Hacker News Reader

Comment by EMM_386 | Hacker News Reader

Everyone should keep in mind that water seeks its own level. And think of this on a global scale.

I've been working remotely for almost a decade as a senior software engineer. Now, post-Covid, almost everyone realizes they can do the same.

Salaries are going to drop in the "rich world", and it's not just because people are now fleeing places like SF/SV to lower cost of living areas.

We are also beginning to compete globally, far more than ever before with the ease of remote work. Qualified engineers can be found for 1/10th of the price with "near shore" companies in the "rich world".

I know because I've worked with them throughout various roles, both as peers and as a PM/Team Lead.

The money may start flowing from the "rich world" to the "poor world" soon, no need for H1B visas or anything else.

The gold rush days may be over.

View on HN

>> We are also beginning to compete globally, far more than ever before with the ease of remote work. Qualified engineers can be found for 1/10th of the price with "near shore" companies in the "rich world".

Yep. I've said it many times here and basically anywhere I can: Clamoring for remote-only work, maximum-introvert, never fly somewhere, don't value in-person communication/meetings/etc is a dangerous game to be playing. People vastly overestimate how talented they are and how hard the problems they are solving may be.

Not today, and not tomorrow. But if face to face communication, meetings, and the other sociable stuff goes away, it won't take long for domestic management to realize where the cost savings could come from, and international management to realize they need to upskill their people in English and code quality to earn "huge" [0] salaries consistently.

[0] Huge salaries to them being a high-five figure salary.

> Yep. I've said it many times here and basically anywhere I can: Clamoring for remote-only work, maximum-introvert, never fly somewhere, don't value in-person communication/meetings/etc is a dangerous game to be playing.

What's interesting is that I flew in for a meeting with my company recently, the first I've had since I've been hired.

This took hours upon hours of my time. Time I could have spent working.

We spent it between a conference room and at restaurants, and much of the time was spent discussing things with the larger team that were not relevant to me. So I spent that time on my laptop fixing bugs, in the conference room.

There was zero benefit to any of this outside of a solid handshake and getting to "meet people in person".

However, I have 3 meetings a week with the entire team on HD video, so I already knew exactly who I was meeting and what their mannerisms and personalities were.

That included walking through an office where people jumped out of the cubicles and offices when they saw me and said "hey! Great to finally see you in person!" without a second thought. They knew exactly who I was without having ever met me.

Is this really necessary? This was a huge waste of company money that I could have spent working.

>> This took hours upon hours of my time. Time I could have spent working.

What engineers and people on this site seem to not grasp is that "working" is not a strict definition that maps to "writing code" to management, business operations, marketing, sales... basically every non-engineering department.

If that concept starts to take root in the mind, then it becomes a bit more clear why people like the office. Engineers on HN seem to be incapable of considering that the social aspect of work is important to most non-introvert non-engineers in an office and that a lot of "work" is forming bonds, developing relationships, and yes, "playing politics" to some extent.

I don't doubt that the 10x engineer is well-represented on this site and that their worth is quite high for their work output. Lesser engineers and developers who work on glorified CRUD apps and mobile adware can easily be replaced, and the issue is that often they think they are also elite 10x engineers who have the same type of nobility and don't have to play the office game.

Time will tell if they're right, but I'm betting not. Especially since I know a lot of hiring managers exploring outsourcing during the Great Resignation and Remote Work Only craze and finding results being... quite good.

> Engineers on HN seem to be incapable of considering that the social aspect of work is important to most non-introvert non-engineers in an office and that a lot of "work" is forming bonds, developing relationships, and yes, "playing politics" to some extent.

I do this all day in private Slack communications, 1-1 video conferences, and everything else.

This "watercooler effect" myth may seem important to some, but I know my team members closely because I am talking to them all day, whether we're staring at each other face to face or not. I already know their kids are in college, or the sports teams they are interested in, or the typical company rumor mill.

I'm 2+ decades in this game and I am familiar with the office. I spent 10 years driving an hour-each-way commute to spend 10+ hours in an office to help start a company with one other person. Which ended up growing to 20+ employees.

What is the purpose of "in person"? I have friends and a life outside the office. That doesn't make me an "introvert", it makes me a person who wants to spend the company's money wisely, especially against tight deadlines.

They need me writing code, or architecting a project, or leading a team.

> This "watercooler effect" myth may seem important to some, but I know my team members closely because I am talking to them all day, whether we're staring at each other face to face or not. I already know their kids are in college, or the sports teams they are interested in, or the typical company rumor mill.

That doesn't just happen. I'm glad your company/team has apparently figured it out; mine certainly hasn't.

Think about how you can make it happen directly around you, don't wait for "the company" to get it - be the agent that propagates it. If you spend the time and the energy to make it happen at least with your direct network, you'll create a competitive advantage for yourself, your team, and get a valuable set of skills.

I think it's fair to say that HN can be a bit myopic. Both about this and other topics, there is a lack of understanding of the mindset of "the general population".

