Seems like this article ignores the gigantic wave of out-sourcing throughout IT that already happened in previous decades and in many cases returned to near-shore / onsite work.
What you actually see if you look at remote work job boards is many (if not most) companies in say, the USA, want remote people from the USA (or at least the same timezone as the USA). I think this is what will happen in other countries too.
In the first wave of outsourcing, companies saw that the contract organization provided more or less equivalent results at substantially reduced cost.
What they failed to realize is what they outsourced were their bottom tier workers, the unproductive people. They got excited by the reduced cost with minimal reduction in effectiveness.
When they try to outsource their better talent that’s where they failed to recognize good talent is costly everywhere. You might save some salary but it’s offset by lots of other things from time shift to organizational culture.
> [...] what they outsourced were their bottom tier workers, the unproductive people.
That might be true to some extent, but I think there's a problem with that line of thought.
People are a "moving target". What may be a bottom-tier worker now, could very well be a valuable employee in 5-10 years. Many folks have built their career by starting at a low level and then getting promoted and upskilled over time through hard work and commitment. Starting at a low position and advancing is becoming, sadly, a rare thing.
The "first wave" and subsequent waves of outsourcing have to a large extent eliminated paths of career advancement for many workers. At first it was unskilled laborers and now it has been creeping up to virtually all technical job descriptions. The wet-dream of MBA's who promote this stuff is corporations consisting of a few C-level people and their board, and then a layer of fab-less product and operations people who just manage supply-chain and services stuff with external vendors. It's an ugly picture but that's what the global supply chain people want.
The day before they graduate, a Harvard college student will work on your research project or startup for $0/mo, if it’s interesting enough. The day after, Facebook is ready to pay them $10,000/mo+.
They’re the same human being before and after graduation day. Just as talented the day before as the day after. It’s the pedigree variable that explains the vast majority of the salary.
You’re saying something similar, it’s just that you’re getting distracted by the red herring of the out sourced worker. You should be analyzing the difference between a Harvard and a UC Irvine student, whose average salary difference is as large as the difference between an average US programmer and Accenture contract off shore programmer. It’s got nothing to do with time shifts and organizational culture. You’re looking at this way too logically, along with many other commenters. Indeed I think hardly anyone, including the people who actually say work for Facebook, understand really why one person is paid more or less than another, at their own companies or elsewhere.
That aside you’re onto something with low skilled workers being replaced. The net result of hoovering up low paying programming jobs and sending them to another statistical group (not in this country) is that programming salaries appear to rise. Which is exactly what happened. So if you are of the opinion that programming salaries rising reflects increase in demand, so you should get into programming boot camp, you’d be like 200% wrong. You’re chasing a low salary programming job that doesn’t exist. Which again, is sort of exactly what happened.
I am in LA and a friend tells me he can't hire good in house engineers locally. When I suggest Vietnam/etc he indeed mentioned tradeoffs regarding timeshift/culture. I guess you can't have it both ways.
Remote work is not the same as out-sourcing. Out-sourcing was a necessary evil and only worked for large/mature companies with carved out business processes that could be offloaded. These companies were never remote-first.
With companies being forced to modify their internal processes to be remote-first, what they will realize is that remote does work once they align to it. And once they realize that, there is no stopping them. Since the benefits of having a remote first company well aligned to working efficiently far out-weigh the benefits of a co-located team.
And it's not really the same as a globally distributed company either. Plenty of companies have large software development offices in places like Eastern Europe which is a very different situation from outsourced call centers (cost is still one of the drivers, though not the only one).
For example a few years ago I worked with a programmer from India who was part of a "remote consulting company" based in the Netherlands. The experience of working with her was identical to working with the larger offshore companies based in India. As in, time zone, cultural and communication barriers were substantial and disruptive to our productivity.
In my totally unscientific assessment of remote job boards, US companies seem to be the only ones requesting US-only applicants, and I have no insight as to why this happens.
In my -South American- country the trend is to look outwards if you're hiring remotely; European countries seem to fit this description too.
A lot of software companies’ customer contracts specify that only U.S. employees can access customer data, also. Ops, customer support engineering, and many kinds of bug fixes all require that access.
European countries are outliers due to EU regulations. Any EU "citizen" can work anywhere in the EU, so pragmatically speaking, why would you only want to hire Spanish people instead of opening the door to French, Italian or German candidates? It comes at literally zero cost to the company.
Some industries are heavily regulated in the US and having non-US based employees can become a real headache for US companies. A lot of US companies have background check as part of their hiring process, pretty hard to do for someone not US-based.
Also, if you target only the continental US you're already talking about companies that may be spread across 4 major timezones. If you start including Europe you're now dealing with people that are gonna be more than 6 hours removed from your HQ's timezone.
The US has 330m people, you generally (emphasis, as there are certainly exceptions) don't need to look beyond its labor base to find what you're looking for.
If you're in Estonia and looking to hire a software engineer for remote work, maybe you end up hiring someone from Poland or Spain. That's still EU hiring in the EU, more akin to what you're referring to with the US. On average the smaller the country, it probably increases the odds that more of the labor you're looking for is going to be outside of your own borders.
Communication and cultural differences become significant drags on velocity. Time zone differences exacerbate resolving issues. More importantly, it’s tough communicating technical issues in your non-native language.
It’s also hard to build an engineering culture when you don’t engage with your coworkers often. You have to build credibility so you can work through difficult issues - that’s hard to do when your primary medium of communication is Slack.
We're in what I'll call the third wave of offshoring now. There are pockets of offshore developers who are actually interchangeable with US-based teams; but the cost difference is more like 25-50% less than the previous waves that were promising 90% cost savings.
My last company ended up outsourcing from Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay and Argentina with good results. We often didn't tell clients they were offshore and billed US rates for them and pocketed the difference. Over the course of about 5 years we had let go our US-based teams because they were just too difficult to hire and retain for the marginal increase in quality.
How did you decide which clients could use offshore labor? If you did that in financial or defense industries you could be opening yourself up to significant legal liability
Agreed. Sometimes, when reading articles/comments about out-sourcing, I question my own sanity. We've done it before, am I the only one remembering it? It failed miserably.
If companies want to relocate work to India, or China, or Eastern Europe, they can already do it.
It actually worked in manufacturing but it had some negative externalized long term negatives for the US. The long term negative is that the country lost innovation ability in those areas. The countries that manufacturing was outsourced to are gradually or have become the innovators in those areas.
For higher end companies, it wasn’t outsourcing. It was remote offices. The expertise still does move to those countries.
> Seems like this article ignores the gigantic wave of out-sourcing throughout IT that already happened in previous decades and in many cases returned to near-shore / onsite work.
Agreed.
> What you actually see if you look at remote work job boards is many (if not most) companies in say, the USA, want remote people from the USA (or at least the same timezone as the USA). I think this is what will happen in other countries too.
Which realistically they cannot enforce, merely incentivize; I'm pro-remote work, mainly because it can free up roads and reduce emissions for more critical infrastructure and needs in the Market, all while offering people the ability to re-locate to less populated areas and ideally help under development, and boost there local economies there. That includes International/Non-US based countries.
What happened is that most IT never returned but the work that IT was doing is now done by cloud service providers. Because of immense software scaling, it made sense to pay for quality workers.
You can sell each additional software product at very high margins so it makes sense to spend a bit more on the worker for a slightly better product that will result in many more high margin sales.
Sometimes they found that it was more effective to do low cost work in cheaper US locations (American South, etc...) than India.
A large telco I worked for (owns a significant % of global cable TV assets and programming) used to outsource all hardware and software development. While I worked there as a contractor from 2013-2018 I saw them replace this with large onsite teams in their HQ in the EU and nearshore teams in Belarus and Ukraine.
I've encountered some of these nearshore companies in E. Europe multiple times over the last decade, business is booming for them.
Anyone can already take your job, as long as they are willing to relocate, or your company opens a new office near them.
It is more important than ever to differentiate yourself. To do that you need to find something to do that you love, and then find (or more often make) a niche in that that that you become one of the top ten people in within your context.
