It's possible we'd hire junior engineers locally for the offshore roles if we went fully local, but there's zero chance that we could offshore any of our existing onshore roles. This is for a few reasons:
1. Data law compliance. We can't let people outside the US see PII, which precludes them from participating fully in many support roles, including rotations within engineering.
2. Time zone differences are huge. We have some developers in Eastern Europe who we love, but coordinating their work with the roles that we can't offshore is substantially trickier than local employees. At a certain point it's more rational to pay higher salaries for US-timezone employees.
3. Cultural differences get in the way. It's far easier for a product person or a designer to get an idea across to someone with shared cultural context, so there are fewer back and forth iterations when there are US employees on a project than when there aren't. For the same reason we can't offshore design roles since we're serving a US market, so that doesn't work as a solution.
4. There's substantial difficulty in filtering for quality. We have some offshore contractors who've been with us for years, but we've struggled whenever we tried to add new ones. Hiring is always hard but it's particularly hard when you're either doing it indirectly through a contracting company or doing it yourself across cultural barriers.
Lastly but perhaps most importantly, when we're doing offshoring through contracting companies who take a share of the fee, the difference in cost versus a US employee is much less significant. And if we're not using a contracting company then we're on the hook for figuring out the tax situation ourselves and as I mentioned filtering for quality is much harder. So it doesn't save as much money as people would assume to offshore a role.
That isn't to say that teams should be monocultural, but expecting to have high performing teams without any thought to culture, time zone, or communication ability is optimistic.
(1) This generally isn't true for most companies. You must be in healthcare? Otherwise there are a bunch of state-level data protection laws which to my knowledge do not prevent access to PII by persons not within the US.
(2) Partially covered with my first comment about South America. I'll also note that asynchronous work seems to be more productive for a lot of people, and practically everyone in the corporate world complains about too many meetings – so maybe making it harder to constantly have meetings is a feature, not a bug (even if your org isn't great at async).
(3) Shared context might be helpful, but the design part is nonsense. Obviously non-Americans can design for the US market. Suggesting otherwise is just so ludicrous I don't know where to start.
(4) This is just a skill issue. You can definitely filter for quality in off-shore roles just as well as you can for on-shore roles. If you're bad at it, that's on you, not intrinsic to the off-shore labor or their circumstances.
(5) Saving money isn't the only reason to off-shore roles. Believe it or not there are actually more talented people you have access to if you consider all 8 billion of the world's population rather than only looking at 4% of it. Or for example with your first point where off-shoring can actually be a huge boon because diff timezones means all of your employees can work a 9-5 without needing people to work graveyard shifts. Also there are solutions like Deel which are less expensive than your average contracting middleman, but still allow you to hire people globally without needing to deal (pun intended by them I guess) with all the local tax etc issues. So even if money is your only concern, there is plenty of room left in the market for labor arbitrage.
I don’t think this is the outlook of an ally.
I think the answer to that is a strong union able to bring down the website and get management to the table.
This is why we all need unions.
Unions cannot cause intentional or malicious destruction of their workplace.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/01/politics/labor-strike-supreme...
Coding a time bomb into the website would be illegal, but they can't force you back to work to fix a bug/outage that happens to occur during the strike.
Especially with a huge election tomorrow.
And I guess it's not the case that no one is touching anything, it's being updated constantly.
I didn't meant to imply they would or should sabotage anything.
What prevents the NYT? In part: workers not just lying down and taking it. Just not “complaining” at all, like your implicit feel-for-you advice.
Hell, even in the NY area. Median household in the Bronx is only $37,397, meaning that half of the households are living there for less than that. And that's household income, which is usually about 1.5-2x above individual income. That's a huge margin against what these workers are being paid.
But people don't sell things based on cost. Hell, a lot of people lose money when they sell things. Around 10% of the US population have a negative income in a given year! People instead charge as much as they can (or think they can, at least) get.
And anyone who is worth hiring offshore can get just as much as a local (within some reasonable margin; there can be frictional costs to offshore hiring that won't change the cost to the employer, but will reduce what makes it to the worker). You can sometimes get lucky and hire someone who doesn't understand their worth, both locally and offshore, but you can't count on that (and they aren't apt to stick around for long once they realize their worth). On balance, it costs the same no matter where you go.
1. The businesses didn't know how to handle the workers not being in the office. While a problem in the past, this is now a solved problem thanks to COVID forcing them to figure it out.