There can be a lot of ideas that a stated in way that makes it seem like most people would totally agree, like that "socializing at the office is obviously a chore that's a waste of time", that "work is about maximizing your programming output", or that "managers want employees back at the office is because they feel insecure about their value and don't trust their employees to get work done". But I don't think the vast majority of the workforce would necessarily agree to those ideas. As much as HN types like to make fun of MBAs and their bean-counting, there's the feeling that in their own heads the primary directive is to try to maximize the throughput of neatly parceled work units and would deride those who disagree as "time wasters".

The risk with this kind of thinking is that you end up not being nearly as objective as you think you are, and worse, you will fail to predict how things are going to happen. If you were reading Reddit during the 2016 and 2020 democratic primary; you would have been sure that Bernie was going to be the nominee. My workplace surveyed whether people want to do full-remote, hybrid, or full-office. Reading HN, you'd think the obvious top choice would have been full-remote, since most of us could actually work fully remote. As it turns out, it was not the winner. (Before saying that management fudged the numbers: The outcome was supported by my informal questioning of my coworkers as to how they voted.)

That's what the metaverse is for, or at least that seems to be what Meta is banking on.

What sort of projects are 10x engineers working on?

They work on projects that can afford them, and they are not necessarily the most interesting ones

Short projects.

Considering slightly broader aspect of why the work is done in the first place – to bring profits to the company – people should also factor in the creative part of work, and nonlinearity of individual contributions to that case.

It's one thing if your job is to stay at the assembly line punching holes in metal sheets 40 hours a week. And another thing if you have the capacity for improving the overall process (and profits), while still spending 10 hours punching holes part-time because it brings you joy. From management perspective, it's those 10 hours that are wasted.

Or if you're taken out of your dear assembly line and flown to the other part of the country in business class, to attend a week-long series of meeting with a customer. Somehow that ends up helping to secure a huge contract, just because your presence affected the customer's perception. From your perspective, that might look like the company has wasted a fine week of your work on useless meetings and communication. From company's perspective, just with that they have made more money than you'd bring them in a two years otherwise.

Depends on the work, of course. But for me, software is a team sport.

My current job is 100% remote; I've never met my coworkers or my users. I love not commuting, but the lack of personal bonding and the need for all communication to be 100% intentional is a real drawback. I think it's especially limiting for people that I don't work very closely with. E.g., I can't just go hang out with users and watch them work. Which makes it much harder to build relationships where I say, "Hey, let me show you something."

>where I say, "Hey, let me show you something."

So... what you like is making it harder for other people to work by forcing them to pay attention to you according to your whims. I much prefer a coworker reaching out to me on Slack and saying "When you have time, let me show you something." And then I get back to them when I've finished what I am working on.

Sure, that's fine - you like that.

Do you have empathy towards 90% of the remainder of a company who doesn't like that?

Do you mean 90% of developers? Because 100% of the developers I work with agree with me.

Again, it depends on the company. For in-house software, which is quite a lot of the software out there, the people I need to show it to are not developers, but users. Given that I specified users, it seems pretty obvious we're talking about the whole company.

You clearly want other people to show empathy and try to honor the way you like to work. So I'll repeat icelander's question: Do you have empathy towards 90% of the remainder of a company who doesn't like that?

No. There are other parts of a business besides developers/engineers.

I’m doing something similar with my team in a few weeks, and I’d measure our in person value on a different scale than just what we produce in person together. I don’t know if this is naive, but I still feel like it’s important to celebrate our accomplishments together and if we have a chance to do that in person, even if velocity suffers and some money is spent, we get something out of that shared experience together that helps us grow and understand each other that is sometimes lost when we’re just on video calls.

Is it necessary? Definitely not. But I have the opportunity and I think it’s great to do, and great to plan together.

We are finishing up a major project right now. At the last zoom meeting the business lead excitedly suggested that we should all get together in real life once it is totally completed for a celebration. All of us engineers slacked each other and said that we had less than zero interest in this and wondered how we could tell the business person thanks, but no thanks. I've been in the industry for 20 years and I still don't understand the desire of business people to go get a beer together or go eat together or whatever. I do have friends I'd like to do those things with, but that is not you. Please don't make this awkward.

Some people connect better in person. I felt closer to my team, and more like friends, after having spent a few days with them in person, especially outside of a work setting. If it improves collaboration or retention in any way - maybe subconsciously I’m less pedantic in code review, friendlier in chats, more willing to do extra work to help a colleague, discussing with a team I didn’t normally talk to before, or hesitate a few weeks longer before switching companies - it’s worth it to the company.

> There was zero benefit to any of this outside of a solid handshake and getting to "meet people in person".

That’s a lot of benefit to me? I like knowing that the person on the other end of the camera actually exists in 3D.

Do you think they are a deepfake?

If I were advising you, I might note that your post is all about you.

Consider how you define yourself, and where you see your life going over the long term.

Different strengths/reservoirs of energy and motivation are needed to "make it happen" in the real world.

How can you ensure your team will be there when you need them?

The irony of writing this doesn't escape me, as I weigh the frankly-more-time-efficient-for-me working at home I have now, versus the team-efficiencies of being in the office.