By context I mean you don't need to be the best in the world, you can be the best at X within the Y industry, or within defense consulting, or in the U.S. And you don't need to be the best (though see the quote about being the only), but at least in the top 10.
There are two quotes I am fond of that say similar things much better than I can:
"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it." - Steve Jobs
"You do not merely want to be considered just the best of the best. You want to be considered the only one who does what you do." - Jerry Garcia
...and then find (or more often make) a niche in that that that (sic) you become one of the top ten people in within your context
Whatever happened to just getting a normal job and putting in an honest day’s labor?
Now we’re expected to become “one of the top ten”... what exactly? How is that supposed to work? What about those of us with families for goodness sake. We can’t all be super Linus Torvalds ninja hackers putting out code 12 hours a day.
An honest day's labor only existed in the middle of the 20th century. Before the New Deal you had to work hard on a farm or a factory to make ends meet. After the Great Stagnation in the 1970s, the economy cannot sustain widespread growth in prosperity for all classes of American society. The Post-World War II economic expansion was a 1 time miracle enabled by the picking of several low hanging fruits.
"These figurative "low-hanging fruit" from the title include the cultivation of much free, previously unused land; the application and spread of technological breakthroughs, particularly during the period 1880–1940, including transport, refrigeration, electricity, mass communications, and sanitation; and the education of large numbers of smart people who previously received none."[0]
The party is over. Americans are at the top but they aren't getting any higher, and everyone else in the world is catching up. That means Americans have to compete with the rest of global middle class.
You don't, it's the same psycho advice US tech people have been giving each other nervous breakdowns about for two decades now. Thousands of people have solid jobs that pay well where they can learn at a normal pace, do interesting work and put it down at 5/6pm.
If it's true that America really is that way, my advice is look abroad because life is not about your job.
You can put in a normal amount of effort if you want, but then you don't have the right to demand a more than a normal amount of compensation (~$50k/household in the US). I don't think it's unreasonable to demand extra effort for a FAANG salary.
I'd argue you don't need to truly be top ten, you need to be sufficiently good that finding someone better isn't worth the marginal cost (hiring is really expensive!)
Another way of thinking of this: can you be considered top 10 within a pool of 100 applicants?
Also, who is "top ten" is extremely subjective, based on the company, who is evaluating, and niche. I would guess that within a 100 developer cohort there's not a lot of overlap between the top ten embedded c++ developers and the top ten react developers, and even the top ten that can do both c++ AND react.
`an honest day’s labor` never really existed, you were never going to get paid the amount of profit a practically unskilled repetitive job delivers to the person of company you work for.
At the same time, there are plenty of jobs (in the USA) you could do 16 hrs a day and still not make enough money to provide for your basic needs.
I don't think people have to be top ten or something like that to be useful, but being a meat-based robot is hardly compelling for either side anymore. You need to have at least some skill and you need to make sure you keep developing as the world around you also develops. With human expansion the rate of change itself has changed, and not even a luddite would be unaffected by that.
Your recommendation to become the top 10 in something is either impossible, or only achievable by narrowing definitions down to inanity. I can easily be the top 10 in <industry> <feature> written in <specific language version> <specific framework version> run on <specific infrastructure>, but who cares? Recommending that people become the top 10 in their industry is an impossible recommendation; as there might be hundreds of people in my company who perform a similar role, let alone within my industry.
It’s a bit like recommending someone become one of the top 10 basketball players to make money; someone will do it, but the chances are so slim that it’s a bad recommendation.
'Top 10' is a convenient label. It's more about the answer to the question 'who are the most respected experts in X within the Y', and maybe even make X be instead 'X using Z'. Several careers having been made by being known as a leader using a particular technology, or a co-creator of the technology from the beginning, though it always comes with other things to back it up as well:
* Tim Berners-Lee - the web, W3C
* Peter Saint-Andre - XMPP, messaging RFCs
* DHH - Ruby on Rails
* Martin Fowler - Design Patterns
..and many more.
Yes, getting to the Tim Berners-Lee level of industry recognition is unreasonable to expect for most. But I think it is reasonable to think that this is doable, with the depth of the expertise niche needed to be outstanding being inversely proportional to the talent of the expert. One person might have an expertise niche of messaging, while another has RabbitMQ as their main niche. Both are viable to base a living off of.
>>> And you don't need to be the best (though see the quote about being the only), but at least in the top 10.
Basically, you're saying only the top 1% will be employable.
This is going to be a new experience for a lot of devs in the bay area that have been spoiled with job offers. Those days are over. I'd say it's time to hunker down, save as much as possible because future employment will be scare. And, there's already a vast oversupply of talent. I'd hate to think what it would look like in 5 years time.
Real time, remote communication through tools like zoom, slack, and lucidchart (in my humble opinion) has been solved. It might take some getting used to, but in the right environment a group of properly motivated individuals can achieve the same productivity as their peers in a conference room.
Asynchronous communication across timezones has not been solved, and I struggle to see how it would be. A lot of collaboration requires a conversation and instant feedback from another party. You can't collaborate like this when there is a delay of 8 hours instead of 8 seconds between responses.
So "anywhere" is a bit of a stretch. That being said, absolutely this will happen across the United States. There is nothing that makes developers in San Francisco more talented than their counterparts living in Tennessee, so if those can be gotten cheaper, I can see how the overall price would go down.
Presumably though, such an effect would also cause rents and property values to go down in big cities. I can see how the natural evolution of such an idea is that wealth will be more evenly spread out throughout the country, instead of being concentrated in cities.
I still think the Facebooks and Googles will pay a lot more - someone has to be the "top dog" attracting the top talent. The question is, how much more?
> Real time, remote communication through tools like zoom, slack, and lucidchart (in my humble opinion) has been solved.
Unfortunately, that's not the case.
Remote meetings can be far more frustrating and inefficient because of latency, total lack of turn-taking cues, inability to read emotional expressions of concern or worry on one person or to "read the room", emotional fatigue from lack of cues, and so on. And that's all assuming best-case scenario that your equipment and internet are working well. People pay attention less, speak up less, and so on.
Now, this isn't to say that remote communication isn't useful -- it's obviously far better than not having it at all. And even when you're in the office, many teams are distributed anyways across offices.
But remote communication and meetings have in no way been "solved". They still present elementary problems like when someone asks "who has thoughts?", there's 10 seconds of excruciating silence followed by four people speaking simultaneously, then another 20 seconds trying to figure out which one person will actually speak, where nobody wants to seem like the aggressive bully OR never get to speak.
My hunch though is that virtual meetings don't necessarily add new types of problems to real meetings, they just highlight the problems which already exist.
If you have a meeting with 12 people, and most of them are not engaged, the problem isn't necessarily the video call, its more like the majority of those people shouldn't be in the meeting at all, and would just benefit from a written summary.
If you have a meeting where 4 people are jumping in to share an opinion on one topic, that sounds like too many cooks in the kitchen, not a video call problem.
From my experience with remote meetings, the ones that work the best are those between two or three people where everyone is informed and the subject of discussion is concrete. These kinds of meetings are just as productive as the real thing. The kinds of meetings that tend to not be productive are the ones that have a dozen people in the call, with a few people talking and the rest watching the clock until the hour is over. These kinds of meetings are a drag in the real world as well.
There's another side to this coin where remote meetings have some benefits. In my experience people tend to schedule fewer pointless meetings and are more likely to get the info they need over slack/email. I don't have to feel like I have to hide my emotional queues, like I can make a "WTF" face any time without fear of reprisal. I can even mute and say really fucked up things out loud to help me get through stupid things that are happening. Many shy people are more comfortable typing what they want to say into a group chat than they are saying it out loud, so in this way text based meetings can be more inclusive.
I suspect after an adjustment period that we'll reach an equilibrium similar to what we had before as far as effectiveness.
There is an interesting social phenomenon going on here which I think is often missed. The old world was designed around the preferences of the most extroverted people. Those people are losing that privilege, and I understand how difficult it must be. Honestly, I'm extremely introverted, and somewhat autistic, enjoy isolation, etc. So if this whole thing has bothered me a little bit, I understand it must feel like torture for someone on the other end of the introvert/extrovert spectrum. Hopefully we'll settle one a better medium that is more amenable to the median person than what we had before.