2. The businesses tried to hire cheap workers. This is still going to fail, just as hiring minimum wage workers in the US for the job would fail. The workers you actually want charge the same no matter where their seat happens to be located. But I'm not sure that is applicable here as the parent is not talking about cost-cutting, but filling the roles that are no longer filled due to the strike.
I’ve been involved in a lot of software offshoring projects. It’s about twice as likely to end in failure compared to onshore software development services.
It has nothing to do with the price. I’ve worked with great devs who were cheap and terrible devs who were expensive. And it’s hard to tell which is which till the project ships or fails to ship.
Very interesting, thanks!
#2 is a possibility. What happens when you do it is that your cheap hires tend to stay for a short time (as they will get better offers later, possibly involving relocation to better countries). You end up with the ones that are cheap for a reason.
Most of reasons for failure is that incentives in between contractors and hiring company is misaligned, leadership have no idea what they are doing, cultural differences, time zone differences, etc.
If all the butts are in the same office, you are no longer offshoring. You've moved the entire business.
I don't think that is what anyone here is talking about, though. I certainly wasn't. Offshoring normally implies remote work.
But that's not the case anymore. The "onshore" workers are (or at least did for several years, giving the needed experience) also working remotely, so there is no longer an office barrier between the "onshore" business and the workers abroad.
Whether or not the workers "offshore" work together in an office or independently at coffee shops really makes no difference and has nothing to do with the conversation. If you mean the parent misinterpreted what we're talking about – that is likely true. But we're not going to change the subject just because he is confused.
Not workers doing the same jobs though. Look at how manufacturing was offshored over the past several decades -- for many companies, entire job trees within the US were eliminated. HQ is still in the US, but anything remotely having to do with manufacturing isn't. You have to go really high up the chain in those offshored manufacturing jobs before you see anyone actually interacting with an employee in the US.
And how are those not the same jobs...?
No, like I spelled out, your response that I replied to misinterpreted the comment that you replied to. What they were pointing out was that the failure rate of offshore work was never due to offshore teams being unable to coordinate due to not being in-office, but because other other problems, such as culture. Also, the user that you replied to was the one who made the upper-level comment that you originally responded to, not the other way around.
Yes, that is what they pointed out, but it made no sense. The only way that could have applicability to the conversation is if you moved the entire business into that new "offshore" office, but then you wouldn't be "offshoring" anymore. You will have moved the business instead. Which isn't what anyone is talking about. The original comment is clearly about offshoring, not relocating businesses.
I expect you are right that the other commenter misinterpreted something and replied based on that misinterpretation. But, no need to change the subject because of their confusion. Especially when, as you point out, they established the subject! If it was good enough then, it remains good enough now.
No-one was referring to moving business and I'm still not sure where you are coming from with that. Moving a contained software business unit of a US based business to another country is not "moving the business", but is often how offshoring works. This doesn't involve moving the entire business, but just a mostly self-contained portion of it. I don't think surgical_fire misinterpreted anything. The quote above from surgical_fire explains their sentiment. Businesses in the US getting used to their onshore employees being remote doesn't solve any of these offshoring issues.
Exactly. So where do you think the statement in question fits?
> and I'm still not sure where you are coming from with that.
Well, you're certainly not going to figure it out if you keep going off on some strange tangent about an entirely separate part of the comment that has nothing to do with the discussion here and which nobody replied to. And, I might add, offered nothing of value as that part said the same thing as the comment posted approximately two hours prior.
But what is your motivation for being in that state? We can see you are purposefully trying to not figure it out. Not only are you not staying on topic, you haven't even asked a single question to try and help your understanding. What is to be gained in acting like an idiot? Just a show put on for the sake of the lolz?
Cheaper and submissive labor doesn't result in high-quality products.
Is the end goal to just have management in a nice office and all production including hr, finance and IT overseas??
I mean those are office jobs, so they can WFH, so they can be in India or Philipines!! :)
Wow saving so much money!!!
Does a company work in a country or will they just take and take and take from the country and then not give jobs?
Almost making me nationalist (I am in the EU)
The goal of a company is indeed to make as much money while spending as little as possible. Why hire people when you don’t have to?
For example, multiple fast food companies have driven themselves into the ground by exploiting their franchise owners for fast cash. That's how Quiznos died. You would think murdering a company would actually be bad for C level people, but they just move on to the next company. They never seem to have a problem getting hired despite their past performance.