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Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

• thrower123 5y ago
  People underestimate the overhead and difficulties that make companies reluctant to hire in different countries. Companies don't even really want to deal with different employment regulations and tax policies across different US states.
• eddie8848 5y ago
  I am from Nepal and I have seen that US companies who can see this is the future of work are getting the best deals. They are paying decent money by US standard to Nepali top 1% developers for whom its a very good salary and getting an enormous return in result.
• xbar 5y ago
  Not flat wrong. The countries list is, however, quite inaccurate. Croatia is not palatable for reasons other than geography, for example.
• 1cvmask 5y ago
  Other than the classic issues like time zones etc. there are some weird rules and regulations regarding worker insurance. A buddy of mine used to get into flak for being outside the US for too long even though he was in sales and always exceeded his quotas. This was the case all before Covid and apparently the rules have still not changed for them.
• avereveard 5y ago
  Remote work come with sinchronization and communication costs, international remote work even more so. it's not a given that an entirely remote workforce is more cost effective than a partial remote workforce - outsourcing has been there for decades after all, and it hasn't been an existential threat to local jobs - remote worker lack the middleman costs but also the organizational support and work structure.
• aborsy 5y ago
  But other countries don’t want to pay. EU, for instance, might be paying even less than developing countries (but mostly due to social charges, which may not apply to overseas workers?).
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  The last time the US outsourced its manufacturing jobs to the cheapest rest of the world, it wasnt exactly a disaster.
• bamboozled 5y ago
  Except a lot of places are “going back to work” and let’s be honest, timezones aren’t and probably will never be an easy problem to solve.
  • bwb 5y ago
    Especially around development (on time zones), you have to actively factor in teams and makeup as well as what they are working on to get it working right...
    • bamboozled 5y ago
      I’m struggling with American “superiors” who won’t have a meeting in any time that isn’t perfect for them. If it’s not between 9:00-17:00, sorry, bad luck for everyone else.
      • redis_mlc 5y ago
        Sounds reasonable to me, if the HQ is in the US. Or are you saying that you're entitled to that block of local time for some reason?
      • bwb 5y ago
        Ya, poor leadership if they are not willing to use global teams and then lead them through example.
        • bamboozled 5y ago
          Reminds me a of a quote from "The Last Dance" [1]: “If you ask all my teammates… ‘The one thing about Michael Jordan was he never asked me to do anything that he didn’t f*%king do.’” [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8420184/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8420184/
  • drstewart 5y ago
    Not to mention navigation employment laws and regulations. One country is hard enough, let alone doing it worldwide
• bwb 5y ago
  I find this a bit far fetched, with as many problems as the USA has it still has a solid reputation as a place you can come and make a new life with low corruption, a justice system, free speech, affordability, and on the local/state level a government/bureaucracy that still works. Same goes for Germany and countries that provide a high quality of life for their people. I understand the idea, but there is a reason people want to leave places that are "broken".
  • Oddskar 5y ago
    I think you overestimate the reputation of the US and underestimate how much it has rapidly declined the last decades. I also think you underestimate how much effort it takes to really start over and become properly integrated in a new country. It is a very enticing prospect for many to side-step this issue entirely and still get an almost unfathomable salary for some countries.
    • bwb 5y ago
      I've personally been remote since 1999 and run teams from around the world since then. The largest was a company I grew to ~130+ people over 18 countries. I know you are underestimating the rep of the USA outside of politics and the dysfunction :) Remote is a great opportunity and one I've used at every company I've built. But, the thing that draws global talent is money, and American companies have all the money. If anything this is going to hurt local companies who can't compete for top talent hiring out of the USA :) I will note, i think Canada is doing a great job of being pro-immigrant in a way the USA can't and American companies are opening lots of offices and hiring there.
      • Oddskar 5y ago
        > I know you are underestimating the rep of the USA outside of politics and the dysfunction I don’t really understand. Why would I disregard “the dysfunction”? That’s very much at the core of what shapes the rest of the worlds perception of the US. Agree on the second point though. It does (potentially) globalise the job market quite a bit.
• 0xy 5y ago
  I don't buy it, US tech salaries continue to skyrocket and we're nearly two years into pandemic conditions. Just over the last 6-9 months, salaries have markedly jumped. There's still a huge thirst for talent that isn't being quenched, and global pools don't help either. Facebook, Google and others have satellite offices all over to soak up talent elsewhere, but they're still ultra competitive in the US. They can pay a senior engineer $350k in the US, or an equivalent experience senior engineer $100k in Europe. There is no shift occurring though. They're still hiring like crazy everywhere. There's no place like the US for tech workers. Nowhere even comes close, even on a CoL-adjusted basis. European developers get screwed. South American developers get screwed. Asian developers get screwed. US developers don't get screwed.
  • GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Still, I find the quality of life in Spain preferable. We have a government health system paid through taxes, no guns on the streets, not much pollution, amazing public transport, 4 weeks holidays and good weather. I prefer having those things as a safety net instead of having to pay for them myself. I really love not needing a car here at all, I haven't driven in years. I was recently offered a job in silicon valley but despite the fact that I would make several times my current wage and the language would be better for me (I'm not a native here), I wouldn't consider it. Money isn't everything (and silicon valley is crazy expensive, it wouldn't amount to that much). It's about quality of life for me.