If one needs to read the room or care about facial expressions in one's meetings rather than believing and trusting one's coworkers' actual responses, one is a shitty manager / executive. The video part of remote meetings is equivalent to micromanaging work except now one's micromanaging the meeting. The goals and outcome are the same. Doubly so for anything involving building software as it's clearly possible and often desirable to work almost completely asynchronously for most tasks as much of the open source community does.
I worked at a company that had a New York office and a remote country office. People basically sat in a videochat all day long. I'd say it is more efficient, because you don't need to be in the room all the time, and you can do other things while people are talking about subjects that are not interesting to you.
And there is one unspoken piece. Real decisions happen in person, and then may be just repeated via email for CYA purposes. Remote communication may be solved, but the reality of making hard decisions was not.
I've worked for Swiss companies from the west coast of North America (9 hours difference). It's not perfect, but I started early and they kept an eye on slack until late. Most of the time we communicated in the couple hours of overlap we had.
It works because as a developer it's a plus to have multiple hours of good focus time with no meetings or interruptions. Plus we can cover each other for pager duty so nobody has to normally wake in the middle of the night.
I think remote work greatly increases the circle of people you're competing with. I don't recommend trying to be remote only unless you're world class - because the world is technically your competition.
That said there are lots of reasons most people in Vietnam or India are not actually in competition with me. Being able to communicate fluently in English and divine requirements from non technical people who don't know what they want is still the most important part of the job. You can be the best programmer in the world, but if you can't do that, you'll just build the wrong things beautifully and ahead of time.
Then there is the trust issue. People need to know they can trust you with their code, customers, and business. That's a challenge if they've never met you in person. It's a bigger challenge if you live in the developing world - maybe that shouldn't be true, but it is. I had more trouble getting jobs when I lived in Panama.
Ive been on projects like this as well (the other way though - working from Spain for clients in San Francisco). You can definetly make it work, but its far from ideal. As you go through your day, questions inevitably pop up outside of the overlap hours. If you have to wait until the next day to get answers, you either have to pause what you are doing and switch to something else, or continue under assumptions that might be proven wrong the next day.
Coming back to the states and being able to collaborate real time throughout the day was always a boost to productivity.
In my digital nomad days, the golden place for a client was always New York. This is because it would allow me to have solid overlap from anywhere in the states, and also good enough overlap in Europe.
> I think remote work greatly increases the circle of people you're competing with. I don't recommend trying to be remote only unless you're world class - because the world is technically your competition.
Another perspective, from a remote-only employee away from all the world's tech hubs: there just aren't that many local jobs to choose from. Remote work really makes it possible for me to have a job in this field where every other company is complaining about shortage of talent.. and I don't have to leave home & everything behind and move into a big city (I don't like cities btw).
Trust, overlap of working hours, language, and culture are huge -- and often insurmountable.
Having dealt with Tata, Cap Gemini, Genpack, CTS, HCL, and a handful of smaller groups in the Philippines, I'd avoid offshore workers if at all possible. Would absolutely hire qualified Indians and Filipinos in the US, but outsourcing is dicey.
When I was at Intel, they had outsourced graphics driver development to Panang. Within a year they had created a large number of US jobs for folks who had to rebuild the work from Panang and validate/test/fix any new working coming back from Panang.
There is a difference between a cheap foreign engineer without formal training and a trained domestic engineer. Anyone who thinks every type of labor can be outsourced to cheaper labor markets has no understanding of the phrase "You get what you pay for".
Sure, the call center guy telling you to reboot can be outsourced trivially, move up the stack and you may be making a large fiscal mistake. This is discounting the much higher fraud rate attached with outsourced labor as well.
> There is a difference between a cheap foreign engineer without formal training and a trained domestic engineer.
IMO there's no difference between a trained domestic engineer and a trained foreign engineer. Foreign vs domestic isn't a meaningful difference.
However. Existing tech hubs got their cachet for having the best and the brightest, which in turn draws in the best and the brightest. Companies have to pay more for talent on average in hubs because the talent has self-selected for a high concentration of great folks.
That doesn't mean there isn't an assortment of great folks elsewhere who just didn't feel like moving, but IMO, more than likely, the majority of the great folks are already in tech hubs. I think the risk is overstated.
Fun fact, you can get good foreign engineers as good as any SF engineer but they also tend to be as costly as their US counterpart maybe slightly less do to lower living costs.
This is nothing but racism. Foreign engineers are no inherently worse than "domestic" born and raised. For proof, just visit any Silicon Valley company office. You will see nothing but foreign born engineers.
> someone has to be the "top dog" attracting the top talent
As I said in my comment, this is the big shift I would be looking for. The shift in the top dogs. The top dog could become a Chinese company snagging US expertise rather than the other way around. That could then create effects where US workers are applying to jobs abroad.
The real competition might not be positioning yourself as the talent. The real competition of the future might be attracting the talent. Once you get _that_ shift, then this conversation takes a totally different turn.
I can't imagine any of my US coworkers every working for a Chinese company. The non-zero chance of being sent to a 're-education camp' if you ever have to travel is a big concern
> Real time, remote communication through tools like zoom, slack, and lucidchart (in my humble opinion) has been solved. It might take some getting used to, but in the right environment a group of properly motivated individuals can achieve the same productivity as their peers in a conference room.
What is not solved, of course, is how a remote-only employee can build trust and relationships with peers.
In my opinion that’s the reason a lot of remote work is working well right now. Everybody already knows each other.
> What is not solved, of course, is how a remote-only employee can build trust and relationships with peers.
You're saying that trust can't be built virtually? I think there are online communities whose members would say they trust each other, and can collaborate and work together just fine. A lot of open source communities certainly work on this basis.
Besides, working remote-only doesn't mean occasional meetups or virtual events (gaming, etc.) couldn't be held to bring the team more socially together, but I don't think this is a requirement.
Of course, trust is subjective, so others will feel differently about what it takes to establish it for all involved, but that applies for physical communication as well.
Through projects? I'm working remotely and it's the same as in person. First few months is about everyone feeling each other out once you understand more you give people more trust in those areas.
I don't think that 'Tennessee' is the correct spelling for Shenzhen. The low cost of living states in the US are still expensive compared to low cost of living countries. There is engineering talent around the world, and I don't see how the rural parts of the US are going to compete with more urban populations in other well educated parts of the world.
Anectodal, but I spent a year on a recent project collaborating with a group of firmware engineers in Shenzhen, and it was an absolute nightmare. Apart from the timezones, the code quality was horrendous and basically never worked correctly. They also ignored all common standards, and made assumptions about things like ordering of fields in JSON. None of their engineers spoke english, so code communication had to go though the project manager who wasn't technical.
I can see how english fluent Mexican, South American and Canadian employees will be in competition - this is already happening, but I think that China might be one of the last places I would higher a developer due to the huge time difference and their poor english speaking ability.
Actually if you look at cost of living data, the USA is in quite an interesting position. It contains both some of the most expensive and cheapest cost of living in the developed world. Salaries in some areas are some of the highest in the world, and in other places are closer to Eastern Europe or South America once you've accounted for things like taxes and healthcare. There's a seriously huge gap in pay when looking at Rust Belt Ohio vs the Bay Area.
Two kids go to school at Ohio State in the same program. One moves to SF and makes 200k right out of school. The other stays in Ohio and has a starting salary of 55k doing similar work. I don't think you need to worry about the Chinese coming for your tech jobs. In a remote world, the Buckeyes will get there first.
Offshoring has been a thing for years, we already know how it plays out. There are distinct disadvantages, and a lot of companies have been bringing development back into the US as a result. My company is one of them.
If you really want offshoring to work, you at least have to move 100% of your development staff overseas. Really you need to move 100% of your engineering altogether, and maybe a good chunk of your leadership as well.
Tennessee has a huge advantage over places like China and India simply due to communication. Language fluency, cultural similarity, and a low timezone offset all very much contribute to a successful team.
