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The unintended consequences of working from home
- smt88 6y agoCan be outsourced. Not will or should be outsourced. If outsourcing were only an issue of money, then every all-remote company would exclusively hire in places like the Phillippines, where there seem to be an abundance of extremely low-cost, English-proficient workers. Money isn't the only issue, of course. Language skills, culture, educational background, security clearance, tax laws, infosec, time zones, law enforcement, etc. are all also factors.
- mdorazio 6y agoThank you. Anyone who has worked extensively with offshore teams knows that there are always trade-offs involved. You can save money, but often at the cost of lower quality, lower maintainability, increased lag times due to time differences and miscommunications, added PM overhead, etc. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't.
- mech422 6y agoit actually seems like the off-shoring craze has died down a bit in the U.S. I think companies realized its not as easy to get right as they thought. I've been working continuously with a team 10 hours away for the past 2-3 years, and it takes some accommodation on both sides....
- blaser-waffle 6y agoThat has generally been my experience as well -- the concrete benefits in terms of lowered OpEx (aka paying less for a worker) is offset by the intangible inefficiencies. It's a lot harder and a lot more chaotic than people realize. Plus automation is eating away at the lower level stuff.
- jandrewrogers 6y agoEven in the realm of pure technical ability, some skills are extremely unevenly distributed. Some skill pools have small populations globally.
- moneywoes 6y agoDo you mind sharing what those skills are so I can focus on them as a younger developer?
- neurostimulant 6y agoML and infosec comes to mind. They are always in demand and companies pay top salary for those skills, but as those skills are hard to master, the supply pool is still limited even after all these years.
- smt88 6y agoIf you want to outsource-proof yourself, develop your soft skills. Consciously practice your technical and business writing, team management, mentorship, sales, presenting, etc. Don't just practice. Find opportunities to leave your comfort zone and get expert feedback (perhaps from someone more senior in your company) about what you did well and what you still have to work on.
- downerending 6y agoGreat advice. For better or worse, being able to talk a good game and schmooze often matters more than technical skill. (Or is a technical skill, if you like.)
- downerending 6y agoNot a terrible idea, but keep in mind that those pools are probably small for a reason. For starters, there may also be very little demand for the skills. Certainly don't neglect your general skills while you're focusing. And if at all possible, get someone to pay you to acquire specialized skills.
- lyjackal 6y agoYeah, although I think we'll still see more "local offshoring" from city to city or state to state. Market rates are cheaper to hire a developer from somewhere in Ohio who doesn't want to move than one in New York
- cable2600 6y agoOr a job that can be automated by an AI program or robots.
- function_seven 6y agoI don't see how that follows. If I can do X in any location, that doesn't mean X is something that is a target for automation. Offshoring and automation are partially orthogonal. Offshore the jobs that can't be automated, automate the jobs that can't be done elsewhere, retain the humans for high-skill or high-touch jobs that resist the first two threats.
- clavalle 6y agoTrue. And if I move to another country I'll let my employer know. Until then, good luck finding another me.
- __m 6y agoWe found a replacement; you are fired
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pasquinelli 6y agoThe graveyard is filled with indispensable men.
- zizee 6y agoI had never heard this quote before: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/21/graveyards-full/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/21/graveyards-full/
- clavalle 6y agoIndispensable? No. Irreplaceable...maybe. I don't technically need my foot. But I suspect my life is a lot easier with the one I have.
- kelnos 6y agoThis comment is flippant, arrogant, and low-effort, but it's true that there are countless companies who have replaced key talent with cheaper, often offshored, substitutes that eventually create disaster for the products they build.
- arkis22 6y agoThe easiest part of my job is writing code. the hardest part is understanding it. Distance doesn't help.
- hewrin 6y agobut does it hurt?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoYes. It's much harder to perform complex communication across cultural, language, and timezone gaps.
