY and currently live and work in Rochester, NY - Albany is a straight shot drive along I-90 and has similar socioeconomic conditions.

Upstate suffers from high taxes and regulations introduced by the Governor with NYC in mind. Combine that with long winters and urban decay and we see that many bright young professionals born here end up fleeing once their parents retire.

I personally am planning on moving to Raleigh, NC in a few years. I only rent an apartment now so I'm mostly insulated from the astronomical property and school taxes, but I feel the state as a whole does not have my best interests in mind.

astronomical property and school taxes

You should try no education and public services at all. Here in the rural South, 70 % of my students are incapable of doing 8th-grade math. These are the nursing school aspirants, and you genuinely fear for your life when you must go to hospital. Same with property taxes. You need functioning city services. Our county roads here are on a 70-year repaving schedule, and it shows. There was a storm a couple of weeks ago, and the town can't afford to haul away the debris. Inequality has a way of affecting even the wealthy. Hope you enjoy the Southernness of Raleigh.

It's not. It's a pretty typical smaller ("tier 2"?) city in the northeastern US, with several colleges and plenty of trees, parks, and museums. It's the seat of state government, and has quite a few really nice neighborhoods of old houses, as well as some classic brownstones, if you prefer that sort of thing. It's fairly diverse, and has good nightlife due to the large college-aged population (at least, it used to).

Unfortunately it is fashionable (among people who choose not to live in them) to talk about non "tier-1" cities as if they are "shitholes", but IMO the quality of life people experience is probably higher on average: less crowding, more open space, more housing, cleaner, less expensive.

I guess the sweatshop jobs these days are mechanical Turk things in Calcutta, Bhubaneswar, and... New Orleans?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/16/technology/ai-humans.html

New Orleans has long been third world, should not be news to anyone.

You drive a car, I use a bus.

You eat meat, I eat potatoes.

You fly to Disneyworld, I take the train to the seaside.

You live in a big house, I live in a small apartment.

You pay American income taxes, I don't.

You demand clean air and water, I tolerate pollution.

There are some fundamental factors which make labour in other parts of the world much cheaper, and people willing to accept a much lower quality of life and associated lower incomes.

Its no wonder that big tech is so in favour of remote working - its going to allow the outsourcing of a huge amount of work (white collar) previously considered untouchable.

Funnily, except for the pollution part, most of your items on the right seem more attractive from a quality-of-life point of view than those on the left. Flying to Disneyworld sounds like a nightmare I would never (willingly) do, but a trainride to the seaside is always nice.

Haha I have to admit I wasn't sure of his point at that stage. Taking a train to the seaside sounds sort of romantic. Flying to Disneyland sounds sort of rote. I still get the point but it is amusing.

In addition, there are a couple concerns when branching out to other countries:

Currency exchange means some can work at a discount compared to USD

Government subsidies hoping to diversify their economy may even pay partial salaries

Strong social safety net in other countries means companies may not need to pay for health benefits for remote workers

That strong social safety net does not fall from the sky. People in those countries just pay higher taxes instead, so if you want your employee to have the same net income, you need to increase the salary.

My American friends always rant about the high income taxes in Sweden. But my taxes include health insurance and I pay essentially nothing for kids' daycare, school and university. For people without perfect health and with kids, the total pay is worse in the U.S.

It also makes many parts of the world less effective. Air and water pollution can significantly impair brain function and cause stress on employees

Those properties lead to inefficiencies for the workforce. Pollution negatively impacts the health of a population, including mental health. Lower taxes lead to less reliable infrastructure. And there are probably other non-obvious benefits to having a workforce living in a developed country.

Western Europe and the USA have maintained a huge advantage over the world. I wouldn't be so confident about that advantage disappearing. Much like wealthy people today are much more likely to have ancestors who were wealthy, I think people born in developed western nations are going to continue to enjoy competitive advantages over others for many more generations.

It goes both ways:

* I'm online at the same time as my coworkers, you don't respond until the next business day.

* I can travel to any business location next day, you need a visa application.

* Your continued employability is subject to geopolitical risk, but California isn't sanctioning Ohio any time soon.

* I can handle sensitive data and technology, your country is subject to export controls.

* I develop rapport with customers, you don't understand the slang used in support tickets.

Agreed. Just keep investing in yourself, your network, and growing and you'll be fine. That's my hypothesis anyway. I am not the best at what I do but I am getting better everyday and I keep in touch with people doing really cool things at the biggest places in case I want to join them in doing something neat. My network came through for me when I was suddenly let go due to this pandemic and so I am giving back by helping out those coming up behind me as best I can but also investing in myself by upskilling.

The employers can also balance out the wages.

Your saving on travel, they save on building, building services and location adjusted wages.

With huge savings being made by all businesses and less costs on the balance sheet.

Wages will come under intense scrutiny.

> Wages will come under intense scrutiny.

What's going to drive that scrutiny? Shareholders won't demand it, they'll be happy to keep the additional margin. Employees may demand more, but that will only accelerate hiring from lower wage regions.

But when you start opening up jobs to people from all over the world, those in countries with lower living costs can undercut those in higher-income countries.

Globalism has already decimated the working class in developed countries, it's only going to accelerate and get worse.

Salaries are set by supply and demand. Looming economic collapse aside, we can assume a move to remote work doesn't necessarily mean an increase in global supply or demand.

Salaries will even out but workers will have the ability to change jobs more easily. Companies will want to keep talent. Top tier salaries might go up as companies are now competing for talent globally.

I wonder if we'll see brain drains (without emigration) as a country's talent is bought out by a wealthier country. Would you want your country to have the salaried workers or the executives and corporate revenues(or maybe that goes into the modern incarnation of double dutch)?

Should be interesting.

If you ignore trust and need for stable income then maybe.

Companies don't hire people remote first and especially junior people. Now it will be even harder for junior people to get a job, any job, companies will stick to who they have and even fire some.

Employees don't want to work with company on the other side of globe, because company might just cut them off with no pay and what they are going to do? How do you sue a company from another continent?

There is also a lot more in terms of laws and regulations, where even hiring people from another country in EU is not just "hire and forget".

Last note, there are people who want to live in high expense areas, want to live in big cities because that is a lifestyle they like. I see on HN that mostly people argue like everyone would like to live in some forgotten small town only to pay less rent. I am not big fan of big cities but somehow I like to have a cinema or selection of pubs bigger that one or two.

