What you actually see if you look at remote work job boards is many (if not most) companies in say, the USA, want remote people from the USA (or at least the same timezone as the USA). I think this is what will happen in other countries too.

What they failed to realize is what they outsourced were their bottom tier workers, the unproductive people. They got excited by the reduced cost with minimal reduction in effectiveness.

When they try to outsource their better talent that’s where they failed to recognize good talent is costly everywhere. You might save some salary but it’s offset by lots of other things from time shift to organizational culture.

That might be true to some extent, but I think there's a problem with that line of thought.

People are a "moving target". What may be a bottom-tier worker now, could very well be a valuable employee in 5-10 years. Many folks have built their career by starting at a low level and then getting promoted and upskilled over time through hard work and commitment. Starting at a low position and advancing is becoming, sadly, a rare thing.

The "first wave" and subsequent waves of outsourcing have to a large extent eliminated paths of career advancement for many workers. At first it was unskilled laborers and now it has been creeping up to virtually all technical job descriptions. The wet-dream of MBA's who promote this stuff is corporations consisting of a few C-level people and their board, and then a layer of fab-less product and operations people who just manage supply-chain and services stuff with external vendors. It's an ugly picture but that's what the global supply chain people want.

I was thinking more along the lines of companies that are little more than a layer of product managers and operations folks just managing vendors and service providers that do ALL the work.

This is going to happen faster than other times when offshoring has occurred in various industries historically too. Just think about it. You can bet contract work is going to be commonplace, and you can kiss your benefits goodbye. If you do not think this will happen to you, well, you’re next on the chopping block.

Work will become hyper competitive for benefits and for full time status. A good employee will be someone who answers emails 24/7 and within minutes of it being sent, night or day. The work will never end. Surveillance technologies for remote work will remove any semblance of freedom when you work from home. This is all very unlikely to be made illegal in the US in the foreseeable future. Also. populism uprisings that occur in a respective country last on average for 30 years, so you better be thinking in the very long-term for how bad this could actually be.

My personal experience with remote work is that it allows me to be present as a father in my children's lives and also to be more productive. I'm not saying everyone will have that experience, but for me it's an excellent fit.

As far as productivity, if we look at productivity increases since 1950, we should be working half as much for the same productivity/pay (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20766443). With voices like Andrew Yang trying to shift social values to valuing the underappreciated like stay-at-home mothers through a UBI, this seems like a positive path forward.

I know things seem dark right now, but in my powerless position, I choose to believe there is a better, more positive path forward, and I put my energy into pursuing it.

Frankly, I've never met a rich guy whose nose I couldn't bloody. I've rarely met one whose spirit I couldn't cut deeply in less than 15 minutes of conversation.

They have their hands on the levers. The have the resources to arbitrage or withhold or defect or take hostages (economic!) until they get what they think they can get.

Same thing will happen with self-driving cars.

The peons will capture just enough value so the new life seems a bit better than the old life.

(Long long time remote worker, since before my 17 year-old was born. Love being at home with my kids, love the efficiency and flexibility.

Doesn't change the ultimate macro outcome.)

Look what happened to G.E. They outsourced everything they possibly could and had a decade or two of unparalleled profitability. But, over time the well of ideas and competencies for products and services dried up and they went from being a powerhouse to a cautionary tale.

Don't export knowledge or know-how to save a few bucks. It always comes back to bite you.

Institutional knowledge informs why a solution works better than a shiny. The contract org will push through what works best for them, more than what’s best for your org long term. Contract orgs like checking off Hundreds of NIST or CIS controls as if that in and of itself means anything substantive.

The same logic could be used to justify duct tape software across the enterprise. There is some point where the cost-benefit leans in favor of outsourcing. Institutional knowledge may be under-priced by today's business execs, that is certainly possible. But we also shouldn't build a homegrown solution for every problem.

This. I have seen consulting companies keeping consulting contract only because the only guy that knew their system inside out was this single consultan that had been there so long that he became the effective sysadmin with the last word on everything related on the subsystem that he had been managing for years.

I think the validity of this point depends on how you understand "bottom tier". When I read "bottom tier"[1] I tend to read that as a combination of "people who suck at their jobs" and "people who are doing things that are highly commoditized or commoditizable". The former interpretation in particular has nothing to do with seniority.