> Asynchronous communication across timezones has not been solved, and I struggle to see how it would be.
I disagree, at least if we are talking about what tools to use. But many people who are used to being face-to-face aren't used to async. Async communications require patience, foresight, and good writing skills. You need to envision the end result of the collaboration, provide as much of your perspective as possible without writing a wall of text, and ask good questions. Then, in 8 hours, your coworkers do the same. And over a few days, consensus arrives.
Easier said than done, I admit. It takes time and deliberate practice to do this well. It is not how people are used to collaborating. But that does not mean it doesn't work - it means people only succeed when they put in the effort learn new communication skills.
Patience, foresight, and good writing skills don't solve the fundamental problem that a consensus in 3 days is less valuable than a consensus in 30 minutes. Any long sequence of consensus-based decisions becomes infeasible in the asynchronous model.
>I still think the Facebooks and Googles will pay a lot more - someone has to be the "top dog" attracting the top talent. The question is, how much more?
They will pay more. But Facebook has already announced they'll readjust salaries to people who work from home in lower COL areas.
That’s not quite true. They said they’ll adjust salaries according to the “market rate” of the location they’re hiring in, which doesn’t always line up with cost of living.
This sucks for people living in London, for example, where developer salaries are low but the cost of living is high.
> Asynchronous communication across timezones has not been solved
The company I work for has offices in Europe an throughout the US and Canada. We span 11 time zones, and we are absolutely able to make it work. My team has 7 people and only 2 are in the same office.
The trick is to have multiple communications channels, good collaboration tools, and to hire excellent communicators.
I agree from experience that straight outsourcing, where you throw a language barrier in with the time zone issue, is not a solved problem, but purely working across timezones is very doable,
Suppose you have two engineers, one in America, one in India. PRs cannot be merged without an approval. Suppose the average PR requires 3 back-and-forth comments before it gets merged.
In the same timezone this gets merged in an hour. In a different timezones its days.
> There is nothing that makes developers in San Francisco more talented than their counterparts living in Tennessee
I think there's more to this. There's a "network effect" of living in a place like SV. I felt that the bar was much higher in the West Coast due to the high density of companies and talent attracted.
> What globalization did to manufacturing jobs, remote work will do to many service jobs.
This is bait. It's taken as a given rather than a hypothesis to be proven, which invalidates most of this post for me.
Issues with the analogy:
- Offshoring existed before remote work was popularized. For the many of "your jobs" up to be "taken" that shift has already occurred.
- Outsourcing is not a magic bullet. Timezone gaps, communication style, expert knowledge, and legal compliance are all issues that previous outsourcers to call centers have already discovered.
- Significant gaps remain between "tier-1" and "tier-2" support. Effective deployment of offshoring requires using the two to complement one another, not trying to use the latter to replace the former.
No matter what it is that your company is selling, tricky situations will come up that needed to be escalated to an experienced customer success team, whether that's the founder or a dedicated team. Being able to recruit globally doesn't magically make building that team any easier.
> But if company goes 'remote' much more work becomes outsourcing worthy.
Again, there's a difference between "outsourcing worthy" and "can reliably outsourced for enough cost savings for the whole thing to not be ROI negative". And, that's my point. Companies going remote doesn't magically jump start geographic labor arbitrage from zero. That geographic labor arbitrage has been ongoing for a long time.
> Now, you can either hire someone from San Francisco and subsidize their obscene rent, or you can hire someone from Omaha. You can get the same work done, but cheaper. What would you choose?
This depends on the assumption that there's a big supply of workers in Omaha that are able to step in and do the job. I'm an outsider, but I'd guess that the people worth $600,000 Facebook salaries are already living there and working for Facebook. And then there's the question of whether those jobs are the ones that can be done remote as well as in a specific location. You have to ask why, if there were such big savings on the table, these companies hadn't already moved in this direction. I don't think it's as clear-cut as many are making this out to be.
Within software at least, there are simply more people that have significant 'clock time' working within well run software companies in San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, etc.
It's no different than college football players that spend their four years in well run systems that run pro style offenses. Sure, there may be a kid that has insane athletic ability that is playing at Calhoun Community College, but someone like Jerry Juedy ( wide receiver for Alabama ) is the player that the Denver Broncos will choose if they can get him.
There simply aren't as many well run software companies in Omaha as there are in Seattle. And one could argue that the best free agents are going to be the ones coming out of those cities who can command higher market rates because companies believe there is higher ROI.
Yes, exactly. I've learned much more in the last two years working at a big tech co than I did at a small software company in the midwest, making me a much stronger engineer.
I've traveled to a lot of customer sites throughout the Midwest and to a couple dozen of their offshore plants in Mexico and China. Some of those customers are giant automotive OEMs and Tier 1 manufacturers with brand new glassy R&D labs with brand name equipment and Ivy League engineers making salaries well into the 6 figures. But some are tiny, self-taught, rural mom-and-pop outfits working from their garage with used equipment who might make more money as a line worker in the former shops.
One critical thing to I've really come to experience in my travels is that all humans are basically the same. Those Ivy League engineers are no more intelligent or hard-working or creative than the guy in his garage or the site engineer from the Mexican or Chinese state university, instead it's often the opposite. If they're able to use the people, tools, and budget their position affords them, they can be more productive, but on the spot without those aids if anything they're less productive.
The only differences are social connections, credentials, resources, the value multiplier from the volume that goes through their business, and the fraction of that value they're able to extract.
The former three factors stack up against the engineer from Omaha. The last two mean that Facebook or Ford can easily afford those higher salaries while the Omaha garage cannot.
I also think people are overestimating the impact that FAANG going full remote will have on the tech world. I know that they're trend setters, but a lot of companies have already been operating full remote/remote friendly and offering perfectly fine wages.
I really only see net-positive from this cultural shift. Frankly its obscene that location matters more than talent currently.
> I'd guess that the people worth $600,000 Facebook salaries are already living there and working for Facebook.
Yes! I think this is true. However, the more interesting development to me is what happens 10 years from now. The engineers who are making $600k in SF are typically 10 years into their career (if not more). This is the biggest knock against expanding into places like Omaha- there's plenty of entry-level talent, but little, if any, mid-level to senior talent.
In Edmonton (Canada), where I'm from, there's an awesome university that graduates tons of CS grads who immediately head to the Bay Area, because they can make 4x more there. As such, most of the work in town isn't sophisticated- there's lots of web development shops, but not many jobs doing sophisticated engineering at the level of, say, Facebook or Google.
As a result, you're right, there's not many people who could get a $600k offer from Facebook. But! If these companies start supporting remote work, we could see tech ecosystems developing, and we could see new grads staying in these places, and building ecosystems around them.
To answer your question about:
"why, if there were such big savings on the table, these companies hadn't already moved in this direction."
I think the answer is as follows:
1. New grads need more experienced talent to help mentor them and ensure that they're seen as productive.
2. All of the companies' offices have historically been in certain locations, so we either need to a) have the new grads move to somewhere we have experienced talent, or b) need to have experienced people move to where the new grads are.
We see both of these- companies regularly will start new offices once they can get sufficiently experienced people to move there, but only when they can get that. This is the main reason (aiui) why many of the large tech cos in the Bay Area are concentrated in the Bay- there are no senior level people who are interested/willing to move.
I left New York to move and be closer to family about 4 years ago. The local market does not pay well for software developers, but I've managed to find steady contracting work and with the lower cost of living have been saving more money.
If you can find decision-makers and demonstrate quality work to them, and start planting the seeds that you would be available for contracting, there is a good chance you can make your move back to Omaha within a year.
just as a counter point, and using a throwaway because I don't want to leak net worth stuff. I'm in a flyover state (started in SoCal, not remote). Not a FAANG. Base salary is 200k and I have about $200k per year in RSU, not to mention the IPO that gave me about $1M. I'm a distributed systems developer working on multi-tenant systems for hundreds of thousands of paying customers doing multiple billions of calls from customers that multiplex into larger internal load on our DCs. I've grown with a company from a couple dozen employees to thousands. Through IPOs and acquisitions (from both sides). This gives me some more perspective on working in different sized orgs with long time scales and a deep understanding of operations and maintaining software while switching out legacy code for new code (the proverbial changing out wings on a plane in flight).