> Last note, there are people who want to live in high expense areas, want to live in big cities because that is a lifestyle they like. I see on HN that mostly people argue like everyone would like to live in some forgotten small town only to pay less rent. I am not big fan of big cities but somehow I like to have a cinema or selection of pubs bigger that one or two.

+1 for this. I've been 100% remote 5+ years now and I regularly contemplate going rural -- like far, far away rural -- but always hesitate because the lack of amenities and things to do is fairly limited.

Fear of losing a job and not being able to get another remote gig is also a concern; being near-ish to a big city gives me some fallback options.

It should be "Anyone _Could_ Take Your Job"

It's the Jevons_paradox [1]. More available workers will lead to more demand for workers. It's a two edged sword. Unlike unskilled labour, remote workers can switch employers, too. This turns an employer market into a worker market. Actually it is even true for unskilled if there is a local surplus of unskilled work.

The world is essentially in an intelligence war for resources. No player can pass on brain soldiers. We see a decline in wages because there are still people not connected to the internet.

I would expect that once that transition period is over, remote work becomes a liability to a company. Companies will have to create unique and enticing work environments to bind workers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

This article seems to ignore the fact that working with people in vastly differing timezones can be a real nuisance. Yes, it can also be a boon for some positions, like follow-the-sun type SRE or customer support, but for a lot of positions, having people working massively different schedules is a real challenge.

It can absolutely work, given the right async workflows, but it can also absolutely fail. I'm inclined to believe failure is the default mode of operation.

Almost my entire (small) company is based in NYC, but we have one programmer in Europe. He just adjusts his schedule to US Eastern Time hours. Might be harder if he was in Australia, but that still leaves a lot of flexibility.

Heck, as I'm writing this, it's 11:20 am where I live, and I just overheard my sister get out of bed in the next room. Last night, she was taking an online MCAT prep course until after I went to bed around midnight. She could easily work in a different timezone.

In my experience, Eastern Time to Central European Time synchronous communications works pretty well without anyone having to deviate too much from normal working hours. Add Pacific Time to the mix and you're starting to need people willing to take calls at 6am and/or in the evening.

But, yes, some people are willing to adjust their personal time zones. I know someone who lives in Hawaii and runs a PR agency with mainland US clients. She just normally gets up very early.

1995 wants their article back.

The horse is out of the barn there. I remember working with HP, Microsoft and IBM people in 1999 whose management chains were in South Dakota, Phoenix, etc.

The bigger issue right now is the total cratering of the world economy. Then there's also the unknown resets which will come with that. Trends which were in slow motion and maybe barely noticeable may have gone into overdrive. Now we don't know where we're at.

To say that you're role is at risk because anyone around the world can take that role is as much guesswork as anyone else can give. This is just another prediction in a storm of unknowns.

From the article...

> If you thought globalization was fun for manufacturing, buckle up. Remote work is about to globalize a bunch of service jobs as well.

This makes sense from what I knew a few months ago. What doesn't sit right with me is that we're also possibly looking at a world in which globalization will be reversing. Supply chains may be rejiggered to operate closer to home. Will remote work go MORE globalized while everything else possibly reverses?

> Like any big economic change, there’ll be winners and losers, and it’s not exactly clear from the outset who will end up benefiting from the change.

So, we don't know what's going to happen, this is just his prediction.

This is a complex subject. Software doesn't operate like textiles. If the textile company charges twice as much, then the consumer pays more. Facebook engineers charging X more than engineers from SE Asia doesn't make the service more expensive. It's still "free" for the customer. There are other things to optimize on before you get to cost of workers.

Another potential bigger issue for US workers is the possible change of the center of gravity for software development. US workers need to stay competitive. This will be challenged not so much by cheaper workers, but by global competition to US companies. Which should US workers worry about more? Workers from around the world taking US jobs? Or ByteDance challenging Facebook?

US workers have already been dealing with outsourcing. The big change would be US workers applying for foreign jobs. Right now the US has a load of strong talent these companies could be mopping up.

> Will remote work go MORE globalized while everything else possibly reverses?

I think this is the right approach. Global bits, local atoms.

The article makes broad, sweeping generalizations, but it was enjoyable and engaging to read, so cheers to the author for that. He's right, too, generally speaking: lots of work can and will be done remotely from various locations across the globe. Of course, there will always be natural divides (that's what makes us human). Someone who can't speak the same language as the rest of the team just isn't going to get hired, no matter how well they can code.

Government regulations also play a huge role in how "globalized" a job can be. If you're working at a defense contractor, for example, you sure as heck aren't going to be replaced by a foreign national. In many cases, the office culture at those companies won't change hardly at all, due to data governance restrictions.

I had this same fear a few years back. I don't have any notable personal projects on GitHub and my skills are pretty standard (Full Stack .NET) these days. I don't even have a degree. Nothing really stands out in my resume that screams "hire this person". I figured I would hardly get a response when applying to remote companies let alone an offer. The competition is surely way more qualified than I am. Furthermore I was applying on StackOverflow where talent pools are endless. I applied anyway.

Well, I was wrong. I've had many interviews from that platform and so my last two jobs have been fully remote companies. The compensation has been even better than what I get locally (Portland, OR). It seems there is still a strong desire for experienced professionals and cultural fit; both of which many candidates don't posses. Despite the immense number of applications these companies received, they still complained that good talent and good personalities are hard to come by. What that tells me is even an average Joe like me doesn't need to worry about "anyone taking my job" because there's always a demand for it somewhere that's not being fulfilled.

I appreciate your short term perspective, and agree with you that today remote work doesn't have these fears. However, the author is thinking about a longer time horizon.

As an example, with agreements between Canada/US and similar culture it would be very easy for your company to start hiring remote workers in Canada. Suddenly due to currency differences their salaries are 30% cheaper, and with a strong social safety & gov. subsidies likely even cheaper for similar talent.

Then some time later after your company has had success with some international workers they branch out farther and hire a few juniors from South America in the same time zone. Repeat this cycle over the next decade and now salaries have been eroded even for high paying information workers.

I'm starting to feel globalization is a race to the bottom for everyone but the owners.

But then there's nothing stopping American workers from moving to cheaper COL places and still competing for these jobs. And with reduction in salary costs, the product becomes cheaper as well, meaning more people have access to it and (potentially) opening up new opportunities than before.

I'm not saying it's going to be a completely painless process, but I'm far more optimistic about the ultimate end point.