Since I was forced to work remotely due to Covid lockdowns I "waste" much more of my time in meetings now then I did when I was working on site in an office.

When there was friction involved in organizing a meeting (Needing to gather participants all in one place, book conference room, get projector working etc.) people were reluctant to call trivial meetings.

Now it feels like everyone has discovered Microsoft Teams and people feel obligated to call meetings for all manner of things that would have previously been solved by email or 'water cooler conversations'.

The volume of meetings I find myself attending now has skyrocketed compared to how often I'd be physically present in meetings when I worked in office. The only saving grace is you can mute yourself and alt-tab which is much more difficult when you are physically present at a meeting.

You can decline a meeting, try it :)

From my 20+ years of experience working the spectrum from fully remote to fully in-office - there seems to be something primal that happens when you make a real human connection with someone. In person > zoom > phone > email.

It doesn't matter much in the good times when everything is going smoothly. But when the crap hits the fan and you don't have that connection - things tend to get contentious a lot faster. If you're the only one on the team without a human connection to the rest of the team, you're set up to be the scapegoat when things go wrong. It's just human nature.

> "[0] Huge salaries to them being a high-five figure salary."

CheckSalary.co.uk puts the average salary for "a programmer" in the UK at £43K, Reed.co.uk says £41k, Glassdoor says £35K, Payscale says £31K... maybe devs here should upskill in English?

https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/programmer-salary-SRCH_...

programmer is very vague, and glassdoor does show the jobs bringing that down as php/web development, which is highly saturated and competitive.

nice! shots fired.

Doesn’t Facebook use Hack, a PHP derivative, internally?

Sure, but that’s not where their high-paying engineering jobs are at. HHVM itself is in C++.

Russian remote programmer here. The language is a small part, cultural difference is the most painful one. Americans never give direct negative feedback and expect this from you, for example. Many US companies hire only people from US and pay them more b/c cultural and timezone difference is another hidden cost and not every company wants to pay it - they rather pay 200k more in $. But personally for me that's fine, even miserable salary by US standards is great, and it has grown significantly in the past year thanks to covid. Some companies offer salaries close to 100k$/yr which was unreachable 5 years ago.

This is an issue not just with Russians, but with differences between mainland Europe and Anglo-Saxon culture in general (UK too). Funny enough, it gets worse the better at English you get: if you're obviously not very good at English then people tend to give you the benefit of the doubt. If you're reasonably good at English in such a way that it's not obvious you're not a native speaker at a glance then people tend to be less forgiving. And the whole passive-aggressive culture also means they won't actually tell you, so it can be quite hard to learn and improve.

Of course, attitudes differ wildly from individual to individual, but the average can be quite hard to work with. It took me a few years to really adjust.

The Germans and people from eastern Europe are usually straightforward in their communications. There might have been a shift towards conflict-avoidance in younger generations (< 30 yo) though.

> The Germans and people from eastern Europe are usually straightforward in their communications.

May be, Germans (and most Europe) are "straightforward" from an American perspective. I find Europeans with their own shade of "subtlety" which you could only learn if you were part of the culture. Otherwise, they are "subtle" and "measured" too.

German and Dutch straightforwardness only goes one way. Try talking to them back with the same straightforward way they talk to you, and see how they react.

Eh? It's how these people interact with each other. Your line of thinking seems to be something like this:

  1. *Something straightforward*
  2. *Straightforward reply*
  3. "Zomg! Hypocrite!"

I use straightforwardness as a proxy for rudeness, which is what it usually is in these cases. Its like the famous "brusque New Yorker" style or "Berliner schnauze". If you talk to them the same way they talk to you they get pissed because this brusqueness is not how they talk to an equal, but rather an outsider.

What do you mean specifically? Do you have any examples?

You should look at a job with a Dutch company, they're very direct for the most part.

Yes however look at FAANG salaries in UK. Still very high.

I would tend to agree, but there are large cultural differences as well which I don't think are easily overcome.

The problem is that cultural differences are most often in conflict during lots of communication, especially face to face in meetings and so forth.

The more you eliminate synchronous communication, in-person interaction, and office work... the less those cultural differences are going to matter.

I don't think thats true, having worked with teams in Russia, Belgium, and India. The cultural differences can be a huge deal and sink projects.

Strong disagree with that one; I think it's the exact opposite in fact. The more direct communication is, the easier it is to avoid and/or quickly clear up misunderstandings and the like.

Some email that was sent and misunderstood? Your entire project can go off-rails. People can hold grudges over something that was not intended at all. Etc. You're much more likely to catch these things early in face-to-face communication due to body language, tone of voice, etc.

Text communication is pretty hard to get right in general and text communication in a non-native language is even harder, doubly so when you're talking to a native speaker and there's an asymmetry in language skills, which there often is, even with fairly proficient non-native speakers. Add to that cultural differences on what is or isn't "appropriate" or different interpretations on various things and it can become quite tricky to communicate effectively.

This table is a good example of this: https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2014/02/angl...

