Don't call it 'outsourcing': Hiring employees globally is getting easier
axios.com
axios.com
It may seem fun and flexible now, but the acceptance of fully-remote work will lead to jobs being hired globally, at lower cost to the company than hiring domestically.
And don’t fool yourself, that developer in Colombia is just as talented but can work for half the cost.
https://www.oecd.org/pisa/test-2012/form/
For example, 25% of Americans could solve problem 4, and 39% of Canadians, but only 2% of Colombians. (But 8% of Chileans, 15% of Serbians, 21% of Croatians.) Problem 5 is USA 9% to Colombia ~0% (Chile 2%). Problem 6, Taiwan is at 18%, USA 2%.
Colombia’s IMO team, drawn from its 50 million people, also gets trounced by Mongolia, population 6 million. And Mongolia isn’t just poor and polluted, half of that 6 million are horses. Only 3.3 million Mongolians are human.
Taking the 25% vs. 2% comparison, we could say Colombia’s quality-weighted population is effectively 50 million divided by 12.5, so it’s effectively a 4 million person country, measured in Americans.
It is relevant only to the degree of whether or not you can do high-school maths, and the assumption is anyone who can write code can.
You might need maybe 5% of the non US/non EU countries if we also exclude the EU countries, to get double the absolute number of non Americans who can solve it.
I suspect if you asked someone to perform long division, or adding large numbers with decimals and carry overs by hand, instead, the non US countries would perform far better than Americans, who may not even have been taught how to do that.
Edit. I should add that if your project really matters, the dude from Bogota will be a spy or a blackhat with nearly complete certainty. He will be well spoken, likeable, presentable, competent, he will even appear to believe in your company values and will ask for a very moderate salary. And you will brag about how you've got such a superstar for 10% of going payrate here, except that one day he'll stop responding to emails after having collected all the info he needed.
In theory, nothing. In practice, a dramatic reduction in quality.
> And don’t fool yourself, that developer in Colombia is just as talented but can work for half the cost.
Again in theory, yes. In practice, not usually.
There are talented and smart people in every country.
There are also tons of low quality, low experience, cheap devs in the US, just like the countries you seem to be maligning.
This really seems like simple racism to me.
Yep. Nowhere did I dispute this.
> There are also tons of low quality, low experience, cheap devs in the US, just like the countries you seem to be maligning.
Yep. Nowhere did I dispute this.
> This really seems like simple racism to me.
This is speaking from lots of experiencing working with and managing outsourced dev labor. I would say that your take seems intellectually lazy to me. Hiring is insanely hard, and adding timezones and language/culture hurdles only makes it harder.
In the past the outsourced teams were clearly second class teams behind the primary local teams.
That won’t be the case if the entire company is remote first.
> That won’t be the case if the entire company is remote first
This assumption is based on the idea that outsourced teams were the second class teams because they were remote.
They weren't. They were second class teams because they were outsourced.
This is it. The quality of the work was just really bad, very consistently. It had nothing to do with being remote.
> In the past the outsourced teams were clearly second class teams behind the primary local teams.
Outsourced teams were second class because of the frequency they didn't deliver/delivered something poorly/needed almost full-time guidance and direction. I would put outsourced help in a similar category to taking on a Junior dev, fwiw. It has its place, but you can't get mad at someone put in a position that was never meant to succeed if they end up failing.
The difference I see in results is that a remote worker might trigger regrets for not really giving them a winable situation but a local internal worker triggers empathy even if they became your new lower bound on lazy. This leads some people to fix some local workers and almost all people to give them 3-5 years to improve while hiring additional people that shouldn't be needed.
Yep.
> The difference I see in results is that a remote worker might trigger regrets for not really giving them a winable situation but a local internal worker triggers empathy even if they became your new lower bound on lazy. This leads some people to fix some local workers and almost all people to give them 3-5 years to improve while hiring additional people that shouldn't be needed.
I again think it's a super complex problem. I think local workers have the luxury of tight feedback loops. When working with offshore labor, you have to basically build in several extra days to get what you want. For an in-office (or even in-timezone) worker, you can get regular updates in real time, so you have more opportunities to jump in if something isn't going correctly. For offshore, you give them a task and then check back in tomorrow. Usually, what they delivered wasn't close to what you asked for, but since they're offline when you're reviewing, you just have to again write what you want and send it back over the wall (where they will update what they did, but again not deliver what you wanted). It takes so much longer.
