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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

> affected teams in finance include Google's Treasury, Business Services, and Revenue Cash Operations teams

> Google would build out its "growth hubs" in locations such as Bangalore, Mexico City, and Dublin as part of the restructuring

> that a small percentage of the roles will move to other offices in the US and abroad where Google is putting more investment, including India, Dublin, and Atlanta

Doesn't sound too bad or too surprising. Most back office and RevOps was outsourced decades ago, and played a major role in making Ireland, India, and Phillipines what they are today.

Reading between the lines, I think they might be offloading some of these RevOps roles to Accenture or Deloitte based on the locations mentioned.

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It makes sense that Google would want to push jobs from high-cost centers to low-cost ones. The only question is why they haven't done so more aggressively.

> why they haven't done so more aggressively

The pandemic proved that organizations can continue to function even if the workforce is distributed globally, plus visa processing in the US has basically ground to a halt due to systemic issues internally at USCIS.

This is the pandora's box that was opened by WFH and systemic incompetence in USCIS.

>The pandemic proved that organizations can continue to function even if the workforce is distributed globally, plus visa processing in the US has basically ground to a halt due to systemic issues internally at USCIS.

They realized this with the big offshoring boom in the late 1990s.

>This is the pandora's box that was opened by WFH and systemic incompetence in USCIS.

It is not. Companies have been offshoring as much labor as they feasibly can, and often more, for at least 3 decades.

> They realized this with the big offshoring boom in the late 1990s.

The productivity tooling we take for granted (Github, Zoom, Slack, Salesforce, high speed internet penetration) didn't truly exist in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

> It is not. Companies have been offshoring as much labor as they feasibly can, and often more, for at least 3 decades.

Absolutely, and we've done it as well, but the pandemic was a major forcing function in the tech industry to show that you can still retain your employees whose visas renewals got stuck in the system or rejected, but still want to work for you.

A mix of coincidences (rise of Productivity SaaS, a global pandemic, Twitter mass layoffs yet semi-functional operations, extremely slow visa processing by USCIS) has caused a systemic shift in the tech industry.

A lot of old timers think it'll eventually get better - but it won't for new grads. New grad hiring has functionally stopped, because that capital can (and has) been better deployed abroad now.

This is not to say the industry is dead - if anything it's growing - but the barrier to entry is going to be much higher now. You can't just be a dropout from Spokane and finagle your way into a 6 figure entry level dev role anymore.

>A lot of old timers think it'll eventually get better - but it won't for new grads.

It will, just have to wait for the next hype train. Long live the hype train. Toot toot!

I'm an old timer, so take that for what it's worth.

New grads have to do their part. They can't just coast through college and think some company is going to hire and train them up just because they have a degree and no drive.

We've been hiring for a year now and there's a whole lot of people with no drive, no ambition, don't feel the need for self improvement via side projects, etc. I always had a side project going on to learn new stuff. It's table stakes.

If there's one piece of advice I could give to new graduates is that. Give a shit about your career. Always be improving on your own time. Otherwise you'll be one of millions of people who got into tech for the money and got pushed out during a culling like we're currently going through. If you can't hack the hacking, get into QA, it pays pretty ok too.

> New grads have to do their part. They can't just coast through college and think some company is going to hire and train them up just because they have a degree and no drive.

I fully agree with you! No one should be complacent.

> Always be improving on your own time. Otherwise you'll be one of millions of people who got into tech for the money

EXACTLY

> If you can hack the hacking, get into QA, it pays pretty ok too

This is the issue - relatively meritocratic entry level roles like Support Engineering, QA, SRE, ITOps, etc have been offshored (eg. at my last employer, we completely offshored TAM and L1 Support Eng), because of a mix of cost savings and a lot of us old timers don't mentor as much.

What if you’re a new grad that does have drive? You might still end up in a situation where all the experienced people want to work from home, and half of them are offshore anyway.

That's funny because internally at Google this is what happened:

Step 1) Forced RTO for folks who weren't officially remote back to their HCOL offices. (Also, in some orgs, fully remote people were being told they're not going to get promoted).

Note that remote folk were getting paid less. They removed the ability to apply to go fully remote too effectively.

Step 2) Moving people to be closer in their "main offices" for their team. Again, inflating how much they need to pay.

Step 3) Suddenly, its fine to hire in lower cost of living areas, even though the team is now going to be split again.

The reason they gave for RTO was better inperson team work, but then are splitting teams again.

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