I'm sure there is not a big supply of folks like me anywhere, and most of us are probably doing work at FAANGs and such. Truth is, FAANGs can't afford me because I'm not jumping ship for anything less than full time remote with good people on a product I think is worthwhile for anything under $600k/yr. I'd actually like to start something around edtech, so maybe I'll look into that if I lose my golden gig.
Big IT does not care, they make bank despite bleeding stupid money. Reorg after reorg, projects canceled left and right, expensive consultants onboard not pulling their weight, cloud costs through the roof, the list goes on and on and on.
Before covid most companies were hiring like crazy, it is not either/or, they want all those workers, both the people in SF and in Omaha too.
The implication from this litter of thinkpieces on HN is that proximity to a tech hub (SV/NY) is your only competitive advantage as a knowledge worker—your butt is close to their chair. This runs counter to the other prevailing wisdom about SV/NY, which is that those areas are hubs—and essential to the tech industry—because the world's top talent is drawn to it.
As someone who is unable to move to California due to family, I've always seen the biggest benefit I am missing to be not applying to jobs close by, but being the proximity to people I can connect with who can help me (and my ideas) grow.
It's an old cliche, but true, that if you surround yourself with people smarter/better than yourself then you will likely get better yourself; conversely, if you are the smartest person in the room on X (no one is the smartest in the room on everything), then there is no forcing function driving you to get better other than one you artificially create for yourself.
"The room" has lost most of its meaning, hasn't it? You're no longer limited to working with people who live within driving distance of yourself, you can now meet super smart people from all over the world on lots of websites, talk to them, work with them, learn from them, get inspired by them.
So you think every node.js / rails developer that happens to live in SV and work in a startup is the next Linus? Of course they're lots of ordinary developers working and living there.
And yes, being born American / European is a huge advantage over 80% of the rest of humanity.
Seriously. There are a ton of wannabes up there (entrepreneurial and technical) just like there are wannabe actors in LA. A lot of incredible talent missing at those companies because people simply have zero desire to live there. I can appreciate the Bay Area but it's just not my style (weather, culture, lack of diversity in industry, etc). I'd bounce to wine country or the forests up north if I lived up there now.
Things that don't make sense tend to get adjusted during bad economic times. I've worked with alot of companies as a customer, and at end of the day, none of the stakeholders are getting bang for the buck. Companies set money on fire, employees are mostly living a middle class lifestyle at an insane level of compensation.
I live out in the provinces, and we pay 20-30% of the rate for SV talent. My lifestyle in SV would require 7x the compensation without me being any smarter or skilled than I am. NYC is more of a real place and is probably less inflated, alot of the premium there is really about domain expertise.
> NYC is more of a real place and is probably less inflated, alot of the premium there is really about domain expertise.
We'll see. I'm betting you're wrong - NYC has nothing on SF in tech expertise and the rest of the country (especially outside of the West coast) doesn't have much on it either.
The same set of people aren't saying both things. The people who believe SV and NY have top talent are exactly the ones who think remote work is great. I'm excited about the trend; a bigger pool of talented engineers for me to work with means I'll be able to accomplish more and have to compromise less on my career goals.
The people who worry that remote work will be a disaster are the ones who never believed SV engineers were more talented in the first place.
There are multiple layers. I think SV will remain a hub from a commercial standpoint, so if you're fishing for VC money that's still where you want to be.
From a purely technical standpoint, we'll see, but tbh, as others have said, outsourcing has been happening for decades now and if anything the wave is currently retreating.
I can count three VCs in my immediate circle of contacts that are expanding up and down the West Coast at least.
The NIMBYs in SF are going to get their wish: shrinking the city and collapsing its major industry. As another poster stated: things that don't make sense get adjusted in bad economic times. Things like paying 7-10X for real estate when you're in a digital industry...
VC money being geographically concentrated in SV seems like the kind of ingrained inefficiency that VCs themselves clamor on about disrupting excessively. Dealflow is a solvable problem for distributed futures.
It can be both. Prior to the current situation, many/most companies preferred people who could/would commute to a company office. Which gives more options to people willing to work near one of those hubs and mostly work in an office.
At the same time, many people prefer to live near one of those hubs whether because they just like NYC, Boston, Austin, Bay Area, Seattle, etc. or because they believe it gives them more flexibility in changing employers. (And/or being in proximity to many like-minded individuals.)
immigration doesn't select for the most talented, it selects for the younger, the male, the willing, the otherwise unburdened etc. The intellectual bar to enter SV is not that high. The willingness to relocate, assimilate to the culture etc, is.
As someone who basically never worked in an office since I began working as a dev in the early 90s; you have to protect yourself and carve out niches and knowledge that takes actual time and elbow grease to catch up to. Sure many people anywhere in the world can do what I do, but with the deep knowledge I have about some subjects (banking/payments/insurances backends & production firmware), it is not very likely to get a better deal as I speak the same language of all parties involved and I did it many times already. So it is not trial and error. It simply takes actual time to sit down and suffer for years/decades. You can hire entire teams cheaply with great looking resumes and fail because some of these things are not hard/difficult per-se but you have to have done them before to succeed fast.
But yes, if you shoot with hail and focus on the latest and greatest, you might be easily replaced. I am surprised how cheap (embarrassingly so) I can find good react/node devs; that tells me it is really bad to specialise in that...
100% agree that experience and good communication skills are key. People will happily pay more for somebody that understands them the first time they explain something, that comes back with questions about things they hadn't thought about and has already dealt with similar issues before and can provide guidance. If you're also able to at least manage yourself on the project, you will be loved.
Imho, freelancing on smaller projects is great for learning those skills, because you will either learn them quickly or you will sink like a stone.
try to find cheap react/node devs in the U.S, good luck with that. The cost of skills doesn't always translate to how hard it is to acquire it. I mean, some medical nurses study for 5-10 years and specialise and specialise only to earn 1/2 what a react dev earns in the U.S
I think we were talking about work-from-home/remote people and for me that is ‘earth’; I can find really good people for next to nothing because everyone jumped on the bandwagon. And this is not a stab at the technology; it is saying that it is a not a niche; I have maintained an yoy upward income for over 25 years by picking things that are valuable always. And, in line with this article, if I can have excellent react/node (and Go.. and C# and Java...) people for $1k/mo or less, then that is not for me. It might work well now; I want things to work out longterm. Because, you know, shit happens and they might kick everyone but the bottomline out...
The extent to which it's true entirely depends on what "your job" is. Routine, non-creative work that can be performed asynchronously, with limited contact with others - the tech equivalent of craft piecework - sure, that can usually be done from anywhere: things like answering (simple) tech support requests, maintaining a static codebase with no new requirements, or implementing a feature for which the requirements and technical design have already been specified by others.
Having myself worked on teams that located such tasks in lower-cost-of-labor regions, I can attest that most of those cost savings have already been realized.
But creative work, like proposing the problems to solve in the first place, facilitating the discussion of how to solve them, and designing the technical and human solution - especially for problems at the intersection of technology and culture - those are not easily shifted to remote work. If the outsourced/remote worker is competent enough to work in that kind of capacity remotely, they will cost as much the non-remote worker.
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What you actually see if you look at remote work job boards is many (if not most) companies in say, the USA, want remote people from the USA (or at least the same timezone as the USA). I think this is what will happen in other countries too.
What they failed to realize is what they outsourced were their bottom tier workers, the unproductive people. They got excited by the reduced cost with minimal reduction in effectiveness.
When they try to outsource their better talent that’s where they failed to recognize good talent is costly everywhere. You might save some salary but it’s offset by lots of other things from time shift to organizational culture.
That might be true to some extent, but I think there's a problem with that line of thought.