The contrast between that and non-offshore-remote is still night and day. You don't have to plan so many extra cycles for converting whatever they gave you to whatever you wanted. And the timezones again are just so much easier to work with.
Always outliers, but environment and opportunity fuckin matter.
and customer service positions in phone banks, it'll never be 1:1 due to colloquial lack of familiarity with non country A dialects.
Language, for one - although there are fluent English speakers in Colombia and Argentina, there are far fewer there than in the US.
In the past two years, it seems like the only quality US candidates come from active recruitment - job ads do not seem to produce a high quality of applicant. Even after initial screening I still get people who can't parse a simple CSV applying for senior dev positions (you can use google, you get full credit if you copy-paste from stack overflow, you get full credit if you launch into a monologue about how parsing CSVs seems simple but there are a lot of hidden pitfalls, you can use any language you want, you can use a library or read the file and parse line by line and split (no trick cells with commas, all numeric), it's not meant to be a hard test). Some of the interviews are just brutal.
So really the only difference I've been experiencing is it's a lot easier to passively recruit in less competitive markets (specifically overseas), in the US I have to spend a lot more time ensuring I do things like volunteering for pitch event mentorship so I can find people I can encourage to interview for us or keep in contact with so I can actively recruit them if they don't enjoy their job.
This cultural issue with management tends to bring up "whiteness", but most middle management in Finance/Tech are older white males, many of them are totally awesome, but majority of them lack cultural understandings and "offshoring" can create massive frictions.
On a side note, I think 1st gen have it the hardest of all. 0-gen know their standing and know they are newcomers with foreign customs. 1-gen often are in the middle and aren't sure where they belong culturally, here, or there. 2-gen usually don't have any such ambivalence.
I found that understanding the differences helped a lot when I started work in an extremely culturally diverse company.
https://erinmeyer.com/books/the-culture-map/
https://www.peterfisk.com/vault-entry/xl-culture-map-erin-me...
On the other hand, organizations are well aware of certain cultures being non confrontational, and have done a lot of work in actually helping them speak their mind without being confrontational. Pre-pandemic when I became a manager, my company provided me with a ton of training on structuring meetings and brainstorming sessions in a way that encourages everyone to participate.
There's a very good argument to be made that in a remote first environment the "confrontational" culture would lose out, whereas the "non-confrontational" culture, which can easily be worked around through a variety of management techniques, will work much better.
It's ALL about culture. Do your employees and co-workers share your values? Do they have the same priorities as you and the company? Do they overshare or undershare when they have problems?
Different cultures have very different expectations of how you talk to your peers. Some of the SE-Asian people I've worked with will work very hard but never ask clarifying questions, so they might slave away for a week building the wrong thing unless you check in on them. The Polish people I've worked with are straight shooters and always ask really good questions. They're very blunt but great to work with. The Brits are more cautious but generally do a good job, but they're formal to a fault. The Americans are the worst for "toeing the company line". To me they come off as insincere suck-ups, but I know it's just the culture. I myself enjoy being the slightly loony "weird foreign guy" on the office. I'm quite blunt and tell jokes at inopportune times to troll the Brits :) - but ONLY if I know everyone there knows me well and understands my style of humour.
It's all fine if you know your team intimately but unless you know the culture, that new guy who joins you remote is going to be a pain to work with, and they also won't understand what's expected of them, making it difficult for them to do a good job. I've also found that a lot of people who've never left their original environment (i.e. never worked abroad) are totally deaf to this and will always interpret cultural differences as insubordination or arrogance.
If you're going to effectively manage a multi-national team you need to very quickly gauge people's style of working and communicating or you're doomed to fail.
For example saying: "how are you getting on?" seems to be a rarer expression than simply asking "how are you?" and is more difficult for non-native speakers to parse, of course they can learn specific British and American expressions, dialect and office jargon but it's another hurdle to communication.
This contradiction makes executive personnel decisions look like the execs choose personal power over their employees every time.