WFH revolution could see millions of white collar jobs outsourced | Hacker News Reader

WFH revolution could see millions of white collar jobs outsourced

cityam.com

2 pointsjmfldn4 comments

I am a bit sceptical about this but maybe I'm being complacent?

"The new report suggests that whilst previous offshoring has been predominantly focussed on blue collar roles like manufacturing, the “mass experiment with remote work” suggests professional, white-collar roles will no longer be “sheltered from the pressures of globalisation.”. Examples of “anywhere jobs” include software programmers, accountants and insurance underwriters."

To anyone who has grown up in a country like the UK, and seen first hand what the collapse of manufacturing did to people and communities, this is a sobering and alarming prediction.

To anyone who has lived through various attempts to 'outsource' software development to various countries over the past two decades this is a sad joke. There is a reason most (possibly all?) of these projects fail. For quite a while the people who were capable of performing the work ended up migrating to a few locations; now that they are spreading out a bit in a post-COVID world we are likely to see more work move out of specific geographic locations, but the work is still going to be done by the same people. There may be a small bit of price competition from lower COL areas, but those same coders will also be able to compete for a wider range of available work so that will maintain the higher price for labor.

Yeah this is essentially my take. I also think this report is drawing a fall equivalence between the impact of globalisation on manufacturing in the 1980s and in white collar roles now. Former can easily be moved abroad, eg steel production from Scotland to India. The latter involves splitting a high skill knowledge-based company across cultures, timezones etc. Most of what I've seen of this in IT has not been good. It's also not like our whole sector hasn't been theoretically offshorable for a decade or two either. The barriers from a pure labour point of view have been low for a long time. In other words, it could have happened en masse already but conspicuously hasn't.

> I am a bit sceptical about this but maybe I'm being complacent?

WFH on a permanent basis is a remote job. Once that is internalised by the employer they are bound to ask why hire a remote person in the UK (for instance) when they could equally hire a cheaper remote person somewhere else.

That being said, I am not too worried for software engineers in tech companies: If we take the FAANG as an example they can already hire anywhere in the world and what they usually do is to open R&D centres across the world. Sure they hire in cheaper locations like India, but they still have major presence in Silicon Valley, London, etc. because that's where the "talents" they need are. So while remote jobs open opportunities for people who live away from these tech centres, I'm not sure it will have a massive effect. If anything, maybe the people who live in these expensive tech centres will decide to move to cheaper areas for better quality of life.

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