    • qaq 5y ago
      I think you are really onto something truth is if you have 100K remote job in Spain you will hav better lifestyle than having 300K job in SV. If I only could convince my wife to move :(.
      • GekkePrutser 5y ago
        I'm nowhere near 100K in Spain but I wouldn't make 300K in that job in SV either :) I think it would work out worse in SV though in terms of spending power. With the exception of tech toys which tend to be around the same price everywhere so relatively expensive in Spain. But I'd give up a lot. Being half a world away from family and also the other drawbacks I mentioned. No, I'm fine here.
• yosito 5y ago
  Does the US have a monopoly on global talent that I'm unaware of?
  • presentation 5y ago
    US definitely pays a lot higher than other markets, and that definitely talks.
  • treeman79 5y ago
    Apparently we are just that awesome.
  • pi7h3n 5y ago
    FAANGs retain a lot of this talent I guess
  • School-Cotton 5y ago
    Monopoly is an exaggeration, but the US does still attract a staggeringly disproportionate fraction of developers from all over the world.
  • austincheney 5y ago
    That would depend upon the definition of talent. My long mega corporate experience has taught me there isn't any practical different between CS graduates (bachelors level only) from the US and India once they enter the real world. It is generally Java focused with some C++ thrown in and for everything else that isn't Java or C++ you make it look like Java as much as possible. I have also noticed many generalized similarities between self-taught developers from the US and India in how they proceed against a problem as well. The CS educated developers are convention focused in that there is a certain way to solve problems regardless of the problem while the self taught developers tend to focus more on the goal, the solution.
  • 0xfaded 5y ago
    The US seems to have a monopoly on the ability to pay top talent (at least in the west). At the high end of the talent pool, I don't think opening up is going to have a significant impact. We're mostly already internationally mobile or can demand competitive salaries, and a new supply of mid-tier talent will only create more capital-deploying opportunities. I'm a computer vision person with a good grasp on 3d geometry, SLAM, linear algebra, statistics, filtering, etc. We've had budget and I've been trying to hire another me for at least half a year with no luck (western Europe). Thousands of applicants and the couple of interesting candidates were snapped up before we could move (and likely for more than we could pay). I'm about to leave and go on the job market, and I have no concerns whatsoever about landing a high paying job. It also helps that I have ties to the bay area and am more than willing to go back.
• JohnWhigham 5y ago
  In the short term, I think it's going to be a lot harder than this article lets on, but long term, it is abundantly clear: cushy developer jobs in the US are on borrowed time. Salaries may continue to go up for a little while longer, but they will fall to reflect the rest of the world catching up with the US. And that's a scary prospect for those under 35 now. And I don't think there's a way out of it. We embrace remote, but at the cost of demise.
  • satyrnein 5y ago
    For some people, the solution may be the management track. If developer salaries fall, there will be more developers hired, who will need managers. US candidates (for now) will have the advantage there.
  • AlexAltea 5y ago
    I disagree, I don't see how the supply/demand ratio of talent will significantly change by remote work. Companies will pick from a larger pool of people. People will pick from a larger pool of companies.
    • zthrowaway 5y ago
      This is a good point, the ratio increases both ways.
    • blensor 5y ago
      Except that developers from countries that earn on average less than their US counterparts have an incentive to work for a US company remotely but a developer from the US does not have many incentives to work for less for a company abroad
      • flatiron 5y ago
        The politicians will fight back with work visas and limits etc. protecting domestic work forces should be a primary concern for politicians.
• polycaster 5y ago
  From my personal experience I think that the most challenging factor with outsourcing is in fact the time zone. Being situated in Germany I see many webdev jobs being outsourced about 1 hour to the east and about all the way down to South Africa and Mauritius („Cyber Island”). This are the projects that work like normal. Then of course the vast majority is outsourced to contractors in India or China – but frankly communication in these projects has always been a bummer. But then again, it's just my own bubble and probably depends heavily on the type of work and the frequency of communication involved.
  • FirstLvR 5y ago
    you're right about the time zone and the language barrier... am from Chile and working for foreign projects is always a headache
  • ndm000 5y ago
    The North American equivalent is Latin America. I’m in consulting, and every new project has some set of near shore resources billed much lower than their North American counterparts. In most cases the only discernible difference is proficiency in English.
    • eb0la 5y ago
      I remember after "corralito" a lot of US companies started opening their CoE (center of excelence) in Argentina because wages were really low, and they could hire easily. I heard (not sure if it is true) people wanted to be paid in USD because car loans were denominated in dollars rather than pesos.
      • TMWNN 5y ago
        >I heard (not sure if it is true) people wanted to be paid in USD because car loans were denominated in dollars rather than pesos. Wikipedia says that 60% of bank loans in neighboring Uruguay are in US dollars, so I am not surprised to hear that about Argentina, a country that has for years had an unofficial "blue dollar" exchange rate with the US$ (<https://www.coha.org/blue-dollar-black-market-the-illegal-exchange-rate-as-a-financial-indicator-in-argentina/ https://www.coha.org/blue-dollar-black-market-the-illegal-ex...>) that is very, very different from the official one.
