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Comment by osigurdson | Hacker News Reader

This is why remote work is better for the economy.

OP's quote: "your job can end at the whim of a boss or the slightest gust of economic headwind."

If remote work is established properly, then your remote job will end instantly and will be shipped to Canada or Latin America (if bosses care about timezones) or to Eastern Europe or India (if timezones are not an issue). My company had multiple layoffs and then new waves of headcount. Most of the layoffs happened in the US. 100% of the new headcount is in cheaper countries.

Remote work seems glorious if you look at 2020-21. But beware the second order effects!

Equalising world GDP will be good in the long run at least. Of course it sucks if it happens to be you on the chopping block

It won't be good for 50% of the people/countries that are already above average - it will only be good for the 50% below average.

And more justice for all.

Only if the level of happiness is constant, which it isn't.

I've never understood macro-economics. How is it possible that in one country $70K USD is barely scraping by while in another country that is $2K. The base inputs to the economy are global commodities.

> good in the long run

And extremely disastrous in the short run. If societies lose good paying jobs, that is asking for a populist uprising which typically goes pretty bad pretty soon.

> If remote work is established properly, then your remote job will end instantly and will be shipped to Canada or Latin America (if bosses care about timezones) or to Eastern Europe or India (if timezones are not an issue).

This was always the case for companies that wanted to offshore. Remote work hasn't changed that.

I addressed this in another comment so copying it here:

[remote work] hasn't really been a reality the way it is today. During covid, we were forced to implement norms and tools for remote working (like Zoom). Also, we learned about replacing an expensive worker for a cheaper one one at a time. Earlier, there used to be entire teams in some remote location, so it was similar to having 2 islands (one large, one small) with a bridge which was crossed may be once or twice a year during annual trips to HQ. Now with one-new-person-at-a-time, teams don't lose productivity but over time, American workers are replaced with cheaper ones.

Source: seeing it myself in my current company. Also remembers: shareholder class is ruthless. If I can see this, they are seeing and acting on it as well.

Edit: cannot reply to the unity1001's reply so editing here - sorry to break it to you but earlier, there were only tools. Covid forced us to implement cultural norms and processes to actually work with those tools effectively. That was missing before.

> [remote work] hasn't really been a reality the way it is today. During covid, we were forced to implement norms and tools for remote working (like Zoom).

Sorry to break it to you, but those tools were around and the companies that were outsourcing were already using them heavily way before. So that's not a factor for anything being different either.

Offshoring to the lowest bidder and hiring remote from all over the world are completely different things and not remotely comparable.

What? You seem to think that offshoring/outsourcing => only hiring an external company to do the work. It isnt. Companies have been setting up local subsidiaries in offshoring countries to hire local talent there and offshore the work to their own subsidiaries. It didnt bring down salaries. Neither did contracting out dev work to external companies overseas.

"Cultural norms" has never, ever gotten in the way of profit.

Companies have been working with offshore talent for decades.

This is an argument for protectionist employment laws from the government. If you work for one of these Fortune 100 companies with activist investors who are now pushing to have every new hire come from India — regardless of official WFH policy — you’re already fucked anyway.

> If remote work is established properly, then your remote job will end instantly and will be shipped to Canada or Latin America (if bosses care about timezones) or to Eastern Europe or India

That was already happening. Remote work doesnt change anything with that.

Moreover, dont think that the senior dev in those other places will work for American companies for dimes like that. They will want the equivalent of top dollar in their country and that ends up being closer to the cost of the remote American dev when the obscene real estate/housing costs and general cost of living in places like SF or NY are removed from the equation. If you dont give that remote overseas dev the competitive rate in his/her country, he will either go with someone who does or he will just follow the traditional, more respectable career track in his country - like moving to manager positions in a respectable local corporation or launching his own business.

And if the American company goes for junior devs who are actually willing to be working for dimes when they start, they will get sloppy jobs like how they get with such cheap outsourcing now. And at the moment those juniors gain some experience, they will either ask for competitive pay or they will leave and take the traditional career route.

I've been thru 2(3?) offshoring crazes already in tech... and yet, the tech market now is bigger/better paying then ever.

Have you not looked at the past two decades in tech? Offshoring and hiring firms in other countries has been attempted for a long, long time. The reason why it fails is because offshoring even in a fully remote environment is hard, from cultural differences, work quality, time zone differentials and so forth. You can hire a company in India to do work, but optimizing for cost and hiring a cheap shop instead of one of the more premium ones means you get exactly what you paid for.

Every time companies either bring the jobs back, bring the people back or spend more on hiring good firms in their offshore country of choice.

So what happens when instead of shipping entire departments to India, companies hire a specific individual in Dublin or Topeka Kansas for half of what a SV employee costs? There won't be nearly the issues of culture or time zones or whatever. For now, remote salaries are holding up to what workers made in their HCOL offices. That won't and can't hold true over the long run.

Periodically, I see this argument and I wonder if my work experience is really so unusual for tech/knowledge work. I do not consider my physical location as my value in negotiating or marketing myself. I've worked with people from many countries and never considered their current location to be that significant either. I managed to take work with me when moving overseas for several years. I eventually returned and work with several of the same folks still.

Working in academic R&D, I've usually found myself in "virtual" teams spread over many time zones or even continents, so the people I work most closely with are not the ones I would see in the office building and accompany to lunch. We were effectively embodying more of a glorified coworking space before any of us had heard of this as a named concept.

My boss always professed a preference for onsite collaboration but then was, ironically, the one most often away on travel or offsite at other satellite locations in our city. I could be in the office daily but not see him for weeks, going even longer between substantive face to face conversations. Most coordination was already digital before the pandemic.

At the same time, our division with a dozen or so employees is supposedly tight-knit and managed as a matrix org to share responsibilities. But in reality, logical silos are formed. Only a couple people pay attention to any one project and usually do so for an entire, multi-year project lifecycle. When we were onsite, we would spend most days in our private offices and not have a work-driven reason to visit one another.

Our group went from all onsite to hybrid with several remote-only. The rest agreed to return to the office one day per week on a day they chose by consensus. After a year of this, I can see that the locals often struggle to get quorum for the scheduled onsite day. We've also struggled to get our nominal quarterly all-hands get togethers to actually recur.

Fast approaching my 50s, I think more about lifestyle effects on my future health, or about retirement savings and the economy as a whole. I don't see that outsourcing of our individual "remote" jobs is a risk worth pondering. Rather, it would be whole companies or sectors as part of bigger trade wars or economic crashes. That is another kind of conceit to worry that our knowledge work could be out-competed by foreign workers while the parent organization and managerial layers are not also subject to competition from foreign companies.

Interesting that Canada is seen as a low cost center. However, it is possibly true that it would be a little less expensive than the US (52K vs 70k GDP/capita). Note that India is 2K and Mexico is 10K so not really in the same ballpark for "offshore".

Canada is really perceived as a cheaper region than the cheapest regions of the US, while still have pretty much the same experience in terms of work culture, timezones, English language proficiency, talent etc. [Source: have hired Canadians at 3 different companies I have worked at].

It might be better said that remote work is better for the remote worker's economy. In regions where remote workers moved to, people with money in the bank found themselves homeless as there was nowhere left to live.

And domestic migration is a zero sum game, so local policies built on in-migration of skilled workers from poorer areas isn't clearly a national good.

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