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Comment by JasserInicide | Hacker News Reader

I'll contend that while I've been fully taken advantage of remote work (and probably want my next job to be remote too), I still fully believe it's a long term "leading lambs to the slaughter" type of plan. Companies save big on remote in so many ways. No more offices. No more weekly happy hours (just do a company retreat every 6 months). They can now depress salaries even further because they have a wider pool from which to choose. Don't need to bother with those pesky things called relationships because your boss from 500 miles away can lay off your ass without breaking a sweat.

It's short term benefits for all, but ultimately the workers will lose out.

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Maybe, but that works both ways. Employees are often reluctant to leave jobs where they have a lot of personal relationships, or if getting a new job would entail moving to a new city/state/country, even if jumping ship would entail a sizable payraise or other improvement in working conditions.

In an industry where remote work is the norm and changing jobs doesn't even require changing offices, people are much less likely to give up some pay to stay where they are.

>Employees are often reluctant to leave jobs where they have a lot of personal relationships

That sounds like having a life. I guess the alternative is to isolate yourself to a point where you don't have any personal relationships. No hard choices then.

Or, just do some socializing outside of work.

People keep saying that.

Humans don't work like that. Almost all meaningful relations are based on prolonged proximity.

You must hang out with some poor quality humans.

My meaningful relationships are based on how much I like the people.

Sitting within X meters of someone doesn't make me like them particularly.

Liking someone is based on how similar we are in aesthetics, politics, philosophy, and world view, not whether we worked on unrelated things in the same neck of the woods.

I've been in the work world for almost 40 years now and I have just one friend I met at work. Most of my friends are people I met through purest chance who happen to have similar world-views.

I like (and appear to be liked by) many people where our politics are quite different, including my spouse. I value “how interesting are you to interact with?” far more than “how perfect a mirror are you?”

> Liking someone is based on how similar we are in aesthetics, politics, philosophy, and world view

I’m a pretty social person, and have great relationships both at work and outside of work: this list you’ve provided made me recoil in disagreement. The first two items are aesthetics and politics!? Even philosophy and world view I cannot strongly agree with.

Not saying that this isn’t true for you, and that’s genuinely fine. But I wouldn’t agree that you can generalize your preferences in relationships to others if the quoted sentence is genuinely true.

Mutual respect, friendliness, interest, shared experiences come to mind for me, though I admittedly typed that up in a few seconds without thinking very much about it.

>Sitting within X meters of someone doesn't make me like them particularly

I'm not goint to like nor even remember every neightbor, but it gives me OPPORTUNITY. You need some luck to make friends post college, and luck is simply opportunity + preoaration.

Especially post COVID, opportunities are sparse. All I want is a chance. If we don't click, cool. The kind of people that I probably click with aren't going to random meetups I guess.

even if that were the case, the only place you're getting prolonged proximity to a (relatively) fixed group of people is your workplace? that sounds super not good.

I would argue that proximity matters, but there are many different ways of slicing proximity.

Certainly moving away from friends so that I no longer can interact with them routinely would affect the relationship.

But you can also view proximity as how often people show up in your routine. There are many people I knew and had solid friendships with just because we put in the effort to call or message in the evenings a few times a week.

Very few (but not zero!) of my meaningful relations have been through work.

This is so sad to hear and it's insane how many people on HN are against the idea of forming friendships at work.

Ya'll really are socially inept.

Nobody is against it. People are just reflecting their lived experience.

What’s sad and socially inept is that you’re demonstrating no ability to empathise with that.

I think you misunderstand. It's the opposite; it's that our non-work relationships are more meaningful, not that we are unable to form friendships at work.

Way too many people (mostly when young) fall into this trap of making their work their life. Don't be one of those people!

meanwhile all my post college relations have been through work and I've struggled to try and make friends outside of work. Unironic advice seems to be to make friends with co-workers. And meetups, which I have yet to form a signifigant bond at (when most people flake after 1-2 sessions and sessions are monthly, I can't blame them).