• brianmcc 5y ago
  I am sceptical. Reminds me of the predictions 20 years ago that outsourcing/offshoring would eliminate hands-on developer jobs in US/UK and other "expensive" countries. Timezones, language factors, cultural factors, retention and exclusivity challenges plus basic logistics stuff like payroll and taxes all matter a lot. None of that's insurmountable but it takes a level of effort that can be very high. And I say this as someone who quite likes working remotely. I just don't see it disrupting the world in the extreme way it is sometimes portrayed.
  • presentation 5y ago
    I think it disrupts it in corners. I'm fully embracing it in the company I'm building, and several of my tech-startup-running friends are too, though I know plenty of people who aren't.
    • alistairSH 5y ago
      How are you dealing with local tax and labor laws? My employer (mid-sized international software company) recently posted a revised work/travel/location policy. Basically, for anything over a month, we are only allowed to work in a locale where the company has an existing presence, and we have to notify the company in advance so they can plan payroll accordingly. I believe (thought not 100% sure) this is because they effectively transfer us to the local entity for the duration of the travel.
  • sparsely 5y ago
    The payroll, taxes, and labour laws are a big barrier at the moment. Even if you are happy hiring someone as an independent contractor to simplify the first two, how do you know that you aren't breaking local laws, e.g. about disguised employment? You still have to be familiar with local laws and regulations. It seems like something that an intermediary could help with, and a few do exist, although they are pricey. Simplification of regulations into a standard framework (without weakening them) would be a huge win here but I can't imagine that happening anytime soon, even in the EU, as labour laws are so sensitive.
• nabla9 5y ago
  Remote work favors efficient performers on their own to-do lists. In the short term, it will can be super productive Remote work does not work when part of the job is helping others, learning from others. Figuring out things.
  • Asooka 5y ago
    I have no trouble helping and communicating with people remotely. Some days most of my time is spent helping others and it's a lot easier over the internet, since I can switch between people rapidly and have several conversations going at once.
• sys_64738 5y ago
  I've seen what it requires for an individual to be in a country other than the USA and the US-based company not wanting to treat them as an employee due to the paperwork. That generally means they need to be an independent contractor so individual needs to set up a company in their own country and deal with all the issues associated with that and the tax implications. Most smaller companies won't deal with foreign employees and leave it all up to the individual, if those companies are will to do it as all.
  • londons_explore 5y ago
    There are plenty of labor sourcing companies who will happily do all the paperwork (and take on the legal risk) for you to hire someone in a foreign country, but in fact you pay the labor company some fixed hourly rate, and they hire the worker as an employee. It's a good model, because then when the laws of the foreign country change to say "Women's average salaries must match mens" or "Workers shall be paid 2x rate on religious holidays" or "Employers shall pay extra tax for hiring people over the age of 62 years old"... All those cases can be dealt with by the foreign company who knows the local laws and customs.
    • LurkingPenguin 5y ago
      > All those cases can be dealt with by the foreign company who knows the local laws and customs. I haven't seen it mentioned here but while in many cases you can as an employer outsource payroll and labor law compliance, you can never completely shed the potential liabilities that come with employing someone and this can get complicated when your workforce is based in different countries. There are a lot of things that can go wrong. Your payroll/compliance vendor could screw the pooch. Your foreign-based employee could do something negligent or malicious that leaves you in a legal bind where your costs of protecting your interests skyrocket. And your employment of an individual in certain countries could subject you to laws and taxes you never even knew about. Of course, a growing number of companies do employ remote workers around the world but it's really not as simple as "I can hire anyone in any country as long as they are talented". The world simply isn't that flat.
• Aeolun 5y ago
  Not if jobs in the US keep paying as they have been. If you can work remotely then the US makes most sense from an income perspective.
  • vbezhenar 5y ago
    I've heard that overwhelming majority of US companies pay adjusted salary to remote workers depending on their location.
• eb0la 5y ago
  I don't believe the US has a monopoly on talent. The US has a monopoly on being able to go to market. US corporations are extremely efficient getting funds, putting that capital to work, and deliver a product people want to buy. Historically they got that advantage because (among other factors) their internal market is HUGE, and successful US products were also appealing in other countries. As I said there are other factors as well (regulations, overseas taxation, and exports to name a few).
  • formerly_proven 5y ago
    The EU has a similarly sized internal market, but it's consistently self-sabotaging on many levels (EU, countries, state, local) so does not realize a lot of the benefits it could get.
    • pi7h3n 5y ago
      Self-sabotaging in what ways?
      • MaKey 5y ago
        The newest example would be Europe's Digital Services Act. Here is an article by Cory Doctorow about it: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/10/europes-digital-services-act-collision-course-human-rights-0 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/10/europes-digital-servic...
    • PeterisP 5y ago
      The differences in languages, culture, and legal aspects mean that at least for consumer-oriented startups EU is very much not a single market yet. There has been a lot of progress over the last decade or two, but when starting a company you still pretty much start with the market of a single country and have to do a bunch of work, adjustments and local hiring to expand to a neighboring EU country.
  • dragonelite 5y ago
    Its a winner takes all and the winners have been decided 20 years ago here in the west. You need something like what China did with a closed off garden where their own thousand flowers can bloom and grow strong enough to compete on the global market.