Globalization is and always was a race to the bottom for everyone but the owners. In my opinion, the idea has always been outsource work to other countries to bootstrap their economies into the modern era so whatever work we didn't outsource could benefit from additional customers.

I think Globalization went a bit too far and left too many American cities in the dust while catapulting strategic competitors into a powerful position. The idea that millions of workers who lost their jobs could just immediately retool and find work higher up the value chain was a disaster. Many argue that Globalization has been a success for lifting millions out of poverty, but to me that just says we ruined some peoples livelihood for the benefit of other countries who seek to simply replace the need for us instead of trade with us.

We were told that globalization made things more efficient. So, if you always saw it as a race to the bottom you are smarter than I and many others because that wasn't what was sold to us.

Maybe the real problem is that in the 60s we were told that our future selves would be filled with leisure time due to automation. That leisure team turned out to be a synonym for unemployment. The problem is that the wealth generated from globalization became centralized instead of benefitting everyone.

> I'm starting to feel globalization is a race to the bottom for everyone but the owners

And the people in Canada who can get paid twice as much - or the people in Ukraine who can get paid ten times as much as before. It flattens the competitive landscape globally, so it is a loss for those who were the highest earners previously without much competition (US, Switzerland, London) but a gain for people everywhere else.

Writing code is only like 60% of the job, and the other 40% can far outweigh the value of the code. Technical talent is everywhere for sure, so the 60% is easy to off-shore or put to remote. But rarely in my experience does that off-shoring to cheaper locations result in candidates qualified in the other 40% of the job. That may change (hopefully will) over time, but it's not like it's a lurking fact that is just waiting for its moment.

Not true at all. Working remotely is a skill and lifestyle - not everyone likes/have it

I have a strong opinion on this, but it starts at a lower level...

A good developer is a developer that makes themselves obsolete.

By making themselves obsolete the developer has made themselves invaluable.

How can both of those things be true?

This is basically because you find that great developers write code and patterns that make it easy for anyone to jump in an understand. Even if complicated. I strive to do this as much as possible. The more I do this the faster development becomes for myself and my team. However the more I do this, the more my team leads realize that without me, things won't progress in the right direction. But theoretically they can fire me any time and find a cheaper worker to do my job.

The point is, I see lots of managers treat engineers as commodities. However if that is their outlook, then they will always look to outsource because they see no value in you. Good managers realize that things are smooth and maintainable because of the people who put effort into doing that, not that because things are smooth and maintainable everyone is expandable. Every time I see the latter being the mindset there's always a HUGE slowdown because the wrong things start being built.

I think the thing you are describing might be seen as a scalar quantity by management. They may just see speed, and not why something is fast.

This is unfortunate because if they are operating with scalar conversions then you might misleadingly believe they see the why and how, but in reality are just seeing the what (price or speed or quantity, but not value, impact).

well yes, however good management works to check up on that. it is foolish to assume everything is smooth because it is smooth, you want to know why things are going well just like you want to know why they are not.

at a high level this is really hard to know. but it is important to know who your talent is, otherwise you replace the talent. many in upper management assume engineering is like factory work, which is how you end up with the most terrible software and no path to fix it :(

I agree, but in my opinion, that's not about greatness, but about mindset and your understanding of your role. You don't need to be great or write very smart code to get there, you just need to have "somebody must be able to take this over if a bus runs me over tomorrow" and "I want to solve this and move on, not managing it to become my permanent job" as guiding principles when you approach problems.

I've seen a very smart developers get fired recently, because he was hogging responsibility and became a bottleneck precisely because he figured that would strengthen his position in the company. "If they need me, they can't fire me". Once "they" figure that out, they will really want to fire you, and if the pain you cause is greater than your value, they will. And it usually always is greater if you're a bottleneck.

This is a loaded topic.

On one hand I do work for a large European enterprise with a branch in India. I know for a fact that it adds a lot of social and cultural overhead to co-operate with a remote branch who barely speak English.

They're great for specific tasks, like 24/7 ops and monitoring. As long as there are clear instructions.

On the other hand I'm an idealist at heart who believes that borders should go away and we should work together as one world.

But it might be a bit too naive to think that utopia is around the corner just because IT techs are working remotely.

So I'd have to say that OP is wrong. For more than one reason. We're also contractually obliged to hire citizens for certain private sector clients. And in some cases we have to go even further and security rate them.

But regardless of my experiences there will always be people who shine and hopefully get picked up by a remote employer who treats them well. Our branch might be ~60 people, I've worked with only a handfull of them for 3 years and still managed to meet one or two who really went above and beyond to show that they cared about their work.

As someone who has worked remotely and worked for remote teams for some time now, I can say that you need hire a higher caliber people with excellent communication skills who you can really trust to deliver.

I think remote work will just make sure good people are in higher demand, which means that the market may even get hotter for better people.

Companies who just complete on price will fail spectacularly.

Bring it on.

If you get replaced only because of your salary, they're doing you a long-term favor. They weren't really invested in you.

This article implies the cog theory of developers, and I rarely see that supported on this site:

>You can get the same work done, but cheaper. What would you choose?

It probably won't be the same work. Other variables, such as throughput, also factor in.

A lesson learned in other markets applies here: you can avoid a race to the bottom by effectively competing in one of the many dimensions other than price. If you don't want to be a commodity, you have to be able to answer the question of what is the one thing you do better than almost anyone else, and sell that. Geographical proximity isn't a great answer in a market where everyone is going remote. It doesn't even need to be technical in nature for a developer.

Different companies place inordinate value on different things, so it is partly a game of matching your exceptional dimensions to companies that place a lot of value on those dimensions. How many people here are using the cheapest laptop that will technically do the job? The developers that are at risk are those that are "average" in every dimension that an employer might care about.

Anyone who has ever worked with off shore teams or international engineering offices knows that it's not technical skill, but things like communication, cultural norms, expectations, requirements, project management. So while it's true that "anyone can take your job" the reality is that it's harder than you think.

Companies have already had the ability to outsource talent for decades. It's proven much less beneficial than anticipated. Everyone has had "that email" from an overseas office where it makes little to no sense. Or, that code review that completely misses the feature request. Remote work will not change that significantly. Companies might be more distributed, if they can make the organizational structure work. But moving to a "remote focused" organizational is an incredible amount of work and hard to execute properly.

