On paper, offshoring has made sense the entire time, and yet here we are in 2025 and companies still hire American devs. Not only that, they often fly in foreign devs just to pay them more here than if they had just offshored to their home country.
There are many reasons: It’s difficult to understand _intention_ when deprived of non-verbal communication and working in a choppy network call. Even if one can gloss over communication needs etc. there’s burnout looming around the corner and natural, healthy laziness getting into the way. Sometimes even internal politics might be blocking knowledge/access/contribution for more or less peculiar reasons.
It’s not like it’s impossible to hire remote engineer, yet my (completely unmetered) estimates out of experience is that approx. 10% of engineers willing to work remotely can sustain health (physical and mental) and be efficient outside of 1-2 years of honeymoon period.
There was some tumbling around COVID but IMO both stationary jobs and remote ones are doing well on mid-high quality positions.
I see lots of people thriving in remote. Main reasons being a huge increase in quality of life. Regaining 2-3 hours of senseless commuting time per day, getting small household chores done over lunch, not having to schedule repair and maintainance appointments in the weekends etc. is huge.
Now I do agree it is not for everyone. I see especially younger people living alone not coping to well. Part of the reason is they (ab)used the office as a socializing place, and are not used to organizing a personal social life outside work. There's also people that don't actually have much work outside of attending office meetings, and nobody thrives sitting in Teams calls all day.
Then there's also real downsides. Some people living in shoebox appartments in the city just do not have the space. W While work can be done (more?) efficiently remote, but carreer climbing needs in person contact. It's like dating. Real dinner or a video call? No comparison.
Best of both worlds would be 0 commute time to a luxurious private office inside the company premises. All the rest will be tradeoffs and compromises either way.
What you’re saying is true especially in the honeymoon phase, but the running joke is that you don’t really live remote life unless solitude made you name a pigeon. I’ve seen careers of many of my peers and usually 5 years in people starts to seek on-site.
There’s another point to take into consideration though. In Europe commute is usually less than hour and for many morning routine is an opening to watch movies/read books/listen to music or podcasts. Some travel with friends so that’s a social occasion too. Given accounts of my US colleagues where it’s usually lone drive back and forth experience is different.
Yet remote means omitting or social events and being outsider in the most-social environment (especially for men). Even hybrid with one day is much better than completely remote.
What I found over the years is that no one can say what differentiates remote-able to non-remote. Quiet back-seat engineer can get depressed after year of remote and that guy who is always heart of the party can thrive in remote. It’s just… it wears people down quickly and problems are usually creeping. Back pains coming from tension. Working hours slowly inflating to compensate for extra 10 minutes spent on lunch, this one time when you are bored at 8pm because you are bored in front of computer so why not help someone.
Maybe I’m biased but I find situation that some people are remote and some aren’t to be a healthy one. This preserves local jobs while also making an opening for those who want to do remote work for any reason whatsoever. And this honeymoon period is good to check out if you’re fit for remote or not (and gives enough churn to provide opportunity to try).
When discussing remote vs non-remote with a colleague some time ago over lunch, he mentioned that "remote is an extreme version of yourself", so those inclined to slack off will slack off way more to the point of being unproductive, and those inclined to work longer hours will eventually just spend all their time working... Maybe over-simplified but I think he was onto something.
This is kind of hilarious because I moved to Wyoming a few years ago and have recently started naming the magpies.
Rarely companies want to hire communication expert to help shape good practices even though they’re spending hundreds of thousands if not millions on stuff like Datadog etc.
I have this theory that mailing lists with rich search (slash Google Groups slash Newsgroups) are the best communication tools.
Hadn’t had opportunity to try it out though, as it was shunned „old tech”.
If internal politics are blocking knowledge, access, & contribution of any employee the correct action is not to hire them. If they are already hired, the correct action of management is to offer them severance.
My experience working in software startups is that the average retention period of an employee is 2 years, in any work environment. What you're calling the honeymoon period is effectively just the average retention of the industry anyways.
* This bit is confusing to me even as I say it - I want to keep it in mind as we move forwards in case we're thinking about it wrong.
* This requirement is really annoying and I'd love to find a way to get rid of it.
* This part is super super urgent, and if we find a way to do it faster without too many other costs we should rework the plan.
You can't "just" write these things down, both because some requirements aren't so annoying you can come out and explicitly say it and because too many parenthetical clauses start to make a document impossible to read. If they're not communicated nonverbally it's hard to communicate them at all.
It used to be totally non-controversial and completely validated by direct personal experience that only a minority of the population is built to work remotely. It’s so silly this is even an argument when our entire society and education is built on in-person interactions.
