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I’m a CTO at a small startup, not forcing RTO on anyone BUT the vibe I get in my peer group is that managers don’t know how to manage remote teams, don’t want t

I’m a CTO at a small startup, not forcing RTO on anyone BUT the vibe I get in my peer group is that managers don’t know how to manage remote teams, don’t want to do real performance management, and they personally have some loneliness issues they solve by working from the office. I work from an office with my cofounder 1 day/week, and it has been great for my mental health to leave my living room. I think broadly speaking that the path of building and managing a remote team successfully is different than in person in that (1) it should be more transactional, less relationship based, and you should be more comfortable and active in routinely cutting the bottom performers. Remote work does genuinely change the labor relation to be a step or two closer to the contractor model (extremely transactional and performance based, not culture/family etc). Remote work gives power to capital/management and it seems like most managers who graduated Stanford/MIT and learned to run teams in a zero interest rate env are not comfortable exercising this power on behalf of the companies they represent. (2) Managers should be hiring in low cost areas, you don’t need a team in NYC/SFBA for most things. There are great engineers in Latam. You can find very committed senior talent in latam for 120-160k, the US equivalent would be 180-250k, and the latam folks are less likely to job hop or negotiate a higher comp in month 12. (3) a lot of senior leaders don’t want to learn a new playbook (remote management). They have a playbook that worked, they used it for 10-15 years, and they want to turn the clock back to that time. Even if 30% of senior leaders at a company feel this way, that’s usually enough to “roll back” to how things were. The remote enthusiasts who haven’t taken on the new management style whole hog don’t have any wins to show, so the revanchist old managers are winning the hearts and minds of CEOs. The companies who mastered remote and learned how to do it right aren’t doing RTO BUT remote done right definitely is not paying a globally average Bay Area engineer locally competitive salaries for globally average work.