[1] And I'm reading it this way probably because I'm back-projecting based on experience of working with some outsourced/offshored workers who sucked at their jobs.

Furthermore, the interviewer spent the entire interview complaining about how she mostly couldn't even get people who would show up, let alone act maturely. We discussed the starting date, but within a day or two she reneged, presumably because I had dressed formally for a minimum wage job and was overqualified.

Another thing that comes to mind is the janitorial duties were outsourced in the building I used to work in.

This sort of thing is why I think it's dumb whenever I read something about a progressive company having a minimum wage of whatever for their employees - it's purely a statement about who they keep on their books and who they use indirectly.

Then they can't understand why projects fall behind.

This is how Microsoft operated for a while. Entire support ecosystems were built around Redmond, from non-core competency support (design, boutique marketing, food services, maintenance) to core competency augmentation (vendor, off shore, near shore, local). They still employ that model but to a lesser extent. They've moved away from it based on labor market trends and local competition (more companies have moved to the greater Seattle competing for resources). So I don't know if its a universal doctrine or model that will be employed, but it does seem to have a time and a place.

The earlier waves of outsourcing were about shifting things like management responsibility out of the company, and I think that was shown to have unintended negative consequences for a lot of firms. I don't think there's much reason why an employer wouldn't be excited about hiring good, talented people from cheaper labor markets now.

Someone in the Philippines learning Python on Khan Academy today could very well be competitive for a senior engineering job in 10 years if the career path were possible.

I've met countless skilled technical people who could not a get job at XYZ company simply due to visas, not qualifications. Now working for these companies can be a real possibility.

Of course there are tradeoffs. A programmer who is much better than me has advantages in quality (assuming you are much better, in my biased opinion I'm great)

It's already happening to a degree. There a number of what you might call "reluctant Trump voters" where I work. The most frequent (and often only) argument you'll hear from them in favor Trump is around immigration and H1-B visas. You'll also notice that the Democrats in the U.S. who are surprisingly quit around Trumps efforts to reduce H1-B issuance.

I'd be willing to bet that unrestricted competition for a limited number of high-paying jobs in the developed world would fuel the Nationalist parties and movements that we've been seeing more of in the U.S. and Europe.

But having classes of people who live in the country but have special restricted rights and never become full citizens worries me.

I wish we could move away from the idea that citizenship is a reward for following the rules and instead consider that making people citizens is a benefit for (maybe even vital to preserving) society.

Why should a company A pay more to train a bottom tier worker into a high tier worker, when said worker will then be able to move to company B who offshore's its low tier workers. In effect, company A is subsidizing company B's training program.

They’re the same human being before and after graduation day. Just as talented the day before as the day after. It’s the pedigree variable that explains the vast majority of the salary.

You’re saying something similar, it’s just that you’re getting distracted by the red herring of the out sourced worker. You should be analyzing the difference between a Harvard and a UC Irvine student, whose average salary difference is as large as the difference between an average US programmer and Accenture contract off shore programmer. It’s got nothing to do with time shifts and organizational culture. You’re looking at this way too logically, along with many other commenters. Indeed I think hardly anyone, including the people who actually say work for Facebook, understand really why one person is paid more or less than another, at their own companies or elsewhere.

That aside you’re onto something with low skilled workers being replaced. The net result of hoovering up low paying programming jobs and sending them to another statistical group (not in this country) is that programming salaries appear to rise. Which is exactly what happened. So if you are of the opinion that programming salaries rising reflects increase in demand, so you should get into programming boot camp, you’d be like 200% wrong. You’re chasing a low salary programming job that doesn’t exist. Which again, is sort of exactly what happened.

Like you are implying: status signaling from degree mills is pretty useless compared to actual competency.

Whether or not that’s due to differences in education or purely signaling behavior is something I have yet to fully make up my mind about.

On one side you have people that managed to claw their way through the boot camp but didn't actually pick up any of the skills; they memorized enough to get through instead of actually learning stuff. On the other side, you have people that did learn but aren't confident in their skills and so flub the interview when their confidence gives out.

I've watched the latter happen on more than one occasion and I really wish I knew how to handle it as an interviewer.

...but it's really just a comfortable lie we tell ourselves.

Presumably he means that he can't hire them for the amount he's willing to pay.

I don't think that's correct. They outsourced lower-skill jobs that could be done remotely to regions with lower labor costs.

