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None of these arguments were ever made when sending engineering teams offshore.
by jfghi 3y ago
None of these arguments were ever made when sending engineering teams offshore.
- missedthecue 3y agoWell there's a major difference here. Paying a dev overseas $50,000 a year instead of $180,000 a year could be well worth it even though you incur losses in areas like coordination, community, and communication. But paying devs $180,000 a year to sit alone 20km away from each other, while they slack and zoom doesn't have the same cost/benefit ratio to consider. You still lose the benefits mentioned above, but don't save anything on costs. This isn't an argument for or against remote work, but offshoring and WFH have important differences.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nitwit005 3y agoIt does mean statements aren't completely honest though. Public statements by companies unsurprisingly tend to leave out the downsides of decisions.
- CameronNemo 3y agoThis is assuming that when offshoring, it is only the medium of communication that changes. Language barriers, dialects, and social norms can all be quite different when offshoring. The local worker, even if they are working from home, is still more in sync culturally (presumably, maybe you hire some real weirdos).
- missedthecue 3y agoRight there all kinds of seen and unseen costs associated with offshoring. My point is that there is a huge benefit in cost savings.
- CameronNemo 3y agoSorry, I'm not best with social cues. Thank goodness for companies that hire local weirdos like me!
- Affric 3y ago100% Having worked in offices, remotely, and with offshore teams I can say that remote work leads to really bad outcomes from team members who don’t want to be part of the team. Worse than having them in the office. I think the big part is that, at least in work culture here, that you simply cannot call someone out for not doing their job. There’s no shame. No cost. Nothing to avoid. There’s performance plans. There’s meetings. There’s never radical intervention that leads to the change needed to have people shit or get off the pot. This is good financially for these people in the short term but in my experience much worse for their careers in the long term. WFH would be way easier on us if people had the freedom/were enabled to leave jobs they hate.
- xwdv 3y agoYou call me out for not doing work I’ll call you out for not doing work. Mutually assured destruction. I keep a file on my computer with many co-workers names and lists of things they’ve done to fuck up or times they didn’t do any work just in case.
- rikthevik 3y agoLet's see the list! I'm interested!
- nimbleplum40 3y agoDo you also keep a list of times coworkers went above and beyond or did exceptionally good work?
- bonestamp2 3y ago> You still lose the benefits mentioned above, but don't save anything on costs. It depends on how you measure the costs of remote... the company I used to work for saved $5 million/year in real estate costs by switching to full remote at the start of covid. That is one thing to consider when comparing remote and on-site costs. *It took about 2 years to reach those savings as we waited for some leases to expire.
- Terr_ 3y ago> Well there's a major difference here. [Money] I'd also like to interject that "Productivity" metrics are almost never some kind of efficiency of human potential to create civilization against a hostile universe. They're b(i)ased on what the employer spends. So even if a study says an employee is X% more "productive" at the office, that means ignoring all the time/money spent commuting, since that's typically shouldered entirely by employees. So watch out for people conflating "employers get a better deal" with "offices are good for society."
- bcrosby95 3y agoNevermind that "the 8 hour work day" included your lunch hour at one point. With an average one-way commute of 30 minutes for my state (California), here's basically 2 hours of on-the-clock time you aren't getting paid for.
- paulddraper 3y ago9-5 with a whole hour for lunch? Really?
- test098 3y agoyeah. we used to get pensions too.
- paulddraper 3y agoI guess that would be the downside
- test098 3y agoit was, for execs who don't want to pay fair prices for labor. but don't worry, we're waking up again and labor has the numbers on its side.
- pirates 3y agoMy company does this. if i start work at 7 i can stop at 3, 8-4, etc. Before we went widely WFH if you were in the office for 8 hours that was it. People ought to have been pushing back on the whole “8 hours is actually 9 hours” years ago.
- unlikelytomato 3y agoYou can save on costs by spending less money on on office space in favor of team events. You can also save money with hiring and retention due to happier employees. Offshore is a reasonable comparison. Virtually all offshore implementations that I have observed result in at least one employee being forced into becoming an offshore orchestrator. Everyone now has to play telephone with the offshore dev through this channel. Even if they could contact them directly, you have a one day communication lag because you only get one shot a day to have a one hour sync with the offshore team. In bad scenarios, the offshore team has all communication channeled through the local team lead creating yet another layer and further communication lag. The point here is that engineering teams have been communicating how this issue is detrimental for years. We saw WFH work in a forced experiment (and had a lot of data about improved productivity). It is obviously not a direct comparison, but the egregious nature of blind positivity towards offshore and blind negativity towards WFH makes the comparison relevant.
- paulddraper 3y ago> blind positivity towards offshore and blind negativity towards WFH You must read a different HN than I do
- OJFord 3y agoPretty sure GP meant in the industry, corporate positivity/negativity, not among HN commenters.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]