There's a negative way of looking at things. Another way of looking at it is remote work means I can take anyone's job!

Yes, but with caveats. This is what happened with call centers in the US which broadly went to places like India with big outsourcing firms.

That back-fired big time when the quality of service went to crap with companies rushing to bring these services back home.

Similar stories with tech outsourcing. There are things that have been successfully outsourced some functions to places like India, but there’s also a reason why high performing companies actually don’t seem to offshore key IP development efforts. The labor might be cheap but the true cost of bad quality is sky high.

So this will happen to an extent but cost can’t be the only factor driving decisions if the goal is long term success.

> That back-fired big time when the quality of service went to crap with companies rushing to bring these services back home.

Ofc now many of these have gone to crap again now with full automation.

And you can take anyone’s. The scale is bigger but is hard to argue if the ratio isn’t similar but just at a larger scale. I think the bigger difference is the option to WFH is not just an after thought, but a real option now.

Assuming a theoretical point of view as pointed by the article, there are multiple pieces still missing in my head.

Lets say a traditional software team has these 5 types of people: - Design / XD - Software Engineer - Software Manager - Product Manager - Data analyst or Data Scientist

If you assume all of these roles can be collaborated on a async basis and from within different timezones - that makes progress extremely slow right? Someone emails, someone has a question, someone has a clarification, etc.

Now if we assume same locale, that drastically changes the game since everyone can communicate at the same time even if remote. Therefore, my point#1 is, a global distributed teams that are across time zones really don't make sense.

Keeping in line with the article, let's say a company decides to outsource all these different professions. That would mean, you're even outsourcing management, people that need to oversee are needed to the same region. How high does one go? All the way to directors of each respective field or Vice President? Maybe we go as far as till we reach an owner for a service or product for that region. This is what happens basically today (pre-covid). Each region has a focus in a deliverable. India team is working on X, China team is working on Y, etc. So point#2, outsourcing has to happen not only for people that are executing work, but for people that are overseeing the execution as well.

That finally gets me to the last point. If we have these vertical's of people localized to specific regions, you cannot have specific outsourcing of jobs. You would need a batch outsourcing of jobs from IC's to managers. However, each region a company is in, requires locale specific folks to solve specific problems. Amazon US is very different than Amazon India pay after you receive package, for example. So my point#3, I don't believe we will see too much of a shift for jobs to other countries. We might see a shift in jobs from California to Texas for example.

By now, you might understand where i'm going :-). If you hired enough of a presence in mid-west, suddenly, you now have a pool of candidates that competitors, and other companies can also hire from. You as a company, unless you can spin an entirely new vertical, will back-fill employees from the mid-west again since the remaining team is located in that region. Thereby creating a pocket of talent. Enough pockets of talents will create many companies that want to hire that talent. This is what we effectively have today in major cities. The only difference is, you have a larger area vs a smaller city.

This thought isn't new. The company I work for now has been around a while, and they went through an entire phase of remote work. They have walked it back lately. We still have plenty of people working from various corners of the country, but new hires are on site at one of our office locations.

I won't be surprised to see a renewed push for remote work, but the tools are still pretty mediocre compared to in person collaboration, so I also won't be surprised to see some pushback as organizational leaders decide getting people in a room is worth paying extra for.

That's a nice sentiment. Every country is looking for skilled IT workers. The amount of positions isn't going to magically decrease to create an overflow of ITers. There'll still be a shortage.

Having personally seen the quality of outsourced code and the effort needed to clean up the mess in order to make the product stable, companies are going to be in for a nice surprise if they think that short-changing devs and simply going remote will work in their favor.

Interesting times are ahead.

More like anyone can rip off employers. When you are dealing internationally, you are out of the bounds of US law. There is no guarantee that your code won't simply be stolen. You have no recourse except travel twelve time zones to a place you have no power in. No one need worry about outsourcing. It's been proven that the only work going to outsourcing is low risk service labor like phone support.

As a counter example IP laws in Canada are aligned with US and is the same timezone, yet with currency exchange salaries are discounted by 30%.

> yet with currency exchange salaries are discounted by 30%.

It doesn't work that way. Salaries are lower in Canada, but that is not due to the currency exchange.

Canada is only ~10% of the U.S. population. I'm not sure in terms of developer numbers, but if percentages are comparable, that's a pretty small effect on the overall market.

I wouldn't consider increasing the labor pool by 10% a small effect.

Regardless, and once a company has figured out hiring remote for Canada, then why not add Mexico which through NAFTA/USMCA has sorted out IP type issues. Then once MX has worked well why stop there and repeat across South America. So, the reality is likely increasing the labor pool size every year for the next decade. Those annual small changes compound and lead to dramatic changes over the long term.

Take a look at what happened to manufacturing jobs in the US over the past few decades. Remote work has the potential to transform things just as much.

Everyone would have to sit two meters apart, which means two times the square feet

No... it's four times the square feet.

four pi times the square feet?

Hmm. Could use hex packing, but still need aisles. And there are probably fire escape regulations.

Timezones, sanctions, taxes, labor laws.

Yeah, there's no way the governments of nations will let their companies outsource their IT more and more that easily.

Let’s flip this around. If [anyone] can take [your] job, then it stands to reason that remote work means I can take someone else’s job.

But what would this mean for me? First off it would mean doing all the same work to prepare myself as a candidate. Take Machine Learning for example, which is my area. I need to prepare my resume based on my current projects. I need to brush up for nauseating leet-code hazing trivia dumb shit (probably on a virtual whiteboard now). I need to research companies that have roles I’d be interested in.

Now I do all that, let’s say I do well in the interview.

Am I going to take less money to take the job? No. In fact, I’ll probably want more money than I am earning now if I am going to risk switching jobs.

Am I going to accept my salary to be adjusted by geographic region or cost of living data? No. My compensation is about the value I add to your company. It has nothing to do with where I live.

If I want to do lifestyle arbitrage on my high salary, that’s purely my business and is a private matter my employer does not get to know about or consider.

Given this, how many employers are really likely to want to hire me? I’m going to demand a NYC salary no matter where I live. They won’t get to replace their existing NYC-salary-person with a cheaper competitor, because nobody is cheaper, and a lot of people are more expensive.

In essence, supply went up if you can hire from anywhere, but the price for that supply did not go down, it’s just permanently higher.