I am not sure why you would say that. I mean it is true, but I am not sure how it is relevant here. If one avenue is not there, ones that crave it badly enough will venture forth. If I don't go to work and WANT to engage with others so badly, I will. And besides, meaningful relations is a meaningless term.

Example. My parent has neighbors. They have lived closely to one another. So closely and long, in fact, they had to sue to resolve some outstanding issues. In other words, neither prolonged proximity or meaningful relationship is a useful metric. I will trade those for a new neighbor every year.

Humans work like they always worked. Their predilections move them. If those are not satisfied, they are channeled.

If your health limits your active hours to barely more than you can work, you won’t. In that case, you get very lonely, from my experience.

You have a point and I actually understand that rationale. I have no real argument against it beyond general question of whether individual loneliness should be solved with my forced presence.

The big problem these days is age. My neighhbors seem fine but are in different stages in life. I more or less inherited this house but it's a house built for families to be raised. So all my neighbors are 40's+ taking care of at best very young teenage kids, and I'm a 20's tech dude. Not much clicks.

>If one avenue is not there, ones that crave it badly enough will venture forth

I guess all my 20's demograpic in town don't crave socialiation. Or I guess literally all of them are in bars. Not my scene.

This is what I have seen so far. The younger cousins in my extended family consciously opted to live in Chicago-Chicago specifically due to night life. I will admit that I never understood it ( and I moved to suburbs as soon as it became an option for me ). Naturally, all anecdotal, but I doubt people changed that much over 20 or so years.

My dad retired from his factory job last year. Outside of company Xmas events, he met his colleagues exactly 0 times in a social context while he worked there.

Yes, and the point is that if you or your coworker is laid off or take a new job, that proximity is immediately nullified and the relationship typically withers and dies.

Spend less time socializing at work, and more time creating that prolonged proximity outside of work, so that relationships of your choosing can be formed that are less subject to the whims of your bosses and the economy.

>so that relationships of your choosing can be formed

and then you realize no one wants to choose you back and maybe your niche geeky tech company is the best place to find fellow introverts.

that's why I show up to my olympic weightlifting club, and music shows, and acroyoga jams regularly.

I do like my co-workers. A lot. But if seeing them in the office was my only social life I'd die. I can't speak for everyone, but personally the time/effort invested into forming meaningful relations by regularly showing up to places where I can engage with others who have similar interests (oly lifting, music, acroyoga) has probably been the best thing I've done for myself.

And being able to work remotely greatly facilitates that.

>But if seeing them in the office was my only social life I'd die.

great. Now imagine if you didn't have that nor any clubs where you felt welcome. That's the situation for many people who do make friends at work.

idk I religiously firewall my work and personal life but still feel a lot of "personal work employment inertia":

    - I know that everyone doesn't suck to work with
    - I know who to ask for specific institutional knowledge, or to get something done through unofficial channels
    - I know who is more or less competent in specific domains
    - I know what kind of work people do and do not enjoy

etc. It's actually the main reason I haven't done the whole salary optimization by job hopping thing, well that and the effort of hyping myself up into extroverted self-pimp mode

This type of knowledge is far more valuable than many people realize. When you see people who get things done, get more raises, or seem to do great work without working so hard... then they know things about how to operate in the organization.

> you don't have any personal relationships.

You mean work relationships?

I have relationships outside work. Though, I'm fully remote and also have work relationships.

A 2080 worker who works 35 years will spend over 8 entire years of their life at their job.

I have plenty of friends in real life and plenty of things to do, but I do value, at least somewhat a good work environment considering how much of my life I'm going to spend in it.

The average tenure at most tech companies are around 3 years. I assure you that most of your “friends” at work won’t keep in touch with you three years after you leave.

Complete opposite experience for me. Worked for a startup a couple of years as a young dev, made some amazing friends including my wife. 12 years later we're all quite a bit older and still meet up every couple of months (and now our kids are best friends).