• DeathArrow 5y ago
  I see many people here comparing US with EU in term of wages. But for the comparation to work taxes, healthcare, education, and subsidizing several public services like transport or heating should be taken into account. Also, the comparation should take into consideration PPP. $300 000 pre-taxes in US is not 3x $100 000 after-taxes in EU. Especially if you adjust for other factors.
  • nly 5y ago
    By my estimation, even factoring in the cost of living, medical insurance, tax differences etc, people working in the Bay area are taking home twice what an equally qualified dev would take home in say, London. If anything the contrast is even more stark across the EU
    • GekkePrutser 5y ago
      They also seem to work very long hours with long commutes and get few vacations. When I see that the average cost of a house in Cupertino is 2.5 million dollars for example, I would imagine most of those Apple engineers live far away.
      • mrguyorama 5y ago
        Never forget that "Free Dinner" is a big "perk" of work in FAANG land. I can't comprehend the messed up work life balance that makes that make sense
        • jmgao 5y ago
          Why not? The vast majority of people who ate dinner at Google immediately went home afterwards. My daily routine was to show up at 11, check email, eat lunch, work until 6:30ish, eat dinner, and then go home.
      • dboreham 5y ago
        It has been a few years since I lived in the South Bay, but generally Apple engineers would live somewhere reasonably local. A few would choose to commute from Gillroy or Santa Cruz for sure, but it's not like there are only zillionaires living in Cupertino and Santa Clara. Those are pretty mid-range places to live.
• locallost 5y ago
  The author focuses on physical presence in a country, but as she points out, immigrants flocked to the US because it's an economic powerhouse. This will not change, and for all intents and purposes the talent will still be in the US, since their work will be in the US. If anything, it will make it even stronger, since most of the interesting things in e.g. tech are done there, and there is now less of a barrier to get the talent. Big fish will eat the small fish, you can see this clearly in e.g. the EU, where "talent" from smaller poorer countries goes to richer countries massively, since there are effectively no borders or barriers. So they might not be there physically, but this is not really a big concern if you're a US company. It might be different for the country as a whole though.
• torginus 5y ago
  This is a bit off topic, but wrt working for an US company - US programming salaries are weird - it used to be a decade ago, that programming salaries were roughly in line with other domains in engineering, while most places required a STEM degree as well, meaning both engineering and CS employed roughly the same talent pool at similar wages. Imo, this estimation still holds in the rest of the world, but CS salaries in the US have skyrocketed, while companies opened up to the idea of hiring any enterprising leetcoder.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• foxyv 5y ago
  The demand for software developers and experts is a bottomless well right now in EVERY country. Hiring everywhere is a challenge. The problem is that software development is genuinely challenging. Training is a huge problem because programs can't keep up with the new technology. In the past 10 years there have been 3 separate revolutions in our technology stack and 2 in our project management. Everything is moving at a lightning pace. The US doesn't really have a monopoly on global talent, we just pay the most for it wherever and whenever we can get a hold of it. We import talent at huge rates and we act as an education and training center for the world. One thing I've seen with remote work is that wages have gone up. All of a sudden, developers that were making $60k in some sleepy town are getting hired by huge software companies for sometimes two to three times as much and they are still making less than their in-office counterparts.
  • alistairSH 5y ago
    It's not just the $60k developer in Sleepville, USA. Salaries in Bangalore have literally sky-rocketed.
    • anon-686876876 5y ago
      Launching money into space is unlikely to help the situation.
      • alistairSH 5y ago
        That's about what it feels like dealing with comp over there. It's really insane. Great for the locals. Frustrating trying to hire and retain them from the US.
    • bcg361 5y ago
      How high are they?
      • alistairSH 5y ago
        I haven't hired a developer in Bangalore in a few years now, but talking to colleagues, salaries are up 30% or more in the last 18 months. Enough so that our comp charts are way off and unusable.
• kranke155 5y ago
  Crypto has blown this up already. Teams are almost always decentralised.
• zcw100 5y ago
  Much ado about nothing. Developer jobs have been able to be outsourced and work remote for a couple of decades. If it was going to go that way it would have long ago. The rest of the world might be catching up to the remote work game but software development has been there, done that. If anything we've already experienced a pullback where outsourced developer jobs have been pulled back when they experienced the problems with it.
  • ozim 5y ago
    That was couple of decades of Cognizant or Infosys and likes of them getting contracts and selling their services from their offices. Now it is the time to build real distributed teams where it is easier to hire a person from other part of the globe to be part of your team. Working directly with them and not hiring bunch of warm bodies to dump trash tasks on them.
  • kelnos 5y ago
    Agreed. The "worst" I see happening is some US tech jobs will go to Canada, since the time zones are "compatible" and culture is similar. People from Central and South America will get in the game somewhat as well, but I still think cultural and language barriers cause enough problems that there's still a bit of a moat. We've already been offshoring to Asia and Eastern Europe for decades now, and even though we should have a good handle on what does and doesn't work by now, I still see companies making the same mistakes, and either having to pull back, or just fail and be too blinded by hubris to figure out why.