With companies being forced to modify their internal processes to be remote-first, what they will realize is that remote does work once they align to it. And once they realize that, there is no stopping them. Since the benefits of having a remote first company well aligned to working efficiently far out-weigh the benefits of a co-located team.

For example a few years ago I worked with a programmer from India who was part of a "remote consulting company" based in the Netherlands. The experience of working with her was identical to working with the larger offshore companies based in India. As in, time zone, cultural and communication barriers were substantial and disruptive to our productivity.

In my -South American- country the trend is to look outwards if you're hiring remotely; European countries seem to fit this description too.

Some industries are heavily regulated in the US and having non-US based employees can become a real headache for US companies. A lot of US companies have background check as part of their hiring process, pretty hard to do for someone not US-based.

Also, if you target only the continental US you're already talking about companies that may be spread across 4 major timezones. If you start including Europe you're now dealing with people that are gonna be more than 6 hours removed from your HQ's timezone.

The employer needs to pay social contributions in the employee's residence country. And more often than not, the employee cannot just become a freelancer or incorporate a single-person company and bill only one customer, as this is considered disguised employment. So no, it's not necessarily trivial for an EU company to hire a remote worker somewhere else in the EU, unless they have a local presence already.

Every state has their own tax scheme. Every new employee in a new state is a big set up cost and ongoing maintenance.

Then there's the potential for each employee's address to be considered a nexus, since each of their homes becomes a de-facto company presence. Potentially subject to local registration, licensing and taxation by local municipal authorities, in addition to just the state level requirements. If you have a presence in the state, and your employee's official work location is that location, then you only have to deal with that local registration once wherever the presence is located. But if you don't have a location the state, or you have employees who are officially designated as work from home (rather than unofficially working from home while being designated as assigned to an office), then this quickly scale into a giant mess of regulation to navigate[2].

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/local-income-taxes-city-and-county...

[2] https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/04/remote-employee-complianc...

[1] https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/04/remote-employee-complianc...

-- Yes, you can outsource most of the payroll-related headaches to someone like ADP but

-- There are still a lot of other state by state details that can't just be handed off to a third party and told "Make it so." It's not a particularly big deal for a larger company, but it can be a fair bit of overhead for a small employer adding a new remote employee in a state with lots of paperwork.

No I don't think so. They look with within EU.

With respect to R&D, for example, the US no longer allows foreign R&D activities to qualify for the R&D tax credit.

Also, some states, like CA, are very unfriendly which regard to the extra costs required for employees in terms of benefits, wages (salary exempt) and classification of employees with the ABC test [1], so the wins that states make for employees incentivizes many employers to look elsewhere instead.

In a more remote work culture, even ignoring offshoring/nearshoring, this is going to be really bad for people in certain states. And it will be bad for those states themselves.

The increased competition among states to attract higher income workers will be interesting. States like Tennessee, North Carolina, etc have a massive opportunity in front of them as they were already pretty well poised to attract younger professionals.

[1] https://www.labor.ca.gov/employmentstatus/abctest/

This explains why so much R&D happens in CA. Because it's too expensive to do it in this state...

The reason R&D happens in CA is because any company that wants to sell to CA is already going to be subject to CA taxation anyway, however they try to apportion their state income. If you develop R&D in another state and use that to sell to CA, you've just added an additional state to your tax compliance burden. Moreover, if you generate the R&D in say, Nevada, but the overwhelming majority of your income is CA sales, CA can (edit: changed from will) simply disregard your chosen allocation as fraudulent.

I did the R&D tax credit this last year and it seems to me the savings for offshoring would drastically make up for the loss in R&D tax credits in most cases.

This was true...before GILTI and BEAT were passed in the TCJA in 2017. It's no longer true. And as a downside, you must also contend with transfer pricing requiring your offshored entity to show a profit, and thus pay foreign taxes which likely would not be recoverable in the US under the GILTI regime.

I do know that certain countries limit what you can send them as far as $ each month as part of anti-money laundering regulations. And it's a pain.

What other implications are there? Is it because some of the offshoring countries force you to register there to conduct business?

Or is it because they want to create a separate P&L for tax and/or liability purposes? Or to park IP?

You don't need an entity to contract offshore, but if you're doing foreign R&D you're savings generally would be less than you would get back with the R&D credit. If for some reason your savings are greater with fully-offshored R&D, you need to ask yourself serious questions about why it's so much cheaper--including the likelihood that your R&D is being shared with the contractors' other clients if you're using an Indian or Chinese contractor.