I’ve been working for 25 years across 8 companies. Only two of them has anyone heard of. One was a fortune 10 company at the time (ruined by the decisions of Jack Welch) and one is currently a fortune 10 company. I keep in touch in real life with three people. One person followed me between three companies between 2008-2015 and I married the other.

Well the average person only has a few close friends. It sounds like you made at least one (your wife) at work, so having a work place where deep social connections are possible was very valuable to you.

Perhaps the UK is different (Im making assumptions obvs) but I’ve kept in touch with quite a few from each job I’ve worked in - potentially 50% of my friends are people Ive worked with.

I also see “acquaintances” keeping in touch with ex-colleagues on some social media sites, so I know Im not an exception.

I appreciate “most” isnt all, but your comment is very different to my decade of experience. Work is a great place to form friendships.

I do think there's a big cultural difference. I've worked over a decade each in the UK, Australia, and now the US. In the UK and Australia, it was very common to hang out with colleagues socially, but I see it rarely in the US. Maybe it has to do with the "pub culture" in the UK and Aus, and a few beers after work being common, which it doesn't seem to be in the US (at least where I've lived - places with a 'bar scene' like New York may be quite different).

I may be biased due to getting older and having a family, so I'd expect to hang out after work less anyway, but I observe that generally amongst younger colleagues too.

When I was younger at my second job between 25-34, we all had more money than sense (not anywhere near what we can make today) and it was a combination of men and women. We were all single, hung out at each others house, went to strip clubs together (yes the women too) went on overnight trips at cabins together. But as we got older, and settle down, we became more of “coworkers”. I keep in touch with a couple of them once or twice a year.

At my third job between 2008-2012, I keep in touch with one guy that followed me across two more jobs until 2015. We try to meet along with one of my coworkers from my third job at least once per quarter.

I also met my second and current wife at my third job. But I can’t honestly say whether I would have tried dating her if I hadn’t known that the company we worked at was about to go under anyway.

I had a Slack group where I kept in touch with 5 of my coworkers from my 5th job between 2014-2016. But that died off.

When I go back to my home state, I am going to try to connect with my former CTO and a couple of other people from my 7th job (2018-2020). My former CTO reaches out to me every now and then and we talk. I owe him, he gave me a chance to lead their “cloud native initiatives” and hired me even though I had never opened the AWS console at the time. But he thought “I had some good ideas” even though he knew I had just watched a video and went through a certification training.

Now that I work remotely at AWS in the consulting department, there isn’t anyone I consider a “friend”, but one person who I worked with from the time they were an intern when I was their mentor.

The “team” I work with changes dynamically based on the project.

Going to brothels with coworkers at the end of the day was a common thing regardless of marital status back in the day here (before my time).

Not sure what happened

That's fine, then I'll have friends in one place for three years, and then I'll have friends in another place for three years. I don't see the problem here.

The problem where you end up not making any friends and you're all alone now because your Meetup groups are bust.

Employee and employer are not on equal footing. This is better understood among the workers in other industries. The current situation with supply and demand of CS workers has led some to believe that this trend will never die. It may not stay like this and if/when that day comes, lord help us for we are not prepared.

It's happened time and time again.

I'm currently reading Marx Das Kapital and it's amazing how all the narratives are more or less exactly the same. The worker is lazy, society will collapse if every moment of time is not taken from the socialised labour etc.

This never seems to end.

> Employees are often reluctant to leave jobs where they have a lot of personal relationships, or if getting a new job would entail moving to a new city/state/country, even if jumping ship would entail a sizable payraise or other improvement in working conditions.

Yeah you know I’d much rather work in a place where I have a very limited relationship with the people I spend at least 8 hours a day with. That was sarcasm. One of the reasons I didn’t take a remote job last year was the lack of deep social connections I’ve experienced in other remote work.