Honestly, I doubt much will be considerably different for most US based companies. In SV firms, maybe, but in corporate America it will be years before they would even consider another run at mass off shoring. Lots of corporations are still dealing with the fall out of the off shore/consultant boom of the early to mid 00s.

Group video chat makes an enormous difference. And most of the early to mid 00s offshoring was to India, perhaps also places like Russia or China, where the time difference to US can make things exceedingly painful. Now, though, I've worked with many super talented developers in Central and South America where the time difference is minimal.

> domestic management to realize where the cost savings could come from

Management has been looking at off-shoring whatever they can for the past decades already. Having a bigger pool of talent willing to work remotely is a boon, but most of the new influx is not from lower level countries (they already were 99% ok with full remote), and more from places with high level salaries.

Management will find cheaper people, but only marginally, and not that different from the people they already had. Except most of the people they will find will be the ones playing the full-remote "dangerous game" you warn about

>> Management will find cheaper people, but only marginally, and not that different from the people they already had.

This is a dangerous assumption rooted in past failures. I can personally tell you that I have a lot of evidence that points to it no longer being true. Eastern European developers are good enough to do CRUD and basic work that is massively overpaid here in the US, and speak English quite well.

I would tread lightly. It's still very early.

I am not sure what you see as past failures, in the last decade I've already seen first hand long term outsourced projects with Romanian teams and Vietnamese team, and we weren't even their main clients.

I don't think engineers in France or London (and I assume the US) are getting paid big bucks for actual basic work, that ship has long sailed IMO.

How do you define CRUD? Most Cloud/Web based companies we hear about are CRUD. Shopify/Github/Square/Twitter/Stripe it's all CRUD in different scales. What I mean is that 90% of their programmers write software in high level languages that talk to a database and the end product is usually some html/json. The current "modern" web stack isn't that much easier than writing C/C++ imo, it's just different.

"maximum-introvert"

What seems missing from this discussion are the social connections remote workers pursue in the absence of water cooler conversations and company social events.

For many office workers, their co-workers are their main source of social interaction.

For remote workers, it's a deliberate decision to keep their social lives separate from work. They very well may be extroverts in their personal social activities.

As an Eastern European I can assure you that high five figures(is dollars) are by no means considered "huge" around here.

It's actually more or less the market rate.

I've been hearing this argument for 20 years. I was doing ASP/Perl programming while I was in high school in 2000, and I remember being told that I need to move into management because soon all the jobs would be offshored to India.

Then in 2008 when the economy crashed I had one bizdev guy tell me that pretty soon everyone was going to be able to code with these new 'no code apps' and that I was going to be a fossil and I should move into management.

Then in 2012 people talked about how many brilliant chinese programmers there were and how all the jobs were going to be outsourced to china.

I think about this sometimes, because while I did have a successful stint as a team lead, now i'm just a senior SWE. Things have turned out pretty well so far. I've only seen salaries go up.

> I think about this sometimes, because while I did have a successful stint as a team lead, now i'm just a senior SWE. Things have turned out pretty well so far. I've only seen salaries go up.

This is different because Covid-19 has shown to everyone that they can do their jobs remotely.

And if they can do their jobs remotely, why can't an equally skilled engineer in a country with a cost of living 1/10th of the "rich countries" do the same?

They are realizing they can, and handing this off.

I too was around in 2000, writing applications in C# beta before 1.0.

Still here but noticing the trends.

> This is different because Covid-19 has shown to everyone that they can do their jobs remotely.

Citation needed.

> Citation needed.

We're on HN, a technology site.

Many of us have realized we can do our jobs the exact same way as we did before.

I'm not talking about construction workers, police, fast food, etc.

I'm not sure this needs a citation.

Many of us have also realized the quality of work is not the same when there is zero in-person collaboration

I have more often than not heard the quality is better, as in the output. Are you referring to the quality of the experience of work being worse?

> Many of us have also realized the quality of work is not the same when there is zero in-person collaboration

"Many of us" with decades into this career and who have managed such teams would disagree.

This is not so different as one might believe. Those exact arguments about off-shoring and remote work already existed back then. Even your first argument was pretty much the same in all those other events as “has been shown that every code monkey can do their job remotely”. Turned out pretty soon that Software engineering is much more than just churning out code.

> This is not so different as one might believe. Those exact arguments about off-shoring and remote work already existed back then.

This is far different than then.

In 2000, remote work was almost an impossibility... between bandwidth, protocols and everything else.

These days it's as easy as enabling your built-in HD cam and mic and getting to business.

Linux was 9 years old in 2000.

Successful off-shoring isn’t about enabling a bandwith-hungry HD cam streaming your team in 4K. Neither back then nor nowadays. The right communication tools for the job existed back then but that wasn’t the reason why it didn’t work out in 2000 or in 2009. Management isn’t dumb and would happily off-shore to the cheapest remote workers all those last years where nothing of that was a major issue but the problems aren’t primarily about tooling, protocol or bandwith.

> Management isn’t dumb and would happily off-shore to the cheapest remote workers

I've had my share of severe pushbacks with "management" over the years.