You're also going to have IP valuation issues due to those risks, meaning that the IP simply won't be worth much, if anything, to a US or EU buyer, compared to the same IP generated anywhere by a subsidiary.

From a GILTI perspective, your IP is now foreign-generated IP, so you're looking at potentially paying the GILTI tax if you sell resulting products outside of the US.

There are additional legal considerations that apply to outsourced R&D development as well.

This is exactly right.

People seem to think all these regulations are doing them a favor and increasing their freedom but what's actually happening in reality is pretty much the opposite.

It's now literally cheaper even after accounting for delivery risks to hire people from Tennessee, North Carolina, etc.

From what I've seen, many companies will shoehorn regular product development into the R&D category. I'm not sure if it's supposed to cover next iteration of existing products that most company should be doing anyway.

R&D doesn't require something to be socially innovative; it's evaluated at a per-company level. It's intended to incentivize companies to recreate wheels in-house (if it is otherwise financially reasonable to do so).

It does not create a barrier to small companies. If you're not big enough to handle the paperwork for the R&D credit, you're not spending enough to derive meaningful benefit from the credit anyways. And generally, there exist plenty of accounting firms that will prepare the R&D documentation on a % basis (of the allowable R&D credit identified).

It also subsidises product development engineers - a profession that is doing well already

In the software world, sure. There are plenty of industries where product development staff (many of whom aren't engineers) don't make anywhere close to 6 figures.

Additionally, the US company would have to abide by any local labor laws / tax laws in the country they are hiring in.

Depends on what legal structure they've established within the country where the employee resides (and the laws regarding such things).

If you're in Estonia and looking to hire a software engineer for remote work, maybe you end up hiring someone from Poland or Spain. That's still EU hiring in the EU, more akin to what you're referring to with the US. On average the smaller the country, it probably increases the odds that more of the labor you're looking for is going to be outside of your own borders.

It’s also hard to build an engineering culture when you don’t engage with your coworkers often. You have to build credibility so you can work through difficult issues - that’s hard to do when your primary medium of communication is Slack.

My last company ended up outsourcing from Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay and Argentina with good results. We often didn't tell clients they were offshore and billed US rates for them and pocketed the difference. Over the course of about 5 years we had let go our US-based teams because they were just too difficult to hire and retain for the marginal increase in quality.

If companies want to relocate work to India, or China, or Eastern Europe, they can already do it.

For higher end companies, it wasn’t outsourcing. It was remote offices. The expertise still does move to those countries.

Agreed.

> What you actually see if you look at remote work job boards is many (if not most) companies in say, the USA, want remote people from the USA (or at least the same timezone as the USA). I think this is what will happen in other countries too.

Which realistically they cannot enforce, merely incentivize; I'm pro-remote work, mainly because it can free up roads and reduce emissions for more critical infrastructure and needs in the Market, all while offering people the ability to re-locate to less populated areas and ideally help under development, and boost there local economies there. That includes International/Non-US based countries.

Seems like a win-win to me.

Do you have any examples? I dont see this at all.

You can sell each additional software product at very high margins so it makes sense to spend a bit more on the worker for a slightly better product that will result in many more high margin sales.

Sometimes they found that it was more effective to do low cost work in cheaper US locations (American South, etc...) than India.

I've encountered some of these nearshore companies in E. Europe multiple times over the last decade, business is booming for them.

Useful for CERTAIN types of jobs, especially recurring ones

Anyone can already take your job, as long as they are willing to relocate, or your company opens a new office near them.

It is more important than ever to differentiate yourself. To do that you need to find something to do that you love, and then find (or more often make) a niche in that that that you become one of the top ten people in within your context.

By context I mean you don't need to be the best in the world, you can be the best at X within the Y industry, or within defense consulting, or in the U.S. And you don't need to be the best (though see the quote about being the only), but at least in the top 10.

There are two quotes I am fond of that say similar things much better than I can:

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it." - Steve Jobs

"You do not merely want to be considered just the best of the best. You want to be considered the only one who does what you do." - Jerry Garcia

Whatever happened to just getting a normal job and putting in an honest day’s labor?

