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> If your job in SFO can be done from Sacramento or Portland, why can’t it be done from Manila? Or Warsaw? In theory, nothing. In practice, a dramatic reductio

> If your job in SFO can be done from Sacramento or Portland, why can’t it be done from Manila? Or Warsaw? In theory, nothing. In practice, a dramatic reduction in quality. > And don’t fool yourself, that developer in Colombia is just as talented but can work for half the cost. Again in theory, yes. In practice, not usually.

sneak 5y ago
> In theory, nothing. In practice, a dramatic reduction in quality. There are talented and smart people in every country. There are also tons of low quality, low experience, cheap devs in the US, just like the countries you seem to be maligning. This really seems like simple racism to me.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- void_mint 5y ago
  > There are talented and smart people in every country. Yep. Nowhere did I dispute this. > There are also tons of low quality, low experience, cheap devs in the US, just like the countries you seem to be maligning. Yep. Nowhere did I dispute this. > This really seems like simple racism to me. This is speaking from lots of experiencing working with and managing outsourced dev labor. I would say that your take seems intellectually lazy to me. Hiring is insanely hard, and adding timezones and language/culture hurdles only makes it harder.
  - addicted 5y ago
    The problem is that your experience is based on a pre pandemic WFH experience. In the past the outsourced teams were clearly second class teams behind the primary local teams. That won’t be the case if the entire company is remote first.
    - bluefirebrand 5y ago
      > In the past the outsourced teams were clearly second class teams behind the primary local teams. > That won’t be the case if the entire company is remote first This assumption is based on the idea that outsourced teams were the second class teams because they were remote. They weren't. They were second class teams because they were outsourced.
      - void_mint 5y ago
        > They weren't. They were second class teams because they were outsourced. This is it. The quality of the work was just really bad, very consistently. It had nothing to do with being remote.
    - void_mint 5y ago
      You're focused very hard on the WFH part, which is actually totally irrelevant to me. When someone's offshore, you don't even really think about the context from which they're working. They could've been in an office, or they could've been in a bed, I didn't know/didn't care. > In the past the outsourced teams were clearly second class teams behind the primary local teams. Outsourced teams were second class because of the frequency they didn't deliver/delivered something poorly/needed almost full-time guidance and direction. I would put outsourced help in a similar category to taking on a Junior dev, fwiw. It has its place, but you can't get mad at someone put in a position that was never meant to succeed if they end up failing.
      - smorgusofborg 5y ago
        From what I've seen 80% of local workers end up being somewhere between marginal and abysmal, so much so that many companies actually run on having internal workers do whatever is fun based on the work of niche consultants. The difference I see in results is that a remote worker might trigger regrets for not really giving them a winable situation but a local internal worker triggers empathy even if they became your new lower bound on lazy. This leads some people to fix some local workers and almost all people to give them 3-5 years to improve while hiring additional people that shouldn't be needed.
- aiisjustanif 5y ago
  Yet that are often treated as such, race and ethnicity are not the same.

sneak 5y ago

> In theory, nothing. In practice, a dramatic reduction in quality. There are talented and smart people in every country. There are also tons of low quality, low experience, cheap devs in the US, just like the countries you seem to be maligning. This really seems like simple racism to me.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
void_mint 5y ago
> There are talented and smart people in every country. Yep. Nowhere did I dispute this. > There are also tons of low quality, low experience, cheap devs in the US, just like the countries you seem to be maligning. Yep. Nowhere did I dispute this. > This really seems like simple racism to me. This is speaking from lots of experiencing working with and managing outsourced dev labor. I would say that your take seems intellectually lazy to me. Hiring is insanely hard, and adding timezones and language/culture hurdles only makes it harder.
- addicted 5y ago
  The problem is that your experience is based on a pre pandemic WFH experience. In the past the outsourced teams were clearly second class teams behind the primary local teams. That won’t be the case if the entire company is remote first.
  - bluefirebrand 5y ago
    > In the past the outsourced teams were clearly second class teams behind the primary local teams. > That won’t be the case if the entire company is remote first This assumption is based on the idea that outsourced teams were the second class teams because they were remote. They weren't. They were second class teams because they were outsourced.
    - void_mint 5y ago
      > They weren't. They were second class teams because they were outsourced. This is it. The quality of the work was just really bad, very consistently. It had nothing to do with being remote.
  - void_mint 5y ago
    You're focused very hard on the WFH part, which is actually totally irrelevant to me. When someone's offshore, you don't even really think about the context from which they're working. They could've been in an office, or they could've been in a bed, I didn't know/didn't care. > In the past the outsourced teams were clearly second class teams behind the primary local teams. Outsourced teams were second class because of the frequency they didn't deliver/delivered something poorly/needed almost full-time guidance and direction. I would put outsourced help in a similar category to taking on a Junior dev, fwiw. It has its place, but you can't get mad at someone put in a position that was never meant to succeed if they end up failing.
    - smorgusofborg 5y ago
      From what I've seen 80% of local workers end up being somewhere between marginal and abysmal, so much so that many companies actually run on having internal workers do whatever is fun based on the work of niche consultants. The difference I see in results is that a remote worker might trigger regrets for not really giving them a winable situation but a local internal worker triggers empathy even if they became your new lower bound on lazy. This leads some people to fix some local workers and almost all people to give them 3-5 years to improve while hiring additional people that shouldn't be needed.
aiisjustanif 5y ago
Yet that are often treated as such, race and ethnicity are not the same.