People are a "moving target". What may be a bottom-tier worker now, could very well be a valuable employee in 5-10 years. Many folks have built their career by starting at a low level and then getting promoted and upskilled over time through hard work and commitment. Starting at a low position and advancing is becoming, sadly, a rare thing.
The "first wave" and subsequent waves of outsourcing have to a large extent eliminated paths of career advancement for many workers. At first it was unskilled laborers and now it has been creeping up to virtually all technical job descriptions. The wet-dream of MBA's who promote this stuff is corporations consisting of a few C-level people and their board, and then a layer of fab-less product and operations people who just manage supply-chain and services stuff with external vendors. It's an ugly picture but that's what the global supply chain people want.
They’re the same human being before and after graduation day. Just as talented the day before as the day after. It’s the pedigree variable that explains the vast majority of the salary.
You’re saying something similar, it’s just that you’re getting distracted by the red herring of the out sourced worker. You should be analyzing the difference between a Harvard and a UC Irvine student, whose average salary difference is as large as the difference between an average US programmer and Accenture contract off shore programmer. It’s got nothing to do with time shifts and organizational culture. You’re looking at this way too logically, along with many other commenters. Indeed I think hardly anyone, including the people who actually say work for Facebook, understand really why one person is paid more or less than another, at their own companies or elsewhere.
That aside you’re onto something with low skilled workers being replaced. The net result of hoovering up low paying programming jobs and sending them to another statistical group (not in this country) is that programming salaries appear to rise. Which is exactly what happened. So if you are of the opinion that programming salaries rising reflects increase in demand, so you should get into programming boot camp, you’d be like 200% wrong. You’re chasing a low salary programming job that doesn’t exist. Which again, is sort of exactly what happened.
...but it's really just a comfortable lie we tell ourselves.
I don't think that's correct. They outsourced lower-skill jobs that could be done remotely to regions with lower labor costs.
With companies being forced to modify their internal processes to be remote-first, what they will realize is that remote does work once they align to it. And once they realize that, there is no stopping them. Since the benefits of having a remote first company well aligned to working efficiently far out-weigh the benefits of a co-located team.
For example a few years ago I worked with a programmer from India who was part of a "remote consulting company" based in the Netherlands. The experience of working with her was identical to working with the larger offshore companies based in India. As in, time zone, cultural and communication barriers were substantial and disruptive to our productivity.
In my -South American- country the trend is to look outwards if you're hiring remotely; European countries seem to fit this description too.
Some industries are heavily regulated in the US and having non-US based employees can become a real headache for US companies. A lot of US companies have background check as part of their hiring process, pretty hard to do for someone not US-based.
Also, if you target only the continental US you're already talking about companies that may be spread across 4 major timezones. If you start including Europe you're now dealing with people that are gonna be more than 6 hours removed from your HQ's timezone.
No I don't think so. They look with within EU.
If you're in Estonia and looking to hire a software engineer for remote work, maybe you end up hiring someone from Poland or Spain. That's still EU hiring in the EU, more akin to what you're referring to with the US. On average the smaller the country, it probably increases the odds that more of the labor you're looking for is going to be outside of your own borders.
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It’s also hard to build an engineering culture when you don’t engage with your coworkers often. You have to build credibility so you can work through difficult issues - that’s hard to do when your primary medium of communication is Slack.
My last company ended up outsourcing from Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay and Argentina with good results. We often didn't tell clients they were offshore and billed US rates for them and pocketed the difference. Over the course of about 5 years we had let go our US-based teams because they were just too difficult to hire and retain for the marginal increase in quality.
If companies want to relocate work to India, or China, or Eastern Europe, they can already do it.
For higher end companies, it wasn’t outsourcing. It was remote offices. The expertise still does move to those countries.
Agreed.
> What you actually see if you look at remote work job boards is many (if not most) companies in say, the USA, want remote people from the USA (or at least the same timezone as the USA). I think this is what will happen in other countries too.
Which realistically they cannot enforce, merely incentivize; I'm pro-remote work, mainly because it can free up roads and reduce emissions for more critical infrastructure and needs in the Market, all while offering people the ability to re-locate to less populated areas and ideally help under development, and boost there local economies there. That includes International/Non-US based countries.
Seems like a win-win to me.
Do you have any examples? I dont see this at all.
You can sell each additional software product at very high margins so it makes sense to spend a bit more on the worker for a slightly better product that will result in many more high margin sales.
Sometimes they found that it was more effective to do low cost work in cheaper US locations (American South, etc...) than India.
I've encountered some of these nearshore companies in E. Europe multiple times over the last decade, business is booming for them.
Useful for CERTAIN types of jobs, especially recurring ones
Anyone can already take your job, as long as they are willing to relocate, or your company opens a new office near them.
It is more important than ever to differentiate yourself. To do that you need to find something to do that you love, and then find (or more often make) a niche in that that that you become one of the top ten people in within your context.
By context I mean you don't need to be the best in the world, you can be the best at X within the Y industry, or within defense consulting, or in the U.S. And you don't need to be the best (though see the quote about being the only), but at least in the top 10.
There are two quotes I am fond of that say similar things much better than I can:
"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it." - Steve Jobs
"You do not merely want to be considered just the best of the best. You want to be considered the only one who does what you do." - Jerry Garcia
Whatever happened to just getting a normal job and putting in an honest day’s labor?
Now we’re expected to become “one of the top ten”... what exactly? How is that supposed to work? What about those of us with families for goodness sake. We can’t all be super Linus Torvalds ninja hackers putting out code 12 hours a day.
"These figurative "low-hanging fruit" from the title include the cultivation of much free, previously unused land; the application and spread of technological breakthroughs, particularly during the period 1880–1940, including transport, refrigeration, electricity, mass communications, and sanitation; and the education of large numbers of smart people who previously received none."[0]
The party is over. Americans are at the top but they aren't getting any higher, and everyone else in the world is catching up. That means Americans have to compete with the rest of global middle class.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Stagnation
If it's true that America really is that way, my advice is look abroad because life is not about your job.
Another way of thinking of this: can you be considered top 10 within a pool of 100 applicants?
Also, who is "top ten" is extremely subjective, based on the company, who is evaluating, and niche. I would guess that within a 100 developer cohort there's not a lot of overlap between the top ten embedded c++ developers and the top ten react developers, and even the top ten that can do both c++ AND react.
> Whatever happened to just getting a normal job and putting in an honest day’s labor?
That doesn't sound very interesting.
At the same time, there are plenty of jobs (in the USA) you could do 16 hrs a day and still not make enough money to provide for your basic needs.
I don't think people have to be top ten or something like that to be useful, but being a meat-based robot is hardly compelling for either side anymore. You need to have at least some skill and you need to make sure you keep developing as the world around you also develops. With human expansion the rate of change itself has changed, and not even a luddite would be unaffected by that.
It’s a bit like recommending someone become one of the top 10 basketball players to make money; someone will do it, but the chances are so slim that it’s a bad recommendation.
Also, how do you define “top 10”?
* Tim Berners-Lee - the web, W3C
* Peter Saint-Andre - XMPP, messaging RFCs
* DHH - Ruby on Rails
* Martin Fowler - Design Patterns
..and many more.
Yes, getting to the Tim Berners-Lee level of industry recognition is unreasonable to expect for most. But I think it is reasonable to think that this is doable, with the depth of the expertise niche needed to be outstanding being inversely proportional to the talent of the expert. One person might have an expertise niche of messaging, while another has RabbitMQ as their main niche. Both are viable to base a living off of.
This where immigration restrictions make a difference. A Brazilian developer has trouble working in SV, but no trouble working remote.
Basically, you're saying only the top 1% will be employable.
This is going to be a new experience for a lot of devs in the bay area that have been spoiled with job offers. Those days are over. I'd say it's time to hunker down, save as much as possible because future employment will be scare. And, there's already a vast oversupply of talent. I'd hate to think what it would look like in 5 years time.
Outsourced people can take your job, for much less money.
Asynchronous communication across timezones has not been solved, and I struggle to see how it would be. A lot of collaboration requires a conversation and instant feedback from another party. You can't collaborate like this when there is a delay of 8 hours instead of 8 seconds between responses.