Now we’re expected to become “one of the top ten”... what exactly? How is that supposed to work? What about those of us with families for goodness sake. We can’t all be super Linus Torvalds ninja hackers putting out code 12 hours a day.

"These figurative "low-hanging fruit" from the title include the cultivation of much free, previously unused land; the application and spread of technological breakthroughs, particularly during the period 1880–1940, including transport, refrigeration, electricity, mass communications, and sanitation; and the education of large numbers of smart people who previously received none."[0]

The party is over. Americans are at the top but they aren't getting any higher, and everyone else in the world is catching up. That means Americans have to compete with the rest of global middle class.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Stagnation

> We can’t all be super Linus Torvalds ninja hackers putting out code 12 hours a day.

If it's true that America really is that way, my advice is look abroad because life is not about your job.

But I'd posit that salaries are not a zero-sum game, in the microcosm or the macrocosm.

Within a company each department head likely gets a certain amount of raises to distribute within their department, maybe enough to give most people X%, but also enough to give 2 or three 1.5X%. The company itself has a limited amount it can spend on labor costs.

Within a country there is the monetary supply. There is approximately $1.5 trillion physical currency in circulation. That equates to about $5k per person. Yes there is money that is not backed by physical currency, but the more of that you create (or the more physical currency you create) the higher inflation goes. If we want UBI then we need to back it with something. The Saudis backed it with their annual oil profits, Alaskans the same, and the Norwegians straight out created an investment fund from oil surplus profits. Getting to a workable UBI is not going to be a stopgap fix, and will likely take around 50 years to implement correctly.

It's doable from a technical perspective, in a number of ways. I worry about the political perspective. Our parties are divisive and one party can tear down any of the works of a past administration. So what is to prevent the UBI investment fund being repurposed, similar to Social Security's outcome.

Nope.

What is going on here is the person from India gets to now enjoy a much higher quality of life (because 50% of a U.S. salary gets you a lot in India) while the person from California sees their effective take home pay decrease (because their costs continue to grow but not their salary)

Definitely not a race to the bottom but it sucks to be the person from California.

globalization is happening whether we want it to or not.

> we shouldn't protect our interests

I made no comments either way.

... but, sure, let's think about this.

If you were to pass rules and regulations to stop globalization from happening, what would the top 3 be?

Rule 1: International trade deals forbid offshoring of manufacturing. Example, cars from Ford can't be made in Mexico for 1/10th the price. This is universal and enforceable by dissolution of companies that don't comply.

Rule 2: Stringent regulations to prevent Tax and location based gaming of Rule 1. Ford doesn't get to pay taxes in Tahiti, incorporate a mailbox in Mexico so they can make their cars there, but take advantage of US infrastructure for the rest of their business.

Rule 3: Companies reaching a monopoly size will be broken up into relatively equal sized companies, importantly those companies will be competing in similar regions. It's not like AWS and Amazon. It's like two Amazons. I'm sure figuring out the codebase and IP will make many jobs for lawyers and engineers. Maybe less for the MBA's.

EDIT: For rule 3 I forgot to add that the break up forces innovation as similar companies are competing now in the same market. It's an engine of growth built into the system.

Sure, but then the buyers of said cars from Ford has to pay the premium.

The heavy growth of Amazon, Walmart has proven that the U.S. customer does not care about well paid workers, their benefits or their health - why would they agree to pay more for cars?

> but take advantage of US infrastructure for the rest of their business.

Fair enough. This point is basically Ford gaming the system by taking more out (take advantage of US infrastructure) than what they put in (taxes, local worker compensation)

> Companies reaching a monopoly size will be broken up into relatively equal sized companies

You and I can do this already.

You and I can get together today and force Google or Amazon to be broken up.

However, a broken up Google or Amazon is more powerful than Google or Amazon itself.

There's a practical limit to how expensive a share can get before majority can't afford it anymore. "NYSE: BRK.A" is not the norm, it's an exception. If BRK split itself up, they would, overnight, become way more valuable.

Google has already broken itself up because of this.

The only reason Bezos has not broken Amazon up is because its tremendously profitable AWS and Amazon's North American retail operations allows it to fund and offset the not so profitable (yet) international retail businesses.

Once those are profitable, Bezos will happily break them up before you or I get to it.

Regulations never help.

It cannot. It can, at best, move issues around.

