Tech Industry Warns That More Remote-Work Jobs Are Headed Out of U.S.
wsj.com
wsj.com
Been there, done that. If it could have been outsourced it would have already been outsourced. Do you really think they were sitting around saying,”I know they cost more but I’m too busy playing golf to bother” and they’re only getting around to it now?
Feel very strongly that the tech work from home movement is shining a light on something they don’t want a light shined on. They should be vehemently making cases that teams need to be in offices together and that “face to face is best” to keep their jobs in their citadel.
There is a big difference between questions being answered right away and questions being answered overnight that one still has to consider for outsourcing.
The remote-or-bust crowd always seems to assume salaries would stay the same. Most, not all, but most software development jobs don't require specialty skills. If the job can truly be done anywhere, why would we assume the answer will be to pay SF salaries all around the world?
The must-be-in-office crowd tends to ignore that most of the time remote work mostly is fine. Yes, everyone has an anecdote of this going horribly wrong. But they ignore that minimizing costs as first priority is not going to yield optimal results. And a lot of those horror stories involve bottom rate outsourcing operations.
There exists a world in which outsourcing/remote covers most needs but pays less than we're used to in the US software industry. It's neither the penny on the dollar model of traditional outsourcing nor junior devs making 500K TC in theo there extreme.
Poor communication a multiplying factor for all the other problems.
> "The outsourcing of the 1990s failed because of poor communication; there's no replacement for regular face-to-face meetings" reply
I was specifically talking about the progression of things like video/audio/text chat (think Zoom/Slack) but I get that I wasn't clear. I fixated on "there's no replacement for regular face-to-face meetings" which isn't true, and that alone wasn't the reason outsourcing failed.
Language barriers, cultural barriers, timezones, and the list goes on of things I group under "poor communication". These should not be scoffed at or downplayed.
Every experience I've had with "let's save money by using this outsourcing firm" has been terrible and a complete failure, even if it took the execs years before they would admit it and reverse course. Sure, for a few years you can coast on what the developers you laid off/fired built but cracks will start to show and you can't just slot in developers like RAM sticks. It takes time to fully understand any system but execs are so shortsighted and oblivious to gross hacks being done to get something to work. It only takes a few years of outsourced code management before it turns into a house of cards. Hell, most software already is somewhat of a house of cards, if you bring in people that do not care about anything but billable hours they aren't even going to maintain the current mess, they will do the easy thing every time until your software is completely unmanageable.
This actually happens quite a lot in my West-European country. Companies that aren't too picky about language knowledge can get cheap(er) Eastern European developers to do a lot of work. It works out well for the company. I'm one of the last expensive local developers, so I work with them quite often.
These developers are well-educated and very capable. They are in the same or an adjacent timezone, so there's no issue there. They have little to no knowledge of my local language, but that's not a big issue for us because we do most of our work in English anyway. There is no daily/weekly face to face interaction of course, but with WFH that doesn't happen with local developers either. There are just no insurmountable problems with nearshoring anymore. And since you can easily save 30-50% on a developer's salary by doing so...
That being said, I'm not worried about outsourcing. I believe I bring enough value to the table to withstand those pressures, even if eventually I have to take a wage hit to compete.
You're missing the point here.
They're not going to be hiring from 'body shops' they're just going to be hiring people 'remote' - just like you.
Why do you think that you in 'Small Town Ohio' are going to get hired over the guy in France at 80 cents on the dollar, or Poland 60 cents on the dollar, when they have decent language skills.
You're going to find out quickly that 'core education' in a lot of countries is as high, if not higher than US.
Brazil has iffy educational standards but their upper 1/3 get a good education, and India the ratio is worse but population higher.
The number of good devs. from China is blowing up.
US is 5% of the world's population, and educational standards vary.
It's a big world and Google etc. have no 'loyalty' to America.
Shithole country that can't do shit, with a capitalist upper-class that's rich enough to insulate themselves from the shithole aspects. It's the libertarian utopia we've all dreamed about.
It will last until the foreign societies cease to recognize the American upper-class's paper ownership interests.
https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w...
However, tech salaries in the US are much higher than tech salaries in Europe even after adjusting for cost-of-living. That is what leads to resentment: a developer in London making a London salary would not be able to afford the same things as a developer in New York making a New York salary.
They're going to be 'employees'.
Now - they will be paid less - yes (maybe that's what you meant?)
But that's a function of supply and demand.
They will absolutely accept 'less' because it's where they sit on the supply/demand curve.
I'm not holding my breath over the situation changing in the near future, but 2 years of remote work do make people reconsider things.
Companies are not 'discriminating' against people in other countries due to 'lack of legal protection'. They are just hiring people in other countries, and paying them what they are worth.
That's it.