So "anywhere" is a bit of a stretch. That being said, absolutely this will happen across the United States. There is nothing that makes developers in San Francisco more talented than their counterparts living in Tennessee, so if those can be gotten cheaper, I can see how the overall price would go down.
Presumably though, such an effect would also cause rents and property values to go down in big cities. I can see how the natural evolution of such an idea is that wealth will be more evenly spread out throughout the country, instead of being concentrated in cities.
I still think the Facebooks and Googles will pay a lot more - someone has to be the "top dog" attracting the top talent. The question is, how much more?
Unfortunately, that's not the case.
Remote meetings can be far more frustrating and inefficient because of latency, total lack of turn-taking cues, inability to read emotional expressions of concern or worry on one person or to "read the room", emotional fatigue from lack of cues, and so on. And that's all assuming best-case scenario that your equipment and internet are working well. People pay attention less, speak up less, and so on.
Now, this isn't to say that remote communication isn't useful -- it's obviously far better than not having it at all. And even when you're in the office, many teams are distributed anyways across offices.
But remote communication and meetings have in no way been "solved". They still present elementary problems like when someone asks "who has thoughts?", there's 10 seconds of excruciating silence followed by four people speaking simultaneously, then another 20 seconds trying to figure out which one person will actually speak, where nobody wants to seem like the aggressive bully OR never get to speak.
It's really hard.
If you have a meeting with 12 people, and most of them are not engaged, the problem isn't necessarily the video call, its more like the majority of those people shouldn't be in the meeting at all, and would just benefit from a written summary.
If you have a meeting where 4 people are jumping in to share an opinion on one topic, that sounds like too many cooks in the kitchen, not a video call problem.
From my experience with remote meetings, the ones that work the best are those between two or three people where everyone is informed and the subject of discussion is concrete. These kinds of meetings are just as productive as the real thing. The kinds of meetings that tend to not be productive are the ones that have a dozen people in the call, with a few people talking and the rest watching the clock until the hour is over. These kinds of meetings are a drag in the real world as well.
I suspect after an adjustment period that we'll reach an equilibrium similar to what we had before as far as effectiveness.
There is an interesting social phenomenon going on here which I think is often missed. The old world was designed around the preferences of the most extroverted people. Those people are losing that privilege, and I understand how difficult it must be. Honestly, I'm extremely introverted, and somewhat autistic, enjoy isolation, etc. So if this whole thing has bothered me a little bit, I understand it must feel like torture for someone on the other end of the introvert/extrovert spectrum. Hopefully we'll settle one a better medium that is more amenable to the median person than what we had before.
It works because as a developer it's a plus to have multiple hours of good focus time with no meetings or interruptions. Plus we can cover each other for pager duty so nobody has to normally wake in the middle of the night.
I think remote work greatly increases the circle of people you're competing with. I don't recommend trying to be remote only unless you're world class - because the world is technically your competition.
That said there are lots of reasons most people in Vietnam or India are not actually in competition with me. Being able to communicate fluently in English and divine requirements from non technical people who don't know what they want is still the most important part of the job. You can be the best programmer in the world, but if you can't do that, you'll just build the wrong things beautifully and ahead of time.
Then there is the trust issue. People need to know they can trust you with their code, customers, and business. That's a challenge if they've never met you in person. It's a bigger challenge if you live in the developing world - maybe that shouldn't be true, but it is. I had more trouble getting jobs when I lived in Panama.
Coming back to the states and being able to collaborate real time throughout the day was always a boost to productivity.
In my digital nomad days, the golden place for a client was always New York. This is because it would allow me to have solid overlap from anywhere in the states, and also good enough overlap in Europe.
Another perspective, from a remote-only employee away from all the world's tech hubs: there just aren't that many local jobs to choose from. Remote work really makes it possible for me to have a job in this field where every other company is complaining about shortage of talent.. and I don't have to leave home & everything behind and move into a big city (I don't like cities btw).
I don't think I'm world class.
Having dealt with Tata, Cap Gemini, Genpack, CTS, HCL, and a handful of smaller groups in the Philippines, I'd avoid offshore workers if at all possible. Would absolutely hire qualified Indians and Filipinos in the US, but outsourcing is dicey.
There is a difference between a cheap foreign engineer without formal training and a trained domestic engineer. Anyone who thinks every type of labor can be outsourced to cheaper labor markets has no understanding of the phrase "You get what you pay for".
Sure, the call center guy telling you to reboot can be outsourced trivially, move up the stack and you may be making a large fiscal mistake. This is discounting the much higher fraud rate attached with outsourced labor as well.
IMO there's no difference between a trained domestic engineer and a trained foreign engineer. Foreign vs domestic isn't a meaningful difference.
However. Existing tech hubs got their cachet for having the best and the brightest, which in turn draws in the best and the brightest. Companies have to pay more for talent on average in hubs because the talent has self-selected for a high concentration of great folks.
That doesn't mean there isn't an assortment of great folks elsewhere who just didn't feel like moving, but IMO, more than likely, the majority of the great folks are already in tech hubs. I think the risk is overstated.
As I said in my comment, this is the big shift I would be looking for. The shift in the top dogs. The top dog could become a Chinese company snagging US expertise rather than the other way around. That could then create effects where US workers are applying to jobs abroad.
The real competition might not be positioning yourself as the talent. The real competition of the future might be attracting the talent. Once you get _that_ shift, then this conversation takes a totally different turn.
What is not solved, of course, is how a remote-only employee can build trust and relationships with peers.
In my opinion that’s the reason a lot of remote work is working well right now. Everybody already knows each other.
You're saying that trust can't be built virtually? I think there are online communities whose members would say they trust each other, and can collaborate and work together just fine. A lot of open source communities certainly work on this basis.
Besides, working remote-only doesn't mean occasional meetups or virtual events (gaming, etc.) couldn't be held to bring the team more socially together, but I don't think this is a requirement.
Of course, trust is subjective, so others will feel differently about what it takes to establish it for all involved, but that applies for physical communication as well.
I can see how english fluent Mexican, South American and Canadian employees will be in competition - this is already happening, but I think that China might be one of the last places I would higher a developer due to the huge time difference and their poor english speaking ability.
Two kids go to school at Ohio State in the same program. One moves to SF and makes 200k right out of school. The other stays in Ohio and has a starting salary of 55k doing similar work. I don't think you need to worry about the Chinese coming for your tech jobs. In a remote world, the Buckeyes will get there first.
If you really want offshoring to work, you at least have to move 100% of your development staff overseas. Really you need to move 100% of your engineering altogether, and maybe a good chunk of your leadership as well.
Tennessee has a huge advantage over places like China and India simply due to communication. Language fluency, cultural similarity, and a low timezone offset all very much contribute to a successful team.
I disagree, at least if we are talking about what tools to use. But many people who are used to being face-to-face aren't used to async. Async communications require patience, foresight, and good writing skills. You need to envision the end result of the collaboration, provide as much of your perspective as possible without writing a wall of text, and ask good questions. Then, in 8 hours, your coworkers do the same. And over a few days, consensus arrives.
Easier said than done, I admit. It takes time and deliberate practice to do this well. It is not how people are used to collaborating. But that does not mean it doesn't work - it means people only succeed when they put in the effort learn new communication skills.
They will pay more. But Facebook has already announced they'll readjust salaries to people who work from home in lower COL areas.
This sucks for people living in London, for example, where developer salaries are low but the cost of living is high.
True, but the workaround is I'm willing to adjust my work hour to fit my team. In a big city, life can still be 'lively' during the night.
The company I work for has offices in Europe an throughout the US and Canada. We span 11 time zones, and we are absolutely able to make it work. My team has 7 people and only 2 are in the same office.
The trick is to have multiple communications channels, good collaboration tools, and to hire excellent communicators.
I agree from experience that straight outsourcing, where you throw a language barrier in with the time zone issue, is not a solved problem, but purely working across timezones is very doable,
By focusing on excellent written communication.
Great written comms is hard, and (like coding) requires lots of deliberate practice and training.