- jrockway 6y agoMy experience working in New York on a small team with the rest of the organization in Mountain View is that I got 10x the communication work done when I travelled to Mountain View. Some things are just better sitting around in your cubes or gathering for lunch, versus setting up a video conference, booking rooms, writing an agenda, etc. People can veer off topic. People you didn't invite can show up. People are at their primary workstations with their work open. Collaboration actually happens, rather than a mere "here is a question that will unblock my next day of work". I was an IC with a very small team (who were in New York), so I didn't really need to meet with other teams on a daily basis. But every couple months, I did need to fill the pipeline with future work, and it was much easier to do that in person. I am not sure what this means for a world beyond COVID-19, but right now I feel like everyone is in a holding pattern and are just tweaking their day-to-day applications, rather than planning the next big thing. That is sustainable for a few months, but it will be interesting to see if it's sustainable for longer than that. (Do people ever co-found a startup with someone they've never met in person? Has anyone ever had a summer internship in college remotely? I am very interested in seeing how these things work.)
- benttoothpaste 6y ago> People you didn't invite can show up. To be fair you can have that with remote meetings as well. There is even a name for it: zoom-bombing.
- ageek123 6y agoAm I the only one who goes crazy when they see someone write "outsourced" when they mean "offshored"? These are different concepts.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mehrdadn 6y agoI'd become numb to the distinction at this point, but yes, now that you reminded me it's bothering me too. Similar story with "disclaimer" and "disclosure", "third world" and "developing world", etc.
- goatinaboat 6y agoIf your company starts using Tata or Wipro or whoever, then they are both outsourcing and offshoring so the two concepts are very closely intertwined.
- WheelsAtLarge 6y agoPeople are focusing on the good side of working from home but the fact is that a job from home can be done anywhere in the world. Why would a company limit it self to the U.S? Work from home jobs are going to go to the people that are can do the work and are willing to work for the least compensation.
- triztian 6y agoLegal risk, unfamiliarity with the remote job market, cultural differences. Some companies might no have the internal legal frameworks to hire remote in the US or far less outside the US, as an anecdote a company I used to work for was fully remote but only hired remote on some specific states, this because of tax laws that would vary in each state would complicate their operations. This was a smallish company, less than 40 people.
- buzzkillington 6y agoBecause when I say fanny I don't want to hear from HR.
- samename 6y agoAs smt88 said: > Money isn't the only issue, of course. Language skills, culture, educational background, security clearance, tax laws, infosec, time zones, law enforcement, etc. are all also factors.
- cachestash 6y ago> Why would a company limit it self to the U.S So this is essentially protectionism. I mean if engineers outside the US are just as talented and productive, why should a company only use US engineers, especially if their marketplace is global.
- runawaybottle 6y agoThey should. The concern US developers have is that devaluation doesn’t always occur in sanitary ways. Let’s say you have the same talent elsewhere, it’s likely a company will pay considerably less, and may also take advantage of other factors due to that person’s desperation - overwork, given less input/influence, less career growth/trajectory, more contract based, less full-time, less or no benefits, less laws, etc. So the quality of life for the US developer will not only come down in terms of pay, but also for all those other reasons. The worst part about it is that the off shore workers won’t regain those improvements for awhile (as in, until their standards go up over time - higher pay, etc). It’s a regression on more fronts than compensation, with the enemy not necessarily being developers (where ever they are), but more so the ruthless market mechanisms.
- foogazi 6y agoIt’s already happening Call centers, office assistants are both getting outsourced to other countries or to AI > If your job can be done from anywhere, that doesn’t necessarily mean you get to keep your job with the city salary and have a sea change. It also means a “you” will get a chance at a remote job that you didn’t have access in your region
- deeblering4 6y agos/from home,// - ftfy Any job or task can be outsourced, but there are tradeoffs involved. It’s nothing new.
- sebular 6y agomanual labor caregiver security retail anything in the service industry Why would I bother going on? Sloppy comments like yours have no place here.
- LeifCarrotson 6y agoAll those things can be outsourced to other service contractors, none can be completely offshored.