joxel 4y ago
You’re c-suite material all right. A natural hate for someone asking for more compensation. Hope your startup fails.
no_wizard 4y ago
Man I do get it, cost of labor sucks as a business. It’s always disheartening to me though that it’s just so easy for people to justify undercutting labor in just a few swift sentences like this, especially because the nuances of culture are very different, for one, and for two, there are downsides to this form of recruitment that never gets acknowledged from issues with time zones to acceptable quality standards and other things. Maybe I’m just old, but it feels almost heartless to be compared by the numbers that someone should just “hire in Latin American because they have less leverage”. Just treat your employees well. No you don’t need to hire in traditionally geographical Silicon Valley areas every time or by default, but you don’t have to go all the way to latam either. I hope people in other areas of the world wise up to this and ask for 1st rate salaries and benefits
- mostlysimilar 4y ago
  I believe for every person out there like the parent poster there are people like you and I who can hold back that flow. It's incumbent upon us to not give our skills or our time to people who treat us like disposable resources. It's also incumbent upon people like us to build companies and hire people who share those values, and to treat them with dignity and respect.
  - junofan 4y ago
    The people who think like that want RTO, which is part of what GP is saying. The disposable resource people champion remote work.
    - 0xB31B1B 4y ago
      Exactly this, the two stable equilibria are “the company is the employees, we all work together in office” and “the company employs labor to solve our customers problems, and the company does this in the most cost effective way possible”.
    - phil21 4y ago
      Yep. This. I can't believe HN zeitgeist cannot understand this. Why would I hire a US employee for twice the cost when I can hire someone 95% as good remotely in a low cost area of the world and actually get an employee that sticks around for a decade vs. a year? It's honestly not even really a decision at this point if you have the management infrastructure in place.
mostlysimilar 4y ago
> You can find very committed senior talent in latam for 120-160k, the US equivalent would be 180-250k, and the latam folks are less likely to job hop or negotiate a higher comp in month 12 Disagree. Quality engineers will ask for their worth regardless of location. Also I think indexing on "less likely to job hop or negotiate salary" is short-sighted thinking. You're asking people to do a complex job where the key skill is critical thinking and self determination. Those skills go hand in hand with people willing to demand their worth from you. Sure, save a little bit of money now. But you're going to be building a brittle, disposable product with a brittle, disposable team for what ultimately will amount to a brittle, disposable company.
- 0xB31B1B 4y ago
  Employees in the bay and NYC have more opportunities and thus more negotiating leverage. It doesn’t mean they’re better at the work. Hiring in competitive locales does mean more brain space dedicated to “how do I retain this employee” and less brain space dedicated to “how can I make my customers happy and grow my business” which is a losing trade. The winning play is pay top of market rates to labor in low cost locales, and if the people you hire don’t work out then fire them quickly because you’re paying top if market and there is a lot of talent liquidity in that band. It’s the Netflix model, but global. Not really a new playbook.
  - lampington 4y ago
    "Fire them quickly" isn't always easy in some jurisdictions, though, at least without some very careful planning -- and sometimes not even then.
  - thebigfilter 4y ago
    It’s a very effective playbook, but it’s taking the easy path. More interesting and challenging is building a high perf company that has a better relationship with it’s labor. A cutthroat model will always work, but I think humans are intelligent enough to build high performing groups that succeed while taking care of others. Even the mafia took care of family, in their own perverse way (If you off Tony for talking to the cops, you still take care of his wife and kids).
sf_manager1 4y ago
> ...most managers who graduated Stanford/MIT... > ...you don’t need a team in NYC/SFBA for most things... There are great engineers in Latam > ...globally average Bay Area engineer There are two sides to the kind of broad strokes generalizing you are doing. It has been my experience, and the experience of everyone else that I know, that the Ivy League US-SF-NY people we work with are far and wide smarter, more productive, nicer, and way fewer problems, fewer emotional problems especially, than others in engineering and management. Go ahead and run a LATAM team. Nobody really cares. It will not turn out to be the management superpower / huge insight you are making it out to be.
fishcrackers 4y ago
sounds like it would be effective if the cto was in latam too
- thisarticle 4y ago
  Right? Funny how C-level employees never think they’ll get outsourced. Ten or twenty years from now there will be great CTO level talent founding companies in Latam if they aren’t already. Then the whole company can operate in a cheaper country with lower taxes and benefits. Good luck competing with that in the US.
  - isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y ago
    They won't because they don't have anywhere near the same access to capital. There is no country even close to the US in this regard, and US salaries in software engineering are the exception, not the norm.
    - thisarticle 4y ago
