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Comment by joelbluminator | Hacker News Reader

If anyone can do your work remotely...ANYONE can do your work remotely. Do you guys think maybe when the next recession happens we will see unprecedented offshoring due to companies not being able to pay 160K to a developer with 3 years experience? Its all nice and well when every startup can raise as much money as it wants. What happens when/if that pops?

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That goes both ways though. It also means that you can get hired by some company on the other side of the world that possibly offers better conditions than anything local.

Well yes it's great for Indians / Africans. For people living in U.S, U.K not so much. I think it also means people should go deep, way deep in their stack. Don't switch too much. You know PHP? Become great in PHP. Know Ruby? Stick to Ruby and become a real expert. Generalists may become a commodity...just my personal opinion. You will have to set yourself apart somehow. What is your strategy in this brave new world?

As somebody who's quite a bit of a generalist, I really don't see this happening. IT is just such a huge field that knowing enough general stuff to be useful is still pretty hard.

> For people living in U.S, U.K not so much.

If you live in San Francisco or London, probably, but there are lots of places where the cost of living is lower.

Yes, definitely.

The tech company I work for was all SF based for it's engineering. Now they're open to hiring from anywhere.

They haven't entirely committed to hybrid/remote. They have however expanded beyond the Bay Area based on their experiences during covid. And that's meant new offices in the Philippines and Mexico City.

Sure but I think that's a good thing. I would rather we slowly lift millions of people out of literal poverty than sacrifice ~5% of our day (1/16 awake hours) in commute just to gatekeep our jobs.

Plus there are other barriers. WFH can be every day except a monthly lunch or social event with the team. Or it's WFH save for on-prem things like hardware upgrades. WFH doesn't have to mean fully remote... just not an office environment.

Lots of people took monetary obligations (mortgages mostly) thinking they'll make 6 figures for the next 20-30 years...what happens if that's no longer true?

Currently, mortgage debt evaporates faster from inflation/wage growth faster than outsourcing can realistically occur. In any case I don't see why software engineering should be exempt when the manufacturing and textile industries hit hard by outsourcing and automation. It sucks but that's just how capitalism works. SE's would probably have an easier time adapting than people in those industries anyway.

There's a lot of factors slowing down the outsourcing of CS jobs. The most talented pretty much always immigrate to the US because of higher wages and higher standards of living. Security concerns mean a lot can't be outsourced at all. Language & cultural differences give the US & western countries a huge hold on CS education. Etc. Plus a lot of jobs could be WFH 99% of the time but the last 1% is very important.

Even in the most extreme push of WFH or remote work, outsourcing would just be jobs moving from high COL areas like SF to lower COL areas of the US. Same culture/language, minimal timezone differences, etc. The pendulum is still very far on the side of favoring in-office work giving a few select areas a huge advantage & driving COL in those areas. The US is a huge country; even a 2x increase in WFH jobs wouldn't exhaust the number of low COL areas in the US.

You raise good points. I'll just counter this: you say currently and that's a very important word. Currently things are good in tech, in fact never have been better. Almost any startup with half decent product raises tens, often hundreds of millions of dollars with ease. With this loose finance (the causes of which are the low interest rate) of course paying a lot for developers doesn't matter much. I'm talking about a scenario in which if (when?) a lot of hot air is released from this bubble. This will terminate many companies that don't really produce much and will cause the rest to cut costs aggressively. I guess something similar to the dot com bubble only I think this time it will be worse. I do agree with you though that if the abundance of money continues, for the reasons you listed the current dynamic will probably prevail.

After reading what I just wrote I fully realize this is one of those things that is impossible to predict and pointless to worry about. It can happen tomorrow, in 10 years or maybe never.

This has been bandied about since the '90s. There might be drastic hiring of people outside of the tech hub area (Midwest, Canada), but offshoring beyond North America is hamstrung by linguistic, cultural, and time zone differences.

South American and Mexico are in the same time zone, I'm sure there a couple million decent programmers in the entire South continent.

I've made that point before, but was told otherwise.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27356320

IDK, how important is culture on a fully remote team? Also, what IS culture exactly? Basecamp's employees were all from the same culture, yet they managed to start hating each other and almost dissolve the company.

I don't know about the US but in the UK I've seen a lot of my corporate customers offshoring work to India.

> Do you guys think maybe when the next recession happens we will see unprecedented offshoring due to companies not being able to pay 160K to a developer with 3 years experience?

Has been quite like this since early 2000s.

So....better suffer now because otherwise we might suffer later? No, thanks.

Not to mention that suffering now wouldn't prevent the future suffering.

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