I’ve observed that the best work is often done by small teams with deep social connections. Think the original Mac team in 1983 or id software in the early 90s. I want to like and even love some of the people I work with, even if the time is short and I’m fired. Because life is short and even a couple years with someone I connected with is valuable when it’s 8 hours a day for 1/40 of my life.

When you’re young maybe, but after ten or fifteen years of “deep social connections”, working remote can be quite peaceful and satisfying. Personally I’ve always been more productive working at home.

Well I'm 35. You can decide if that's young or old. Some people are just more social than others of course.

Being social is fine. That’s what I have real friends for. I don’t need pretend friends at work.

I always see this parroted by people on HN and it's such a pathetic stance to take.

Every job I've been at I've formed close friends. My closest friends include people from every job and I don't think it's a coincidence. These friendships are just as real (and I'd argue stronger) than your "real" friends.

Maybe the problem is with you and you are just somebody people don't like? Or you think you shouldn't be making friends at work which is kind of sad.

I encourage you to find you’re friends where you want, but where I live, having close friends at work just isn’t done (and never has been).

Despite this, the weekends are always busy with friends from outside of work. I find it builds a strong community.

For my part, I work for a Silicon Valley company and therefore do have some close friends at my job, I get the best of both worlds.

The reality is outside of work you pick your friends. At work, you're placed on a team with other people and you have no choice but to work with them. Sometimes they're great, but sometimes they're people you want nothing to do with, but they're on your team so you suck it up and make it work to the extent required by the job.

Over my career I've both worked with people that I've voluntarily kept in touch with after our time together ended (we even occasionally float the idea of jumping ship and going into business together) and people that drove me up the wall who I couldn't wait to get out of my life (as people, not even necessarily that they were unproductive employees, although some of them were). If I could just have less of those forced interactions due to physical proximity, then I'd have more social energy to spend on people I actually want to spend it on.

Not really. you can't force anyone to be your friend, and if there is some supericial reason someone doesn't like you, you can't really change that (not without a big change I guess. I'm sure if you got ripped you'd suddenly have a lot more "friends). You're at the mercy of luck in where you meet and who clicks with you. And that gets harder as meetups and socialties become more based around how drunk you get or if you like sports. I like neither.

I have collected work friends since 1998. Most of the time it dwindles to one or two per job, after a few years. But former colleagues now outnumber friends from primary school (1), highschool (0), college (5), sports I used to play (0), bars I drank at (0), places I used to live (3) and where I live now, ie: neighbours (6).

Should you create life-long bonds with people because of accidents of geography, or because you have chosen to spend your working life doing the same thing? Even the incidental friendships you make at the water cooler with people who just happen to be working in the same company are as valid as the ones you make when you're walking your dog.

Why did you jump to assuming people don’t like the parent poster? It’s totally possible that they get on well with everyone but don’t feel the need to go for after work drinks with them.

I had friends at the office and even a kind of crush. One month into the pandemic, we just didn't care about trying to keep the non-work banter going. It's a forced situation; romance as a result of shared stressors in particular is well documented, but not necessarily healthier than just meeting someone randomly.

No one is saying they can’t make friends at work. They are saying there is a big difference in quality between work friendships and non-work friendships. The point is that if the main reason you are all associating is because you are being paid to, that the relationship can be severed when someone is fired, and that when you take a new job those relationships are quickly replaced by new ones, then it isn’t actually a strong relationship.

Actual friendships aren’t monetarily driven.

I don't even know how you find "real friends" these days without being friends since grade school/college. Been trying for years in meetups to make real friends and nothing clicks. I have some good friends but they are as busy as I am and syncing up to meet is hard.

Social != friends.

You're young and I agree with your assessment. I also think that working close together is fundamental to start something new quickly, especially if the team doesn't know each other well. Think of new hires in a new company of any kind. However I rather pick something to work from home and keep my social life for the evenings and the weekends. It's so much more convenient than having to commute, from 10 minutes to one hour. And not be bound to 9-18.