The day we regulated minimum wage, we removed the only tool an unemployed, untrained but happy-to-be-employed-if-possible person had to entice an employer.

When given a choice between an unemployed, but trained person vs. an unemployed, untrained person both at minimum wage, I know who to choose every time. The unemployed, untrained person cannot even get on unemployment!

BIG RED FLASHING CITATIONS NEEDED SIGN HERE

Another way of thinking of this: can you be considered top 10 within a pool of 100 applicants?

Also, who is "top ten" is extremely subjective, based on the company, who is evaluating, and niche. I would guess that within a 100 developer cohort there's not a lot of overlap between the top ten embedded c++ developers and the top ten react developers, and even the top ten that can do both c++ AND react.

> Whatever happened to just getting a normal job and putting in an honest day’s labor?

That doesn't sound very interesting.

It’s a bit like recommending someone become one of the top 10 basketball players to make money; someone will do it, but the chances are so slim that it’s a bad recommendation.

Also, how do you define “top 10”?

* Tim Berners-Lee - the web, W3C

* Peter Saint-Andre - XMPP, messaging RFCs

* DHH - Ruby on Rails

* Martin Fowler - Design Patterns

..and many more.

Yes, getting to the Tim Berners-Lee level of industry recognition is unreasonable to expect for most. But I think it is reasonable to think that this is doable, with the depth of the expertise niche needed to be outstanding being inversely proportional to the talent of the expert. One person might have an expertise niche of messaging, while another has RabbitMQ as their main niche. Both are viable to base a living off of.

Now talking about having a niche is a fair argument, but that’s literally a completely new argument. “Be in the top 10” and “specialize” are not the same pieces of advice, at all.

This where immigration restrictions make a difference. A Brazilian developer has trouble working in SV, but no trouble working remote.

Basically, you're saying only the top 1% will be employable.

This is going to be a new experience for a lot of devs in the bay area that have been spoiled with job offers. Those days are over. I'd say it's time to hunker down, save as much as possible because future employment will be scare. And, there's already a vast oversupply of talent. I'd hate to think what it would look like in 5 years time.

Outsourced people can take your job, for much less money.

Asynchronous communication across timezones has not been solved, and I struggle to see how it would be. A lot of collaboration requires a conversation and instant feedback from another party. You can't collaborate like this when there is a delay of 8 hours instead of 8 seconds between responses.

So "anywhere" is a bit of a stretch. That being said, absolutely this will happen across the United States. There is nothing that makes developers in San Francisco more talented than their counterparts living in Tennessee, so if those can be gotten cheaper, I can see how the overall price would go down.

Presumably though, such an effect would also cause rents and property values to go down in big cities. I can see how the natural evolution of such an idea is that wealth will be more evenly spread out throughout the country, instead of being concentrated in cities.

I still think the Facebooks and Googles will pay a lot more - someone has to be the "top dog" attracting the top talent. The question is, how much more?

Unfortunately, that's not the case.

Remote meetings can be far more frustrating and inefficient because of latency, total lack of turn-taking cues, inability to read emotional expressions of concern or worry on one person or to "read the room", emotional fatigue from lack of cues, and so on. And that's all assuming best-case scenario that your equipment and internet are working well. People pay attention less, speak up less, and so on.

Now, this isn't to say that remote communication isn't useful -- it's obviously far better than not having it at all. And even when you're in the office, many teams are distributed anyways across offices.

But remote communication and meetings have in no way been "solved". They still present elementary problems like when someone asks "who has thoughts?", there's 10 seconds of excruciating silence followed by four people speaking simultaneously, then another 20 seconds trying to figure out which one person will actually speak, where nobody wants to seem like the aggressive bully OR never get to speak.

It's really hard.

If you have a meeting with 12 people, and most of them are not engaged, the problem isn't necessarily the video call, its more like the majority of those people shouldn't be in the meeting at all, and would just benefit from a written summary.

If you have a meeting where 4 people are jumping in to share an opinion on one topic, that sounds like too many cooks in the kitchen, not a video call problem.

From my experience with remote meetings, the ones that work the best are those between two or three people where everyone is informed and the subject of discussion is concrete. These kinds of meetings are just as productive as the real thing. The kinds of meetings that tend to not be productive are the ones that have a dozen people in the call, with a few people talking and the rest watching the clock until the hour is over. These kinds of meetings are a drag in the real world as well.

