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Sure, but then we're discussing remote work as an employee benefit, which is a different discussion driven by a different part of the company etc. Not as a thin

Sure, but then we're discussing remote work as an employee benefit, which is a different discussion driven by a different part of the company etc. Not as a thing which improves the company's bottom line which is where C suite and shareholders spend the vast majority of their attention. If it doesn't improve job productivity then at the level where decisions get made I can think of two really significant points regarding remote work. A. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we don't need to pay for as much office space and whatever other expenses are incurred by the employee's physical presence B. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we could recruit contractors in other countries instead of full-time US employees. (Which in turn is going to undermine labor's bargaining power in the US...) I personally love remote work and believe in the benefits but I think a lot of people with an employee mindset just don't want to acknowledge the existence of B, they may even downvote me for bringing it up, but I guarantee that is one of the main conversations that will come up in the board room as remote work is normalized. Not "oh hey great, now labor can do laundry on company time!"

ozim 3y ago
Reducing costs by hiring in other countries is not as easy as it seems. In reality there is an opportunity to hire wider pool of full time applicants in US because now you can offer even 1 day a week in the office instead of 5 or doing 1 day a month. If I have to consider company that is 2h driving away - one way - and be there 5 days a week, that is a deal breaker. Doing that once a week is still much more manageable and opens up opportunities for employees and employers as well. Especially if someone can't just move to next big city on a whim but can drive there once a week.
- RestlessMind 3y ago
  > Reducing costs by hiring in other countries is not as easy as it seems. Over the last 2 years, my company has had multiple rounds of layoff with US bearing the brunt of them. All new headcount is in Canada, LATAM and India. India sucks because of timezones and LATAM sucks because of language barriers, but our management loves Canada - cultural compatibility, no language or timezone barriers and Canadian worker is cheaper than even the cheapest US workers. Canada is also opening up its borders big time for "skilled labor", so there will be a downward pressure on wages for a long time.
realusername 3y ago
> I think a lot of people with an employee mindset just don't want to acknowledge the existence of B Because the outsourcing threat was a thing before remote working, remote working changes nothing to that. Employers love to bring this up on the subject of remote working but if they could outsource your work to an Indian paid 10x less, they would have done it already. Those employers are deluded if they think remote work is changing anything here. If anything it makes outsourcing of global talent even harder for them since now companies are competing globally for the best talent.
- ponector 3y ago
  Outsourcing jobs and salaries exploded with COVID. 100k USD annual compensation is insane for many countries. You can get best people overseas for a fraction of US costs, and with no obligation attached to you by labor laws. I'm glad this happens so I can use geographic arbitrage: work for US client but live in nice place in Europe with reasonable costs of living.
  - realusername 3y ago
    I didn't see any change at all personally, I do live in Europe though. The best talents globally are going to be paid at a rough similar level outside of the big tech giants. As we go forward, the monetary gain of outsourcing is trending down, it's already less worth it than 10 years ago. Remote working plays against outsourcing in my opinion, nobody wants to be underpaid, including talents in lower cost of living areas, what was a local market became a global one. And then those countries are also developing as well, reducing the gap every year. Both effects together are very powerful against outsourcing.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      >I didn't see any change at all personally, I do live in Europe though. Depends where in Europe as there's a pretty big divide in the IT labor market in Europe that only grew bigger. Most of the remote-work and outsourcing from the US spilled mostly to Eastern Europe or tax heavens like Netherlands or Ireland or tech hubs like Berlin and Barcelona. The rest of Europe wasn't that much impacted and stagnated.
Scarblac 3y ago
Well the laundry is indirectly part of C. We can probably get away with paying remote workers less because they get other benefits from working remotely.
sublinear 3y ago
B... y'all are massively out of touch of how your business actually works and I hope you all pay dearly for that. You will. I promise. Count your days but I know you'll just go somewhere else and ruin it there too. Communication counts for something. You might not know much about that because you see businesses as interchangeable balance sheets rather than a living breathing thing. Your loss. Expect your end. I really do wish you sad lost puppies find a place to park your increasingly worthless "privilege". Your retro career is melting. What you can coast through: running a business from a high-level perspective. What you can't coast through: actually running your business and digging into the implementation details that directly hit your bottom line and keep your worthless ass afloat. All tech companies are pure implementation details. You'd know this if you bothered to and everyone more successful than you actually has because they can take it and aren't as clueless. Growth by absorbing the old ways of doing things doesn't come from nowhere. Expect the next wave of more literate employees to push you out. Doesn't matter where they come from. They will. It's already happened at the places bigger than you. Prepare.
