6 ms·

A better headline would have been, “Tech industry uses scare tactics to try and force people back into the office”. Been there, done that. If it could have bee

by zcw100 4y ago

A better headline would have been, “Tech industry uses scare tactics to try and force people back into the office”. Been there, done that. If it could have been outsourced it would have already been outsourced. Do you really think they were sitting around saying,”I know they cost more but I’m too busy playing golf to bother” and they’re only getting around to it now?

JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
Actually yes I do. Feel very strongly that the tech work from home movement is shining a light on something they don’t want a light shined on. They should be vehemently making cases that teams need to be in offices together and that “face to face is best” to keep their jobs in their citadel.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  If work (of any kind) can only be done face-to-face, why do companies have satellite offices? I've never worked for a company with more than a few hundred employees that didn't have offices in multiple states and co-workers who had never met in person, yet still conducted business just fine remotely.
- scandox 4y ago
  Absolutely. I am seeing this unfold right in front of me and I'm amazed how happy people are to cut their own throat. I guess it's just because a lot of people have only ever experienced being highly in demand.
- TimPC 4y ago
  Or maybe it’s enough to have people in the same time zone working the same hours and communicating using technology. There is a big difference between questions being answered right away and questions being answered overnight that one still has to consider for outsourcing.
  - jghn 4y ago
    Right. Both sides of this debate have been disingenuous. The remote-or-bust crowd always seems to assume salaries would stay the same. Most, not all, but most software development jobs don't require specialty skills. If the job can truly be done anywhere, why would we assume the answer will be to pay SF salaries all around the world? The must-be-in-office crowd tends to ignore that most of the time remote work mostly is fine. Yes, everyone has an anecdote of this going horribly wrong. But they ignore that minimizing costs as first priority is not going to yield optimal results. And a lot of those horror stories involve bottom rate outsourcing operations. There exists a world in which outsourcing/remote covers most needs but pays less than we're used to in the US software industry. It's neither the penny on the dollar model of traditional outsourcing nor junior devs making 500K TC in theo there extreme.
    - bin_bash 4y ago
      Even the most highly paid juniors (L3) don’t make 250K let alone 500K.
      - jghn 4y ago
        Yes, it was hyperbole.
michaelt 4y ago
I think they were sitting around saying "The outsourcing of the 1990s failed because of poor communication; there's no replacement for regular face-to-face meetings"
- joshstrange 4y ago
  I have no doubt there are execs sitting around thinking that, they are wrong but I don't doubt it. There are a how slew of reasons why outsourcing fails time and time again and "poor communication" isn't very high on that list.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > I have no doubt there are execs sitting around thinking that, they are wrong but I don't doubt it. There are a how slew of reasons why outsourcing fails time and time again and "poor communication" isn't very high on that list. Poor communication a multiplying factor for all the other problems.
    - joshstrange 4y ago
      Agreed, "poor communication" can mean a number of things that are huge problems. > "The outsourcing of the 1990s failed because of poor communication; there's no replacement for regular face-to-face meetings" reply I was specifically talking about the progression of things like video/audio/text chat (think Zoom/Slack) but I get that I wasn't clear. I fixated on "there's no replacement for regular face-to-face meetings" which isn't true, and that alone wasn't the reason outsourcing failed. Language barriers, cultural barriers, timezones, and the list goes on of things I group under "poor communication". These should not be scoffed at or downplayed.
    - hungryforcodes 4y ago
      Having some experience with this -- poor communication comes time and time again as the number one problem both clients and outsourcing companies list as problems in their google slides during project retrospectives.
- 4y ago
joshstrange 4y ago
Agreed, wake me up when cheap outsourced developers actually works out. I've yet to see it. I have nothing against foreign developers but most of the outsourcing shops I've had the displeasure of working with are 0.2-0.5X developers at "only" 0.6+X of the cost. I know there are developers in other countries that can run circles around me but they aren't working for pennies. Also this mindset completely disregards things like timezones, language barriers, and understanding/relating to your customers. Every experience I've had with "let's save money by using this outsourcing firm" has been terrible and a complete failure, even if it took the execs years before they would admit it and reverse course. Sure, for a few years you can coast on what the developers you laid off/fired built but cracks will start to show and you can't just slot in developers like RAM sticks. It takes time to fully understand any system but execs are so shortsighted and oblivious to gross hacks being done to get something to work. It only takes a few years of outsourced code management before it turns into a house of cards. Hell, most software already is somewhat of a house of cards, if you bring in people that do not care about anything but billable hours they aren't even going to maintain the current mess, they will do the easy thing every time until your software is completely unmanageable.
- lucumo 4y ago