I think if companies are looking to trade employees for a cheaper model, they are going to be surprised that hiring remote doesn’t facilitate this at all. The people from rural Kansas who can do the same job are not idiots happy to take 1/2 the pay because of where they live. It’s stupid to expect they would be.

Maybe the people in Kansas won't be taking a pay cut, but workers who were previously limited by immigration laws would definitely be happy to. Indians speak english, Mexico and a handful of other central/south american countries are in the same time zone as the us. People in those situations would be incredibly happy to work for half of what you make now. There are definitely problems with hiring those people, but your argument that supply won't expand is incredibly naive.

No, you are just wrong. People from around the world are not dumb! If they are worth $X they will demand $X. This mythical idea that they won’t research & understand their worth is so foolish.

If you’re smart enough to write complex software or do complex math, you’re smart enough to ask basic first-order questions about how you will be compensated according to the value you bring to the table.

This dismissive idea that globalizing advanced software jobs leads to vastly cheaper labor is silly. It boils down to literally just assuming foreign people are dumb, don’t value themselves and don’t do basic research.

I don’t know about you, but that sure doesn’t describe the huge cohort of software engineers that I know - from _anywhere_.

If there are suddenly 10 times as many people fighting for the same number of positions salaries will drop. That's just basic supply and demand.

Basic supply and demand is a very poor economic model. It’s cited all the time by armchair commenters, but rarely reflects reality.

Source?

Please don’t write comments like this. It immediately indicates you are not open to considering other points of view and you believe the burden of effort for improving your beliefs rests on other people instead of yourself, and that you think this is a valid rhetorical tactic in conversation.

This point is so far beyond indisputable with massive available confirmatory data as well as economic theory that to engage a lazy “citation needed” type of response does more harm than good, worse than a “let me google that for you” situation by a wide margin.

You made an unsourced claim that flies in the face of established literature. My comment was a joke because you obviously are completely uninformed. The fact that you could call someone else an armchair economist is disgusting and shows how awful social media is for society. Maybe you can start with wealth of nations and work your way up from there. Please don't make any comments like this until you have completed your required readings.

> I need to brush up for nauseating leet-code hazing trivia dumb shit

I know this isn't your main point but as someone who is interviewing this really hits at home. These leetcode interviews kill me.

Remote work also means companies can get the best people for that company anywhere.

Remote work means life changes can happen and you can retain the best people for that company. With jobs and life, changes happen, people move, have families, want to be close to family, want to change scenery, get a new significant other, go to school, buy a house, all of these things can mean you might have to quit if you have to physically always be in the office.

Even when companies have remote/different city offices, virtual communication is very important anyways.

Clients and customers are almost always remote with some sprinkled in meetings but mostly virtual communication and communication through the work.

Companies would be wise to switch to remote first thinking and processes with a focus on virtual communication and a nice to have of physical meetups, integration sessions etc.

Remote work helps companies focus on their external view not just their internal machinations.

For truly unique talents and workers, location has never really mattered.

People are arguing a lot about if the claims in the post are true or not but I feel like this misses the point. Assuming they're all true that's still a good thing.

I expect competitiveness in every sector of the economy I don't work in, so I have to measure myself by the same standards. If someone can do my work for less money, hire them. We can talk about welfare for displaced workers but employment isn't charity, the best worker who can do the work for the least amount of money should do it, and we're all better off.

Removing geography and mobility as a limiting factor is a boon for innovation. It will give an unprecedented amount of people a shot at a great job. Not to mention that increased competiton for existing jobs will create a huge incentive for entrepreneurship. Without all those cozy well paying tech jobs lined up, there's a real incentive to starting your own company.

Side question. I have noticed for a few weeks now that since I don't have a Medium account I'm prevented from reading certain articles (like this one), but I still have access to some other articles on the platform. Does it mean that some authors require that the readership be part of the network too? What are the rules?

Bold flashy predictions usually fail.

The main threat to your job is today the same that it was last year. China is growing its influence and technical capacity. TikTok could have been an American (or European, ...) company with American employees, it is not.

It’s easier to create a company in China and produce software there than to hire individual developers. That may work for very small companies with special needs, but it’s very inefficient.

If Chinese citizens are allowed to purchase American video games, hire AWS and Azure services, etc. then it is not a big deal. Other wise the draining of jobs will continue like has been happening for the pas two decades.

Another option is to be more protective of critical industries. As the pandemic shows how vulnerable is the west in the supply chain.

I expect a future similar to what we had one year ago. With some more jobs moving to China and some light increase in protectionism to avoid too much job bleeding.

> If you’re working on Wi-Fi at home, that means your job is literally up in the air.

This statement is hyperbolic and meaningless enough that I'm comfortable calling it "stupid." I've been working remotely for a long time and guess what? I moved to a big city to be closer to jobs. I am a US citizen and well qualified but I can tell you from experience most employers do not want to hire remotes.

Anyone who thinks you can just replace your colocated North American dev team with lower-cost employees across Asia must not have tried doing this. I've worked with highly qualified, competent programmers in India whom I respect and admire, and communication & timezones were still major issues. How do you establish the rapport you need to resolve disagreements and come to compromises with someone you've never met? How to you collaborate with a team 13.5 hours apart from you in time?

Furthermore, having worked in highly cross-cultural and international teams for a good amount of time (even colocated in an office) I can tell you that language/English proficiency is not some non-issue, it can be a big issue. I went into a recent job with the attitude of "language issues are no big deal! We can make it work" but over a couple years of running a team it became clear that having a team comprised of people with varied levels of English abilities and from different countries is a big deal. Think of how difficult it can be to resolve interpersonal conflicts and miscommunications with your coworkers, then imagine the two parties don't share a native tongue and multiply the number of miscommunications by 10, then multiply that by the number of non-native speakers/learners on the team. [content warning: bad metaphor] It's like carrying around a beanbag chair–it doesn't seem hard for a few minutes but do it all day for a week and I promise it will become exhausting.

As a side-note, hiring in South America for North American teams is cheaper & can still be same timezone (and easier to fly in!); I think there's a lot of growth potential there.

Anyone can already take your job.

Since there is a growing number of businesses that are accepting remote work, that means that more potential work is available to remote workers.

Seems like people are trying to justify their preference for working in an office. Not to diss those people, but remote workers know the kind of position they are in if more people work remotely.

Personally, I'd rather live in a world where I'm not so dependent on one particular employer, and where I can change jobs without having to worry about moving away from friends and family. Who cares if someone can "take my job"? Businesses already outsource to other parts of the world where labor is cheap, and they get what they pay for most of the time.