- charlieyu1 3y ago
  Pay people enough so it is worth enough to come on-site. Which is probably double.
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
A. This doesn't happen because many C-suite people have commercial property investments. B. Language issues, cultural issues, and time zone issues all have negative effects. C. Or it could mean labour is more productive because it has more free time and is less stressed. There's no pointless commute and some chores can be done in the background. Getting slightly distracted by laundry is far less of a loss to productivity than being constantly distracted by conversations, office noise, pointless meetings, and so on. Your arguments are all MBA-level arguments, which means they look superficially convincing but they lack systemic insight. There's plenty of evidence that happier workers are more productive. Treating workers like people instead of machinery has comprehensive business benefits. The only real cost is a reduction in the self-perceived relative status of the C-suite. Essentially this is an argument about hierarchy and loss of face, and not so much about measurable business costs/benefits.
- hiatus 3y ago
  > This doesn't happen because many C-suite people have commercial property investments I keep reading this but have seen no evidence. Are you saying executives are invested in the buildings their companies occupy?
  - bongodongobob 3y ago
    Lol what? 100% yes. It's super common to have a separate holding company for the real estate that the business leases from.
    - hiatus 3y ago
      Sure, can you give examples of companies whose executives own the holding company their business leases real estate from?
      - bongodongobob 3y ago
        It's common practice afaik, there's no secret there. I used to work for one and they are small peanuts. Edit: Acme inc owns Acme Real Estate Co and Acme Operations Co. Operations Co leases from Real Estate Co. There's no funny business, it's just how a business might split its assets and liabilities.
surgical_fire 3y ago
> just don't want to acknowledge the existence of B Because outsourcing is nothing new. Hiring people in cheaper markets is something companies have been doing for many decades already, with varying degrees of success, long before remote work was even a thing. There are many other issues with outsourcing - for example: time zones, language, work culture, exchange rates - that go beyond the hot topic of "butts in seats".
gumballindie 3y ago
> B. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we could recruit contractors in other countries instead of full-time US employees. (Which in turn is going to undermine labor's bargaining power in the US...) The biggest drive for overseas recruitment will be ai. Extracting knowledge for western workers and transferring it to cheaper workers overseas will be the new manufacturing outsourcing. A workers without the high quality training the west provides will suddenly be able to compensate using tools trained against the knowledge produced by their western counterpart.
- mlrtime 3y ago
  I don't disagree.. However isn't this just internet on steroids? I remember when retail internet was in this stage and comments were very similar. 3rd world countries will have the world's information at their finger tips. What happened as I recall [in a study I remember] is that people essentially played more candy crush.
thesuitonym 3y ago
>If it doesn't improve job productivity then at the level where decisions get made I can think of two really significant points regarding remote work. It would be nice if the rich assholes making these decisions realized that allowing people to take care of life stuff during work hours actually does make them more productive. But it's tough to measure, and impossible to convey to someone who can just afford to pay a person to do their dishes.
- wharvle 3y ago
  > But it's tough to measure, and impossible to convey to someone who can just afford to pay a person to do their dishes. My least-favorite genre of C-suite-sort LinkedIn post is the kind that explains how they manage to be CEO of startup X, on the board of another company and a charity, an advisor on some other startup, plus maybe a few other things, and still find time for their kids and for travel and such despite all those "challenges". Gee. What could be the explanation? It must be that you're just that good. It can't be that all of those are effectively very-part-time jobs (let me see... hm, Startup X has 40 employees and two of them are your executive assistants...) with very flexible schedules, and that you pay more than some people make all year to make twenty hours a week of chores & maintenance & childcare work just vanish. No, it must be that you're amazing. You should probably give your advice to some working-class single parents, bet they could use your expertise.
flappyeagle 3y ago
People saying "outsourcing has always existed" are missing the point entirely. The amount of friction to outsource when your whole team is remote is significantly lower. Because my company is remote, we have people in every US timezone, which opens up outsourcing to Brazil. A team member in Brazil is indistinguishable from someone in Florida. Adoption can be gradual instead of all at once. We don't have to spin up a whole team in a remote location, we can go 1-by-1.
