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Comment by hmmmcurious1 | Hacker News Reader

Remote vs office is just smoke and mirrors. A company with a good product will thrive no matter the policy. Making a big deal of returning your cattle to the farm is just to soothe investors when you have a subpar product

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> A company with a good product will thrive no matter the policy

A different way to say it is "If you found a gold mine, you can afford to do things others can't".

99% of companies don't sit on gold mines like Nvidia.

Maybe they would be able to afford more if they didn't spend so much of the budget on renting out offices, eh? Remote work has gotta be leagues cheaper, even if you own the building you still don't even have to pay people their commute fees.

The biggest cost savings from remote work comes from lower talent cost (read: 20-50% lower salaries) because instead of hiring exclusively in a few cities, you can now stop hiring in expensive cities and hire everywhere else.

Wait till they realize there are high-quality devs in SE Asia, South America and India. That remote job can be done by anyone, anywhere. Literally.

Some industries may have regulatory protection, but I don’t think it’ll be long before others start mass-outsourcing the kinds of jobs people thought were safe.

Some already realized that. For USA companies, the problem with Asia, India, and even East Europe is timezones.

I used to work at a US company that had offices here in Mexico and had a GREAT QA team in India (despite the hatred they get here in HN, Indian techies are GOOD! ) .

The TZ problem is what ended up fracturing the relationship between the teams . Us/Mexico teams synergy was just great, while Indians were generally disconnected.

But yeah, US and Canada companies that turn to LatAm do get an "unfair advantage". I'm slowly but steadily trying to help this happen. Sorry?

> For USA companies, the problem with Asia, India, and even East Europe is timezones.

I've seen more of a mentality and attitude problem than timezones. Often these other offices are just treated as 2nd class citizens without enough context to act.

> that turn to LatAm do get an "unfair advantage"

My company has been trying to do this (pay top percentile latam salaries) but it’s just been a larger grind to find decent devs than when we were advertising US salaries. “You get what you pay for” seems to be at play for us.

I imagine remote work can give you some edge but we’re trying to get 2 devs for the price of one and it’s really hard. We’re probably losing money on all the time wasted (you get a ton of applicants at lower price points).

I think the timezone issue is being mitigated - I’ve found Indian devs (only picking them out because of direct experience) were generally already working odd hours to at least give US overlap, but I think asynch tools will continue to get better and make it less of an issue. Probably doesn’t work in a five person startup where you need a lot of direct/constant communication, but especially in mature companies, I think the timing issues are very solvable (where they haven’t already been addressed).

Agree on the quality - there were some devs we worked with who needed more hand-holding, but a majority were very capable.

Offshoring is nothing new, it's been happening for at least a decade in earnest, of course far more for manufacturing. Even if you just count since the start of the pandemic, companies have now had 3.5 years to figure this out. Where is the mass-outsourcing?

It’s coming with higher quality candidates. For a long time, off-shore devs were uniformly mediocre and generally made things harder. I think that has been changing over the last decade, and is changing faster with more and more high quality online education.

Thinking that there will be a switch-flip moment (or that, because there hasn’t, there won’t be) is, I think, a limited view.

Average American devs just aren’t enough better, or won’t be soon, to justify the massively higher cost, and I think the push from a lot of devs around remote-first policy has forced employers to figure out timezone/asynch issues.

I will say that I’m really guessing about 3-5 years from now. Happy to see other perspectives!

It‘s like unions squeezing out more than market rates, it eventually renders the companies uncompetitive

Then companies should lobby to make unions required.

If there was any entity that had enough power to enforce this worldwide I‘m sure companies would jump at and lobby like crazy. We are blessed that no such (Orwellian) entity exists (yet)

You can enforce it in the US. Which I think would be a good idea coupled with a humane immigration policy that focuses on lifting everyone up.

You can also enforce it through trade laws, requiring imports to come from union shops.

What is Nvidia's gold mine? They don't make their own chips, right? Doesn't that mean that other companies can quickly catch up, if they are even behind?

Look at the history of 3dfx . They were up there with envidia at the dawn of 3D graphic cards wars. But bad logistics brought them down.

Mainly they decided to manufacture their tech here in Mexico instead of in Asia. But here on Mex we dont have the skills to to such high tech manufacturing.

What does Microsoft make? You download bits over a wire and store them on your personal SSD. They don’t make SSDs so it should be trivial for other companies to quickly catch up.

