Tell HN: Current WFH trend (part 2) | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Current WFH trend (part 2)

17 pointsRestlessMind15 comments

I wanted to follow up on my previous post - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27696235

My latest observation at my current company which is "fully-remote": 75% of the new headcount is out of US. Total compensation offered in foreign countries is much cheaper (35-60% lower depending on Canada vs EU vs LatAm vs Asia) than even the lowest pay-tier US regions. Bulk of the gains are flowing to the company's revenue bottomline, and thus to the biggest shareholders (Capital class). A small fraction of those gains is coming to the rank-and-file's pocket via the increased value of their meagre RSUs.

To address a big point raised in the previous thread about outsourcing, when we have been trying that since 2000's and why is it a big deal now - with previous rounds of outsourcing, entire project was shipped to a different country. There were neither any "remote-first" culture nor any tooling to support collaboration. Integrating an entire team from an entirely different culture was very hard. Compared to that, today we are onboarding one foreign employee at a time and onboarding someone from Mexico City is as easy as onboarding someone from Miami. Because it happens one team-member at a time with an enhanced level of support, current WFH trend is very different from the 2000's outsourcing one. I have first-hand experience with both of those trends.

Finally, another recurring theme in the previous thread was spreading out the privilege from SV to other corners of the world. My fear, backed by hard data I am observing, is that this will greatly benefit the Capital class in the US along with the middle class in the developing world. But it will be devastating to the middle class in the US.

This trend will benefit big companies and harm small local companies.

Hiring abroad is not as easy as you might think, usually you need to establish legal presence in the other country and other requirements. And who has resources to do that? Bingo, big companies. Small local companies will be left unable to compete, as they will be forced to hire locally, at higher expense.

Cat’s already out of the bag. Collectively demanding to work in an office is, well, kind of silly. Maybe we should collectively demand something else.

Maybe we software engineers should get wise to the fact that, in theory, we’re as easily replaceable as a driver working for Uber. Sure, in practice, it may not be so easy to replace a Bay Area engineer with an engineer from a substantially less expensive country, but it’s doable, and perhaps that should give us reason to pause. We shouldn’t so easily enable bad actors because our compensation makes us believe that we’re fundamentally different from a factory worker. We’re not.

We should wholly expect to one day have to live in the world we created. We should expect to reap what we sow.

> replace a Bay Area engineer with an engineer from a substantially less expensive country

There’s no such thing as “hiring” someone overseas.

You have to either a) establish a legal presence in the country of the job taker or b) have them form a company and invoice you. Both come with different challenges (and advantages).

Many large U.S. companies already have a legal presence in countries all over the world because they have sales offices there.

For example, here is the list of Google offices in Asia: https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/locations/?region=asia-paci...

> We should wholly expect to one day have to live in the world we created. We should expect to reap what we sow.

Or, we can anticipate those outcomes and work to avoid the ones we don't like. A lot of the current state of the human society can be traced back to concerted effort(s) by a group of people at some point in our history.

Clickable link to Part 1 (first WFH post from this author 6 months ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27696235

To add a data point: In a U.S. company I'm familiar with, software development managers have been told to hire any future developers from overseas.

Simply put the world is getting flatter - I think what was laid out in The World is Flat [0] 17 years ago by Tom Friedman is finally coming to fruition.

It's good for the world but not necessarily affected US workers. We might see legislation to try to protect the outflow jobs in the name of nationalism / protectionism in various forms but there's no reversing the trend.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat

I'm fine destroying well-paying jobs in order to work remotely. If the office-jockeys of yesteryear weren't so dead-set on destroying blue-collar jobs and the comfort of living a lower-class lifestyle, I might feel a bit of remorse tearing down your facade of a job. But you didn't, you kept squeezing wages and making poverty into an inescapable cycle so you could enjoy a $2 burrito before tips.

Your "capital class" has been dead since the iPhone released. The moment people started spending a tangible amount of their income on digital assets, the middle class lifestyle died. Enjoy your funeral, but don't act like you're defending anything that other people care about.

I don't know who you are referring to with "you". Probably it is a similar set of people I dislike - Capital class trying to maximize returns for themselves while destroying stable communities.

> I'm fine destroying well-paying jobs in order to work remotely.

I am sorry for whatever life experiences you have had which brought you to this conclusion.

Aren't you trying to maximize returns for yourself when you take issue with companies hiring employees outside of your immediate vicinity?

As one of those remote workers, in my opinion you'd be better off campaigning against location-based pay rather than remote work.

> you'd be better off campaigning against location-based pay rather than remote work.

If there is no location-based pay and everyone across the globe has the same wages, I am afraid I will be paid far less instead of someone in the developing world being paid far more. Keep in mind that the labor pool will come from all over the world and not only from the US.

If you are a remote worker in Mexico or Pakistan, it is totally rational for you to root for that outcome. However, if you are a remote worker in the US, think again. Here are some salaries from around the world and they will be your benchmark, not SV salaries:

https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Berlin-Ger...

https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Bangalore-...

https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Singapore/

For comparison: https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/San-Franci...

Tldr we are paid well because there is a lot of demand. Thanks to the disaster that was 2000-era outsourcing, there was the mistaken belief that supply is fundamentally limited to local offices. The pandemic has revealed that this is not true, so effective supply has exploded.

I expect that the glory days of making hundreds of thousands of USD per year as a bit-laying chicken in an enterprise software farm are likely over. This is good for "remote" workers, superb for the capital class and horrible for us.

It feels to me like we are the factory workers of the 1960s and are about to go through a similar explosion.

I feel bad for the kids studying CS and information systems now and dreaming of.. basically my job today.

I mean your company is one data point, people can surely give examples of the opposite.

I don't want to be remote and I don't want to take a pay cut for remote work either. I'm strictly in the "I want to go to an office in a big city and I want to be paid well for it" camp and I wonder if those opportunities will exist in the future.

> people can surely give examples of the opposite.

Opposite of what? That fully WFH companies are not suppressing wages in the non-US countries, or that they are not hiring outside the US at all?

Well, I can add my datapoint. Even before the pandemic, my company changed from hiring in the US to hiring from India, Mexico, the UK, then the US in that order. WFH accelerated this significantly.

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