      How much capital does someone need if wages are low and you’re building an auto-scale enabled SaaS business without an office?
    - joyfylbanana 4y ago
      I think the macroeconomic trend is that the work is moving slowly to poorer countries. Makes perfect sense, as in US there is a lot of money, it should mean less desire to work and more to enjoy life, meanwhile in poorer countries people have high appetite for money/work. For example in India it used to be only outsourcing, but now they are launching their own startups as well, some quite succesful. Slowly the capital will start accumulating there as well. And that is a good thing, for global inequality.
  - moneywoes 4y ago
    Why not have the ceo in latam as well? What’s the US advantage?
listenallyall 4y ago
> the vibe I get in my peer group You acknowledge you are a cofounder of your company, therefore you and your cofounder named you as CTO (as opposed to an existing company where somebody was promoted or hired into the position by someone else). I'm just curious who your "peer group" is, the ones you believe "don't know how to manage remote teams" and have "loneliness issues" -- other self-proclaimed CTOs? Or a wider group of people? And what experience do you have that makes you so much of an expert? What are the long-term consequences of an engineering team that you assembled at a discount?
- 0xB31B1B 4y ago
  Peer group: CEOs, VP eng, CTO, directors at seed-series B companies where leadership team is Bay Area based. I think you’re seeing this wrong. Every other locale is a discount to SFBA/NYC. Many companies can and should pay top of market in cheaper locales. That is the winning remote playbook. Maybe the locale is Canada, maybe the locale is Argentina, maybe it’s Portugal. Pick your choice, they’re all 1/2 cost or less of SFBA/NYC, and if you’re all remote locale doesn’t really matter.
  - junofan 4y ago
    Yep, people are starting to look elsewhere.
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      They always have been.
  - onethought 4y ago
    I agree with this. The natural conclusion of “I want to work remote” is the equalisation of global wages. This is great for developing countries with highly skilled English speaking people and terrible for entitled software developers earning 2-10x their remote counterparts.
danaris 4y ago
> They have a playbook that worked The playbook worked for them, but that doesn't mean it worked for the people they were managing, or the company they worked for. My experience with managers and "the playbook that worked" for the past 50 years is that 80% of it consists of "if the employee is in their seat, and not visibly goofing off, that means they are working at 100% productivity; anything else is stealing from the company." It's effectively rooted in an assembly-line mindset (where if you weren't at your post, you clearly weren't working, and it was pretty easy to see whether you were working when you were at your post), in addition to treating subordinates like robots with no mental, emotional, or even physical needs while they are at work.
hfbff 4y ago
This has been my experience too. The transactional vs familiar thing is a tradeoff IMHO and people will have different preferences. Also: I'd like to ask you a few questions on Latam remote work. My email is in my About if you have the time!
giantg2 4y ago
"You can find very committed senior talent in latam for 120-160k, the US equivalent would be 180-250k," You can find devs in the US for less too. $160k for a senior dev in the Philly region is generous.
nunez 4y ago
See this is the thing that really confuses me about this whole kerfuffle. The more we collectively push for remote work, the more likely it becomes that our compensation takes a huge nosedive. Engineers in Brazil or El Salvador will LOVE working at even 30% of total FAANG comp (while enjoying fewer worker's rights and fewer benefits), and they are by and large technically competent. This whole thread has a very "I got mine" vibe to it.
raphar 4y ago
You can have really senior talent in Latam, starting at 60k. Don't let any intermediary believe otherwise.
FrontierPsych 4y ago
"culture/family etc" That's really just a veneer for "transactional and performance based" Whenever I hear a company say that they are like a family, I run. In a family, you don't lay off family members. As a matter-of-fact, if it is a family run business, and there's a business downturn, they will lay off all workers and leave their actual family members working. In reality, saying it is "family" is just a machiavellian ploy to pretend a business actually cares about the employees, in order to make them loyal to the company, without the loyalty going the other way. I've read so many stories about how owners were always talking about the company being "family" but when push came to shove, they shoved the employee out the door. But like so many companies, all the ones that are shedding employees, they never seem to fire the C-suite, somehow. As far as culture goes, all companies want to create a culture that is maximal efficiency for the company. That's all the culture is in a corporate world. It's transactional. No company is going to have a culture of 5 hour picnic lunches every day, followed by an hour foot massage for everyone so that only 2 hours of work get done a day. That would be silly. ALL business cultures exist to maximize shareholder investments. To the extent that cultures are different is just a different way of trying to maximize employee output. Nothing is wrong with it, but it actually is transactional. To the extent people talk about "culture" that is really just trying to polish the turd. I agree with everythinig else you wrote.