Eh, my boss's boss not that long ago suggested that if I really want to quit, they won't have a problem replacing me. His statement is technically true, but then a new person would have to go through the same training and it would take time before they were competent even if they already had experience in the same domain. Remote does mean the pool of candidates expanded, which sucks for me as that usually means my salary has a potential to go down, but the overall skill set did not change. It is not that cannot be replicated, but it does require training, which most businesses avoid like a plague these days.

edit: But then I am in banking, which is its own little world.

Most company geographic re-alignments happen through attrition - which averages around 10% per year (+/- 5% by industry).

A company could move a large chunk of its workforce to lower cost locations in only a couple of years without the need for layoffs.

You can "solve" the timezone issue by having chain of command changes.

Think about all those distributed teams that are all over the place, how do they work? They've been doing this for years now, are successful, and they must have done something right.

From what I have seen: reporting structures are different, team sizes tend to be smaller. In some circumstances, particular cities have "hubs" for employees if anything needs to be done on-site.

It's not rocket surgery, it's not blindly obvious either, but there is a solution here.

I don't like the tone of these articles because they have such a negative, fear-porn driven bait title that it mars whatever good wisdom the author wants to impart.

It also means the supply of jobs available to you will greatly increase, as you won't be limited to positions location in the area/areas you can live.

For some reason, so many of these articles and blogposts only factor in the increased supply of applicants, and completely ignore the other side of the coin. I think this will lead to a new equilibrium that's beneficial to both parties.

Companies based in the bay area won't be forced to keep salaries in line with the astronomical cost of living there, while job seekers outside of the bay area who can't or don't want to move there, will now have access to high paying jobs that they previously didn't.

Despite a market for cheap labor, especially around CRAuD apps, companies doing complex things require a certain level of experience and skill.

Outsourcing firms thrive on having one “knowledgeable” person who interfaces with a client, and a bunch of cheap worker bees behind that person. Generally the quality and deliverable are influenced by how much you sit on top of and manage them.

As for low caliber remote talent taking jobs, the same applies... there will be certainly a threshold where that can happen. At a certain point, though, experience and competence are necessary. That could be anywhere, but it’s hard to amass such remotely.

Many service workers will still want to live in or around relatively expensive areas.

I live just outside of Chicago: 10 minutes to the beach; 20 minutes to downtown; 20 minutes to a hub airport; 15 minutes to top class sports, theatre, and concert options; A+ school district with reasonable diversity; ice rink, gymnastics center, bike trails, parks, music lessons, and art lessons within a mile or two.

Sure, my taxes are through the roof and my house is small, but quality of life here, particularly for families, is just unbeatable. If you go more than another 10 miles out to get the massive sq. footage you are giving something up.

"Everyone would have to sit two meters apart, which means two times the square feet, which means two times the rent."

Ugh. If the office isn't already sitting me 6 feet apart from someone then I don't want to work there.

Before we left,a former employer was about to force my team (with allin probably average individual compensation of $600000) from 81sq foot cubes to rows of connected desks of 36" width. This in a city with $20sq ft office rental rates. The official name of the model of the desk layout: the harvest table. That was the catalyst to begin looking for a new home...

I think you can see this in something like commission art. If you wanted to draw commission artwork for a book cover or what have you, you now compete with almost everyone in the world; there are plenty of russian or south american artists for example who have both stunning quality and lower prices.

If the job is something that is task-based and doesn't really require as much real-time communication on demand, yeah I can see this happening. I think HN always tends to focus on being the best, and much less on "it's good enough."

The basic premise of this post is "the key edge that you have over your worldwide competition is that you are local". That premise is false, or at least heavily overblown.

If the only detail barring you from working for a company which otherwise totally really would hire you, then there are often times way around this already. I moved half-way around the world for my current job. My competition was therefore people from all over the world. My job won't be "taken" by "anyone" now more than pre-Covid.

I've been working remote with an on-site team for a few years, and well, I'm not sure as everyone of that remote will be the default as the pandemic ends. At least on my current team, I could notice a lot of communication gaps that definitely impacted the velocity of the release that management should definitely be aware, and they are expecting going back to normal.

As I can see, that remote working might be a novelty, but I expect the inertia to push back after the lockdowns ease up.

This topic comes up so much and there's such a variety of misconceptions. Everyone thinks they are an expert despite mixing up basic terms. (remote/outsource/offshore)

For the last 12 years or so I've worked extensively in all arrangements and here's what you need to know.

Outsource: Generally this conflates 2 actions. One is paying for a cheaper labor market. The second is paying for less skilled people. Most of the projected cost savings come from the latter. Most of those projected cost savings don't appear. I remember folks hiring $10/hr DBAs in India and the result was about what you'd expect. India is full of great DBAs and they ain't charging $10/hr or at least they haven't for a long time. It is the case that you can access a cheaper labor pool. Most people do this and then negate that savings by not creating a remote-first culture and introducing massive language and time zone barriers and friction due to multiple companies interacting.

Offshoring: The key difference here is that these are part of your company. In the US it's totally possible to set up an office in central/south america in-timezone and staff it with amazing people and save some money. Well, except for most of those folks who are willing to relocate will eventually accept offers with FANG companies either locally or relocate. So it's a nice scheme while it works. (Hi to all my tico friends now at Google and Amazon)

Remote: this is what most people confuse for the above two things. Remote is about doing 2 things.

1) Expanding your hiring pool beyond a 30 minute commute from your office (turns out that the other 99.99% of the world's population also has some great folks).

2) Making your company culture remote-first. But that's synonymous with writing things down and documenting things.

Sure interpersonal relationships can be trickier to bootstrap and that's a real cost. But see #1, nobody talks about that cost.

The final thing to keep in mind is that for most big companies, there's no way to avoid the remote cost. As soon as you open up an office in another location you're a remote company. Hell, as many people can attest as soon as you ask people to attend meetings on another floor or an adjacent building you find out you're a remote company.

No they can't. They don't have the experience that I have. They can't possibly have it because they don't already work for the company I work for.

I think some people in "the valley" are starting to brick it knowing that they'll be competing with people with far lower salary demands from around the world. But really the only think you'll have to worry about if your job goes remote is having to move somewhere more affordable.

Nobody ever "takes" anyone else's job. Management makes the decision to fire some workers and hire others to save costs. And they'll keep doing this to save more and more money.