- avmich 6y agoGood question. Let's see. Some manual work - e.g. some (some!) surgeon work - can be done via tele-presense. I mean, it's being done already. Some others kinds of manual work don't have good (or any) examples - human's hand is a beautifully complex machinery, we aren't close to replicating all its abilities yet. Caregivers - many aspects of that are done remotely. Checking status? Remote communications? Reminders, some diagnostics, scheduling of various help - from medical to lawn mowing. Again, not all - but we do have examples. Security. Come on, we have remote sensors of all kinds for decades. We have electronic passes, we have door control. Yes, someone need to show up when things are getting too interesting - we somehow hesitate to give robots the armed weapons. Mostly. But - we have non-trivial examples. Retail. Ah, that's interesting. I'd imagine those tele-presence tools, a screen on a stick on a moving platform, which can help with navigating the store, answer questions, show some information. There perhaps are better ideas, but some seem to be hanging relatively low. Service industry in general is quite big - would you, for example, consider working on a visual effects for a movie remotely an example of service - entertainment - industry? - but we do have many examples of that happening remotely. So... A good question, leads to interesting thoughts, where we have some good starts in some places and missing parts in others.
- manifoldgeo 6y agoI know this doesn’t contribute anything meaningful to the conversation at hand, but that comma in the title is super unnecessary. Edit: my work here is done.
- hazeii 6y agoIn case this comment is puzzling anyone, the title was changed by a mod (dang, [0]) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23269061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23269061
- ajuc 6y agoYes. And that's a good thing. It makes the world a little less unequal.
- Barrin92 6y agoYeah I find the dismissive attitude towards outsourcing, in particular in tech hilarious. Disruption is not so fun if you're the person being disrupted. Bringing down employment borders would be one of the most transformative things we could do to raise global standards of living. Everyone should go and read Bryan Caplan's recent book on open borders.
- toohotatopic 6y agoIt's not only the hopefully temporal inconvenience of being replaced. There is a finite amount of resources. If more people have the means to access them, less is available for those who currently consume them. Having 9 billion people sharing the earth will lead to huge improvements in replaceable resources. E.g. movies will be better, appliances will be better, etc. However, if you want to see the Mona Lisa, it's most likely that you will never get close.
- IG_Semmelweiss 6y agoUncontrolled immigration has all the attributes of invasions. Simply put, the folly of open borders is evident with a simple example Would you make an open invite for thanksgiving, so that anyone, inclusing perfect strangers, could walk in? And what if you did, would you be OK with our own family not getting to eat turkey because other guests had their bite? Thus this reveals a fundamental flaw in the approach for open borders. Thus, at its core, open borders is immoral because it fails the ethical notion of symetry. Open borders work if and only if the number of people who want to go come in to USA from say, China, equals those leaving US, wanting to go into China. Do not do to others what you don't want them to do to you. This is NNT's Silver Rule https://www.spencerfernando.com/2018/07/02/taleb-rips-the-virtue-signaling-open-borders-imbeciles/ https://www.spencerfernando.com/2018/07/02/taleb-rips-the-vi...
- mech422 6y ago
- goatinaboat 6y agoThe particular vulnerability of programming jobs to outsourcing and offshoring has been well known for a long time. And yet we feign surprise that people would rather do medicine or law or other jobs that can’t be.
- shuckles 6y agoLawyers can practice remotely. Outside counsel is probably more common than (outside) contract engineering.
- goatinaboat 6y agoTrue but it is not easy to pass the relevant bar remotely, so there is that moat. Same with practicing medicine.
- shuckles 6y agoThe bar exam is probably easier to sit remotely than software development.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- joelbluminator 6y agoWell whole areas in medicine can be automated / offshored.