- safety1st 3y ago
  This guy gets it. Remote is a competency that as a business you develop team by team, position by position. So is async (can we do this just as efficiently when people are in far-flung timezones?) I want to sit in my PJs and work from home just as much as the next guy. But the reality is if you're going into the office 5 days a week they haven't figured out how to replace you with someone from India, Argentina, Canada or wherever else. The competition for your position is still georestricted. You just being there grants you a local monopoly, there are a million people who would like to have your job but they're not in the running because they lack the proper visa and can't show up to the office you can show up to. Once you go remote and the company sees that it works just fine, your monopoly disappears. Many objections were raised in response to my post, none were convincing. That is because no one wants to acknowledge that they're just labor and firms are literally profit maximizing machines, they either maximize or get swallowed/killed by a firm who did. None of this is new or radical, labor just hates staring it in the face because it's dehumanizing: they are a cost that the firm always wants to optimize away. Welcome to capitalism.
makeitdouble 3y ago
In most companies option B has been on the table for a very long time and they most probably partially took it while asking their workers to keep coming to the office up until recently. CS is the running joke, but server management, manual data processing, moderation etc. have been prime candidates for outsourcing for a long time. The reason one's job is/was not outsourced has I think little to do about whether general remote work was an option or not.
- randomdata 3y ago
  > In most companies option B has been on the table for a very long time Mom and Pop may have always been well positioned to fully embrace outsourcing, but they tend to just copy what they see big companies do without any thought. Additionally, where they do put in thought, they tend to lean “shop local” and see offshoring as a threat to their entire business. As for those big companies, truly embracing option B has been difficult as even the C-level are typically themselves just employees, not the controlling ownership, and thus don't want to see their jobs outsourced any more than anyone else. Once the boots on the ground are offshored, you may as well offshore the management of them too. Thus there is a strong incentive for management to keep up onshore appearances and limit offshoring to small doses.
  - ozim 3y ago
    That was a bit of a revelation last year - I though most of the time CEO gets shares as compensation then he is tied to the company and in theory should work to make company profit because it is his profit. Seems like for a lot of companies it is not the case but I can see that CEO type of guys can haggle really well and they call the shots as mostly it is companies that need them more than they need the company so they can disagree on having shackles.
    - soco 3y ago
      A hard disagree on "companies that need them more than they need the company". A headless company can still run, a company-less CEO is nothing. But this is the culture we're in, paying the friends of the board millions regardless of their performance, because the board knows they get their backs rubbed as well.
dhx 3y ago
Amongst the numerous reasons why (B) may not be preferred is governments in looking at macroeconomics will generally want to disincentivise buying services overseas, something which would reduce domestic GDP and strengthen the economies of other countries instead. Governments have tools such as security regulations, migration policies, taxes which act as those disincentives. For (B) to become commonplace, a government would be allowing a job function or industry to decline or disappear domestically, as has happened to Western manufacturing. I can't think of many industries and job functions suitable for remote work that a country in 2024 would want to cause the decline of. Western countries in particular have been pushing "critical infrastructure" regulations and supply chain regulations that generally oppose offshoring and domestic decline of a wide range of industries--energy, healthcare, food distribution, etc. For example, a supermarket chain is becoming increasingly restricted from conducting actions such as outsourcing their logistics ICT systems to another country to host and support.
- logifail 3y ago
  > Amongst the numerous reasons why (B) may not be preferred is governments in looking at macroeconomics will generally want to disincentivise buying services overseas, something which would reduce domestic GDP and strengthen the economies of other countries instead Especially when inflation is eating at their pay packets, most voters prefer the option of "cheaper stuff". The idea of the public taking a long term macroeconomic view is, frankly, laughable. Most politicians can't do this either. > For example, a supermarket chain is becoming increasingly restricted from conducting actions such as outsourcing their logistics ICT systems to another country to host and support Umm, I've recently worked with a European retailer where a large part of their ICT is already offshored to India. The only remaining local presence (supervisory) was described to me by an insider as 'just two guys and a laptop'...