  > Agreed, wake me up when cheap outsourced developers actually works out. This actually happens quite a lot in my West-European country. Companies that aren't too picky about language knowledge can get cheap(er) Eastern European developers to do a lot of work. It works out well for the company. I'm one of the last expensive local developers, so I work with them quite often. These developers are well-educated and very capable. They are in the same or an adjacent timezone, so there's no issue there. They have little to no knowledge of my local language, but that's not a big issue for us because we do most of our work in English anyway. There is no daily/weekly face to face interaction of course, but with WFH that doesn't happen with local developers either. There are just no insurmountable problems with nearshoring anymore. And since you can easily save 30-50% on a developer's salary by doing so...
  - SauciestGNU 4y ago
    Agreed, before the war I worked with an outsourced team in Ukraine, and I was blown away with the quality of their work and the professionalism of all the devs I talked to in that shop. That being said, I'm not worried about outsourcing. I believe I bring enough value to the table to withstand those pressures, even if eventually I have to take a wage hit to compete.
bin_bash 4y ago
The article doesn’t even mention RTO so I don’t see how you came to that conclusion. This article is about scare tactics to get more visas.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  Just because they don't say it doesn't mean it's not there. WSJ and NYT specifically have been running a steady stream of articles about the need, benefits, and inevitability of returning office workers to full time in person work. You don't need a conspiracy explanation to see the trend in these publications, and they've obviously been working this from multiple angles. There's no reason to dismiss this article as part of that pressure just because it can also accomplish another goal.
commandlinefan 4y ago
> If it could have been outsourced it would have already been outsourced It already has been outsourced and then re-insourced as soon as the quality was evident.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  > It already has been outsourced and then re-insourced as soon as the quality was evident. And you don't hear about it because no company wants to advertise eating crow. I once worked for a place that made a huge deal about "$comapnyName China" office opening. A few weeks later I was asked to review a project they did, 150+ hours logged, didn't follow any of our style guides, didn't work, showed a complete lack of understanding of the framework we were using. I redid the entire project in 8 hours. The "China branch" didn't last long after that, but it also was never mentioned again, they swept it under the rug and pretended it never existed. I'm sure some morons will outsource their development, I'll find the smarter companies and work for them until the "who cares, it saves money" group is ousted or comes to their senses (unlikely).
- ActionHank 4y ago
  A common trend I've seen for roles recruiters have contacted me on was for startups that outsourced huge chunks of development and are looking for senior \ staff developer to ensure the quality stays above board.
- jollybean 4y ago
  'Hiring cheap body shop devs. from poor country X' - is not what's happening here. This is not 'offshore body shop' movement. It's the 'hire from anywhere movement' because 'remote working' ... and anyone doubting this is in for hard awakening. The underlying assumption that US devs are somehow 'better' is absurdly wrong. US businesses are often better, for a variety or reasons, pushing up the salaries of those who can ultimately work 'in the office' (by passport or whatever) - but that's changing due to 'remote work'. It's a big, real, secular, probably transformation change. It's probably for the better actually - the only problem I have with it is the the accumulation of capital by shareholders who have more power.
jollybean 4y ago
"If it could have been outsourced it would have already been outsourced." You're in for a rude awakening. It wasn't outsourced before because: 1) standard was in-office and 2) no mass movement to validate it 3) 'outsourced overseas' often meant 'poor country'. We are only expanding overseas right now because the quality is good and the price is much better. At least for what we are doing. The Valley is not going away, neither are high salaries, though I do wonder what it means for 'home talent at the high range'.
- phil21 4y ago
  > We are only expanding overseas right now because the quality is good and the price is much better. Indeed. I've been WFH/remote my entire career and have long worked with folks throughout the world. I was considered an outlier for almost all of it. In the past 12mo this has tectonically shifted. Midsize companies I'm close to who would never have dreamed of "outsourcing" are now instituting US hiring freezes after seeing how well hiring a few developers out of eastern europe went. In many cases the talent is simply better without any cost benefit calculation needed. Yes, the top-tier rockstar talent (anyone posting on HN is clearly in that club of course) has nothing to worry about. The everyman programmer working on yet another line of business app or CRUD interface is in for an incredibly brutal market over the next decade or two. Anyone that dismisses this as "outsourcing" is not paying attention. There is little difference working with someone in Toledo Spain vs. Toledo Ohio other than timezone. Timezone is pretty much the sole remaining argument. However, if you are now 100% remote WFH friendly - why would timezones matter that much? All documentation and process is fully online and asynchronous already so a few hours of overlap a day is more than sufficient for well-run teams on most projects.
RestlessMind 4y ago
> If it could have been outsourced it would have already been outsourced This time is indeed different. Copying my answer from elsewhere in this thread: "now with fully remote, it is easy to replace a USA team member with a Mexican or Canadian or Brazilian and do it one by one. boil the frog slowly. and very soon, majority of your team will be outside USA. I am still watching it happen at my current shop. Majority of new hires and new headcount is from other countries."

