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Remote work enabled me to live outside of a busy city I only lived in for employment opportunities, afford property as a result, gain back 10 hours of commuting
by rajamaka 5y ago
Remote work enabled me to live outside of a busy city I only lived in for employment opportunities, afford property as a result, gain back 10 hours of commuting time a week, spend less money on commuting and eating out. If the price of that is missing out on HR organised 'fun' that's fine - I can be at the bar with friends at 5:05pm anyway.
No chance I'm going back.
- bottled_poe 5y agoBe careful what you wish for. If your role can be done fully remotely, you will soon find yourself competing against the international market instead of just the local one.
- godelski 5y agoI hear this a lot and I don't buy it. There's still a big advantage to being in the same (or +/-a few hrs). I work in a remote team right now with people across the world. It is hard to make meeting times where everyone can join. There's also laws that make it easier to hire nationally vs internationally. This claim is more a scare tactic than a real warning.
- bottled_poe 5y agoSure, the market will decide.
- foepys 5y agoIn Germany the market decided already. After years of propaganda by consulting firms how India will develop all software for pennies soon, companies in Germany are abandoning near and farshoring to eastern EU countries and India en masse because it caused more problems than it solved. VW for example ended all software contracting and now does software development themselves. So I'm not worried.
- thecleaner 5y agoI am with you on your stance on outsourcing. But we decouple that narrative from various countries. Some of the software produced in Germany is absolute crap and I've seen software made locally in India be a lot better in quality. For eastern european countries I onow for fact that the developers there dont compromise on salary esp the educated ones. Just because a country isnt as rich doesnt mean that they are worse in every aspect. By that logic Saudi Arabia or UAE would be a power house.
- bottled_poe 5y agoI absolutely agree with this. Sure, there are a lot of bad developers in India, but guess what? There are also bad developers everywhere else on this planet. People forget that the scale of the pool of developers over there is huge and they overlook the exceptional talent, which while a small fraction of the whole market is still an enormous number of resources.
- foepys 5y agoJust to be clear: I never made a statement about quality of software. It's mostly because of timezones, cultural differences, and language. I specifically mentioned India because more than one consulting firm told me that India would be the future and software developers would not be needed in Germany anymore, only project managers.
- bottled_poe 5y agoI guess that's case closed then!
- foepys 5y agoNo need for snark. All evidence points away from your point. Why should companies like Apple, Amazon, Google want their employees back in the office if they could get remote work for cheap? VW made a multi-billion investment against off-shoring and SV companies pay hundreds of thousands for webdevs that completed six week bootcamps, just for them to be in SV.
- awestroke 5y agoWhat laws? "Hiring internationally" is not a thing, you either hire international one man consulting firms that invoice you, or you open up a subsidiary in their country to hire them as an employee of that subsidiary, in which case the laws of their country applies, not yours
- vosper 5y agoThose aren't the only two options - there are loads of contracting agencies. You can deal with (and pay) their US office, and that money goes to their in-country subsidiary. You can get a modest-size team in Latin America this way. Thing is, the rates at these agencies (at least the LatAm ones) have run up to the point where they're not so far from the US. You can spend $80 USD an hour easily.
- pabs3 5y agoI found it interesting reading GitLab's setup, they have all three options: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/employment-solutions/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/employment-so...
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoLanguage and some culture are a moat against this. Not insurmountable, but real.
- edoceo 5y agoI've been hearing that for 20 years. And it's always been true, there is always a huge competition pool, local or not. From my limited observation it's swing back towards on-shore preference since like 2017.
- gamblor956 5y agoThere are a number of legal and tax reasons why remote work will not become an international market except in uncommon circumstances.
- standardUser 5y agoCommunicating remotely only increases the value of native language and cultural skills.
- dcolkitt 5y ago“Software engineer careers are over for sure this time” says increasingly nervous man for eighteenth time this century.
- zepto 5y agoEven a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day.
- bottled_poe 5y agoNot sure what I said to deserve this ad hominem attack.
- maybelsyrup 5y ago> If your role can be done fully remotely, you will soon find yourself competing against the international market instead of just the local one. Unionize.
- occz 5y agoWell, outsourcing has been tried and has arguably been a failure in the past. Are you suggesting that vicinity was the sole reason for outsourcing not being successful?
- practice9 5y agoI would say the opposite, outsourcing is a success if FAANG and so many other companies in SF are actively outsourcing to Eastern Europe
- nsonha 5y agofunny you automatically assume them being the one on the "losing" side. I'm the one geting a job that pays 1.5x thanks to remote. It does come with cons for both me and my team in regard to logistic of meetings. The biggest cons for me is that I don't have the choice to be on many random meetings which sound annoying on the surface but are good for building rapport and getting involved in company initiatives you whouldn't know. Unless the company is completely async, there are always advantages to working in HQ (albeit virtually).
- parasight 5y agoI work remotely (on and off) since 2012. Neither directly nor indirectly have I ever seen offshoring being considered because of people working remote. In my experience, people working remote are often in the same timezone or even in the same area. Thus, they can easily come to the office if needed. They often share the same working habits, the same culture of communication and they speak the same language. This does not alway apply to offshoring.
- thecleaner 5y agoThis is true. Timezone differences can introduce real delays and slow down the work.
- bottled_poe 5y ago> Thus, they can easily come to the office if needed. Well yes, but that's moving the goalposts.
- whytaka 5y agoBut last year, we saw that it CAN be done fully remotely. Why would going back to the office change that.
- arpa 5y agohah! we have been competing internationally for years.
- bottled_poe 5y agoIf you are working face-to-face (with clients and/or colleagues), that's simply not true.
- arpa 5y agoi've been working with international clients for quite some time before the pandemic, and the local talent pool has been severely exhausted for several years now, so... remote has been a reality for a long time now.