ozim 3y ago

Reducing costs by hiring in other countries is not as easy as it seems. In reality there is an opportunity to hire wider pool of full time applicants in US because now you can offer even 1 day a week in the office instead of 5 or doing 1 day a month. If I have to consider company that is 2h driving away - one way - and be there 5 days a week, that is a deal breaker. Doing that once a week is still much more manageable and opens up opportunities for employees and employers as well. Especially if someone can't just move to next big city on a whim but can drive there once a week.

RestlessMind 3y ago
> Reducing costs by hiring in other countries is not as easy as it seems. Over the last 2 years, my company has had multiple rounds of layoff with US bearing the brunt of them. All new headcount is in Canada, LATAM and India. India sucks because of timezones and LATAM sucks because of language barriers, but our management loves Canada - cultural compatibility, no language or timezone barriers and Canadian worker is cheaper than even the cheapest US workers. Canada is also opening up its borders big time for "skilled labor", so there will be a downward pressure on wages for a long time.

realusername 3y ago

> I think a lot of people with an employee mindset just don't want to acknowledge the existence of B Because the outsourcing threat was a thing before remote working, remote working changes nothing to that. Employers love to bring this up on the subject of remote working but if they could outsource your work to an Indian paid 10x less, they would have done it already. Those employers are deluded if they think remote work is changing anything here. If anything it makes outsourcing of global talent even harder for them since now companies are competing globally for the best talent.

ponector 3y ago
Outsourcing jobs and salaries exploded with COVID. 100k USD annual compensation is insane for many countries. You can get best people overseas for a fraction of US costs, and with no obligation attached to you by labor laws. I'm glad this happens so I can use geographic arbitrage: work for US client but live in nice place in Europe with reasonable costs of living.
- realusername 3y ago
  I didn't see any change at all personally, I do live in Europe though. The best talents globally are going to be paid at a rough similar level outside of the big tech giants. As we go forward, the monetary gain of outsourcing is trending down, it's already less worth it than 10 years ago. Remote working plays against outsourcing in my opinion, nobody wants to be underpaid, including talents in lower cost of living areas, what was a local market became a global one. And then those countries are also developing as well, reducing the gap every year. Both effects together are very powerful against outsourcing.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >I didn't see any change at all personally, I do live in Europe though. Depends where in Europe as there's a pretty big divide in the IT labor market in Europe that only grew bigger. Most of the remote-work and outsourcing from the US spilled mostly to Eastern Europe or tax heavens like Netherlands or Ireland or tech hubs like Berlin and Barcelona. The rest of Europe wasn't that much impacted and stagnated.

Scarblac 3y ago

Well the laundry is indirectly part of C. We can probably get away with paying remote workers less because they get other benefits from working remotely.

sublinear 3y ago

B... y'all are massively out of touch of how your business actually works and I hope you all pay dearly for that. You will. I promise. Count your days but I know you'll just go somewhere else and ruin it there too. Communication counts for something. You might not know much about that because you see businesses as interchangeable balance sheets rather than a living breathing thing. Your loss. Expect your end. I really do wish you sad lost puppies find a place to park your increasingly worthless "privilege". Your retro career is melting. What you can coast through: running a business from a high-level perspective. What you can't coast through: actually running your business and digging into the implementation details that directly hit your bottom line and keep your worthless ass afloat. All tech companies are pure implementation details. You'd know this if you bothered to and everyone more successful than you actually has because they can take it and aren't as clueless. Growth by absorbing the old ways of doing things doesn't come from nowhere. Expect the next wave of more literate employees to push you out. Doesn't matter where they come from. They will. It's already happened at the places bigger than you. Prepare.

charlieyu1 3y ago
Pay people enough so it is worth enough to come on-site. Which is probably double.

