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Comment by missedthecue | Hacker News Reader

Well there's a major difference here. Paying a dev overseas $50,000 a year instead of $180,000 a year could be well worth it even though you incur losses in areas like coordination, community, and communication.

But paying devs $180,000 a year to sit alone 20km away from each other, while they slack and zoom doesn't have the same cost/benefit ratio to consider. You still lose the benefits mentioned above, but don't save anything on costs.

This isn't an argument for or against remote work, but offshoring and WFH have important differences.

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This is assuming that when offshoring, it is only the medium of communication that changes.

Language barriers, dialects, and social norms can all be quite different when offshoring.

The local worker, even if they are working from home, is still more in sync culturally (presumably, maybe you hire some real weirdos).

Right there all kinds of seen and unseen costs associated with offshoring. My point is that there is a huge benefit in cost savings.

Sorry, I'm not best with social cues. Thank goodness for companies that hire local weirdos like me!

You can save on costs by spending less money on on office space in favor of team events.

You can also save money with hiring and retention due to happier employees.

Offshore is a reasonable comparison. Virtually all offshore implementations that I have observed result in at least one employee being forced into becoming an offshore orchestrator. Everyone now has to play telephone with the offshore dev through this channel. Even if they could contact them directly, you have a one day communication lag because you only get one shot a day to have a one hour sync with the offshore team. In bad scenarios, the offshore team has all communication channeled through the local team lead creating yet another layer and further communication lag. The point here is that engineering teams have been communicating how this issue is detrimental for years. We saw WFH work in a forced experiment (and had a lot of data about improved productivity). It is obviously not a direct comparison, but the egregious nature of blind positivity towards offshore and blind negativity towards WFH makes the comparison relevant.

> blind positivity towards offshore and blind negativity towards WFH

You must read a different HN than I do

Pretty sure GP meant in the industry, corporate positivity/negativity, not among HN commenters.

100%

Having worked in offices, remotely, and with offshore teams I can say that remote work leads to really bad outcomes from team members who don’t want to be part of the team. Worse than having them in the office.

I think the big part is that, at least in work culture here, that you simply cannot call someone out for not doing their job. There’s no shame. No cost. Nothing to avoid.

There’s performance plans. There’s meetings. There’s never radical intervention that leads to the change needed to have people shit or get off the pot.

This is good financially for these people in the short term but in my experience much worse for their careers in the long term.

WFH would be way easier on us if people had the freedom/were enabled to leave jobs they hate.

You call me out for not doing work I’ll call you out for not doing work. Mutually assured destruction.

I keep a file on my computer with many co-workers names and lists of things they’ve done to fuck up or times they didn’t do any work just in case.

Do you also keep a list of times coworkers went above and beyond or did exceptionally good work?

No because it would be a very short list.

Let's see the list! I'm interested!

Got a guy with a few examples of times where he spent a whole sprint writing just one or two lines of code for some simple task. And in some cases the code didn’t even pass code review because it didn’t even meet the requirements properly.

Let's see the list!

This seems really unhealthy.

It's MAD if they know you have that list.

If you publicize that list, you are likely to destroy yourself.

Nukes are an effective deterrent only if people think you have them (and think you might use them).

Worth noting this is some straight up psycho behavior.

Probably wouldn’t even work. Imagine getting called up about low performance and instead of responding to it you pull up a list of what everyone else is doing.

If I was their manager, that would be a really bad look for the person.

>I keep a file on my computer with many co-workers names an

I honestly don’t think it’s your mistake to act that way, I think it’s the leadership in there who are not working enough to build enough trust in that work environment so that so you need a CYA folder.

So with the guy not meeting the sprint requirements wouldn’t that have been discussed in the retrospective?

That sounds very toxic. Are you working on your "file" on company time, or are you spending your personal time compiling a case against your own coworkers?

If you're delivering value then you don't need the file, and if you're not, then you should be fired.

This sounds like a LARP.

> remote work leads to really bad outcomes from team members who don’t want to be part of the team.

garbage in, garbage out.

I don't want to be a part of your team. I don't want to be a part of any team. Being a part of a team is used as leverage to make me willing to do shit that I'm not paid for. I don't care about you, your kids, your parents, your spouse. If you got hit by a bus tomorrow I wouldn't care. So and so died? Whatever. Why should I care? Let's say we all come together as a team and knock it out what happens? Layoffs and one or more of us have to go. We get a $25 gift card to Starbucks?

If you want me to be a part of the team you have to make that team have meaning and benefit. That I work with you is neither. Those I work with are no more important to me than the shit stain I power washed off the toilet bowl.

If we miss goals? What happens. Nothing. If we hit goals what happens? Maybe the PM and EM will get a small bonus and we're all made to work hard to achieve that level of productivity with no benefit. So, sorry, no, I don't want to be a part of your team.

Yeah... so why are you wherever you are in the first place? To cynically carry out actions as though you aren't just doing what you are railing against anyway?

That's exactly my point. Why be there except for your need of income to be exploited?

I have a job to pay my bills. I do not have a job to play pretend friends with my coworkers who won't give two shits if I get fired, quit, or die in a week. Anything I say to them can and will be used against me in the court of HR. There's no benefit to engaging with them beyond having my time wasted by listening to them talk about their insufferable lives.

Yes... so you should be empowered to leave said job.

Which has nothing to do with being a part of a "team". I don't understand where you think this is going.

Teams are groups of people working together to achieve a common goal where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Any further prescription is management gaslighting.

> Well there's a major difference here. [Money]

I'd also like to interject that "Productivity" metrics are almost never some kind of efficiency of human potential to create civilization against a hostile universe. They're b(i)ased on what the employer spends.

So even if a study says an employee is X% more "productive" at the office, that means ignoring all the time/money spent commuting, since that's typically shouldered entirely by employees.

So watch out for people conflating "employers get a better deal" with "offices are good for society."

Nevermind that "the 8 hour work day" included your lunch hour at one point. With an average one-way commute of 30 minutes for my state (California), here's basically 2 hours of on-the-clock time you aren't getting paid for.

9-5 with a whole hour for lunch? Really?

yeah. we used to get pensions too.

I guess that would be the downside

it was, for execs who don't want to pay fair prices for labor. but don't worry, we're waking up again and labor has the numbers on its side.

My company does this. if i start work at 7 i can stop at 3, 8-4, etc. Before we went widely WFH if you were in the office for 8 hours that was it. People ought to have been pushing back on the whole “8 hours is actually 9 hours” years ago.

> You still lose the benefits mentioned above, but don't save anything on costs.

It depends on how you measure the costs of remote... the company I used to work for saved $5 million/year in real estate costs by switching to full remote at the start of covid. That is one thing to consider when comparing remote and on-site costs.

*It took about 2 years to reach those savings as we waited for some leases to expire.

It does mean statements aren't completely honest though. Public statements by companies unsurprisingly tend to leave out the downsides of decisions.

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