Most people and companies gloss over this, but it makes a world of difference if you're operating across time zones.
Great internal writing is what separate the great companies from the average.
Suppose you have two engineers, one in America, one in India. PRs cannot be merged without an approval. Suppose the average PR requires 3 back-and-forth comments before it gets merged.
In the same timezone this gets merged in an hour. In a different timezones its days.
I think there's more to this. There's a "network effect" of living in a place like SV. I felt that the bar was much higher in the West Coast due to the high density of companies and talent attracted.
This is bait. It's taken as a given rather than a hypothesis to be proven, which invalidates most of this post for me.
Issues with the analogy:
- Offshoring existed before remote work was popularized. For the many of "your jobs" up to be "taken" that shift has already occurred.
- Outsourcing is not a magic bullet. Timezone gaps, communication style, expert knowledge, and legal compliance are all issues that previous outsourcers to call centers have already discovered.
- Significant gaps remain between "tier-1" and "tier-2" support. Effective deployment of offshoring requires using the two to complement one another, not trying to use the latter to replace the former.
No matter what it is that your company is selling, tricky situations will come up that needed to be escalated to an experienced customer success team, whether that's the founder or a dedicated team. Being able to recruit globally doesn't magically make building that team any easier.
This is different though, because those companies weren't 'remote' so offshoring is not viable without that prerequiste.
But if company goes 'remote' much more work becomes outsourcing worthy.
Again, there's a difference between "outsourcing worthy" and "can reliably outsourced for enough cost savings for the whole thing to not be ROI negative". And, that's my point. Companies going remote doesn't magically jump start geographic labor arbitrage from zero. That geographic labor arbitrage has been ongoing for a long time.
This depends on the assumption that there's a big supply of workers in Omaha that are able to step in and do the job. I'm an outsider, but I'd guess that the people worth $600,000 Facebook salaries are already living there and working for Facebook. And then there's the question of whether those jobs are the ones that can be done remote as well as in a specific location. You have to ask why, if there were such big savings on the table, these companies hadn't already moved in this direction. I don't think it's as clear-cut as many are making this out to be.
It's no different than college football players that spend their four years in well run systems that run pro style offenses. Sure, there may be a kid that has insane athletic ability that is playing at Calhoun Community College, but someone like Jerry Juedy ( wide receiver for Alabama ) is the player that the Denver Broncos will choose if they can get him.
There simply aren't as many well run software companies in Omaha as there are in Seattle. And one could argue that the best free agents are going to be the ones coming out of those cities who can command higher market rates because companies believe there is higher ROI.
One critical thing to I've really come to experience in my travels is that all humans are basically the same. Those Ivy League engineers are no more intelligent or hard-working or creative than the guy in his garage or the site engineer from the Mexican or Chinese state university, instead it's often the opposite. If they're able to use the people, tools, and budget their position affords them, they can be more productive, but on the spot without those aids if anything they're less productive.
The only differences are social connections, credentials, resources, the value multiplier from the volume that goes through their business, and the fraction of that value they're able to extract.
The former three factors stack up against the engineer from Omaha. The last two mean that Facebook or Ford can easily afford those higher salaries while the Omaha garage cannot.
I also think people are overestimating the impact that FAANG going full remote will have on the tech world. I know that they're trend setters, but a lot of companies have already been operating full remote/remote friendly and offering perfectly fine wages.
I really only see net-positive from this cultural shift. Frankly its obscene that location matters more than talent currently.
Yes! I think this is true. However, the more interesting development to me is what happens 10 years from now. The engineers who are making $600k in SF are typically 10 years into their career (if not more). This is the biggest knock against expanding into places like Omaha- there's plenty of entry-level talent, but little, if any, mid-level to senior talent.
In Edmonton (Canada), where I'm from, there's an awesome university that graduates tons of CS grads who immediately head to the Bay Area, because they can make 4x more there. As such, most of the work in town isn't sophisticated- there's lots of web development shops, but not many jobs doing sophisticated engineering at the level of, say, Facebook or Google.
As a result, you're right, there's not many people who could get a $600k offer from Facebook. But! If these companies start supporting remote work, we could see tech ecosystems developing, and we could see new grads staying in these places, and building ecosystems around them.
To answer your question about:
"why, if there were such big savings on the table, these companies hadn't already moved in this direction."
I think the answer is as follows:
1. New grads need more experienced talent to help mentor them and ensure that they're seen as productive.
2. All of the companies' offices have historically been in certain locations, so we either need to a) have the new grads move to somewhere we have experienced talent, or b) need to have experienced people move to where the new grads are.
We see both of these- companies regularly will start new offices once they can get sufficiently experienced people to move there, but only when they can get that. This is the main reason (aiui) why many of the large tech cos in the Bay Area are concentrated in the Bay- there are no senior level people who are interested/willing to move.
Granted, I am just one data point, but it's hard to imagine I am alone...
If you can find decision-makers and demonstrate quality work to them, and start planting the seeds that you would be available for contracting, there is a good chance you can make your move back to Omaha within a year.
I'm sure there is not a big supply of folks like me anywhere, and most of us are probably doing work at FAANGs and such. Truth is, FAANGs can't afford me because I'm not jumping ship for anything less than full time remote with good people on a product I think is worthwhile for anything under $600k/yr. I'd actually like to start something around edtech, so maybe I'll look into that if I lose my golden gig.
Before covid most companies were hiring like crazy, it is not either/or, they want all those workers, both the people in SF and in Omaha too.
Myopic
So which is it?
As someone who is unable to move to California due to family, I've always seen the biggest benefit I am missing to be not applying to jobs close by, but being the proximity to people I can connect with who can help me (and my ideas) grow.
It's an old cliche, but true, that if you surround yourself with people smarter/better than yourself then you will likely get better yourself; conversely, if you are the smartest person in the room on X (no one is the smartest in the room on everything), then there is no forcing function driving you to get better other than one you artificially create for yourself.
I live out in the provinces, and we pay 20-30% of the rate for SV talent. My lifestyle in SV would require 7x the compensation without me being any smarter or skilled than I am. NYC is more of a real place and is probably less inflated, alot of the premium there is really about domain expertise.
We'll see. I'm betting you're wrong - NYC has nothing on SF in tech expertise and the rest of the country (especially outside of the West coast) doesn't have much on it either.
The people who worry that remote work will be a disaster are the ones who never believed SV engineers were more talented in the first place.
Or that technical talent does not really contribute to success as much as the prevailing theories believe?
From a purely technical standpoint, we'll see, but tbh, as others have said, outsourcing has been happening for decades now and if anything the wave is currently retreating.
The NIMBYs in SF are going to get their wish: shrinking the city and collapsing its major industry. As another poster stated: things that don't make sense get adjusted in bad economic times. Things like paying 7-10X for real estate when you're in a digital industry...
At the same time, many people prefer to live near one of those hubs whether because they just like NYC, Boston, Austin, Bay Area, Seattle, etc. or because they believe it gives them more flexibility in changing employers. (And/or being in proximity to many like-minded individuals.)
But yes, if you shoot with hail and focus on the latest and greatest, you might be easily replaced. I am surprised how cheap (embarrassingly so) I can find good react/node devs; that tells me it is really bad to specialise in that...
Imho, freelancing on smaller projects is great for learning those skills, because you will either learn them quickly or you will sink like a stone.
The extent to which it's true entirely depends on what "your job" is. Routine, non-creative work that can be performed asynchronously, with limited contact with others - the tech equivalent of craft piecework - sure, that can usually be done from anywhere: things like answering (simple) tech support requests, maintaining a static codebase with no new requirements, or implementing a feature for which the requirements and technical design have already been specified by others.
Having myself worked on teams that located such tasks in lower-cost-of-labor regions, I can attest that most of those cost savings have already been realized.
But creative work, like proposing the problems to solve in the first place, facilitating the discussion of how to solve them, and designing the technical and human solution - especially for problems at the intersection of technology and culture - those are not easily shifted to remote work. If the outsourced/remote worker is competent enough to work in that kind of capacity remotely, they will cost as much the non-remote worker.