They've often been burned by shopping projects out to the lowest bidder and suddenly realize you need competent engineers to make it happen.

The problem is you can find competent engineers now across the planet for far less than what you would pay a US-based engineer, forget about whatever is going on in SF/SV.

A lot of people would like to stick their fingers in their ears and say "nah nah nah" rather than realize what is going on, but I deal with it daily.

So in 20012, when Skype was huge, why didn't this take over? It's not like it didn't happen, people have been poaching rockstars across the globe forever.

But are you really saying that it's only in 2020 that people put effort into outsourcing to cheaper foreign talent?

Or that the technology of remote work is now what makes it possible? I dispute that as well, good remote collaboration has been happening in open source for forever. People who can make it work make it work. It's not the issue and never has been.

> And if they can do their jobs remotely, why can't an equally skilled engineer in a country with a cost of living 1/10th of the "rich countries" do the same?

I'm an American expat and one of the things that I quickly discovered when I left and started traveling is that skilled engineers (and designers, etc.) in countries with significantly lower costs end up figuring out how much they're worth to employers/clients in richer countries. When they do and they have enough of a track record to prove their worth, their rates go up.

So if you think you're going to take your freelance developer in the US who charges $150/hour and replace him with an equally skilled freelance web developer in, say, Brazil for $15/hour, good luck. Any such developer in the Brazil will eventually discover that he's able to command much more. Except in a few rare instances it won't be $150/hour, but when you factor in time zones, cultural differences and language, there is far less of a difference in cost than you'd think.

Anecdotally, I have a few friends that run companies in the US that have expanded their hiring to consider remote candidates outside of the US and Canada and they still struggle to find suitable candidates even though the rates they're offering are based on qualifications, not location. In other words, they're willing to pay $100+/hour to the right people no matter where they live. Good people are in demand everywhere, and they know it.

I’ve observed this as well, good workers are generally smart people and will figure out their worth.

I think people underestimate the demand for talent and think that globally we can fill that hole. We can’t, yet. Humans don’t scale well enough and eventually automation will be the real problem. (But I also think that is further away than currently advertised, but different topic.)

“Everyone remote” works right now because everyone has pre-existing relationships. Double your team with everyone having never met in person and I guarantee the cracks will start to show and the culture will suffer.

I’m dealing with a company that decided to try outsourcing for a second time starting just before covid hit and it’s just as miserable as it was the last time they tried in 2009. “But video conferencing” doesn’t bridge cultural friction and timezones.

But all big companies knew already that they can offshore, and in fact they have been doing it for decades. Intel and Microsoft were offshoring already in the 90s and perhaps even earlier. The only real "news" here is that you can have high functioning fully remote software teams. But the phenomena of offshoring has been happening for a long long time.

Just in case anyone misreads my point, I want to emphasize I've worked (and continue to work with) brilliant, great, Indian and Chinese programmers, both immigrants and remote.

It's just that good people aren't cheap, even remote ones. And they're hard to find.

Like others have said, this story has been repeated numerous times in some variation in the past and has never panned out.

I think the reason is that many people conflate "remote" with "asynchronous". Having a company go fully remote is one thing, having a company move to a culture of asynchronous work is something completely different.

Some tech companies will be able to do this, but the problems really arise for companies that have to keep "business hours" here in the US. Take a major chain store, a healthcare company, a <insert traditional buisness> software provider.

These businesses have to balance and on-shore workforce with an off-shore workforce. There will be people that work on the ground, and they will obviously have to be on-shore, so will upper management most likely. What about the other layers in the organization. From a high level it sounds simple but when you dive down into which teams support which teams and report to which managers and yada yada yada, where you draw the line all of a sudden becomes much harder and fuzzier.

Most companies that will do what you are talking about have already done so. The reason the water hasn't leveled off more to other parts of the world like you are saying is either due to existing business constraints or risk aversion to possible constraints an offshore team may impose.

Asynchronous is the real difficult part. A lot of companies already have offices in locations with good engineering talents and they usually work as a independent unit. It’s just really hard to coordinate a project when you have 0-1h of possible overlap time for meetings

I think time zones and tax laws may slow this a little. I find it a real pain to work with people whose time zones are 10 hours away from the company timezone. When things need to get done quickly or a problem can only be resolved by talking directly somebody has to work late in the evening or night. I guess the companies don't care but it's very hard for the workers in the long term.

In my company it's also very difficult to hire a full time employee in another country due to all kinds of regulations and the overhead they entail.

My prediction is that in the long run a lot of companies will still prefer people who are close. Managing remote people effectively is very difficult. A lot of managers will fail doing so. And a lot of people are also not cut out for remote work and need interaction at the office.

I remember when offshoring became popular in the 90s it looked all work would go to India but this didn't happen either.

This time zone difference can also be an asset if your business is 24/7.

"When things need to get done quickly or a problem can only be resolved by talking directly"... and that problem occurs at night in my timezone, a team mate who's awake can deal with it with a rested head and no burnout in her or his day.