by zcw100 4y ago

JohnJamesRambo 4y ago

Actually yes I do. Feel very strongly that the tech work from home movement is shining a light on something they don’t want a light shined on. They should be vehemently making cases that teams need to be in offices together and that “face to face is best” to keep their jobs in their citadel.

commandlinefan 4y ago
If work (of any kind) can only be done face-to-face, why do companies have satellite offices? I've never worked for a company with more than a few hundred employees that didn't have offices in multiple states and co-workers who had never met in person, yet still conducted business just fine remotely.
scandox 4y ago
Absolutely. I am seeing this unfold right in front of me and I'm amazed how happy people are to cut their own throat. I guess it's just because a lot of people have only ever experienced being highly in demand.
TimPC 4y ago
Or maybe it’s enough to have people in the same time zone working the same hours and communicating using technology. There is a big difference between questions being answered right away and questions being answered overnight that one still has to consider for outsourcing.
- jghn 4y ago
  Right. Both sides of this debate have been disingenuous. The remote-or-bust crowd always seems to assume salaries would stay the same. Most, not all, but most software development jobs don't require specialty skills. If the job can truly be done anywhere, why would we assume the answer will be to pay SF salaries all around the world? The must-be-in-office crowd tends to ignore that most of the time remote work mostly is fine. Yes, everyone has an anecdote of this going horribly wrong. But they ignore that minimizing costs as first priority is not going to yield optimal results. And a lot of those horror stories involve bottom rate outsourcing operations. There exists a world in which outsourcing/remote covers most needs but pays less than we're used to in the US software industry. It's neither the penny on the dollar model of traditional outsourcing nor junior devs making 500K TC in theo there extreme.
  - bin_bash 4y ago
    Even the most highly paid juniors (L3) don’t make 250K let alone 500K.
    - jghn 4y ago
      Yes, it was hyperbole.

michaelt 4y ago

I think they were sitting around saying "The outsourcing of the 1990s failed because of poor communication; there's no replacement for regular face-to-face meetings"

joshstrange 4y ago
I have no doubt there are execs sitting around thinking that, they are wrong but I don't doubt it. There are a how slew of reasons why outsourcing fails time and time again and "poor communication" isn't very high on that list.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > I have no doubt there are execs sitting around thinking that, they are wrong but I don't doubt it. There are a how slew of reasons why outsourcing fails time and time again and "poor communication" isn't very high on that list. Poor communication a multiplying factor for all the other problems.
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    Agreed, "poor communication" can mean a number of things that are huge problems. > "The outsourcing of the 1990s failed because of poor communication; there's no replacement for regular face-to-face meetings" reply I was specifically talking about the progression of things like video/audio/text chat (think Zoom/Slack) but I get that I wasn't clear. I fixated on "there's no replacement for regular face-to-face meetings" which isn't true, and that alone wasn't the reason outsourcing failed. Language barriers, cultural barriers, timezones, and the list goes on of things I group under "poor communication". These should not be scoffed at or downplayed.
  - hungryforcodes 4y ago
    Having some experience with this -- poor communication comes time and time again as the number one problem both clients and outsourcing companies list as problems in their google slides during project retrospectives.
4y ago

joshstrange 4y ago

Agreed, wake me up when cheap outsourced developers actually works out. I've yet to see it. I have nothing against foreign developers but most of the outsourcing shops I've had the displeasure of working with are 0.2-0.5X developers at "only" 0.6+X of the cost. I know there are developers in other countries that can run circles around me but they aren't working for pennies. Also this mindset completely disregards things like timezones, language barriers, and understanding/relating to your customers. Every experience I've had with "let's save money by using this outsourcing firm" has been terrible and a complete failure, even if it took the execs years before they would admit it and reverse course. Sure, for a few years you can coast on what the developers you laid off/fired built but cracks will start to show and you can't just slot in developers like RAM sticks. It takes time to fully understand any system but execs are so shortsighted and oblivious to gross hacks being done to get something to work. It only takes a few years of outsourced code management before it turns into a house of cards. Hell, most software already is somewhat of a house of cards, if you bring in people that do not care about anything but billable hours they aren't even going to maintain the current mess, they will do the easy thing every time until your software is completely unmanageable.

