Hacker News Reader

Comment by icelancer | Hacker News Reader

>> 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.

View on HN

> 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.

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.

"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.

> 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.

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 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...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com