It's 100% supply and demand.
There are good and bad developers everywhere, and cost of living and opportunities are different everywhere.
Supply and Demand will work itself out.
It only needs to be good enough to keep the lights on, and the occasional escalation to sort out any big issue is seen as business as usual.
This is the key point, software is a creative field - and you ultimately aren't going to get more than maintenance/routine upgrades from an outsourced firm. They simply don't care enough to want to go beyond their contract. You aren't going to be able to get top-tier talent to work in your timezone if that means working a graveyard shift.
Leverage a series of short term wins/long term failures to rocket yourself up to the top.
WSJ and NYT specifically have been running a steady stream of articles about the need, benefits, and inevitability of returning office workers to full time in person work.
You don't need a conspiracy explanation to see the trend in these publications, and they've obviously been working this from multiple angles. There's no reason to dismiss this article as part of that pressure just because it can also accomplish another goal.
It already has been outsourced and then re-insourced as soon as the quality was evident.
And you don't hear about it because no company wants to advertise eating crow. I once worked for a place that made a huge deal about "$comapnyName China" office opening. A few weeks later I was asked to review a project they did, 150+ hours logged, didn't follow any of our style guides, didn't work, showed a complete lack of understanding of the framework we were using. I redid the entire project in 8 hours. The "China branch" didn't last long after that, but it also was never mentioned again, they swept it under the rug and pretended it never existed.
I'm sure some morons will outsource their development, I'll find the smarter companies and work for them until the "who cares, it saves money" group is ousted or comes to their senses (unlikely).
This is not 'offshore body shop' movement.
It's the 'hire from anywhere movement' because 'remote working' ... and anyone doubting this is in for hard awakening.
The underlying assumption that US devs are somehow 'better' is absurdly wrong.
US businesses are often better, for a variety or reasons, pushing up the salaries of those who can ultimately work 'in the office' (by passport or whatever) - but that's changing due to 'remote work'.
It's a big, real, secular, probably transformation change.
It's probably for the better actually - the only problem I have with it is the the accumulation of capital by shareholders who have more power.
Who ever said that? 99% of US devs are Indian devs anyway - in 30 years of developing software I've probably only ever worked with a few dozen US natives. Devs in the same time zone, with at least a passing knowledge of US culture, on the other hand...
You're in for a rude awakening.
It wasn't outsourced before because:
1) standard was in-office and
2) no mass movement to validate it
3) 'outsourced overseas' often meant 'poor country'.
We are only expanding overseas right now because the quality is good and the price is much better. At least for what we are doing.
The Valley is not going away, neither are high salaries, though I do wonder what it means for 'home talent at the high range'.
Indeed. I've been WFH/remote my entire career and have long worked with folks throughout the world. I was considered an outlier for almost all of it.
In the past 12mo this has tectonically shifted. Midsize companies I'm close to who would never have dreamed of "outsourcing" are now instituting US hiring freezes after seeing how well hiring a few developers out of eastern europe went. In many cases the talent is simply better without any cost benefit calculation needed.
Yes, the top-tier rockstar talent (anyone posting on HN is clearly in that club of course) has nothing to worry about. The everyman programmer working on yet another line of business app or CRUD interface is in for an incredibly brutal market over the next decade or two.
Anyone that dismisses this as "outsourcing" is not paying attention. There is little difference working with someone in Toledo Spain vs. Toledo Ohio other than timezone.
Timezone is pretty much the sole remaining argument. However, if you are now 100% remote WFH friendly - why would timezones matter that much? All documentation and process is fully online and asynchronous already so a few hours of overlap a day is more than sufficient for well-run teams on most projects.
This time is indeed different. Copying my answer from elsewhere in this thread: "now with fully remote, it is easy to replace a USA team member with a Mexican or Canadian or Brazilian and do it one by one. boil the frog slowly. and very soon, majority of your team will be outside USA. I am still watching it happen at my current shop. Majority of new hires and new headcount is from other countries."
Many don't realize how bad its gotten lately on the immigration front. Last year, USCIS wasted 160K green cards, this year they are on track to waste 200K green cards, simply because they are too slow to process paperwork.
Companies are probably tired of all this uncertainty and legal overhead so they now offer relocation to their offices outside US if you have visa problems and to have easier access to talent. Remote work has accelerated this since teams are now learning to be geographically distributed.
Companies are now finding it easier to just let their top talent work from their home country, pay them way more than local rates (helps retention) and setup payroll than deal with US visas and immigration.
It's only a few years ordeal to get a green card if you're not Indian, otherwise it's a multi-decade wait. So many are starting to take the offer and move out once they've earned a decent amount.
Sure, FAANG companies may be too rich to care, but they're also probably a small fraction of US tech employment.