    • jsjsbdkj 5y ago
      As someone from a second-tier Canadian city that had relatively few tech employers, this has definitely been a boon. Previously there was one game in town, and they attracted talent with a fancy office and above-market salaries for the region. I left after a couple years and joined a bay area startup remotely for a ~30% pay raise, and several of my former coworkers have as well. The company in question is suffering from a brain drain as old-time employees leave for greener pastures, and they struggle to attract international talent - because they didn't have much cross-polination with other tech companies in the past, there's a ton of NIH built by very smart new grads with no real world experience, and experienced engineers tend to take off once they realize the extent of the problems.
• Sohakes 5y ago
  It's happening on Brazil I think. It's very hard to hire for brazilian companies since people can earn an extraordinary salary by working remote. Our timezone is also pretty close to the US east coast, and still not that far from SV.
  • dboreham 5y ago
    Also Argentina. I've worked with several very talented developers remote from Argentina. UTC-3.
    • SnowProblem 5y ago
      +1 for Argentina. There's an argument from the book Germs, Guns, Steel that in the past civilizations flourished most where geography allowed for trade to happen at roughly the same latitude, where all the same crops would grow and could spread - for example, Europe and the fertile crescent, which is in contrast to the Americas and Africa. Now there seems to be a opposite effect happening along longitudes around remote work because of time zones, and I would expect South America, despite the lower % of English speakers, to be at least as big of a receiver of SV benefits as Europe in the short term and probably bigger over the long term.
• Uptrenda 5y ago
  I feel like when it comes to remote work the great divider will be 'cost of living' versus attained wages (and not 'talent.') As in: suppose I live in India where the cost of living is low. Due to wage arbitrage I can satisfy my cost of living quite easily by taking on low skilled software contracts. In this position, I am happy to take on the work because it more than covers my basic needs. On the other hand, if I want to take on more skilled work I'll have to specialize. Specialization means spending even more time to learn skills at the expense of earning money. So it costs money to specialise. And in poorer countries where the population is high, the competition for jobs will be high, and the less money there will be left over to invest in specialization. So by virtue of being born in a poorer country one is less well-off when it comes to specialization. The West won't be at risk of 'losing' jobs to remote work because we're not competing for the same jobs. Specialization will set the bar for hiring as it always has done, and the same scarce pool of talent will have to be used to fill these jobs. There will be a greater number of choices for specialized engineers to fill-- and it will mean more local jobs get filled by a more diverse pool of candidates. Looking at just local jobs would seem to imply that we're worse off, but not when you compare the number of new jobs that will be open to qualified engineers as a whole.
  • nine_zeros 5y ago
    This is a good point but from what I understand about the tech ecosystem in India and China - they are both producing so many engineers that some are bound to specialize. And they are. You will find amazing cloud provider specialists in those countries these days.
  • LAC-Tech 5y ago
    In countries like New Zealand and (to a lesser extent) Australia, cost of living is Higher while local wages are lower. This may seem like a pedantic point, but companies don't base compensation on anything as 'fair' as CoL. It's all about market rates.
• BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  Except: - no country pay like the US. Worked for silicon valley companies remotely, and made twice the money I made in France, while being 3 times cheaper than local competition. - no country have the volume of hi-level coding gig job offers the US has. - few countries even have has many interesting projects. If you want to code in Haskell or Lisp in Europe, good luck. - the USA don't care about your diploma, only what you can do. You will be limited in opportunities and earnings depending of your background in many countries. - talent attract talent. It's better to work with companies already full of good devs, the colleagues are coolers, the projects are more interesting and the infra will be better. Inertia is in favor of the USA. So no, it will break no monopoly. If anything, it will make it easier to work FOR the US.
  • twox2 5y ago
    On the topic of diploma - I get the sense this is not exactly true for FAANG
    • a_t48 5y ago
      No diploma here - still have recruiters from at least 3 of the 5 messaging me. Edit: downvoters, care to explain a little? Why would they waste their time on me if they weren't interested in me working there?
      • twox2 5y ago
        Do you / have you ever worked at one?
        • groby_b 5y ago
          Working at one for over a decade now. I've got no degree. Both people on my team and in adjacent team without degrees. Also many people with super-interesting degrees nothing to do with CS. So, yes, you can get hired at FAANG & friends without a CS degree. But: I would suggest to always read that as "absolutely go for it, even if you didn't get a degree", not "skip getting a degree, it doesn't make a difference".
• ladyattis 5y ago
  I don't know if this is possible considering many of the big SV companies demand their talent to be on-site. Even Amazon which has become a cornerstone of cloud hosting is basically stuck with on-site/office attendance policies. So, I really don't see remote work being the silver bullet to kill the on-site/office beast. It'll be a generational change and not simply a change due to one pandemic.
• jorblumesea 5y ago
  All you need to do is work with a remote or offsite team once to disabuse you of this idea. It is extremely hard to make remote work...work. Also, cost savings are often negated by having to set up parallel structures in X or Y country. Suddenly your cheaper dev costs are being eaten by legal, finance and HR.
• an9n 5y ago
  I'll happily relocate from the UK to a country that isn't sliding towards tyranny. Are there any left???
  • warkdarrior 5y ago
    North Korea is not sliding towards tyranny.
