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> 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 t

> 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.
    - void_mint 5y ago
      > From what I've seen 80% of local workers end up being somewhere between marginal and abysmal, Yep. > 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. I again think it's a super complex problem. I think local workers have the luxury of tight feedback loops. When working with offshore labor, you have to basically build in several extra days to get what you want. For an in-office (or even in-timezone) worker, you can get regular updates in real time, so you have more opportunities to jump in if something isn't going correctly. For offshore, you give them a task and then check back in tomorrow. Usually, what they delivered wasn't close to what you asked for, but since they're offline when you're reviewing, you just have to again write what you want and send it back over the wall (where they will update what they did, but again not deliver what you wanted). It takes so much longer. The contrast between that and non-offshore-remote is still night and day. You don't have to plan so many extra cycles for converting whatever they gave you to whatever you wanted. And the timezones again are just so much easier to work with.

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.
  - void_mint 5y ago
    > From what I've seen 80% of local workers end up being somewhere between marginal and abysmal, Yep. > 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. I again think it's a super complex problem. I think local workers have the luxury of tight feedback loops. When working with offshore labor, you have to basically build in several extra days to get what you want. For an in-office (or even in-timezone) worker, you can get regular updates in real time, so you have more opportunities to jump in if something isn't going correctly. For offshore, you give them a task and then check back in tomorrow. Usually, what they delivered wasn't close to what you asked for, but since they're offline when you're reviewing, you just have to again write what you want and send it back over the wall (where they will update what they did, but again not deliver what you wanted). It takes so much longer. The contrast between that and non-offshore-remote is still night and day. You don't have to plan so many extra cycles for converting whatever they gave you to whatever you wanted. And the timezones again are just so much easier to work with.