I think the 10% number is variable depending on the org you are hiring into. A company that was never built to be remote or put any thought into how information and communication systems must be different than office? 10% may even be high. A company built from first principles with lots of thought and intentional design behind business processes being remote only? Probably much too low. It will be reflected even in the types of personalities being hired on average.
If you reach for video calls as a solution to your remote companies communication issues you have completely failed and probably would be better served with fully on-premise. This would be the first question I would ask as an interviewee for a remote role. Any company regularly engaging or encouraging this means leadership is simply trying in the worst possible way to recreate an office environment and thus you can expect nearly everything else process based to be horribly broken for a remote company. I have some other “tells” as well, but this one stands out as the simplest as it displays a total disconnect with the reality of how to build remote teams. If you can’t function like a well ran open source project you are almost assuredly doing it wrong.
Just a note that my 10% experience is based on general population of people who were working remotely for at least 6 months (and being a contractor I’ve switched orgs more often than average engineer)
Looks like big and small tech are mostly doing things wrong then?
What people forget is that making a good remote culture requires both the right people and a ton of intentionality. There are no unplanned interactions in the workplace that cause people to form more than a transactional relationship.
I wouldn't agree that most people aren't built to work remotely, but I have always maintained that it is a skill that takes time to build. Which is why it's unfortunate that RTO happened so quickly.
Of course I always prefer remote work for companies in the same city. Being able to come in easily when necessary helps a lot.
I wouldn't really call this "remote work" though. I know the terms are a little fuzzy.
My favorite option is incredibly selfish for me. I love working from home relatively close to an office I can come into at any time I wish. This requires everyone else working in the office on a daily basis so I can come in as my whims desire.
That is not remote work though. That's working remotely for an in-office organization and it only works if you are in the extreme minority in some special positions. Fully remote orgs with no offices whatsoever are a different beast entirely in my mind and require much different organization and communication setups.
I disagree with this. I beleive we just need better tools to support comfortable remote work. Big corporations are not interested in researching and developing such tools. And new innovative remote work tools like Virtual Frosted Glass (https://meetingglass.com/) have not yet gained widespread adoption.
I've worked most of my career as a remote employee and I can say that the best arrangement is when the company is as involved in hiring offshore employees as they are with hiring onshore ones. Someone working through an intermediary will always be disconnected from the company's success, as they work for an outsourcing company, and not the US corporation itself.
There are definitely a lot of discussions to be had around employee cultural fit, and I don't just mean company culture. You want a similar mindset and work ethic that your other employees have if you want a high chance of success.
We also need to talk about how some companies haven't been able to successfully adapt their processes to work with remote employees alongside the office employees and sometimes treat the offshore ones as second class citizens, which is not really a great thing.
Americans have a... distinct work culture and companies - local and foreign - are not stupid, so nowadays they aim for the 50-75 percentile in terms of compensation.
On top of that you absolutely need to be fluent in English, which disqualifies half the candidates right off the bat.
All this combined makes it not obvious whether one would want to/could work for an American company - particularly if it's through various middlemen.
US used to be 100% worth it, but over the course of the last 25 years the ratio of GDPs per capita between USA and my country fell from 5.5 to around 3.75 and compensation naturally followed.
Lastly, the dollar fell 15% since the start of 2025 against my country's currency and that has had an effect on available openings.
> Americans have a... distinct work culture
Another way to look at it: If your country was much richer than the US the model would be flipped. Do you think Americans would post a similar generalisation here? Yep. Not much being said.
The issues of quality and whatnot are at their core racist IMO but are made real because of the timezone issue. The norms and culture expected in the home time zones don’t translate easily and result in an impedance mismatch and a different measure of “good.” Because the remote team is isolated and unempowered they always struggle to adopt the standard of the team and to some extent can’t ever succeed in the quality space as it’ll be an ever shifting goalpost whose reasoning is effectively hidden. Then layer in the latent resentment on both sides and the whole situation is bound to fail, but the home teams have the advantage of being resident with the only management that matters.
I wish everyone involved would realize the experiment has failed. But CFOs are too powerful in most companies large enough to reasonably pull off outsourcing at all and the need for the CEO to please boards and investors who just operating off the financial statements and HBR white papers are too disconnected for why these efforts fail.
Unfortunately the current persecution of immigrants in the US will drive these arrangements more and more. Rather than on shoring local foreign talent with the collocated team, foreign talent will opt to avoid the fear society being birthed. This will lead to a strong incentive to follow talent to their home country leading to more imbalance in talent disoriented time zones. Maybe this would require everyone to figure out the above issues but I seriously doubt it. I think it’ll just make everyone less effective and not achieve anything positive for anyone.
I'm in Europe now and it definitely is easier to set up calls with my South African colleagues than the American ones.