Admittedly, there are many companies who don't need 24x7 business continuity and are perfectly content with 10x5. For them, this is unnecessary complexity.

> When things need to get done quickly or a problem can only be resolved by talking directly somebody has to work late in the evening or night.

On the other side of this, I feel like I'm seeing I'm seeing "leverage time zone differences to accelerate the development process" in hardware engineering job postings with increasing frequency. I can definitely see where there's an efficiency gain for heavily sequential tasks like PCB design bring-up to have teams working in shifts without anybody losing brain power by working outside of normal hours.

I work at a very small remote-only (purely as a result of COVID) company in the United States. We only hire people who live in our state because the burden of complying with tax and labor laws in other states just doesn’t interest us right now.

As long as we can find good enough people in our state, it’s just not worth the hassle to add more HR challenges than we have to.

It depends.

The rich countries still prefer to hire in rich countries, because of:

* similar timezone/working hours

* similar work culture

* less language barriers

* rich countries still got better skilled workers

* less legislative overhead with employments, payments, firing

* if you get a really good person in third world, he will in the end cost similarly as good person in first world

> if you get a really good person in third world, he will in the end cost similarly as good person in first world

Inevitably. Because a person like that will very quickly move to the first world.

Exactly. Companies will fall over themselves to sponsor a visa. And he will jump at the chance to take it.

Maybe not in 100 years, but right now that's how it is.

Exactly. Poor countries have huge problems other than low salaries. Corruption, crime, lack of freedoms, bad infrastructure, poor investment options, etc. As much as many Americans like to think their country sucks, it’s a literal dream land for a large percentage of the world population.

Yep. We used to hire remotely in Nigeria, and that was almost always the case. The ones that we wanted to keep always got to richer countries and multiplied their prices.

yeah, no. Salaries are going to rise all over the world, especially if you talk about salaries. Is it true that a junior dev can have $240k/y in US for example? screw decades of my experience, imma be a junior dev :D

You also have to take into account that working for US company is not that desirable because of the employer culture, for example. Some of us like worker protection laws, for example, or government-mandated guaranteed vacation time or double pay for overtime or some weeks off when you have a newborn on your hands. Or be informed months in advance about your lay-off and be compensated hansomely for that (if the company isn't folding).

In the US these things are under the employers' discretion, and it's considered something amazing and impossible, like ambulance rides that don't cost more than your kidney on black market.

And lose that over 1/10th of what you guys get? Hahaha, oh wow, you're insane. If I have no guarantees, I want to be compensated accordingly! So don't get your knickers in a knot and perpetuate the "omg remote is killing workers" meme. Remote is better for everyone.

Oh and by the way, you know what protects you from %worker apocalypse reason%? UNIONS. There's a reason the bald fuck's afraid of them.

Jesus.

> yeah, no. Salaries are going to rise all over the world. Jesus.

That's not how global economics works.

That's exactly how global economics work, albeit not instantly.

I kind of agree, especially with regards to smaller companies who maybe only have one office and struggle to hire locally. being able to recruit across the whole US, let alone the whole world, is a major game changer for them.

on the other hand, it's interesting to take note of what the big tech companies are doing. for the most part, they seem to have developed an increase tolerance for WFH, but continue to invest heavily in building new offices. not sure what that says long term.

even pre-COVID, big tech companies had offices outside the US. if you could already find enough engineers worth hiring to set up an office in brazil, how much does full remote change things? either way, talent is pretty densely clustered in the biggest cities to begin with.

Ok so we’re back to offshoring as a silver bullet. Consider me extremely skeptical having lived through the last offshoring scare. I do think the global best engineers are about to get a big raise though.

Yeah, that's what I am seeing. The talk feels just like it did back then.

> I do think the global best engineers are about to get a big raise though.

It really does feel like there is a gigantic competency bubble that is about to pop.

The amount of people who are willing to learn the hard systems and businesses is dwindling by the day. You think its difficult to find airline pilots and truckers? Try to find a developer with both the domain knowledge and technical skills to fix a custom piece of code in a community bank's core system that was written in 1994. Oh, and we need it fixed before close of business or our fedwire files are going to be totally fucked...

The amount of money they will have to offer to capture the appropriate talent to keep their businesses running is going to become astronomical. The executives sometimes try to take a quick path out of this hell and usually wind up with 1 additional reason they have to stay. The most common mistake is attempting a full vertical swap-out, followed by paying some firm to explain that your shit sucks by way of installing some middleware in your infrastructure and telling you things you already know.

I mean, isn’t that what’s happening in general? The community banks are just switching to service providers and ditching the 1994 systems.

It could have been done before COVID so it would’ve already been done. Business people aren’t dumb and if they could have offshores development, they would have (and they also have been doing this for years anyway).

So why would they hire workers in their own country? People in this thread already have said it. Time zones, cultural business norms and understanding, native communication ability, tax and legal issues regarding employment (already annoying enough to hire employees in other states in the US for example), ability to connect with clients in the same locale, etc.