Financially, money paid to immigrants stays in the economy of the country they've immigrated to. (Minus money sent back to family in their country of origin, but that will necessarily be much less than 100%.)
Socially, immigrants become part of the community & society. Given that they tend to be skilled, motivated, and adaptable (they need to communicate with multiple cultures, for one!), this tends to be a good deal for the receiving country.
It's like trade, it always seems to end up enriching trading partners as compared to those that refuse to trade at all. And like trade, it requires some degree of control and regulation to not impoverish portions of the population while enriching others—both trade and immigration can be gamed. Nothing's going to have a positive impact on everyone across the board, but it's not like what people seem to be fearing when they focus only on the direct job impact on the so-called "native" population.
Before, companies needed to find them, then convince them to relocate and deal with the immigration hassles associated with relocation. This was tedious and companies hire companies to do this. If these people are not required to relocate, the size of the hiring pool increases to include multi-professional families or those with strong geographic preferences.
I guess this can be rephrased to: if programmers are a commodity, work will flow to the lowest cost area possible. If it’s anti-commodity/bespoke work, one must gather the craftspeople one needs. And these people know they’re valuable which makes the negotiation more even.
Face to face and remote work within the companies legal boundaries is the safer choice. Remote work with no legal leverage is scary when you think about handing over company assets.
But then again, many large companies have managers looking to climb the ladder so they outsource at all costs to make the budget look better- it’s a risky gamble and sometimes it just works. Most times this ends with years of waste in other areas of the company.
Trust issues will limit the adoption of remote work.
This works in the short term, in the same way you could probably lay off 90% of your developers and keep thinks chugging along for a couple years (albeit with next to zero new development). These things take time to fully poison the host but the exec climbing the ladder doesn't care. They get the praise for cutting costs, they aren't responsible for the code/product, and they will jet off to some new company to ruin things before the shit hits the fan.
It's been my experience that companies are not willing to make these choices. I'm not saying "Bob had a bad week, let's fire him" or "Tom is going through some personal stuff and his work has slacked, let him go" but rather repeated failures with attempts to rectify them with the employee that aren't fixed. The bar to let someone go is absurdly high at some places and kills motivation for people who are doing the work "Well, John isn't doing any work and the company don't seem to care, I guess I'll stop caring as well and just coast".
At my last job I had a coworker who refused to pull their own weight. We had the same title and I (and others on the team) were producing 3x+ what they were (when this team member even did anything, 3*0 = 0). Repeated complaints to our manager fell on deaf ears even with irrefutable evidence of this team member doing practically nothing. Some weeks they would move a ticket between statuses and that was all they did, no comments, no commits, no PRs, no reviews, no testing, nothing. Some weeks there was literally 0 activity by them on any of the tools we used and they were always distracted/distant in meetings, hardly contributing at all. That wasn't the only reason I left that company but it was one of them.
Honestly, I don't think corporate decision-makers really care about those metrics.
> It’s not even clear it costs less when you factor in the decline in quality, delays, and extra work needed by everyone else to monitor the outsourced work. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
So it's six of one, half a dozen of the other then? That's not a very persuasive argument against outsourcing.
How do you read that as six one way, half a dozen the other? Outsourcing often leads to lower quality, delays (which has business opportunity costs) and extra expense to monitor and review the work. Instead of being faster, cheaper, better outsourcing is slower, more expensive, and worse. Why would anybody choose that?
>> So it's six of one, half a dozen of the other then? That's not a very persuasive argument against outsourcing.
> How do you read that as six one way, half a dozen the other?
If the costs aren't significantly higher than in-sourced work in ways quantifiable in dollars, then I don't think it's going to matter much to business leaders.
In other words, they just don't plain care about the things we care about. If the thing gets done crappily and painfully, it's still done, and that's fine with them.
Also, I don't think businesses are logical or rigorous places. IMHO, it's par for the course to "save" money by shifting costs into more difficult to quantify areas. For instance: cut desktop support, and the costs move into the groups being supported, so long as the complaints aren't loud enough to reach up through many layers of management, you have yourself a "win".
The companies that embrace remote first or even hybrid scenarios will be the winner in the long run. Happier employees = better outcomes.
If my job could be outsourced, it would’ve been ten years ago when I first joined the workforce as a remote employee.
The difference this time is that we are heading for a recession. Company leadership doesn't want to take the risk of outsourcing while times are good and profits are doubling each year. But when the stock price is in freefall and they are under pressure to cut costs, then the risk/reward of outsourcing looks more attractive.
We haven't had a recession since '08, and the landscape is very different now. Remote work tech was in its infancy back then - Zoom, Slack, Google Drive weren't even created yet. Plus India and China (and others) have developed further and starting pumping out 100s of thousands of CS grads each year that didn't exist in '08.