joxel 4y ago

You’re c-suite material all right. A natural hate for someone asking for more compensation. Hope your startup fails.

no_wizard 4y ago

Man I do get it, cost of labor sucks as a business. It’s always disheartening to me though that it’s just so easy for people to justify undercutting labor in just a few swift sentences like this, especially because the nuances of culture are very different, for one, and for two, there are downsides to this form of recruitment that never gets acknowledged from issues with time zones to acceptable quality standards and other things. Maybe I’m just old, but it feels almost heartless to be compared by the numbers that someone should just “hire in Latin American because they have less leverage”. Just treat your employees well. No you don’t need to hire in traditionally geographical Silicon Valley areas every time or by default, but you don’t have to go all the way to latam either. I hope people in other areas of the world wise up to this and ask for 1st rate salaries and benefits

mostlysimilar 4y ago
I believe for every person out there like the parent poster there are people like you and I who can hold back that flow. It's incumbent upon us to not give our skills or our time to people who treat us like disposable resources. It's also incumbent upon people like us to build companies and hire people who share those values, and to treat them with dignity and respect.
- junofan 4y ago
  The people who think like that want RTO, which is part of what GP is saying. The disposable resource people champion remote work.
  - 0xB31B1B 4y ago
    Exactly this, the two stable equilibria are “the company is the employees, we all work together in office” and “the company employs labor to solve our customers problems, and the company does this in the most cost effective way possible”.
  - phil21 4y ago
    Yep. This. I can't believe HN zeitgeist cannot understand this. Why would I hire a US employee for twice the cost when I can hire someone 95% as good remotely in a low cost area of the world and actually get an employee that sticks around for a decade vs. a year? It's honestly not even really a decision at this point if you have the management infrastructure in place.

mostlysimilar 4y ago

> You can find very committed senior talent in latam for 120-160k, the US equivalent would be 180-250k, and the latam folks are less likely to job hop or negotiate a higher comp in month 12 Disagree. Quality engineers will ask for their worth regardless of location. Also I think indexing on "less likely to job hop or negotiate salary" is short-sighted thinking. You're asking people to do a complex job where the key skill is critical thinking and self determination. Those skills go hand in hand with people willing to demand their worth from you. Sure, save a little bit of money now. But you're going to be building a brittle, disposable product with a brittle, disposable team for what ultimately will amount to a brittle, disposable company.

0xB31B1B 4y ago
Employees in the bay and NYC have more opportunities and thus more negotiating leverage. It doesn’t mean they’re better at the work. Hiring in competitive locales does mean more brain space dedicated to “how do I retain this employee” and less brain space dedicated to “how can I make my customers happy and grow my business” which is a losing trade. The winning play is pay top of market rates to labor in low cost locales, and if the people you hire don’t work out then fire them quickly because you’re paying top if market and there is a lot of talent liquidity in that band. It’s the Netflix model, but global. Not really a new playbook.
- lampington 4y ago
  "Fire them quickly" isn't always easy in some jurisdictions, though, at least without some very careful planning -- and sometimes not even then.
- thebigfilter 4y ago
  It’s a very effective playbook, but it’s taking the easy path. More interesting and challenging is building a high perf company that has a better relationship with it’s labor. A cutthroat model will always work, but I think humans are intelligent enough to build high performing groups that succeed while taking care of others. Even the mafia took care of family, in their own perverse way (If you off Tony for talking to the cops, you still take care of his wife and kids).

sf_manager1 4y ago

> ...most managers who graduated Stanford/MIT... > ...you don’t need a team in NYC/SFBA for most things... There are great engineers in Latam > ...globally average Bay Area engineer There are two sides to the kind of broad strokes generalizing you are doing. It has been my experience, and the experience of everyone else that I know, that the Ivy League US-SF-NY people we work with are far and wide smarter, more productive, nicer, and way fewer problems, fewer emotional problems especially, than others in engineering and management. Go ahead and run a LATAM team. Nobody really cares. It will not turn out to be the management superpower / huge insight you are making it out to be.

fishcrackers 4y ago

sounds like it would be effective if the cto was in latam too

thisarticle 4y ago
Right? Funny how C-level employees never think they’ll get outsourced. Ten or twenty years from now there will be great CTO level talent founding companies in Latam if they aren’t already. Then the whole company can operate in a cheaper country with lower taxes and benefits. Good luck competing with that in the US.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y ago
  They won't because they don't have anywhere near the same access to capital. There is no country even close to the US in this regard, and US salaries in software engineering are the exception, not the norm.
  - thisarticle 4y ago
    How much capital does someone need if wages are low and you’re building an auto-scale enabled SaaS business without an office?
  - joyfylbanana 4y ago
    I think the macroeconomic trend is that the work is moving slowly to poorer countries. Makes perfect sense, as in US there is a lot of money, it should mean less desire to work and more to enjoy life, meanwhile in poorer countries people have high appetite for money/work. For example in India it used to be only outsourcing, but now they are launching their own startups as well, some quite succesful. Slowly the capital will start accumulating there as well. And that is a good thing, for global inequality.
- moneywoes 4y ago
  Why not have the ceo in latam as well? What’s the US advantage?

listenallyall 4y ago

> the vibe I get in my peer group You acknowledge you are a cofounder of your company, therefore you and your cofounder named you as CTO (as opposed to an existing company where somebody was promoted or hired into the position by someone else). I'm just curious who your "peer group" is, the ones you believe "don't know how to manage remote teams" and have "loneliness issues" -- other self-proclaimed CTOs? Or a wider group of people? And what experience do you have that makes you so much of an expert? What are the long-term consequences of an engineering team that you assembled at a discount?