For the sake of argument, let’s reduce Nvidia (my employer but I don’t speak for them) to just a silicon vendor.

You’re not only ignoring the work of thousands who design the stuff that goes on that silicon, the billions of $ in R&D, you’re also dismissing the decisions about what to put in that design, way before other people do it. Some of those decisions were made years before the actual implementation started. It happens to be something a few people at Nvidia are very good at.

Yes, my short post may sound dismissive, but I work in tech and I'm aware that our industry has lots of legitimate creativity and intellectual property. Of course we also have hype, marketing, BS, and herd stampedes. Some aspects of GPU/parallel design are commonly understood and other companies make such chips. So I guess I was just wondering if Nvidia had a secret sauce, are they ahead of others, and if so by what measure? I work more in software, and I'm not in a position now to evaluate their hardware on the merits.

I think your biggest mistake is ignoring the amount of software that runs on top of the hardware.

There were times in the past where others had a higher number of FLOPS, but it didn’t make a dent in the usage of CUDA.

My standard assumption about anything in tech (and beyond) is that you don’t win on first principles alone (“parallel design is well understood”). It’s the details that make you stand out.

Bill Daly gave a great presentation at Hot Chips a few weeks ago that explains how Nvidia’s AI performance was only in small parts due to process improvement. The rest was doing things smarter: matrix sparsity, different number representations and so forth.

https://youtu.be/rsxCZAE8QNA?si=IZneUQQ1J7Gtu81H

They built cuda and embedded it as a foundational technology through university partnerships and generally paying attention to developers. Wrote documentation, talked about their tech a lot, generally made the onboarding broadly work.

They then had the good fortune that their competitors tried to leverage open source and cross company collaboration. While misc open source winning is sometimes thing, the industry built all their stuff on cuda instead of opencl or openmp.

Nvidia thus built their gold mine.

I don't think it's impenetrable. There are some design mistakes baked into their system that are going to be difficult to unravel without breaking backwards compatibility.

Any insight into what those design mistakes are?

Take a peek at CUDA

    They don't make their own chips, right?

In 2023, this is a moot point. Neither does Apple. Neither does AMD. Neither does Qualcomm (which makes the vast majority of mobile phone CPUs). Neither does Broadcomm.

To your second point: I am surprised that AMD hasn't tried harder to chase the high-end enterprise GPU market. Maybe that is a longer term secret plan after they gain more CPU market share. It is possible that a GPU ecosystem cannot out-compete NVidia's CUDA at this point.

Remember how Marissa Mayer in her bid to rescue Yahoo made everyone come to office. Even to relocate entire teams to US.

How did that go?

she got her golden parachute. who cares about the suckers who had to move?

I like to compare it to releasing films in theaters vs streaming. The former has a large industry that has relied on it for decades, as well a subset of consumers that love it. The latter is more convenient for other consumers, as well as being embraced by some companies. Shareholders naturally want to take advantage of whichever is more profitable, which often is a mixture of the two.

That is an interesting comparison, since streaming is bankrupting all the media companies and will likely change movie studios for the worst.

Streaming is not bankrupting media companies, the fact that there are numerous other ways to spend your time viewing content from numerous other content makers is changing the market for media companies.

Had media companies maintained their exclusivity on people’s screen time, then they would be in an even better position. But the supply of content exploded, from video games to YouTube to TikTok and Instagram and even forums like this one.

More supply relative to demand means lower prices.

It's probably also true that streaming almost certainly aligns to different types, quantity, and production values of content overall. And there are always ongoing demographic and public fashion trends going on as well.

I agree with your point about competition. On the other hand, mindless channel surfing has mostly been replaced at the same time. People do it to some degree with streaming and even channels setup for the purpose--but it's a less natural fit.

And lower prices almost universally means lower profits for manufacturers. As prices fall, factories increase production and efficiency as they chase a diminishing profit margin. They are running flat out right until that margin disappears and everything suddenly stops. The frantic rate of tv/film production today, the insane production costs for a marginal return, fits that pattern.

I wish I could upvote this more, the cattle back to the farm is on point, exactly what a lot of these execs think but are afraid to say out loud.

i think it comes down to bad management.

"Remote vs office is just smoke and mirrors. A company with a good product will thrive no matter the policy."

Try doing manufacturing work entirely remotely. Good product doesn't move when you can't actually make it.

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