• mrtweetyhack 5y ago
  well, pay and perks have a lot to do with it too
• nitwit005 5y ago
  It's hard to take this seriously when it doesn't acknowledge that remote work is nothing new, or that people have been making this prediction for decades.
• AmericanBlarney 5y ago
  Ehhh... Have been hearing some variation of this for 20 years. Canada and Singapore already have some tech presence (Singapore is huge for banking), so I don't think those are a particularly bold prediction. I would love for the Caribbean to become a thing but it seems less likely given the issues with governmental stability and severe weather. Just observing the companies I've worked for, I've also seen it's much easier to get hired for an on-prem job and transition to remote after proving your capabilities than to get hired fully remote from the start (minus the past 18 months). I wouldn't be entirely surprised if the result is many current U.S. residents moving to those destinations, moreso than locals being hired remotely.
  • rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
    The pandemic (finally) forced most companies to handle remote work, but remotely onboarding new employees is still terrible at most places. What you've described will become common. Start a job in the flesh, get trained up and productive, then you're free to move. It will probably be harder for you to get promoted if you're working remotely, but you'll also be providing less value because you won't be there to help bring the new hires up to speed. Companies that learn to onboard new employees remotely from the outset, efficiently and effectively, will have a monstrous competitive advantage in the coming years.
• villasv 5y ago
  I see the opposite happening. Strong currency and remote work further aggravates brain drain. 2 years of COVID has already impacted terribly the tech startup ecosystem in Brazil. Well, at least in terms of talent. At least, VC money is even more abundant now if you're raising in dollars.
• quantified 5y ago
  There’s two directions to it. I’ve read crowing articles via HN about how it opens the US up to hiring from the world, it also opens up the world to hiring from the rest of the world and from the US. It’s not just “outsourcing” that’s gone remote, it’s key players and teams. That’s a big difference from earlier waves. The ability to pay and live appropriately will be the chief determinator. US companies might pay better on average, but we may start seeing larger and brighter sparks elsewhere in the world.
• lmarcos 5y ago
  As a developer working in Europe, I would love to work for an American company and make 30 to 50% more. But, it's difficult: - I don't really want to adapt myself to their timezone. Perhaps 1 or 2 or hours of shift from my tz, but not more - I don't want to work as a contractor. I want to be an employee - I want at least 28 business days of vacation per year - I do 9 to 5. No more, no less. I'm not in my 20s anymore Because of the reasons above I don't even care looking for remote positions in American companies (which are scarce already).
  • wesnerm2 5y ago
    You should not make any assumptions about work in the US. There's many American software companies that are able to fulfill your requirements. In many tech companies, you have "unlimited" vacation. You can probably take more vacation that you already get in Europe. This is true of my company, mParticle. I can work 9-to-5 as an employee. That is the culture of the company that I work for. People can choose to work remotely or in an office.
    • mmalachowski 5y ago
      By "vacation" you mean fully paid days ? Unlimited?
      • svachalek 5y ago
        "Unlimited" in quotes. Sometimes better called "unmetered". That is, you are not granted days of vacation, nor does taking a day off get deducted from any limit. But obviously if you're not showing up to work often enough, you will lose your job.
        • Gigachad 5y ago
          I'd much rather have a set amount and feel good using it than worrying if I have exceeded my limit of socially acceptable days off.
    • the_only_law 5y ago
• wolverine876 5y ago
  The software development job market doesn't even encompass large parts of the US labor market, such as women, black and brown minorities, and poor communities. It's not suddenly going to open to the entire world. The education system and opportunities in the latter create very little chance that those kids will grow up to work for Google. I've had CS teachers in the magnet schools - these classes should be the top CS high school students in the district - ask me to donate old broken computers to work on. When the pandemic started and home schooling became a need, I read that some poor districts discovered that 50% of their students lacked a computer at home - their only Internet connection was via phone. I've had employers tell me that (a few) kids didn't know how to use a full-sized keyboard. Think how far that is from becoming a developer; think of the vision required and the obstacles they would have to overcome. You need more than an Internet connection to have an opportunity to become a software developer, or for any job. (Writing that makes me think: A development environment designed for beginning developers using phones might give some of these people one piece of the puzzle. Vim isn't so great on a phone.)
• readams 5y ago
  I personally find it strange how gleeful lots of US developers have been about remote work. It means our US salaries are going to be untenable and we'll be paid like the rest of the world. Why pay a Silicon Valley salary when it's remote anyway and 1/4 the price to get someone from elsewhere?
  • Nasrudith 5y ago
    We went through that with outsourcing already. There is something about businesses and their communications - don't listen to what they say they need - that is really what they want and are whining for. Instead look at their actions - they take measures to fufill their actual needs. We keep on seeing that scaremongering about "you taking advantage of remote work will be bad for your job oooooo!" but that doesn't make any sense. You forgoing its benefits won't make it not happen any more than riding a horse will stop people from using cars. Besides if they can why the hell aren't they already? The capability has long been there and they don't so much outsource to same order of magnitude. Given immigration to the US for work and it implies the other way around - they need to pay US level salaries to get the high quality employees with any level of remote reliability (recruiting is a rather messy and slapdash endeavor at best for judging and obtaining quality).