While I've not worked fully remotely for my actual job, I've had a "remote" side-project for about a decade now.

Some of the people I've worked with on it, I've made friends with—ranging from "friendly working relationship" to "would totally hang out with IRL if that were an option."

I'm also a member of a small online community that's about the same age, that includes a bunch of people who have never met physically, and probably never will, but who are very close friends, help each other through some pretty rough times, and are generally very supportive of each other.

"Remote" doesn't have to mean "never interact outside of pure work". You can 100% make friends remotely. Granted, it's not exactly the same type of social interaction as hanging out with someone in a physical space, but it's certainly social interaction—and for many people (me included), it's often better, because it doesn't have the same kinds of demands and pressures as physical interaction. As an introvert, it's much less draining for me to interact virtually.

If that's not true of you—if you're both someone who craves genuine physical interaction, and someone for whom the workplace is the primary place you want to get that—no one (or, well, nearly no one) is saying you shouldn't have access to that. We're just saying your experience is not universal, and we want to make sure there are a healthy variety of options for people with different needs and desires.

>Yeah you know I’d much rather work in a place where I have a very limited relationship with the people I spend at least 8 hours a day with.

I would. No sarcasm. With the caveat that I don't have to spend 9 hours a day with them, as I'm not forced into an office space with them.

I've also found that working at companies which push for closer employee social bonds with countless office activities, quarterly teambuilding events, parties, etc. actually diminished my QoL. I realized that what I actually want are deep connections with people I like, not someone someone else hired to work on the same project. All those (imo, meaningless) socializing activities cut into my free time I could have been spending with friends and family. Working remotely also frees up time I would be wasting on commutes.

When you can't get the former, the latter is still a nice backup. Remote works can end with neither.

It depends on the company. Some places are very social others not so much.

Prior to Pandemic, hi-tech worker retention rate was 2.5 years in my area (this is not in Bay Area, Seattle, or New York).

People switch jobs frequently is the norm anyway.

That's a really good point. Humans generally don't like big changes, so removing friction to a big change makes it more likely. While remote work might make it a bit easier to fire someone, it totally makes it easier to leave.

Factor in that with the boomers retiring, the workforce is much smaller, especially among those with more experience. Unemployment is expected to stay low for some time (in the US at least), which means workers have more power. This is especially true for work that requires more experience or education. Those roles will be harder to fill overall, and the expected outputs are higher.

As a person working in a fully remote, global company... and as a hiring manager, I can attest to the challenges in hiring and maintaining a remote workforce. Hiring is tough, but keeping employees is also tough... because it is so easy to leave in a time of low unemployment.

>In an industry where remote work is the norm and changing jobs doesn't even require changing offices, people are much less likely to give up some pay to stay where they are.

yea and I already feel those effects. had an office for one month and then they closed it in order to transfer elsewhere. Was already configured to WFH so no issue transitioning. Meanwhile I haven't seen a human face in 2 weeks and haven't interacted with someone my age in 3 months. I guess that is great for true hermits, but I liked SOME interaction.

This also seems to have an indirect impact on my career aspects. Some of the best parts of office was the growth as you worked directly with experts in your domain and seeing how they tick and hearing their war stories. You can hear all that passively in a cafeteria as you're on break. That goes away and I now interact with maybe 5-6 people max per week, and I wonder if I am even growing anymore.

Oh well at least the pay is good.

> because your boss from 500 miles away can lay off your ass without breaking a sweat.

But.. that's actually great? With more companies accepting remote work as just your average way of doing business means what I can fire my boss too, without breaking a sweat. Because I would have ample opportunities to find another, similar, remote work just easily. Oh, I don't need to take the day off for the interview.

The workers will always lose out because the employer has more power. Accept that reality, and that the simple counter-balance is workers organizing.

> I'll contend that while I've been fully taken advantage of remote work ...

I think you meant " fully takING advantafe of remote work ". Not to nitpick. I just genuinely thought you meant you were taken advantage of by your employer.