lucumo 4y ago
> Agreed, wake me up when cheap outsourced developers actually works out. This actually happens quite a lot in my West-European country. Companies that aren't too picky about language knowledge can get cheap(er) Eastern European developers to do a lot of work. It works out well for the company. I'm one of the last expensive local developers, so I work with them quite often. These developers are well-educated and very capable. They are in the same or an adjacent timezone, so there's no issue there. They have little to no knowledge of my local language, but that's not a big issue for us because we do most of our work in English anyway. There is no daily/weekly face to face interaction of course, but with WFH that doesn't happen with local developers either. There are just no insurmountable problems with nearshoring anymore. And since you can easily save 30-50% on a developer's salary by doing so...
- SauciestGNU 4y ago
  Agreed, before the war I worked with an outsourced team in Ukraine, and I was blown away with the quality of their work and the professionalism of all the devs I talked to in that shop. That being said, I'm not worried about outsourcing. I believe I bring enough value to the table to withstand those pressures, even if eventually I have to take a wage hit to compete.

bin_bash 4y ago

The article doesn’t even mention RTO so I don’t see how you came to that conclusion. This article is about scare tactics to get more visas.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
Just because they don't say it doesn't mean it's not there. WSJ and NYT specifically have been running a steady stream of articles about the need, benefits, and inevitability of returning office workers to full time in person work. You don't need a conspiracy explanation to see the trend in these publications, and they've obviously been working this from multiple angles. There's no reason to dismiss this article as part of that pressure just because it can also accomplish another goal.

commandlinefan 4y ago

> If it could have been outsourced it would have already been outsourced It already has been outsourced and then re-insourced as soon as the quality was evident.

joshstrange 4y ago
> It already has been outsourced and then re-insourced as soon as the quality was evident. And you don't hear about it because no company wants to advertise eating crow. I once worked for a place that made a huge deal about "$comapnyName China" office opening. A few weeks later I was asked to review a project they did, 150+ hours logged, didn't follow any of our style guides, didn't work, showed a complete lack of understanding of the framework we were using. I redid the entire project in 8 hours. The "China branch" didn't last long after that, but it also was never mentioned again, they swept it under the rug and pretended it never existed. I'm sure some morons will outsource their development, I'll find the smarter companies and work for them until the "who cares, it saves money" group is ousted or comes to their senses (unlikely).
ActionHank 4y ago
A common trend I've seen for roles recruiters have contacted me on was for startups that outsourced huge chunks of development and are looking for senior \ staff developer to ensure the quality stays above board.
jollybean 4y ago
'Hiring cheap body shop devs. from poor country X' - is not what's happening here. This is not 'offshore body shop' movement. It's the 'hire from anywhere movement' because 'remote working' ... and anyone doubting this is in for hard awakening. The underlying assumption that US devs are somehow 'better' is absurdly wrong. US businesses are often better, for a variety or reasons, pushing up the salaries of those who can ultimately work 'in the office' (by passport or whatever) - but that's changing due to 'remote work'. It's a big, real, secular, probably transformation change. It's probably for the better actually - the only problem I have with it is the the accumulation of capital by shareholders who have more power.

jollybean 4y ago

"If it could have been outsourced it would have already been outsourced." You're in for a rude awakening. It wasn't outsourced before because: 1) standard was in-office and 2) no mass movement to validate it 3) 'outsourced overseas' often meant 'poor country'. We are only expanding overseas right now because the quality is good and the price is much better. At least for what we are doing. The Valley is not going away, neither are high salaries, though I do wonder what it means for 'home talent at the high range'.

phil21 4y ago
> We are only expanding overseas right now because the quality is good and the price is much better. Indeed. I've been WFH/remote my entire career and have long worked with folks throughout the world. I was considered an outlier for almost all of it. In the past 12mo this has tectonically shifted. Midsize companies I'm close to who would never have dreamed of "outsourcing" are now instituting US hiring freezes after seeing how well hiring a few developers out of eastern europe went. In many cases the talent is simply better without any cost benefit calculation needed. Yes, the top-tier rockstar talent (anyone posting on HN is clearly in that club of course) has nothing to worry about. The everyman programmer working on yet another line of business app or CRUD interface is in for an incredibly brutal market over the next decade or two. Anyone that dismisses this as "outsourcing" is not paying attention. There is little difference working with someone in Toledo Spain vs. Toledo Ohio other than timezone. Timezone is pretty much the sole remaining argument. However, if you are now 100% remote WFH friendly - why would timezones matter that much? All documentation and process is fully online and asynchronous already so a few hours of overlap a day is more than sufficient for well-run teams on most projects.

RestlessMind 4y ago

> If it could have been outsourced it would have already been outsourced This time is indeed different. Copying my answer from elsewhere in this thread: "now with fully remote, it is easy to replace a USA team member with a Mexican or Canadian or Brazilian and do it one by one. boil the frog slowly. and very soon, majority of your team will be outside USA. I am still watching it happen at my current shop. Majority of new hires and new headcount is from other countries."