0xB31B1B 4y ago
Peer group: CEOs, VP eng, CTO, directors at seed-series B companies where leadership team is Bay Area based. I think you’re seeing this wrong. Every other locale is a discount to SFBA/NYC. Many companies can and should pay top of market in cheaper locales. That is the winning remote playbook. Maybe the locale is Canada, maybe the locale is Argentina, maybe it’s Portugal. Pick your choice, they’re all 1/2 cost or less of SFBA/NYC, and if you’re all remote locale doesn’t really matter.
- junofan 4y ago
  Yep, people are starting to look elsewhere.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    They always have been.
- onethought 4y ago
  I agree with this. The natural conclusion of “I want to work remote” is the equalisation of global wages. This is great for developing countries with highly skilled English speaking people and terrible for entitled software developers earning 2-10x their remote counterparts.

danaris 4y ago

> They have a playbook that worked The playbook worked for them, but that doesn't mean it worked for the people they were managing, or the company they worked for. My experience with managers and "the playbook that worked" for the past 50 years is that 80% of it consists of "if the employee is in their seat, and not visibly goofing off, that means they are working at 100% productivity; anything else is stealing from the company." It's effectively rooted in an assembly-line mindset (where if you weren't at your post, you clearly weren't working, and it was pretty easy to see whether you were working when you were at your post), in addition to treating subordinates like robots with no mental, emotional, or even physical needs while they are at work.

hfbff 4y ago

This has been my experience too. The transactional vs familiar thing is a tradeoff IMHO and people will have different preferences. Also: I'd like to ask you a few questions on Latam remote work. My email is in my About if you have the time!

giantg2 4y ago

"You can find very committed senior talent in latam for 120-160k, the US equivalent would be 180-250k," You can find devs in the US for less too. $160k for a senior dev in the Philly region is generous.

nunez 4y ago

See this is the thing that really confuses me about this whole kerfuffle. The more we collectively push for remote work, the more likely it becomes that our compensation takes a huge nosedive. Engineers in Brazil or El Salvador will LOVE working at even 30% of total FAANG comp (while enjoying fewer worker's rights and fewer benefits), and they are by and large technically competent. This whole thread has a very "I got mine" vibe to it.

raphar 4y ago

You can have really senior talent in Latam, starting at 60k. Don't let any intermediary believe otherwise.

FrontierPsych 4y ago

"culture/family etc" That's really just a veneer for "transactional and performance based" Whenever I hear a company say that they are like a family, I run. In a family, you don't lay off family members. As a matter-of-fact, if it is a family run business, and there's a business downturn, they will lay off all workers and leave their actual family members working. In reality, saying it is "family" is just a machiavellian ploy to pretend a business actually cares about the employees, in order to make them loyal to the company, without the loyalty going the other way. I've read so many stories about how owners were always talking about the company being "family" but when push came to shove, they shoved the employee out the door. But like so many companies, all the ones that are shedding employees, they never seem to fire the C-suite, somehow. As far as culture goes, all companies want to create a culture that is maximal efficiency for the company. That's all the culture is in a corporate world. It's transactional. No company is going to have a culture of 5 hour picnic lunches every day, followed by an hour foot massage for everyone so that only 2 hours of work get done a day. That would be silly. ALL business cultures exist to maximize shareholder investments. To the extent that cultures are different is just a different way of trying to maximize employee output. Nothing is wrong with it, but it actually is transactional. To the extent people talk about "culture" that is really just trying to polish the turd. I agree with everythinig else you wrote.