I took it as a double entendre. We took advantage of the WFH policy and the company also took advantage of us, coz more work got done, since we had nowhere to go.

> No more offices. No more weekly happy hours.

Those sound like benefits to many.

> They can now depress salaries even further because they have a wider pool from which to choose.

This is only a negative for people who were already making absurdly high incomes in HCOL areas. For many people away from the coasts, salaries are now higher because they have access to the kinds of jobs and companies they didn’t before.

> Don't need to bother with those pesky things called relationships because your boss from 500 miles away can lay off your ass without breaking a sweat.

Has this every not been the case? Besides, there are only two kinds of layoffs. Massive ones that do not take performance into account, and rarely take input from your direct manager about who is going and who is staying. On the other hand, for layoffs in which performance is taken into account, I’m sure many prefer the criteria to be more about their work than how chummy they are with the boss and how well they politick.

I can see how these might be disadvantages for a certain kind of worker, but for other kinds they are huge wins.

“Depress salaries” == “Now the person in the middle of Nebraska can make more than he could make before without moving to California”

Maybe the HN fear of "depress salaries" isn't someone from Nebraska taking Cali tech jobs, but could be most likely a dog whistle for foreigners from abroad taking US tech jobs.

I don't live there anymore but in my home county in Eastern Europe, the WFH boom from 2020 brought in thousands of well paying tech jobs from US companies which might have never arrived if not for Covid. Tech workers there are making bank now, relative to local CoL.

Who knows, maybe this trend will accelerate now that the tap of zero interest money which enabled companie to out-bid each other for SV labor has dried out and many start-up and scale-ups need to actually be profitable for a change, they might look towards skilled remote workers abroad to fill their ranks till the next bull run.

Interesting times ahead indeed.

I 100% think this is the long term play. Once we figure out how to really have "remote only" companies, the "remote" part won't be "remote in the USA" but "remote in some cheap part of the world". We tried this with outsourcing but it failed because we didn't have the "remote" part down... now we do...

Yes. Agree. The only thing preventing this going all the way is the friction in timezones and difficulty in co-ordination (i.e. still requires someone local to the remote people to manage their work).

Well for my line of work (app dev/cloud consulting) there is lot of face time, video conferencing with clients, travel to client sites, etc.

But also many of our contracts have data governance requirements where you have to be US based and other government contracts require you to be a US citizen.

Non-government, international start-ups won't have any of these restrictions.

As someone that has dealt with local (Australia) and remote (Slovakia, Mumbai, Phillipines, Thailand) outsourcing, the problem is not the individual workers, or even language, time zones etc.

The problem is more about the company/organization that is doing the outsourcing than the outsourced work itself. You have to have a clear definition of what you are trying to outsource. Is it "just coding"? Is it "some design, but not analysis"? Is it "do everything below a certain level of management" (the worst)?

If you don't know what you want other than "cheap" then you won't get either of the other two qualities of "good" or "quick".

Developers aren't fungible, neither are designers, or analysts or architects. About the only people that are fungible and easily replaceable are project managers (sorry, buzzword compliant "product owners" and "SAFe scaled Agile practitioners").

I don’t think it’s a dog whistle at all (nor does it need to be).

Drawing from a worldwide pool of capable technologists is pretty obviously the end state and, unless global demand picks up by a factor of over 10x, that will inevitably depress tech salaries in the currently most highly compensated markets (while raising salaries on the other end of the distribution).

Oh hey this is literally me. Started working remote in 2015 and really upped my salary in 2020 working for AWS remotely and then moved to an actual good company. Never had to move to California or Washington.

I actually work for AWS remotely (ProServe).

Sorry to hear that. Haha. Nah, it's very org dependent. A bunch of my team all quit around the same time last year. One of my buddies had been happily there for 6 years.