Now I’ll give you that this MIGHT shift things to a degree. I don’t think it’ll be the race to the bottom you and others are saying.

Well said. It’s tiring hearing this cliché every year again almost as “Now this is really the year of Linux Desktop”.

> The gold rush days may be over.

Maybe in the "rich world", but not globally :-) I've been hearing lots and lots of stories of growing salaries across places that were historically underpaid (Brazil, Portugal, Berlin, etc) - maybe we'll have a thousand gold rushes, as the water level rises to meet the "rich world" levels!

True. 2 years ago $5000/month was super rare, now it's the lowest bound for a senior role. Still nothing compared to the "rich world" but not complaining at all :)

I believe many are missing the fact that for us not in the SV-Bubble earning 30.000$/month, sure we would be happy getting the same paycheck but on the other side our wages are also rising and we are often the top-earners for senior roles in the respective country.

"Salaries are going to drop in the "rich world", and it's not just because people are now fleeing places like SF/SV to lower cost of living areas."

People have been saying this since the 1990's

And they were right. Mid-income people in the rich world were the losers of globalization. There are fewer jobs now where you can buy a house and support a family by working 40 hours/week. Especially for those with no specialized skills.

The same may hit some highly-paid professionals in the future. If tech keeps making things easier while the rest of the world grows wealthier and more competitive, they may find that their skills are no longer in demand. The job is not as demanding as it used to be, and there are more people in the market capable of doing it just as well.

Those at the top are safe, but the top is slowly getting narrower.

> Those at the top are safe, but the top is slowly getting narrower.

This has been happening for decades. It is an inherent property of technology AIG automation driving down marginal costs and increasing yields, all benefiting owners of capital or those who have the ability to help automate.

This doesn't seem to be the case in Australia. The lack of migrant workers coming into the country has made it incredibly difficult to recruit skilled employees in 'office roles' and the market is insane for pretty much every industry. This sure doesn't reflect companies having an appetite for global employees.

I've spoken to a lot of recruiters over the last year and they're primarily indicating that a hybrid 2 days in the office model is the preference.

Integrating new staff is hard at the best of times, let alone half fully-remote and half hybrid.

> We are also beginning to compete globally, far more than ever before with the ease of remote work. Qualified engineers can be found for 1/10th of the price with "near shore" companies in the "rich world".

Sounds familiar... I think you still get what you pay for.

There are certainly a lot of products where it doesn't matter at all, but in other areas you really need to be careful with what you send to the contractor and what you do in-house.

As someone that has worked remotely for the last 10 years I hate to break it to you but skill levels just aren't the same. The reason I moved from Australia to San Francisco was because there were no companies in Australia that could reasonably stretch my skillset anymore (that I wanted to work at atleast, there was local Google office and Atlassian).

I moved back when I reached a point where my skills were good enough that I could secure a job remotely due to social proof/references.

The thing people are missing here is that not everyone that is living everywhere in the world is equally good and those that are 10x as good get paid between 4-5x as much (it should be more but the world is inefficient, overpays for poor quality, underpays for high quality in many cases).

I'm not worried that increasing remote hiring will affect my compensation.

I have worked with remote developers from Poland, Romania, and Portugal, each making approx $20-50/hr, producing code of far higher quality than stuff I’ve seen from $500k/year software engineers here.

Also, their English was almost indecipherable from a native speaker.

To be fair, 50$/hr is considered in those countries the absolute top-tier pay of almost any profession. You don’t wanna know how much a physician earns in poland or romania…

I get the feeling as well. Mid and high tier Eastern Europeans or even Portugal are entirely different from cheapest Indians. And they likely aren't even going to try to sell those. Or if they sell it is same as USA based company. With still cheaper prices.

I normally wouldn’t nitpick wording, but did you mean “indistinguishable” in your last sentence, which means nearly the opposite in context?

Yes I did thank you! I guess my own English isn't so great as a native speaker!

You may be right or you may be wrong, and it will depend on supply and demand as it always has. You are implying that globalization will suddenly bring top notch talent into the reach of American software companies, but hasn't that always been the case thanks to outsourcing and H1-B visas? I understand your fear as a fellow older software engineer, but I do not share your pessimism. I am much, much more afraid of technologies which will make programmers 50% more efficient than I am of foreigners depressing my wages. If you are at the lower end of the skills distribution then sure, I can understand your worry. Talented engineers don't have much to fear, however.

Probably not.

Communication is still a gigantic issue to overcome. So is managing teams and availability during the work day.

If anything, it might push more really smart people to start their own companies instead of working for someone else to achieve a lesser level of prosperity.

> Communication is still a gigantic issue to overcome. So is managing teams and availability during the work day.

Communication is huge but I can assure you I've worked with teams on the opposite side of the globe asynchronously without issue. The concept of "workday" can be tossed aside if we are thinking 9-5 M-F.

Global teams can adjust schedules and work effectively. I know because I've managed teams like this in very complex software projects and it has worked.

100% agree. Before my current job I worked with tons of remote teams and it was great. Even now, the majority of my interactions are with people on the west coast or offshore teams in India. My boss is in the mid west and his boss is in the south east. And so far we’re doing great.

