Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mistletoe | Hacker News Reader

Remember when we said that tech workers should be careful what you wish for with regard to work from home? Execs are slow to learn but eventually the dim light bulb will go off in their head that someone from a much poorer country with an internet line can do the same work as their engineers making six figures and working in their home.

If I was a tech worker I would be championing every return to office initiative that exists, for my own self-preservation. "Yep boss, those face-to-face meetings and talks around the coffee pot are VITAL to this company's success." You have to choose your battles.

View on HN

Offshoring has always been an option and blaming it on WFH is pointless. Every company goes through the cycle of offshoring, doing it too much, regretting the decision and bringing back some of the jobs eventually. We are in the “doing it too much” phase.

If they don’t realize their mistakes, they eventually end up being like Boeing. Cheaper coders are cheaper for a reason.

Now the cheaper coders have AI. Even if you dont think AI is a panacea (which I don't), it levels the field - especially when people brag about how much they "prompt," as opposed to code. And there are a lot more foreign options than the traditional bottom of the barrel coding farms.

Keep thinking that work from home has no negative consequences domestically, and you'll eventually end up like a Boeing castoff.

> If they don’t realize their mistakes, they eventually end up being like Boeing

Very few of Boeing's myriads of problems are related to offshoring (basically only on the 787 program, and it was mostly its initial delays - the recent manufacturing issues are due to low quality work in South Carolina).

737 Max MCAS? Layers upon layers of incompetent people / deadline chasers. It wasn't s software issue, it was a software design issue that should have been caught by the designers, engineers, quality assurance, inspectors. Nobody did their job properly there.

737 Max door blowout? Halfwits forgetting to put bolts back in after sidestepping procedures to save time. Total lack of security culture, missing records, high level pressure to fulfil impossible timelines, and enormous quality issues out of their supplier out of Kansas.

777X delays? Lots of issues, mostly around the engines which isn't Boeing's fault directly.

> 737 Max MCAS? Layers upon layers of incompetent people / deadline chasers. It wasn't s software issue, it was a software design issue that should have been caught by the designers, engineers, quality assurance, inspectors. Nobody did their job properly there.

Back when this scandal broke it came out that Boeing had outsourced MCAS software to offshore contractors making $13/hr. From what I understand software development at Boeing Commercial Aviation has been offshored for many years.

Boeing only uses US nationals for software development in their military division because they're required to do so by law.

Already been happening. This is exactly what's been going on for over a year now at the company I was most recently working for.

When I check in with folks still there, they mainly talk about how the time difference and distance has done nothing but add churn to the entire process both between devs but also between devs and management. Hopefully higher ups will recognize these inefficiences too, but that's wishful thinking.

> When I check in with folks still there, they mainly talk about how the time difference and distance has done nothing but add churn to the entire process

I don't buy that. Saudi Arabia and the United States, via Saudi Aramco, have figured out a solution to that long ago. Business "flows" unimpededly between the two for decades.

This is absolutely true. Still, sometimes outsourcing can go horribly wrong. I wrote about a shocking, outrageous case here:

https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/when-outsourcing...

> Remember when we said that tech workers should be careful what you wish for with regard to work from home? Execs are slow to learn but eventually the dim light bulb will go off in their head that someone from a much poorer country with an internet line can do the same work as their engineers making six figures and working in their home.

It's odd that you're pretending executives didn't already know this, and in fact havnt either already tried it, or have not already been engaging in such practices for a very long time. It's called outsourcing and tech companies have been doing it for literally decades. I didn't see "being in the office" saving any of those people.

Outsourcing is one of the first things i've heard out of the mouth of more mediocre mid level managers than I can count at this point in my career.

> If I was a tech worker I would be championing every return to office initiative that exists, for my own self-preservation.

Thanks for the advice, but i'll pass.

Outsourcing was already a thing more than ten years ago though. It may be easier to achieve thanks to all the freelancers available, but bosses still want to hire people to control them, while outsourcing prevents that in some ways.

Eh, maybe. There's Indian devs from Noida are up to snuff; skilled, fluent in English and hard working, and mesh well with western team members.

But they're not cheap from what I've heard, especially with overhead setting up shop in a foreign country. Similar story for devs from São Paulo as well.

> If I was a tech worker I would be championing every return to office initiative that exists, for my own self-preservation. "Yep boss, those face-to-face meetings and talks around the coffee pot are VITAL to this company's success." You have to choose your battles.

It's not as if you have any influence on that. It all comes down to dollars. Faking a need for office collaboration will only postpone matters a short while.

To be honest I'd love to get my redundancy package now, I've worked at a major enterprise for 15 years and would get more than a year's wage.

I hate working there since the pandemic. Our IT top leaders are complete idiots. And the flex desk office is a nightmare to work in, always running around with your bag of stuff trying to find a desk because nobody obeys the booking system (planon, which is admittedly a total piece of shit)

I'd love to go and work for a startup again but I need the redundancy money to make it through.

Then history repeats itself and the low cost centre needs higher cost support.

There is no real special secret in the WFH world that changes this pattern.

Tech is special in that there is no real capital barrier to a whole lot of what we do; and yet low cost countries are not outputting products...

Maybe.

Offshoring is not new and I’m not sure work from home has any influence. They certainly had these ideas years ago.

I can say from my experience the output and productivity of offshore devs hasn’t matched local. Not necessarily because of capabilities, but communication and culture.

Is a distributed remote workforce, even if it is all domestic, "local"?

> Execs are slow to learn but eventually the dim light bulb will go off in their head that someone from a much poorer country with an internet line can do the same work as their engineers making six figures and working in their home.

This is called offshoring, and has been done for decades, to varying degrees of success.

Companies are always trying to undermine label. This is a tale as old as time. WFH changes nothing in that regard.

Anecdotally, my first job in tech was as a cheap developer from a poor country, more than 2 decades ago.

Thomas Friedman published a New York Times best seller in 2005 — the World is Flat.

A major premise of the book was that post-dot com boom, software engineering in the US had already gone the way of manufacturing — and was never coming back - because executives had figured out that people in much poorer countries with internet connections could do the work for much cheaper.

People have been trying to make outsource only models work for a lot longer than the pandemic.

Return to office mandates don't solve this problem, they will still fire you and replace you with someone cheaper and more desperate to move to work. I've seen folks move to work in office only to be immediately laid off.

Frankly, businesses are due for a reckoning because they're coasting on skeleton crews barely managing to survive critical incidents. More businesses than you think are ran like Boeing under the hood.

>Execs are slow to learn but eventually the dim light bulb will off in their head.

That would be more likely a memory loss and not a light bulb. They already did that but it didn't work out.

That's sounds more like fell for the AI promises, were everybody can code with AI support.

You weren’t getting compensated for your commute time even previously. So you were underpaid either way.

Being at the mercy of a cost cutting boss isn’t going to improve your situation - they will always find a way.

So they get you back into the office and then can still outsource anyway? What?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com