> they have a wider pool from which to choose

This goes both ways for employer and employee

I think this is true: employees will be able to choose from far more options, and they will have more competition. The first phase of this is competing with anyone in the US, but soon enough companies will be hiring abroad for zoom-based jobs. If a foreign employee can work in a reasonable time-zone, and has great english language skills, what's the difference?

I think you'll see increasing numbers of Canadians working for US companies (that's already happening). Of course that's little different than hiring from areas in the US outside the major hubs. Somewhat lower average salaries, but similar skills and work habits, same time zones, etc.

Expanding further, it's already the case that if you're looking for an international employee with similar skills and capabilities to a domestic one, you're going to end up paying similar to what you would domestically. You're rarely going to find someone that you can pay meaningfully less than you'd pay someone in the US (again, outside of places like the Bay area) who has a similar level of skill and ability.

You might find someone with 80% of the ability for 60% of the price, or 50% for 25%, and in some cases companies could save a lot that way. But obviously two 50% developers != one 100% developer in output. And just to reiterate, I'm not saying excellent developers don't exist in other countries; they of course do, but you can't generally expect to get them for a fraction of the price. Maybe a slight discount, which would obviously be worth companies pursuing, but not enough to suddenly put US developers out of work en masse. That's already mostly true, and will become entirely true as remote work becomes more the norm. So it will be somewhat good for developers outside the US, and for US companies; I just don't think the change there will be as massive as it might appear.

I also expect on net it will be great for most domestic US developers as well; there may be added competition, but there will also be more flexibility. The one group that I guess will likely lose out are those who really want to live somewhere like San Francisco, as you'll still have the disadvantage of cost of living, but lose the advantage of privileged access to high-paying companies. (Though as a result, those property values will probably come down over time.)

It will be less stable, but I think I agree with your analysis ( and in real terms, when was it really stable .. 50s? ). Oddly, I think it may only add to the 'Previous team didn't know what they were doing. Fix it.' vicious cycle. In a sense, companies will be re-inventing the big 3 consulting companies.

It is not just just English and skill set that is the issue. In my neck of the woods, I just dealt with otherwise really smart data guy, who was giving me something that clearly did not make sense in the business context - not everything can reasonably be placed in a requirement ( assume earth is not flat ).

Yeah, this sort of thing has been my experience and understanding as well.

> if you're looking for an international employee with similar skills and capabilities to a domestic one, you're going to end up paying similar to what you would domestically. You're rarely going to find someone that you can pay meaningfully less than you'd pay someone in the US (again, outside of places like the Bay area) who has a similar level of skill and ability.

I know. This is going to sound crazy.

The pay gap is still very much alive. I’ve been hiring internationally for 10 years and salaries in India and Indiana are still very far off.

A little over 10 years ago, when we were getting started, we were good at finding A Players, but paying less (otherwise we couldn’t have existed). Did work for Google, Twitter, Sandisk skunkworks, on basically magic creation. Deep OS work. We hired product builders & former startup CTO’s, engineers & designers & PhD’s, who cared about their craft.

Indiana and India still very different.

Nice, you clearly have more experience with overseas hiring than I do. I've attempted it a few times, but haven't been able to consistently find people who were available and some combination of sufficiently good & inexpensive to make it worthwhile vs hiring domestically (in Canada in my case), given the added challenges of time zones, potential language barriers, etc. I'm sure they're out there, but my impression was that you can't just go and hire an equivalent developer for half the price easily.

Care to share any of your strategies for finding talent and hiring in India?

I think “soon enough” started more than five years ago and accelerated in the last three.

> They can now depress salaries even further because they have a wider pool from which to choose.

This appears to be the lump of labor fallacy. Other employers are now competing for those workers too!

If that’s the case then why hasn’t the shift happened sooner?

Previous big waves of the shift were referred to as "outsourcing", "offshoring", etc.

They were also 100% cost driven and not value driven. A lot of companies have opened offices in other countries and hired great people, but they focused exclusively on value.

Most companies just looked at the direct cost and went with it. Of course they picked the absolute worst workers and so the whole scheme collapsed.