- CoolGuySteve 6y agoI've spent a lot of time working with people in London and Asia. I'm based in New York. I can't speak to other professions, but for programming it's extremely difficult to work with people on the other side of the Earth. The 10-12 hour time difference makes any small issue or missing files/data that should take 20 minutes instead take a day to get resolved. Working with people in Europe isn't as bad, you can sync up all morning. But the same applies to any issue that happens in the New York afternoon. It pretty much guarantees your software will become architected around time zones due to Conway's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- skyde 6y agoconsider people in Montreal, same time zone good university with computer science but much lower salary and cost of living
- CoolGuySteve 6y agoWe hire Waterloo coops and let them work from wherever they live in Canada for the exact same reason. It's trivial to pay them the highest end salary and the take home for them will be far better than Microsoft/Google/etc.
- echlebek 6y agoI have to say, the gently threatening tone of this article really rubs me the wrong way. And it coincides with "stay in town or take a pay cut" rhetoric that was on my feed earlier today, from Facebook. (Despite this development, the article doesn't mention it... maybe it will be updated at some point.) I guess, after reflecting, what I don't like about it is that it tells us to be afraid. Be afraid about a way of working that might work really well for some, or even a lot, of people. Here's a fun quote from the article: > But the big challenge is how to safely move thousands of people to and from the suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne and their offices in George or Collins streets. They're saying this in the context of a population living under pandemic protocols, but it's true all of the other time anyways. It takes a massive amount of engineering and energy to move masses of people from one place to another. Doing it needlessly is insane. I suspect that what it comes down to is control, or apparent control, of a workforce. Especially in large organizations. We're going to see who is comfortable with giving up control and who isn't, and that's going to be interesting.
- runawaybottle 6y agoIt also boils down what should be an accommodation for worksite preference to a sudden demotion to ‘you are no longer worth it on a global scale and that changes everything’. Companies are what they are, and they will optimize for this. To remain optimistic, we have to continue believing in the startup space to continuously innovate software standards, where users are unwilling to accept substandard software experiences. That will keep this field moving forward versus a wage race to the bottom. Entrenched corporate companies would love tech to stagnate, that way they won’t ever have to innovate and can cost optimize developers down to the bone.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gabagoo 6y agoIf someone can do your job better than you, they should have your job.
- elygre 6y agoThe law of comparative advantage disagrees. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
- analog31 6y agoIf the newspapers are to be believed, my job has been in danger of offshoring to countries overflowing with "engineering" talent for 20+ years. This is nothing new.
- mech422 6y ago^^^ - too true
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- biztos 6y agoA job that is done alone at a desk can be outsourced. Given the massive incentives for outsourcing and offshoring in the last couple of decades, I think the fact that most of the HN audience has pretty good jobs suggests that much of the tech world is more nuanced than that.
- null_object 6y agoI think if working-from-home becomes the new normal, a lot of companies will try off-shoring or outsourcing as a way to cut costs, but I'm not sure the results will match expectations. I've worked at two previous companies that attempted to offshore coding production, and both times it led to unexpected delays, surprising bugs, badly written code, misunderstandings and cycling through multiple remote programmers. I certainly don't think I'm a specially talented programmer or that coders in other countries are inferior to my skills (demonstrably untrue), it was just a natural consequence of geographic distance, timezone differences, personal commitment and cultural misunderstanding. At both companies the experiment ended after just one project. If this is the 'normal' future then the infrastructure needed to really make offshoring work might be put in place, but if past experience is anything to go by, then simple geographic nearness - at least sharing timezone and the realistic ability to turn up in person at least occassionally, together with the personal commitment felt by 'real' employees - means I'm not sure whether distributed workforces are gonna be as productive as some people may hope. On the other hand, I think truly productive individuals may gain from the situation: if you're a fast and effective 'production unit', then you're going to be a valuable asset wherever you are, and your value will be set accordingly. We'll see which of the two competing economic forces wins out.
- joelbluminator 6y agoWell, if the main issue is Time Zone and you're American, American companies can simply hire across America. That's a gigantic talent pool that wasn't available before. But I think at first it will just move from SF / New York to cheaper U.S states. After a few years of gaining experience in managing remote work, we'll probably see more hiring across the world. Note that only rather big scale ups can afford to do that, hiring from a different country is an accounting headache. So young startup workers aren' likely to be hit.