I don’t see it. Cultural barriers and lost in translations are huge, I’m surprised anyone who’s worked with foreign teams doesn’t think so. It’s not cheap or easy to collaborate with people you have a hard time communicating with.

> The money may start flowing from the "rich world" to the "poor world" soon, no need for H1B visas or anything else. The gold rush days may be over.

You seem to believe there are no political dynamics to this situation. On a small scale, sure. On a large scale I think you’ll find the political stability that executives in the US have come to rely on will quickly disappear. The 2016 elections were already a reflection of the general populace growing tired of offshoring jobs. When that hits the middle and upper middle class as well, shit will hit the fan globally.

It's more than that. It's one thing to offshore some shoe factory to China while keeping most of the quality jobs and R&D at home. It's another story completely if 70% of U.S tech will be off shored; the knowledge escapes, the patents, sometimes IP can be stolen etc etc. Slowly but surely the competitive edge the U.S has will disappear.I'm pretty sure there will be political objection to it and laws to make it less appealing to offshore if that is the case.

I doubt it (even though I run a dev shop w/ Vietnam based engineers). US companies will continue hiring US based engineers. And when Covid is over people will go to the office again.

I think some people will work from home permanently. But yeah, a lot of people will go back. Not 100%. Maybe 70%.

Same for tech giants. No need to rent an office to compete anymore. Global small teams can form overnight, grow and shrink dynamically. Entrepreneurs paradise.

"Global small teams can form overnight, grow and shrink dynamically. "

This is freakishly hard to manage effectively. Sounds good in theory but most will fail trying.

But for big tech companies at least I don't think money is really a significant concern. It's probably better for them to pay 10x for an engineer if that engineer has twice the chance of being a very strong performer than the one they could hire for 1x.

I can’t count the times how often i’ve heard this story in some variation over the decades. It never happened. You can replace Covid with any other catastrophic event, the story always read almost the same including the remote worker cliche.

This could be made into a problem for corporations too.

Stop going to work.

Switch to open source projects.

Let social media crash.

K8s clusters with Kilo hosted on laptops, desktops.

We have the tools to blackout the web and bring a whole huge part of the economy down.

Zuckerberg could be Pauperberg if the internet gathered round chanting “this is the new way”.

I mean you know DC has no clue how anything works beyond quid pro quo.

Yes, people who don't see this coming are in for a potentially rude awakening.

The US tech worker is about to get NAFTA'd.

What is getting NAFTA'd?

that is true but there is regulation that has been set to protect that type of offshoring. realistically though, we will get to a point of one of the goals of capitalism, and that is equilibrium. whatever that looks like, i am an optimistic, (some would view it as pessimistic), but work or work as which we know it will cease to be relevant in a post human production society. nearly 8 billion people connected is new, i know we are all not connected yet, but to assume or pretend that will never happen is only operating at half consciousness and the experience it has to offer. i believe in work, it will exist for awhile but our interpretation of work will at some point change.

What is a “near shore” company?

For US, it's south America. Same time zone, cheaper labor costs.

Specifically Chile or Peru, judging from where some of my friends in the industry are living now.

Interesting. I've been thinking about spending some time in Chile -- what is the English situation in Chile or Peru?

Younger people speak English but it depends what you want to do. People are friendly so they will normally try to help you out anyways. Let me know if you need any advice: guillermog|at|netnotion|dot|com

I'd be curious to know as well, but I'm guessing he means Europe. I used to work with other Data Scientists based in Europe and was always shocked to learn how little they got paid, usually less than 50% of american counterparts. And for work like DS where objectives are more abstract and harder to specify, Europeans have enough cultural and literal fluency to be able to fully replace someone from the US. This is in comparison to the situation as I understand it for India-based pure software development, where communication/cultural barriers requires tighter management to use the talent effectively (this is going off what I've heard, I have no personal experience here. so feel free to correct me if my understanding isn't accurate).

So previously being able to utilize offshore talent was basically a skill unto itself. Now you did two interviews with similarly skills candidates and one wants 50% less pay, they just have a british accent.

> I'd be curious to know as well, but I'm guessing he means Europe.

Other commenters have addressed this, but the term is normally used for teams within +/- the same timezone but at far lower rates for (hopefully) good engineering quality.

So if you are US EST, there are "near shore" companies in the US that will coordinate you with South American teams.

They generally have a PM in the US and developers outside.

Near-shoring usually refers to someone on the same timezone or nearby physically, like South America or Mexico for the US, or Eastern Europe for Western Europe.

In terms of European talent being paid less, yes I agree they are, but there are hidden costs in terms of taxes and compliance that means that companies would rather go to countries which promise an order of magnitude cheaper resources rather than just 50% off.

It’s corporate language for hiring in a similar timezone but less expensive country. Instead of hiring in the U.S. you put people in Mexico or South America.

Another term is “best shoring”, which is code for wherever you can find talent capable of doing the job for the least amount.

"Near shore" == "Canada"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com