    • initplus 5y ago
      Modern remote hiring is very different to the offshoring of old. Hiring individual skilled developers remote is very different from outsourcing an entire project to a consulting shop in India. Modern offshoring is a very different experience, and likely will have downward pressure on US wages.
      • Daishiman 5y ago
        I'm not really seeing it. Competent developers at this point are already working directly or indirectly for US companies that pay well. I don't know anyone who wants this kind of work who doesn't have it already.
  • jaegerpicker 5y ago
• DevKoala 5y ago
  I have been hiring from overseas for a while; great talent at awesome rates. As a CS student in the USA, I would assume I am competing against the rest of the world right now.
• speby 5y ago
  No no no no. Let's go down the list, shall we. Remember, COVID or not, remote work trend accelerating or not, things have not changed as much as they seem: * People STILL want to migrate to the US and it will remain one of the top choices. People move her for economic/job opportunities, sure, but that's not all. * Outsourcing (or hiring remote teams in remote offices), as well as setting up remote and international offices has been going on for .... I can't even remember. 100 years? This was already happening and will keep happening. * Timezones are a physical problem and cannot be fixed. Sorry. Remote work or not, people don't want to work at 1 AM so they can talk to another team half-way around the world at 7 AM. This was true yesterday and it will remain true today. * Culture issues will remain. True yesterday. True today. * Language issues will remain. True yesterday. True today. * US will continue to remain a country people WANT to live in and stay in once they are here. Remote work will certainly allow some people to move abroad and continue working because that's something they really want. But the data definitely doesn't suggest some sea change here. True yesterday. Remains largely true today.
  • cblconfederate 5y ago
    I think the realization people had through the pandemic is that a very large part of the western world is equally livable. Apart from economic opportunity, what else is there on US soil that makes it comparably preferable? And i think you re forgetting that the US has been outsourcing its manufacturing to china for decades, and china is , what 15 hours difference? Most of work is asynchronous I think the US has nothing to fear from remote work -- they will outsource even more work and again benefit from the arbitrage. But it is true that it will diminish their talent advantage, and that will be good for them.
    • coding123 5y ago
      But it's good for exactly who they are - the management. As long as Americans are replaced time and again, it changes the US. We used to care for each other. I think the fact that the greed machine is so precise and backstabbing and self-documented and codified there's nothing to tell it to stop hiring people outside the US simply for cheaper labor. I keep seeing people say that the economy is not a zero sum game - but all I see is people getting poorer and offered worse jobs with fewer benefits. I think however there is ONE potential out: Building HOMES. It seems that the people that DO have a really high paying job is willing to pay 1M for a 2 bedroom house. I think the next major thing is for people to pick up the hammer and build houses for rich people wanting their second and third home. Next change for the laws? Make it easier to get a Gen-Con license...?
• ubermonkey 5y ago
  I mean, maybe? We had an offshore subsidiary in India. The problems with it were LEGION. 1. The key issue was overall quality. I'm sure it's possible to get good code out of an offshore team, but we couldn't. Their contributions to our code base comprise the lion's share of the technical debt we're carrying. 2. Time. Working asynchronously is really, really hard, even without any other issues floating around. I wouldn't want to work async with the best devs I've ever known, let alone a "regular" dev. 3. Culture. Local cultural differences can KILL developmental communication. If the local customs discourage saying "no, I don't understand" or "no, we can't do it that way" or whatever, then you end up with bad code and a worse product even if you get anything at all out of it. (I have my biases here, but I'm trying to frame this as a mismatch of expectations and not, as some might, an example one way being Good and the other Bad.) I might be willing to work with proven, reliable, highly communicative resources at a 6 hour offset, but a new hire on the other side of the planet working local hours? No way.
  • sumedh 5y ago
    > I'm sure it's possible to get good code out of an offshore team, but we couldn't. That depends on the salary, how much were you offering?
    • ubermonkey 5y ago
      EXTREMELY competitive salaries. The company owner believes in paying for talent.
      • sumedh 5y ago
        EXTREMELY competitive salaries does not say anything. You have companies like Google and Microsoft in India paying very well and you have the IT consulting giants like Infosys, TCS etc who pay peanuts yet they still find employees but they have a bad reputation. Was your company paying Google level salaries or the TCS level salaries?
        • ubermonkey 5y ago
• ed_elliott_asc 5y ago
  It wont, US tech companies are making money hand over fist - they want more people to make them more money, they don’t need slower communication for less money.
• rwaksmunski 5y ago
  I'm earning 6 figures in central Europe working remotely for the Americans. Local corporations can't match that let alone beat it. I'm cheaper than U.S. resources, yet a lot more experienced and productive. I'm happy and the employer is really, really happy. If anything remote work solidified US strong hold on IT talent, not broke it.
  • pcurve 5y ago
    Definitely great news for you, but not so great news for IT talent located the U.S. if more companies start doing this. It's also bad news for employers in your country, because they're losing top talent like yourself to deep pocketed American companies.