- jobigoud 6y agoI think it's not an issue with off shoring per se but with hiring. For some reason when off-shoring companies use a different hiring process. As if they were doing this to cut costs so they already start with a lower expectation and no longer look for the perfect match. The off shore remote devs that will make it work exist but you have to look for them with a functional remote hiring mechanism.
- buzzkillington 6y agoSounds like the writer is scared that their bullshit job is on the line. People have tried outsourcing programming forever. The last visible result was planes falling out of the sky. These jobs are highly paid not because they are done in the CBD, but because they require traits most people don't have.
- galaxyLogic 6y agoThere are difficulties in communicating over the phone and video. I don't know if others agree but during the Pandemic I've felt that the quality of TV news programming has gone down considerably because of the people interviewed or the reporters are behind a zoom etc. connections of questionable quality. It is often hard to understand what they say and it is not so pleasant trying to listen to them over the lo-fi connection. So I think that until the tech of virtual meetings improves considerably there's an extra cost for not being able to communicate in person.
- bennyelv 6y agoEven on a fairly high quality connection, you still lose a significant proportion of the non-verbal communication on a video call. The fidelity just isn't the same when you're looking at the slightly laggy image of a person on a small screen vs being able to see them in real life. It presents real challenges working with people that you don't already know in person.
- cachestash 6y agoCome gather 'round people, wherever you roam And admit that the waters around you have grown And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone If your time to you is worth saving Then you better start swimmin' or you’ll sink like a stone For the times they are a-changin'
- galaxyLogic 6y agoFinally
- dang 6y agoThe submitted title ("A job that can be done from home, is a job that can be outsourced") broke the site guidelines by editorializing. Accounts that do that eventually lose submission privileges, so please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and please don't do that.
- runawaybottle 6y agoFor a tech oriented site, I feel like some old hats need to drop some knowledge on the first age of outsourcing. How did it go down, what were the results?
- mech422 6y agoHehe - about as well as every other 'silver bullet' has gone....
- goatinaboat 6y agoHow did it go down, what were the results? The fundamental problem is a misalignment of incentives. Noone has yet figured this out and there is no technological solution to it - it may actually be impossible and it ALWAYS bites the company that outsources on the arse eventually. If your "trusted solutions provider" bills by the hour... they will seek to maximise billable hours. If they charge per ticket, they will drown you in paperwork for the most trivial changes. Anything that your in-house staff used to do that isn't explicitly stated in the contract, they either won't do or will charge a punitive rate for. If your needs change faster than the length of the contract, well you are stuck on the old contract. If you need some code written the spec you will need to write will be so detailed that it might as well be the code. And after a few years you will have lost the capability to take the work back in-house and they will hold you to ransom, because they can, and because that was the plan all along... But the short-term incentives to do it are strong, as a manager in a large corporation or a government department, you can sign that outsourcing deal and it will look good enough in the first year to win you your next promotion, or a guaranteed sinecure in the outsourcing company when you retire, by the time the truth comes out you will be long gone .
- imheretolearn 6y agoSpeaking only for myself, most of my friends (from after university) are people I have worked with. And these are the people I usually get a coffee with, brainstorm ideas on whiteboards, go out for drinks or talk tech with them. WFH permanently would definitely impact this. Even though I might get along great with another dev from 100+ miles away, I cannot possibly do most of the things I mentioned above with them. Edit: Friends also include people working in other teams like project managers, marketing, HR, support teams etc.
- LockAndLol 6y agoDefinitely not with that attitude. I've seen people organize virtual parties with video conferencing software, have personally played games with my team members while having drinks, had brain storming sessions with digital whiteboards or a shared screen, and talked tech with friends for hours in one-on-ones. If you go in with the mentality of "this won't work", well mate, then it won't.
