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Let’s take a less conspiratorial view and realize that when everyone showed they could work from home and clamored so vociferously for it to stay after the pand

Let’s take a less conspiratorial view and realize that when everyone showed they could work from home and clamored so vociferously for it to stay after the pandemic, that companies suddenly realized that meant you could pay someone across the world a lot cheaper for the same output, in their mind. https://www.cnbctv18.com/business/companies/google-microsoft-amazon-and-meta-are-hiring-low-paid-h1-workers-after-announcing-mass-layoffs-report-16697051.htm/ https://www.cnbctv18.com/business/companies/google-microsoft... I remember thinking “be careful what you are wishing for my dudes” when tech workers were loudly proclaiming how much work they could get done at home and never coming into the office. That office was your moat and now it’s gone.

rblatz 3y ago
| That office was your moat and now it’s gone. This seemed so obvious to me, and yet none of my colleagues would hear it when we discussed remote work.
cageface 3y ago
I’ve been working remote since 2010 with teams all over the world. People that are reliable and productive and that communicate well are very hard to find and are still in short supply. We made good money cleaning up messes caused by cheap offshoring deals.
batshit_beaver 3y ago
Imo, time zone, culture, language, data and privacy regulations are also moats, although being physically present helps a ton. I don't think there was anything stopping companies from outsourcing all engineering work pre-pandemic, but that model has been failing pretty consistently over the last couple decades.
stringsandchars 3y ago
> That office was your moat and now it’s gone. I don't think sitting in an office somewhere, with my headphones on is any kind of 'moat'. I'm judged on the quality and speed of work that I do. I'm also paid for understanding the underlying needs my company has for the application I'm building. I'm paid for the ideas I contribute, the work-culture I share, and for being present and consistent during work-hours - even though I work almost always from home. Twice in my career so far I've been involved in projects "paying someone across the world" for "the same output" and they were both total disasters: ending multiple-times over budget without even being completed. The time-difference alone would have been bad enough (where the feedback loop was often a couple of days even for the smallest change), but we found that the coders you were supposed to be dealing with would regularly be replaced, simply disappear altogether (sometimes reappearing in the project weeks later); the new developers would need to be re-briefed, and altogether the coordinating project manager halfway around the world would spend most of their time either bullshitting or stonewalling us. Payment, taxes and other problems all just added to the headaches. I don't mean that these developers were producing code that was lower quality (we barely saw enough to really judge), it's simply that working with someone "locally-remotely" is (almost literally) a world away from expecting to be able to just export that job to a low-wage coder in some other part of the globe.
wing-_-nuts 3y ago
>companies suddenly realized that meant you could pay someone across the world a lot cheaper for the same output, in their mind. Lets not pretend that companies haven't been trying to outsource pretty much everything they can possibly outsource since the early 2000's. The truth of the matter is unless you're willing to put in a lot of effort into finding and directly hiring the best and the brightest in third world countries, you're probably going to be disappointed with the results you get from simply yeeting work over the fence to a third party contractor company.
GoToRO 3y ago
I'm that guy "across the world". They still insisted for RTO. I quit.
kylestlb 3y ago
If I was born yesterday I might believe this. Offshoring labor has been around for a long time, and the problems associated with it haven't magically disappeared because people know how to use Zoom.

rblatz 3y ago

| That office was your moat and now it’s gone. This seemed so obvious to me, and yet none of my colleagues would hear it when we discussed remote work.

cageface 3y ago

I’ve been working remote since 2010 with teams all over the world. People that are reliable and productive and that communicate well are very hard to find and are still in short supply. We made good money cleaning up messes caused by cheap offshoring deals.

batshit_beaver 3y ago

Imo, time zone, culture, language, data and privacy regulations are also moats, although being physically present helps a ton. I don't think there was anything stopping companies from outsourcing all engineering work pre-pandemic, but that model has been failing pretty consistently over the last couple decades.

stringsandchars 3y ago

> That office was your moat and now it’s gone. I don't think sitting in an office somewhere, with my headphones on is any kind of 'moat'. I'm judged on the quality and speed of work that I do. I'm also paid for understanding the underlying needs my company has for the application I'm building. I'm paid for the ideas I contribute, the work-culture I share, and for being present and consistent during work-hours - even though I work almost always from home. Twice in my career so far I've been involved in projects "paying someone across the world" for "the same output" and they were both total disasters: ending multiple-times over budget without even being completed. The time-difference alone would have been bad enough (where the feedback loop was often a couple of days even for the smallest change), but we found that the coders you were supposed to be dealing with would regularly be replaced, simply disappear altogether (sometimes reappearing in the project weeks later); the new developers would need to be re-briefed, and altogether the coordinating project manager halfway around the world would spend most of their time either bullshitting or stonewalling us. Payment, taxes and other problems all just added to the headaches. I don't mean that these developers were producing code that was lower quality (we barely saw enough to really judge), it's simply that working with someone "locally-remotely" is (almost literally) a world away from expecting to be able to just export that job to a low-wage coder in some other part of the globe.

wing-_-nuts 3y ago

>companies suddenly realized that meant you could pay someone across the world a lot cheaper for the same output, in their mind. Lets not pretend that companies haven't been trying to outsource pretty much everything they can possibly outsource since the early 2000's. The truth of the matter is unless you're willing to put in a lot of effort into finding and directly hiring the best and the brightest in third world countries, you're probably going to be disappointed with the results you get from simply yeeting work over the fence to a third party contractor company.

GoToRO 3y ago

I'm that guy "across the world". They still insisted for RTO. I quit.

kylestlb 3y ago

If I was born yesterday I might believe this. Offshoring labor has been around for a long time, and the problems associated with it haven't magically disappeared because people know how to use Zoom.