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago

A. This doesn't happen because many C-suite people have commercial property investments. B. Language issues, cultural issues, and time zone issues all have negative effects. C. Or it could mean labour is more productive because it has more free time and is less stressed. There's no pointless commute and some chores can be done in the background. Getting slightly distracted by laundry is far less of a loss to productivity than being constantly distracted by conversations, office noise, pointless meetings, and so on. Your arguments are all MBA-level arguments, which means they look superficially convincing but they lack systemic insight. There's plenty of evidence that happier workers are more productive. Treating workers like people instead of machinery has comprehensive business benefits. The only real cost is a reduction in the self-perceived relative status of the C-suite. Essentially this is an argument about hierarchy and loss of face, and not so much about measurable business costs/benefits.

hiatus 3y ago
> This doesn't happen because many C-suite people have commercial property investments I keep reading this but have seen no evidence. Are you saying executives are invested in the buildings their companies occupy?
- bongodongobob 3y ago
  Lol what? 100% yes. It's super common to have a separate holding company for the real estate that the business leases from.
  - hiatus 3y ago
    Sure, can you give examples of companies whose executives own the holding company their business leases real estate from?
    - bongodongobob 3y ago
      It's common practice afaik, there's no secret there. I used to work for one and they are small peanuts. Edit: Acme inc owns Acme Real Estate Co and Acme Operations Co. Operations Co leases from Real Estate Co. There's no funny business, it's just how a business might split its assets and liabilities.

surgical_fire 3y ago

> just don't want to acknowledge the existence of B Because outsourcing is nothing new. Hiring people in cheaper markets is something companies have been doing for many decades already, with varying degrees of success, long before remote work was even a thing. There are many other issues with outsourcing - for example: time zones, language, work culture, exchange rates - that go beyond the hot topic of "butts in seats".

gumballindie 3y ago

> B. There might be an opportunity to reduce cost because we could recruit contractors in other countries instead of full-time US employees. (Which in turn is going to undermine labor's bargaining power in the US...) The biggest drive for overseas recruitment will be ai. Extracting knowledge for western workers and transferring it to cheaper workers overseas will be the new manufacturing outsourcing. A workers without the high quality training the west provides will suddenly be able to compensate using tools trained against the knowledge produced by their western counterpart.

mlrtime 3y ago
I don't disagree.. However isn't this just internet on steroids? I remember when retail internet was in this stage and comments were very similar. 3rd world countries will have the world's information at their finger tips. What happened as I recall [in a study I remember] is that people essentially played more candy crush.

thesuitonym 3y ago

>If it doesn't improve job productivity then at the level where decisions get made I can think of two really significant points regarding remote work. It would be nice if the rich assholes making these decisions realized that allowing people to take care of life stuff during work hours actually does make them more productive. But it's tough to measure, and impossible to convey to someone who can just afford to pay a person to do their dishes.

wharvle 3y ago
> But it's tough to measure, and impossible to convey to someone who can just afford to pay a person to do their dishes. My least-favorite genre of C-suite-sort LinkedIn post is the kind that explains how they manage to be CEO of startup X, on the board of another company and a charity, an advisor on some other startup, plus maybe a few other things, and still find time for their kids and for travel and such despite all those "challenges". Gee. What could be the explanation? It must be that you're just that good. It can't be that all of those are effectively very-part-time jobs (let me see... hm, Startup X has 40 employees and two of them are your executive assistants...) with very flexible schedules, and that you pay more than some people make all year to make twenty hours a week of chores & maintenance & childcare work just vanish. No, it must be that you're amazing. You should probably give your advice to some working-class single parents, bet they could use your expertise.

flappyeagle 3y ago

People saying "outsourcing has always existed" are missing the point entirely. The amount of friction to outsource when your whole team is remote is significantly lower. Because my company is remote, we have people in every US timezone, which opens up outsourcing to Brazil. A team member in Brazil is indistinguishable from someone in Florida. Adoption can be gradual instead of all at once. We don't have to spin up a whole team in a remote location, we can go 1-by-1.