    • jopsen 5y ago
      > but not so great news for IT talent located the U.S. if more companies start doing this. We've been saying that for 30 years. In the end, the demand for engineers is much bigger than we think. And if price of engineers goes down just a little bit, more projects will become feasible, so demand will go up. So, if anything we might see wages grow less aggressively, long before they stall, and wages will stall long before they go down. Who knows how long the party will last, but odds are it's longer than nmy career. (Unless a bubble blows up SV tomorrow, hehe)
    • throwawaygh 5y ago
      Meh. I think folks under-estimate the variety of economies in the US. I could move to WV and live very comfortably on about 60K a year. I could very realistically take a 10x paycut (not that I would bother working for someone else in software at that point... "my engineers/scientists might leave and create the start-up that kills me" is definitely upward pressure on wages at least for a certain class of tech worker) (FWIW, I don't really have a horse in this race; my skillset is unique enough that everyone who competes with me for jobs qualifies for special visas and there's a 10:1 or maybe even 100:1 labor shortage with a 6+ year ramp-up time. But I've worked with off-shore talent and seen the comps... my general impression is that Americans over-estimate the cost of living in the cheapest parts of our country and MASSIVELY under-estimate the cost of living in urban cores of other countries)
• calebm 5y ago
  Similarly, remote work will break major cities' monopoly on high-income workers.
• i_have_an_idea 5y ago
  I think US devs that work on high IQ projects have nothing to worry about. It's very hard to find high IQ devs outside of the developed countries - trust me, I've tried. Whilst there are some, they're not nearly enough to influence the jobs market (and they usually charge US rates). I think the local environment plays a big role - stuff like early childhood nutrition, healthcare, clean water and air, a good education system that can recognize and develop talent. That's usually missing in developing countries. I do think there's a decent chance CRUD-related dev work wages will probably be suppressed. I think that's because the work is easier, so lower IQ people can do it well but also (and probably more importantly) a lot of that work is in the process of being automated anyway.
• anonygler 5y ago
  I'd love to believe this is true, but time differences between East/West Coast US alone makes collaboration incredibly tedious. I'm really not a believer in distributed, remote teams due to time issues. It's more feasible in a similar time zone +/- 1 hour. Beyond that you end up with people working into their lunch hours, etc. Global time differences within teams are really just a massive headache and a non-starter for most organizations.
• 5revive 5y ago
  Canadian Company: Our upper bound is 90k American, you get no equity, you have to work Eastern Time Zone US Company: Our mid bound is 200k American, you get equity, you have to be available +/- 4 hours from the time zone of your core team for 3 days a week. Its not even close. And if we are talking about raising money - just lol. Canadian VCs treat their investment like they are buying into a 200 year old insurance company for a check in the 50k range. Turning around a company / industry culture away from a 1950s factory model is very hard, and its even hard for companies who allegedly want to compete against SV firms.
  • cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    100% true. If this WFH Remote trend continues the software industry in Canada is going to get a rude awakening. I know many people walking away from jobs here to go work remote for US companies for a lot more pay. Only way to do really well in Canada is to work for a FAANG with HQ here, as they tend to bring a bit of their comp structure with them. Or consult. But even at the FAANG I work for there's been people leaving to go remote for same or more pay. From my experience with the startup world in Toronto (over 10 years ago, so), the whole Canadian VC industry & startup world was nepotistic. All went to private school together, and role playing a part.
    • 5revive 5y ago
      Yea pretty much, Canadian VC is just an employment scheme for failkids + some guy who cashed out 20 years ago on yahoo or whatever to coast around.
• devwastaken 5y ago
  "illigal online workers" is going to become a term. Why hire a junior in the U.S. for 80K when you can hire a Junior in India for 15K? There isn't some magic difference. Programming is a universal language, the only difference in who can program and who can't is funding of education. We are doing very, very poorly on education funding in the U.S., with only the top uni's with impossible tuiton costs providing anything of value.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• weitingliu 5y ago
  If anything, remote can strengthen US's monopoly on global talent in the short-term. The friction for US companies to attract global talent is now even lower. Now you don't even need to apply for an H1B visa to be physically in the US to work for a US company. However, since the talent is not physically based in the US, this can be a great thing for countries everywhere in the long-run. GDPs are created remotely for countries around the world, and the knowledge these global talent gain by working with US companies will be dispersed around the world. Hundreds of ecosystems will bloom around the world, leveling the playing field. This is a great thing.
• api 5y ago
  Not if we keep attracting it by being a desirable place to live (at least relative to others). The "American Century" was largely built on brain drain from totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and the USSR. If China threatens Taiwan it would be idiotic if the USA did not offer open work visas and fast path citizenship for any Taiwanese refugees that want to leave. This would be the best non-military option for dealing with that, and would help us benefit from brain drain.
• dataexporter 5y ago
  If the US keeps its skilled immigration H1B process so complicated and painful with lots of unpredictability and randomness for its potential immigrants - it is definitely going to lose the attraction that it had on tech workers. I have personally seen hundreds of FANG rockstar engineers leave the country to Canada and Australia where their immigration processes are easier and provide an easier path to citizenship instead of keeping them as indentured slaves for an indefinite period.
• keywords34 5y ago
  Article by crewscale- https://www.crewscale.com/blog/future-of-work/the-gig-economy https://www.crewscale.com/blog/future-of-work/the-gig-econom...