I think we're about to see a big wave of outsourcing over the next few years. And if companies are smart about it (e.g. do it slowly to allow knowledge transfer and compete for top talent, not bottom of the barrel) then it will be successful.
>I think we're about to see a big wave of outsourcing over the next few years.
Yes, but if companies are gonna outsource, they are gonna outsource whether their employees work at the office or work remote. It's purely a financial decision, not a "if you don't come to the office, we are going to outsource you," decision. Executives might use that ploy/threat to get people into the office, but they will still outsource regardless, if it makes sense for their company, just like they have been doing for the last 20+ years.
You still have the most challenging things to work through which are general people/team problems:
- Language barriers
- Timezones
- Craftsmanship/Quality
- Leadership involvement
- etc
I've read over 300 books in the last few years on companies/leadership topics and I would really challenge that this time will be any different regardless of the economic conditions.
The tech industry is still at a deficit for talent. Companies are still hiring faster than ever and the supply is limited between them all and future grads/bootcamps/apprentice programs. India and China have a thriving tech education system and the growth definitely is showing, but most of these companies hiring on full blast already have huge developments for these regions and will continue to expand like US.
While more business opportunities may land in these major regions, the article suggests worker shortages, limited immigration, etc as a means to "offshore" current or future work from the US. I think both the US and these major regions will continue to grow at unprecedented paces. Perhaps slower during a recession, but most of these big companies are growing faster than ever, not showing signs of slowing down too much.
The bottom line is canada is quickly becoming a place to import workers from cheaper countries to keep pay low while any Canadians who have the education and experience flee to the USA for higher wages.
I've seen it in my lifetime with non computer engineering disciplines. A structural engineer making 70k because it's easy to import them from other countries and it drives wages down. The last PEO survey I saw said something like 2/3rd of Canadian engineering grads are not finding work in their industry of choice at all.
My colleague in India gets paid a fraction of what I make, but he is able to afford a bigger house and more luxuries. The cost of living in the Western word is out of control.
If your company was willing to pay a US immigration cost to get somebody in, and can now shave 10%+ off salary to get the same awesome brains from another country AND get 24/7 effort on the problem... what's not to love?
capitalism means making profits
making profits means lowering costs
outsourcing is a way to lower costs
> eh... if the only way for you to increase profits is to cut costs you have a problem that will accelerate after you have nothing more to cut.
You're nitpicking, the GP's post can be easily repaired by reading that as "lowering costs means making more profits."
Businesses like to turn all the dials to increase their profits.
So at least on our side of the ocean it's pretty good! I just hope there's no negative impact for Americans and we can all enjoy this change.
However, as more and more companies adopt regional cost-of-living adjustments for salaries, domestic "outsourcing" (i.e. preferential hiring of employees in lower CoL areas) is likely to increase. Assuming developers in Ohio are just as skilled as Bay Area developers and a two hour timezone difference is easily surmountable, why would Silicon Valley companies not preferentially hire Ohioans if they can pay them 2/3rds as much as Bay Area employees? A $200k salary in lower CoL parts of the country goes much further than a $300k salary in the Bay.
[*] That said, even in high CoL parts of Western Europe, tech salaries are far lower than salaries in high CoL parts of the US (e.g. developers in London make on average ~70% of NYC salaries [0,1]). For certain tech companies on the East Coast, a 6 hour timezone difference might be acceptable for such a dramatic reduction in labor costs. Imagine how much lower salaries are in lower CoL parts of Western Europe.
[0] https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/London/ (median compensation: $133k)
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/New-York-C... (median compensation: $188k)
They might scare the new grads with that sort of talk, but we've seen what happens when you outsource jobs with the sole aim of saving money.
Those of us old enough to remember those times, also have a special rate for helping to clean up projects which started that way. It's usually somewhere in the 200-500% range.
The most FAQ is "hey we tried it in 2000's with outsourcing and nothing happened. why worry now?"
The answer is "now with fully remote, it is easy to replace a USA team member with a Mexican or Canadian or Brazilian and do it one by one. boil the frog slowly. and very soon, majority of your team will be outside USA".
I am still watching it happen at my current shop. Majority of new hires and new headcount is from other countries.
Some things never change
Other people around the world have been getting CS degrees too. Americans think everyone in Africa is starving...everyone in Mexico is in a drug cartel...and yet, I know folks who are extremely happy with the tech talent in both regions.
These other people tend to work for less than US tech workers
So, why is anyone surprised?
It never ceases to amaze me how completely unsympathetic people are towards other people just for wanting different things.
> It never ceases to amaze me how completely unsympathetic people are towards other people just for wanting different things.
Some of it is whining, though. Whining isn't a preference, it's an attitude and style of expressing that preference.