safety1st 3y ago
This guy gets it. Remote is a competency that as a business you develop team by team, position by position. So is async (can we do this just as efficiently when people are in far-flung timezones?) I want to sit in my PJs and work from home just as much as the next guy. But the reality is if you're going into the office 5 days a week they haven't figured out how to replace you with someone from India, Argentina, Canada or wherever else. The competition for your position is still georestricted. You just being there grants you a local monopoly, there are a million people who would like to have your job but they're not in the running because they lack the proper visa and can't show up to the office you can show up to. Once you go remote and the company sees that it works just fine, your monopoly disappears. Many objections were raised in response to my post, none were convincing. That is because no one wants to acknowledge that they're just labor and firms are literally profit maximizing machines, they either maximize or get swallowed/killed by a firm who did. None of this is new or radical, labor just hates staring it in the face because it's dehumanizing: they are a cost that the firm always wants to optimize away. Welcome to capitalism.

makeitdouble 3y ago

In most companies option B has been on the table for a very long time and they most probably partially took it while asking their workers to keep coming to the office up until recently. CS is the running joke, but server management, manual data processing, moderation etc. have been prime candidates for outsourcing for a long time. The reason one's job is/was not outsourced has I think little to do about whether general remote work was an option or not.

randomdata 3y ago
> In most companies option B has been on the table for a very long time Mom and Pop may have always been well positioned to fully embrace outsourcing, but they tend to just copy what they see big companies do without any thought. Additionally, where they do put in thought, they tend to lean “shop local” and see offshoring as a threat to their entire business. As for those big companies, truly embracing option B has been difficult as even the C-level are typically themselves just employees, not the controlling ownership, and thus don't want to see their jobs outsourced any more than anyone else. Once the boots on the ground are offshored, you may as well offshore the management of them too. Thus there is a strong incentive for management to keep up onshore appearances and limit offshoring to small doses.
- ozim 3y ago
  That was a bit of a revelation last year - I though most of the time CEO gets shares as compensation then he is tied to the company and in theory should work to make company profit because it is his profit. Seems like for a lot of companies it is not the case but I can see that CEO type of guys can haggle really well and they call the shots as mostly it is companies that need them more than they need the company so they can disagree on having shackles.
  - soco 3y ago
    A hard disagree on "companies that need them more than they need the company". A headless company can still run, a company-less CEO is nothing. But this is the culture we're in, paying the friends of the board millions regardless of their performance, because the board knows they get their backs rubbed as well.

dhx 3y ago

Amongst the numerous reasons why (B) may not be preferred is governments in looking at macroeconomics will generally want to disincentivise buying services overseas, something which would reduce domestic GDP and strengthen the economies of other countries instead. Governments have tools such as security regulations, migration policies, taxes which act as those disincentives. For (B) to become commonplace, a government would be allowing a job function or industry to decline or disappear domestically, as has happened to Western manufacturing. I can't think of many industries and job functions suitable for remote work that a country in 2024 would want to cause the decline of. Western countries in particular have been pushing "critical infrastructure" regulations and supply chain regulations that generally oppose offshoring and domestic decline of a wide range of industries--energy, healthcare, food distribution, etc. For example, a supermarket chain is becoming increasingly restricted from conducting actions such as outsourcing their logistics ICT systems to another country to host and support.

logifail 3y ago
> Amongst the numerous reasons why (B) may not be preferred is governments in looking at macroeconomics will generally want to disincentivise buying services overseas, something which would reduce domestic GDP and strengthen the economies of other countries instead Especially when inflation is eating at their pay packets, most voters prefer the option of "cheaper stuff". The idea of the public taking a long term macroeconomic view is, frankly, laughable. Most politicians can't do this either. > For example, a supermarket chain is becoming increasingly restricted from conducting actions such as outsourcing their logistics ICT systems to another country to host and support Umm, I've recently worked with a European retailer where a large part of their ICT is already offshored to India. The only remaining local presence (supervisory) was described to me by an insider as 'just two guys and a laptop'...