- imheretolearn 6y agoHe said it better than I could: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jtk6DtkJhrA&t=4m23s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jtk6DtkJhrA&t=4m23s
- neurostimulant 6y agoMy experience working remote for 10 years is the opposite of yours. I found that email is a really great communication tool for work. People tend to talk a lot and unfocused during face to face meeting, but when forced to use email only, they’ll spend more time to write down their thoughts to make sure the other people can understand their points without wasting their time. Email is asynchronous so you don’t need to drag people out of their routine just to discuss stuff that can be done over emails. Meeting is reserved only for absolutely important stuff that can’t be done over email, which is surprisingly rare. Linux kernel development is an example of this, a global collaboration essentially done over emails. We got magnificent tools like git because of the need to streamline this kind of remote works.
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoYou know people keep talking about how to "recreate Silicon Valley at location X" - here is an idea for making your small country / tourist hotspot way less reliant on tourism - implement world beating virus testing and tracking - invest so heavily in child care and education it makes your head swim - build out offices for rent and look at your building codes Now start saying you are a remote work friendly area. My wife and I choose to sit in London's metro area for one main reason - kids schools. A second one is the health system. Nothing to do with commute times (god no) or access to job choices. Want to replace tourism as an industry - focus on office based remote workers.
- oxfordmale 6y agoFacebook have already indicated they will cut pay for their remote work force, as their cost of living goes down. It seems a cynical ploy to cut costs more than a drive to home working.
- joelbluminator 6y agoWell that's capitalism right?
- cmdshiftf4 6y ago>Well that's capitalism right? It is indeed. It's quite a risky hand to play at a time where - cynicism about the tech industry has never been higher - there's a magnifying glass on the inequality wrought by the hands of hardheaded capitalism in the West - globalism is being rejected - million of jobs have been lost - everything is being propped up with fiscal stimulus, in the coming months the true cost of the financial damage on the economy will come to fruition But if Tobias Lutke, Zuckerberg, etc. want to be the face of moving jobs out of the US and Canada in these times then by all means they can go ahead. Hopefully, if there's consequences to bear then it'll be on their heads too, and not the staff they've decided to drag along for the ride.
- joelbluminator 6y agoFacebook already has R&D centers around the world, you're talking as if this hasn't already happened. - cynicism about the tech industry has never been higher Exactly. That's why I don't think the average American is going to care about 250K a year jobs in Silicon Valley moving somewhere else. I don't see a lot of empathy to the millionaire class in the U.S
- cmdshiftf4 6y ago>Facebook already has R&D centers around the world, you're talking as if this hasn't already happened. Developed at a time where they could feasibly say there just wasn't the volume of talent in the US to support their ambitions. With all the startups going bust, big companies laying people off, etc. the same argument won't be feasible. In my eyes at least. >Exactly. That's why I don't think the average American is going to care about 250K a year jobs in Silicon Valley moving somewhere else. I don't see a lot of empathy to the millionaire class in the U.S That's one way of looking at it. Another is that FB and others moving the work away will directly impact the large swathes of people who work for these companies not in tech roles, and also decimate the local economy around their offices by dropping demand for local goods, services and by extension the jobs that exist to provide and fulfill the same. All it takes is a couple of Democratic figureheads to get on TV and say that Zuckerberg et al's actions will dis-proportionally throttle the lives of minorities and the socially disadvantaged, which is true, and presto, you further the ire toward them at a time when they can least afford it.
