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Comment by m_sanders | Hacker News Reader

There was a fansinating take on the potential impact of a WFH revolution on white collar works in The Telegraph the other day.

As companies embrace working from home and downsize their offices presence, a lot of the barriers to entry to offshoring start to disappear - if everyone is remote then a remote individuals in cheaper Eastern Europe will likely integrate a lot easier than when most the employees were sitting together in expensive London.

White collar workers could face the same globalisation pressure and wage deflation that’s happened to blue collar workers over the last 50 years or so.

Personally, if my team stays remote, then our next hire will most likely not be London based. There’s a much larger pool of European talent available to us and we’re now better setup to and culturally open to hiring remote first. This isn’t something our company would have considered before COVID.

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>White collar workers could face the same globalisation pressure and wage deflation that’s happened to blue collar workers over the last 50 years or so.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently. Lots of white collar people seemingly have a very "meh" attitude towards manufacturing getting outsourced. What will the attitude be once these white collar jobs start leaving?

Wage decrease in one place means wage increase elsewhere. If someone who could do my job for half of my income, maybe they should get the job.

I place my future in the fact that it will be hard for employers to hire someone that can do my job (all facet of it) for half of my income. Sure there will be people slipping through the crack at that level, but hiring is a numbers game where you don't count on luck.

Having worked with overseas teams in the past, I'm not particularly concerned.

The cost of hiring good talent (whether remote or on-site) will always be the same. Companies (tech and non-tech) and government facilities have tried to hire cheap labor to replace more experienced workers for many decades. The result is usually the same with a few exceptions: poor work which has to be refactored, re-worked, or completely thrown out. Usually underpaid employees have no incentive to do anything more than what's assigned to them. The old adage comes true: "you get what you pay for."

In the end the employer has to deal with a shitty product and in the end hire the right talent to get the job done (which they should have done in the first place).

Agreed. It's actually amazing how often I've seen a company truly believe that the lower wages they pay to offshore workers has no impact on the quality of the product, only for the truly diminished nature to become apparent after some time.

That's not to say all offshore workers are bad, of course. Just that, just because you can hire an Eastern European for half the price doesn't mean they will produce the same quality work as the other people who were more expensive.

The flip side to that is with the UK leaving the EU will there be legal and taxation hurdles. Also, sometimes having local context, and the ability to meet locally at short notice is an important requirement. I don't think it's as clear cut in all cases.

Will there? Plenty of workers fly in from non EU countries to work in the UK and rest of EU.

We have staff from Asia fly in with a few days notice and vice versa.

Few ever need a work visa they simply visit as a tourist. Certainly if a short trip.

Not that what they are doing is correct. But it happens so regularly, I don't think many office workers even consider they need a work visa.

Anyhow this saga has just proven the vast majority of meetings can be done remote hence why your all working remote will be the companies reply.

If a global company the data is probably shared across the globe and regulated as need be already.

I really think people need to be careful for what they wish for with remote work.

Companies will see savings (well what they perceive as savings) and will see margins increasing.

People thinking they will get the money back the company saves on property costs or paid that "London/New York/SF weighting". That or fully kitted home office's. I think they maybe disappointed.

When a company makes big savings they then often get hungry for more.

Even within the EU every country has its own income tax rules and employment regulation. I'm not a fan of Brexit but I don't see any significant changes around this.

Doesn't work well when time zone difference is too large, though.

> Doesn't work well when time zone difference is too large, though.

That is true. Although I've noticed that some outsourcing companies are comfortable working to the office hours of the headquarters.

London is notorious for low SWEng salaries; you might not have any other choice than to contract somebody in Ukraine who didn't escape somewhere else if your own employees get higher paid remote gigs in the US...

> London is notorious for low SWEng salaries

I was actually going to challenge this before I did a bit of research and discovered you're right - the average wage for a software engineer is £47,500 (https://www.cwjobs.co.uk/salary-checker/average-it-salary). That's ugly.

I'm from Liverpool originally (live abroad now) and I have friends in Manchester earning £50-60k... in the North of England. That's a big wage in that area.

That's for IT though? Software engineer average is £72500 based on your link

Anecdotally, the one senior dev we have on my team from London makes mid/upper 40s. I was astounded when I found that out.

Yeah, even both Google and FB pay engineers pretty terribly in London. I was once asked to move there, and I refused unless they accounted for cost of living changes. They didn't, so I stayed working at my original office.

The stat you link appears to be for "IT" jobs across all of the UK. Restricting the search to "Software Engineer" and "London"[0] bumps the number up quite a bit to £72,500 as of when I checked.

[0]: https://www.cwjobs.co.uk/salary-checker/average-software-eng...

That's a good catch. I hadn't realised it was targeting the country because I specifically searched for London. Silly me.

72k in London isn't a lot :)

> London is notorious for low SWEng salaries

With the banks and big tech, I'm pretty sure it has the highest paying SWE salaries in Europe.

Facebook London rarely gives 100k+ base. Compare that to SFBA.

I would have said 90-100 at E5, right? The stock grants are pretty terrible too (relative to the Bay Area, at least).

That's Zurich

Banks tried this, it was a disaster. The cultural stuff matters, the timezone matters, however capable people in other locations are.

There are plenty of companies specially in tech sector that build and support products that are focused and used in multiple countries, and are quite successful. They have research and product teams that work to understand the target market/country/culture and build products for the target audience. Why would it not be possible to do it the other way around?

> They have research and product teams that work to understand the target market/country/culture and build products for the target audience

Isn't that making the same point I made: local knowledge matters.

I don't think so.

In remote work, communication matters more. Language barriers kill it. Working with non native language speakers over less than ideal communication channels is hell on Earth.

That was a shit editorial, by someone who did no research.

He was highlighting Tech jobs, when we already tried that shit 20 years ago.

Spoiler: It didn't work out well.

That’s interesting and something I hadn’t considered.

That said it probably depends on the job.

I’m currently working remote, but same timezone. I may go remote at a very different timezone, but the expectation is clear that I’m overlapping most of the West Coast work day (calls with vendors, team calls, etc).

For me that would mean working from 8pm to 2am, approximately. Not sure I have the stamina for that.

I reached that conclusion at the start of the coronavirus lockdown; that the managers who resisted letting us work remotely were consoling themselves at the outsourcing experiment they were conducting.

But I’m not too sure outsourcing white collar jobs will work.

Trumpism has 40% of the electorate in any western country. Add in the masses of disillusioned white collar workers, and populism will be the natural political position of every Western country (therefore joining the rest of the world)

Now imagine a “respectable” Trumpism, i.e. populism without the icky Le Penns, Salvinis, or Trumps.

Imagine Brexit with half as many remainers.

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