As long as every company is driven by their rapacious desire for profit, they will continue to screw over workers to net more for themselves. Thinking in terms of another worker taking something from you lets the decisions of those above you off the hook.

I am not paying to read someones blog! This is the second day in a row ... if this was reddit the admins would ban it! Oh yeah I am off to reddit!

Just open an incognito tab then, or if you use firefox checkout this extension https://addons.mozilla.org/es/firefox/addon/medium-unlimited...

I hate medium too, anyway for my the paywall is like a nice feature, if it's behind it I'm probably better off not reading that shit anyways

Brilliant! Thanks for the tip!

Do the people that host their blogs there get an indication of how many readers bailed at the paywall?

Timezone and cultural compatibility still matter, as we've collectively discovered over the last 30 years. Offshoring was already happening before this and will continue to do so, but there will remain demand for people onshore. Presumably the world will eventually have enough software developers, but it's showing no signs of it in the foreseeable future.

Almost all of my work has to be performed by a citizen of my country due to security laws so I feel pretty safe.

Having worked many years with globally distributed teams, especially offshored IT in India, I'd say...LOL.

Pre-remote, I was afraid of a random person walking in off the street and doing my job. I don't think I ever worked for a successful company that wasn't continually hiring people in my role.

I don't think the author realizes that large businesses that rely on software see tech as a team sport, in which camaraderie plays a huge role. Subconsciously, they're willing to pay another $40k for a better social/emotional experience.

Who is a theoretical startup hotshot going to prefer? Option A, who is also in San Francisco, who talks about concerts and cool events they went to every weekend, who stays up late hacking on fun side projects, etc etc. Option B, ives in Omaha, nice enough person but pretty much always logs off at 5pm. Has 3 kids screaming in the background of every Zoom call. Likes board games.

That's not to say B has zero chance of employment. In my experience, B can existed at a company but has to have some seriously strong technical chops, know the higher-ups really well, AND be an integral part of the company in terms of how critical infra is maintained.

I'd take B over you anytime buddy. You sound like you're 19, not that there's anything wrong with being 19. But your preference isn't everyone's preference.

Option B sounds far more likely to stick around the company for a long period of time, option A sounds more like the type to leave after 1-2 years for something more "attractive".

I work for a FANG company and we literally don’t care what “cool” concert you went to and some of our top folks have “kids screaming in the background” of calls. We do have some really interesting people on the team but I never found out how interesting until after they had been on the team for awhile. Hiring people because they are “cool” is an amateur move. Even screening for “coolness” is a bit ridiculous.

A company that hires people for those reasons is rotting itself from the inside. I don't buy things based on how hip the employees are.

Nobody can take my job because they couldn't pay someone enough to do my job. That said, my job could simply go away, and I'm working hard to make that happen. When my job goes away, hopefully the value I demonstrated in doing that will be enough for me to get another job.

Article doesn't cover the fact that many companies are not setup to deal with taxation issues related to payroll for foreign employees. There's opportunity for a payroll company to step in there and make this less painful, but tax reporting will always be a barrier.

There is only one way out of it: Regulation. So far, entities have been gatekeeping people into SV: at first it was stanford degrees, later it's just relocation to SV. With that gone, there s no other route than regulation, like so many other professions.

The economic incentives to out-source development to India have been there for decades. In the 2000s, "everyone" (i.e., the media) was sure that soon there would be no high-paying programming jobs left in the Western world. Well, how did that pan out?

Yes. Please send details on how we surely implement the microservices.

First, start by making a giant empty class heirarchy in java. Once you have created a dozen classes that inherit from each other, but not yet made any variables or functions, send it right over, your work is done my man.

First we make the Spring Boot with the common package yes? Ok. Please reply immediately.

>"Remote work means anyone can take your job"

It also means you can take anyone else's job

It is up to us to provide better value than competitors

It is up to managers to recognize that value is barely related to initial cost/sticker price/hourly rate

Time will tell how those trends sort

Anyone can take your job? Not so fast.

- People on the same or adjacent timezones, or people willing to adapt to another vastly different timezone.

- People with language fluency and proficiency.

- People that can pass an interview.

Apply those 3 filters and the pool of people to pick from is greatly reduced.

I moved into sales partly as a hedge against this. It doesn't help much now as nobody is taking in-person meetings but I suspect (and hope) that companies will still prefer to hire account teams in close proximity to their customers.

This is an interesting angle.

Did you move from software development to sales?

Is this technical sales, "Sales engineer", or something different?

I'm curious how one transitions without any sales experience.

Yep, sales engineer. I was a infrastructure consultant and SRE before that.

It happened through meeting the sales teams of the vendors I worked with. Eventually one of them asked me if I wanted to apply for a sales engineer role. He then referred me and vouched. Always be nice to your vendors and partners.

Lets see everyones release schedules so far this year. And this is with your A-team.

No doubt hiring out cheaper will bring the synergy and velocity organizations pine for. We should all be writing stuff like this to kneecap our competitors.

Remote work means you can take anyone's job. Without having to move to a crappy US city where they can't find any talent. I have been a remote contractor for 7+ years so, for me, this is a great thing!

Any reason someone better suited for it shouldn't be able to take my job?

The idea is that they will accept significantly lower pay and do the job well enough to get by.

Then again, what's wrong with that? Theoretically it just levels the playing field.

The real inequality is higher up the food chain anyway...

I think the biggest population at risk if useless office jobs that have just had staying power for legacy reasons. Once those go remote and off shore they're never coming back to high cost of living areas.

"If you cannot be replaced, you will never be promoted."

Don't most tech people leave to get their promotions?

The article also ignores the legal and tax implications of outsourcing work. At least currently, you can't just hire individuals from other countries indiscriminately.

You can’t hire them as employees, but you can absolutely hire them to perform tasks that you pay them for. For some types of tasks it’s even better for both sides becausethere’s less obligations and overhead expenses.

And this is good. Why you should hold yourself invulnerable when there is talent and competition? I lived and worked in 6 different countries; I am all for diversity.

What if your already remote? It doesn't change anything.

interesting

I don't think much changes for most people in technology. We've always had cross hairs on our back when working at companies without values.

The biggest change will be that anyone who is cheaper will take your job but low price means usually less quality.

Let's fight against lower salaries once for all.

I think software developers need to think about this obsessively because we don’t want to get blind sided like cab drivers were with ride sharing.

