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Comment by r_hoods_ghost | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of HN adjacent engineers are going to have a rude shock over the next few years as there are several pressures working against them. The first is that companies that have been trading debt for growth are not sustainable in a high interest rate environment. The second is that the shift to working from home has meant that employing remote teams, be they in other areas of the states or overseas has become much more normalized. Why would you pay Bay area salaries when you can employ just as qualified people elsewhere for less?

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I completely agree with this. COVID + everyone refusing to go back to the office means nobody needs to be in a specific place anymore. I've changed my hiring strategy to cultivate talent elsewhere and pay 1/3 of what is paid in the US.

This is the common logic since outsourcing was invented decades ago. Everyone eventually gets hit with the reality that large time zone and cultural differences lead to so much overhead on project management, not getting what you actually asked for, creative ways to game the metrics, and huge rework/bug fixes, that the 2/3 you saved gets eaten up by dealing with all of that, and anything leftover doesn’t pay for the stress of it all.

It's possible the experiment fails. The gap has narrowed significantly though since everyone is remote.

A quick look at a globe can tell you there are a lot cheaper markets in the same/close timezones to the US at least. Culture is obviously more nebulous, but it seems like something the US is better at exporting than any country as well. It's why I've long cautioned people about remote work - the work might end up more remote than they'd like.

Yes, Canada, LATAM, New Zealand have compatible time zones with Pacific time.

Having worked in a multi-area/multi-time-zoned company and teams, and having tried to coordinate all these along with the political games: it is a different beast to be remote some times a week and a different beast to try to coordinate with your own team spread around the world.

P.S. Hope your strategy works, and depends on what you do. I'd say a startup that tries to innovate at ridiculous leap speeds needs proximity and an office -- and that comes from me, who is 100% against the "work from the office or else" mandates...

Good luck with that. We are now mostly a remote company but we still pay top rates for the best employees, some of whom like to come in to the office every day, some work from home 50% of the time, some come in one day a week and some work pretty much full time remote. All are in Europe (most in the UK) so we don't suffer from timezone issues or all the pitfalls of extreme offshoring that has plagued every project I've seen that has ever tried it.

I think you're going to need a lot of luck, because I doubt your approach will work.

As a software engineer a good part of my job is communication and having that communication come with an eight hour time zone shift would substantially impede the job. Yes you can hire remotely if people are working largely the same hours or hours with substantial overlap. Hiring from cheaper parts of the world across an entire ocean isn’t going to work for the same reason you can’t get hired for a day job and work a night shift.

Have you heard of the southern hemisphere? All those Brazilians, Argentinians, even Mexicans? Quite similar time zones to much of US…

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