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Comment by JamesBarney | Hacker News Reader

There is evidence that working form home increases productivity. [0] But the problem is harder to solve than just convincing managers that remote work is productive. Many of the employers who believe in the productivity of remote work are more willing to offshore the work for $25 an hour than shell over a the cost of a fully loaded local dev of $80-90 an hour. So if you want remote work you need to convince your boss of two things. That remote work is productive, and that the benefits from timezone sharing and language fluency are worth an extra $40-50 an hour.

[0] https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-emplo...

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>There is evidence that working form home increases productivity. [0]

Those were call center workers answering the telephones.

For the HN crowd, I think a more relevant study would be "knowledge workers" like programmers and engineers collaborating to ship products.

Think of the type evidence that would convince Paul Graham and Sam Altman to yell at all YC2016 founders, "What? You haven't set your up your team as 100% remote?!?! Are you stupid?!?! Why did we give money to you?!? Put the whole team on Skype and VPN access immediately because that's The Competitive Edge you need to beat the competitor from NY-Incubators."

Before we can compare remote and local teams productivity we need to solve the problem of measuring developer productivity. Very smart people have been trying to solve that problem for a long time and it seems to me like they have made very little progress.

So then there really isn't evidence is there?

>Before we can compare remote and local teams productivity we need to solve the problem of measuring developer productivity.

In the blog post, there's the phrase "more productive"... note the qualifier of "more". In this thread are additional examples posters using the phrase "more productive".

More than what? It implies a mathematical relationship right?

If you want to argue the merits of remote workers, you can't have it both ways with the word "productive". On the one hand, everyone can just throw around the phrase "more productive" when it's convenient to the remote-work narrative but then also discount it as "unmeasurable" when we're looking for the type of concrete evidence to satisfy managers.

If that's the state of discussion, these mixed messages reduce to "Remote is good because it is MORE of This Unmeasurable Thing". The discourse on this topic needs to be higher quality than that.

I think the topic of measuring productivity is a little more nuanced than what you think.

Something could be unmeasurable (unquantifiable), but comparable. Consider a contrived example: Two cars start a race at an unknown time - you are allowed to watch the end of the race. Which ever car finishes first is faster (on average, more fast). However, since you don't know when they began, you cannot measure their average speed.

I think a great deal of the headaches concerning productivity is comparing it between people and trying to put an exact amount on it. It is quite possible to say that one would be more productive in one environment vs another. Sometimes it is quite clear (I am less productive if I have a broken hand) and sometimes not so clear (not being in an office makes me more productive,... maybe).

And there's not going to be evidence like that any time soon. Software Developer productivity is extremely difficult to measure. It has very little to do with how busy you manage to keep yourself.

What about retention? That's easily measurable. If you have 1/2 the turnover rate on developers would that convince people?

I don't know if this kind of data is available anywhere though.

That used to be true a long time ago but the game is changed. $25/hour will buy you a junior dev at best who barely speaks English and is 12 hours away. And this developer needs constant communication to be productive. More often than not, you can't get cheap rates like that unless you offshore 20 developers and get a group discount. Usually then there still is a point person you have to communicate with daily, and still you wind up getting a rectangle when you asked for an oval. This is from first hand experience.

For skeptical managers, start with 2 days a week. Standardize on a communication platform like Skype + Google Hangouts. Require the person to be constantly available via IM.

Bottom line, it may be more expensive up front but key advantage to a US remote worker is they are generally always available, highly independent, and it's easier for them to come onsite as needed.

I think translating that hourly salary to yearly salary makes it untrue. You can get some very reasonly english speaking devs for less than 1/4 bay area salaries in europe.

Sure, but for offshoring, a salaried position is a whole different ballgame than a contract you can not renew after 2 months

If you have contacts or know where to look you can get solid mid-level or even senior devs with excellent English skills at that rate. The timezone issue and whether they're suited to remote work are different questions altogether.

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