I'm a remote freelancer, no one has taken my job(s) yet. I also don't make Bay Area money so maybe this never applied to me.

I'm looking down at my half full glass and all I can think is....fantastic news. Remote work means I can take any job I want.

2 meters apart means 4x the square feet, not 2x

That's one of the reasons I outsourced myself to Mexico and adopted a lifestyle that works with a Mexican salary. Lol.

Why?

I wasn't running around begging companies to hire me, they came to me and asked if I'd work for them.

remote work should mean that software engineers should get payed exactly the same anywhere on earth. If they had to go through the same interview process to get a job and are literally doing the exact same job then they should be payed the same as a SWE in SV or NYC

You can try paying software engineers exactly the same anywhere on Earth, but SV and NYC engineers generally won't work at "anywhere on Earth" prices.

Remote work means you can quit any time and get a better job.

And non-remote work means a virus already did.

Remote Work Means Anyone Can Give You A Job

… and you can take anyone's job.

Means I can take anyone's job.

There's some serious irony that traditionally globalist brogrammer types are now whining about outsourcing (to "poorer" areas, or other countries). You guys didn't care when it was happened to blue collar workers, and then go and rag on Trump voters who didn't see any other way out.

Then there's the other faction that doesn't understand basic economics and expects Bay Area pay from Bangladesh so they can live like a king. Your employer will pay the minimum they can. Salaries are only high right now because of the concentration of talent and cost of living.

To those people, please, get over yourselves and stop thinking you're somehow better because you went to college or don't do manual labour.

Edit: Wow. Downvote in five seconds. Really makes you think how much effort people are putting into processing the words I wrote.

Would be curious for you to expand on what you mean by "traditionally globalist brogrammer types."

It's a generalisation to be sure.

But many programmers (from Silicon Valley in particular) or other middle class workers like finance, law, etc.. are in this weird bubble totally isolated from reality. The working class has been complaining about outsourcing for decades and I just find it hypocritical that this bubble is only just starting to complain because now it affects them with remote work.

It's elitist attitude and my number one complaint about our industry.

On the contrary - from my own anecdotal experience - programmers have been complaining about outsourcing forever. There was an especially strong distaste for it at Intel where outsourcing was more common. I've seen countless articles and opinions here on HackerNews outlining the tremendous loss of quality and productivity by outsourcing work over the years. Have you considered if you're the one living in the bubble?

Stereotyping is not cool.

Acting like the don't exist either, isn't either.

I coincidentally found this yesterday, and while it is on the topic of racism, you can just as much transpose races for classes, and still be on point: https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/02/colorblindness-adds-to-...

> Edit: Wow. Downvote in five seconds. Really makes you think how much effort people are putting into processing the words I wrote.

What is there to process besides you making a strawman and injecting flat politically polarized tropes and adding nothing but pollution to a discussion? You are arguing in bad faith with shoddy arguments and should be downvoted:

- False equivalence between blue collar and white collar outsourcing -- what makes you think knowledge work isn't substantially different from blue collar work for them to be apples and oranges?

- Putting words in someone else's mouth -- no one here ragged on Trump voters who "didn't see any other way out" -- you perceived that and projected it into a space inappropriately. This is a giant forum with a variety of people and political opinions. Don't flatten that into a single viewpoint and expect to not get heat for it.

- Misunderstanding of labor pricing. Employers pay the minimum they can, but saying "salaries are high right now because of concentration of talent" misses the network effect of concentration of talent. If you don't understand the nonlinear effect of that, I think it is a little bit misguided to suggest that others do not understand "basic economics"

Please, rethink how you worded your post and how you can say what you were trying to say in a more factually grounded and less inflammatory way. I promise you will get better responses with this approach.

You're right. I wrote this post in anger and frustration because I don't like how things are heading. Let me try and clear things up.

> - False equivalence between blue collar and white collar outsourcing -- what makes you think knowledge work isn't substantially different from blue collar work for them to be apples and oranges?

I'm not suggesting that blue collar and white collar work is similar, but that, at the end of the day, these are livelihoods we're talking about. Remote work will eventually lead to outsourcing (if it is possible).

Plenty of workers are saying, "give us WFH - it works" and if this is true, I can't see why those jobs wouldn't get shipped off ASAP. Every job outsourced is a damn shame, but as far as the media is telling me, I'm now supposed to start feeling sorry for white collar but not blue collar outsourcing? This is blatant bias.

> Putting words in someone else's mouth -- no one here ragged on Trump voters who "didn't see any other way out" -- you perceived that and projected it into a space inappropriately. This is a giant forum with a variety of people and political opinions. Don't flatten that into a single viewpoint and expect to not get heat for it.

Not on this forum, no, but go pick up any newspaper and you'll see plenty of evidence of this. I would go as far as to say, the primary reason Trump was elected was due to his strong anti-China/anti-outsourcing stance. That makes this whole situation political.

> - Misunderstanding of labor pricing. Employers pay the minimum they can, but saying "salaries are high right now because of concentration of talent" misses the network effect of concentration of talent. If you don't understand the nonlinear effect of that, I think it is a little bit misguided to suggest that others do not understand "basic economics".

I do understand this, but remote working to begin with, is predicated on the axiom that being in the same, shared physical space, isn't essential. If that's true, why would companies continue to overpay (from their PoV) workers in these tech hubs (at least long term)

In 2002, when I was looking at colleges and deciding what to do with my life, I received advice that I shouldn't go into programming, because outsourcing was going to make all the programming jobs go away. Fortunately for me, I ignored this advice.

As others have noted, this all is not new (even if it might be different level).

> You guys didn't care when it was happened to blue collar workers

It's a strawman argument to conclude that because someone thinks that a thing is good on the whole (outsourcing), that there can't be bad consequences to it (people losing their jobs). For whatever it's worth, there seems to be a pretty strong pro-tech-union group on HN (which, I happen to disagree with, but that's a whole different story).

Hopefully that's enough evidence that someone took the time to process what you wrote, and you use the feedback to write better.

Oh the irony.

the way it should be right?

good post

this article is paywalled.

Very true for parasite employees. But to employees who actually work and have a basic understanding of self fulfillment, it means nothing more than environment change.

“Parasite employees” is a somewhat unfortunate phrase.

I would imagine that any employer who thinks of their staff like that is already outsourcing or planning to outsource anyway.

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