- consp 6y agoback in the early 00's when I was in university I did some research assignments concerning the outsourcing and offshoring of it jobs in small and medium sized businesses. The main gist of it is that most ended up switching back to local or hiring back part of the staff. The main problems I was told were: Cultural (mostly with eastern Europe) which introduces additional overhead due to cultural things not being equal especially for custom software for things like school districts as an example. You have to specify more which you assumed was common knowledge. Also things like meeting hours are somewhat more flexible in other places than in N/W Europe. Timezones: many things have been said about it but it didn't work for most companies combining Europe with (South)-East Asia. Ukraine and Russia was not a problem. Management capability: a managerial job locally is not the same remotely and most could not adapt or required more people offsetting the cost savings. This tended to count more for smaller businesses. Emotional: lack of affinity with the product, remote workers are counting just hours spend and thus the TCO was ignoring the hours local people spend in their own time working on the product. This is not a given for all but was one of the reasons companies switched back. These are just some examples. Most companies, especially the smaller ones, switched back to local hiring. Some made it work but not at the expected savings. The most successfull were the bigger businesses and my guess would be they had/took a longer time to prepare and hired the correct people for the job instead of relying on already hired employees which is not something you can always do in smaller businesses due to continuity. I really wonder what is going to be the effect this time as everybody is forced at least to train all the soft skills like remote communication and scheduling.
- cmdshiftf4 6y agoI'm a strong advocate for remote, and retain huge admiration for the fully-remote companies that existed and drove thought leadership in the area prior to this mass experiment we now find ourselves in, but the speed at which things appear to be moving draw an uneasy cynicism in me at this point. I'm not worried about jobs being outsourced across the world to places like India. It's just not going to happen en masse. I'm sure some companies will try it and learn the same lessons others have previously about engaging in this behaviour. It would also be political suicide, if not worse, if world leaders saw their companies trying to move locally held jobs outside their borders and did not drop the hammer on the companies involved. We're already in a time of mass unemployment, in which: - many were already heralding the death of globalism - we've learned very dear lessons about outsourcing the supply chain - people are become so much more aware of the risen inequality that even formerly hardline capitalist media are running headlines about the billionaires profiting massively off the pandemic while millions register for unemployment checks So if the leaders want to prevent large scale social unrest, a gun which I believe we're already looking down the barrel of, then they would be wise to keep a very close eye on the movements carried out by companies within their governance. That said, I do foresee some significant, lasting consequences should there be a mass shift to working from home or even a 4 days at home / 1 day in the office situation: - Today's cities face a real threat of ending up as Detroit did. -- People will flee for better pastures immediately. Why live in a shoebox in the sky when your money gets you far better elsewhere? -- Commercial real estate, and nearby residential real estate, has the potential to collapse and rapidly so. If I were living in Toronto, working for Shopify and owned a condo now I would likely be putting it on the market ASAP. -- Taxes, be it through indirect sales taxes or VAT, land transfer taxes, property taxes, etc. would crater leaving a massive hole in public funding through which no reasonable measure will fill. -- Public transit fare revenue will evaporate. -- Small businesses, restaurants, retail etc. will be wiped out with the lack of casual foot traffic When the above potentially happens, those who wanted to live in a city for the benefits of living in a city would also likely flee. - A permanent, wide scale loss of jobs in retail, food & beverage, etc. You could argue that those jobs will be replaced by new demands for new supply in the new areas previous city dwellers move to, but if everyone is WFH I would imagine they won't be frequenting such stores in anywhere near the volume that was provided previously. Given the above I believe it's pretty self-centered and reckless of large companies to be making such announcements as Shopify, Facebook et al. have made at a time where cities and countries are merely trying to ward off a pandemic and are already facing an employment and budget crisis as a result of it. They're essentially doing one of the most damaging, potentially impactful things they could be by doing so right now. These announcements, for me personally and despite my previous hopes of seeing more remote opportunities become available over time, are only furthering my cynicism toward this industry in general at this point.
- jshaqaw 6y agoI find a difference (dare I say flaw) with Zoom type communication for unstructured team conversations is that without physical cues and without the ability to break into quick subconversations, chats among say 9 people are more likely to be dominated by a handful of leaders/big talkers than in real life.
- baumandm 6y agoIn my opinion this is a benefit, subconversations during a meeting are distracting. If it doesn't need to be discussed by the entire group, that conversation should happen after the meeting. Zoom meetings where everyone is on a separate camera/mic make that basically impossible, which keeps the meeting more focused.