Covid pandemic proved that most office jobs can be done remotely with little to no loss of productivity.

I would definitely argue a loss of productivity. But those costs are far outweighed by the benefits, such as less overhead, greater hiring radius, and flexibility. Plus a lot of the weaknesses are more managerial than technical, like synchronous vs async tasks and finding more effective ways to measure productivity.

I wonder about this too.

The UK has lower salaries than west coast US and a large pool of suitable workers.

Big tech has a presence but why haven’t they moved their main operations to the UK?

Once you decide to go to "Europe" then the question becomes why the UK and not somewhere vastly cheaper like Romania or Poland. Wages in the UK are lower but wages in eastern Europe are much lower still.

Not as true now as it was even 2 years ago. Slovakian wages are reaching parity with the "West" of Europe, and Romania is climbing as well.

Until the war, Ukraine was also climbing that same ladder. And when the war is over, they will soar. Their skills are at least the equivalent of any developer I've worked with, their language skills are impressive, and their analysis and design skills are as well.

Twitter still makes all employees work at the office….

The World Economic Forum have stated in a white paper that Corporations and Governments will be expected as part of climate action to help move more people into cities. So that "15 minute cities" legislation can be implemented world wide. This appears to be nothing but a long term climate lockdown. I personally think that to have everyone working locally in these 15 minute zones in each major city and to have them never leave the zone would require that remote work is the norm beforehand. If people think that remote work equals freedom they are in for one hell of a shock.

This is nonsense. What they're saying is that we need to start designing habitation to be more localized and less dependent on commuting and endlessly expanding suburbia. Suburbs, particularly the US variety (and Australia) are terrible because of the lack of local facilities, hospitality and retail.

Cities need to downsize but at the same time regionalize. Smaller cities with HSR and equivalent will work to reduce the need for individual vehicles, which saves on costs, environment, energy consumption, and people's overall health.

Working in a local community is much better for everyone involved than people spending 1+ hours each way every day to get from their home to their work and back again.

The same applies to retail, hospitality and most other service industries.

Manufacturing (particularly heavy industry) is better to be localized to transport hubs (rail, river, sea ports) because of the tonnage that has to be moved in and out, as well as localizing the polluting and environmental degradation (no one really wants to live next to a steel mill).

The latest CT is that the WEF is trying to somehow lock people into their suburb and restrict freedom of travel. That's complete and utter nonsense.

Everything you said is correct and I would agree with - but under the presumption that the climate emergency is genuine and that the individual contributors in the agencies responsible for the models and predictions have not been compromised, coerced, baited, led by funding into agreeing with corporate and governmental agendas, interests.

Is it not odd that we have traditional liberal activists and corporate/government on the same side also?

I agree wholly with you regarding how it is better for everything to be community based, with people working in a local community, that cities need to downsize, that manufacturing is better to be localized, all of these things move us closer to a much better world and I would even be happy if the government used its power to force the change on the population ... but if you study the groups behind this they are international socialists, the presentations they have given quite clearly outline malicious intentions when you look at other movements and ideas the same groups are lobbying for.

Regarding the WEF point you made. I point you towards the case of Oxford City in the UK , which as of last month has already implemented a 15 minute city without any dialogue with its citizens.

The communist china style tracking camera and permit system has been created in their city and it is likely by next year its citizens will start to be fined 70 pounds sterling whenever they go to a neighboring zone without a permit.

It was reported this week 100 councils (local governmental planning agencies) have signed up to implement this in the UK in their jurisdictions own cities. This is without any dialogue or permission with their citizens.

Does the speed of this being rolled out not frighten you enough to question what is going on? It is such a drastic change. Taking a trip in a car from one part of the city to another is such a small journey, such a small cost to the environment. It is not like a cross country trip, I understand the distances between points in the USA is larger but they are planning this for the cities in the USA too, not longer journeys, but god knows where this will end.

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