But my comments are assuming, say, a 12-person meeting that has to happen. For reviews/approvals of a project with 10 stakeholders, it simply has to happen. And I never said anyone wasn't engaged -- participants usually are.

And 4 people having an opinion is the norm, absolutely not too many cooks. Just think -- a small feature idea is presented for approval in order to start work, a designer sees a potential problem, the user researcher realizes a use case was left out, the engineer is worried about feature creep, and marketing doesn't know if it'll be easy to explain. All of these have to be addressed.

So I'm highlighting that even when everything about the meeting is necessary and otherwise awesome and productive, the limitations of remote participation can add substantial difficulties to running it effectively. And that in this sense remote meetings are in no way "solved" yet.

I suspect after an adjustment period that we'll reach an equilibrium similar to what we had before as far as effectiveness.

There is an interesting social phenomenon going on here which I think is often missed. The old world was designed around the preferences of the most extroverted people. Those people are losing that privilege, and I understand how difficult it must be. Honestly, I'm extremely introverted, and somewhat autistic, enjoy isolation, etc. So if this whole thing has bothered me a little bit, I understand it must feel like torture for someone on the other end of the introvert/extrovert spectrum. Hopefully we'll settle one a better medium that is more amenable to the median person than what we had before.

It works because as a developer it's a plus to have multiple hours of good focus time with no meetings or interruptions. Plus we can cover each other for pager duty so nobody has to normally wake in the middle of the night.

I think remote work greatly increases the circle of people you're competing with. I don't recommend trying to be remote only unless you're world class - because the world is technically your competition.

That said there are lots of reasons most people in Vietnam or India are not actually in competition with me. Being able to communicate fluently in English and divine requirements from non technical people who don't know what they want is still the most important part of the job. You can be the best programmer in the world, but if you can't do that, you'll just build the wrong things beautifully and ahead of time.

Then there is the trust issue. People need to know they can trust you with their code, customers, and business. That's a challenge if they've never met you in person. It's a bigger challenge if you live in the developing world - maybe that shouldn't be true, but it is. I had more trouble getting jobs when I lived in Panama.

Coming back to the states and being able to collaborate real time throughout the day was always a boost to productivity.

In my digital nomad days, the golden place for a client was always New York. This is because it would allow me to have solid overlap from anywhere in the states, and also good enough overlap in Europe.

I had a job for a while that I hated where I never knew what my task was. It would seem clear when given to me, but then I would start and questions would come up and there was nobody to clarify. So I'd have to go back to first principles and try to divine what they wanted me to do, and then execute on that. I was over the moon when I got a better gig and was able to leave that one.

Another perspective, from a remote-only employee away from all the world's tech hubs: there just aren't that many local jobs to choose from. Remote work really makes it possible for me to have a job in this field where every other company is complaining about shortage of talent.. and I don't have to leave home & everything behind and move into a big city (I don't like cities btw).

I don't think I'm world class.

But I think you're better than you assume, because you got the job out of a very large pool of potential candidates. By definition, you must've beat everyone who applied in that hiring round.

Which reminds me of the first rule of finding a job - it's just like dating - is a numbers game. Your chance of success on any attempt might be low, but then you just need to make enough attempts and the limit of P(offer) approaches 1.

What kind of problems with people's backgrounds did you find relevant to doing a developer job?

Having dealt with Tata, Cap Gemini, Genpack, CTS, HCL, and a handful of smaller groups in the Philippines, I'd avoid offshore workers if at all possible. Would absolutely hire qualified Indians and Filipinos in the US, but outsourcing is dicey.

There is a difference between a cheap foreign engineer without formal training and a trained domestic engineer. Anyone who thinks every type of labor can be outsourced to cheaper labor markets has no understanding of the phrase "You get what you pay for".

Sure, the call center guy telling you to reboot can be outsourced trivially, move up the stack and you may be making a large fiscal mistake. This is discounting the much higher fraud rate attached with outsourced labor as well.

IMO there's no difference between a trained domestic engineer and a trained foreign engineer. Foreign vs domestic isn't a meaningful difference.

However. Existing tech hubs got their cachet for having the best and the brightest, which in turn draws in the best and the brightest. Companies have to pay more for talent on average in hubs because the talent has self-selected for a high concentration of great folks.

That doesn't mean there isn't an assortment of great folks elsewhere who just didn't feel like moving, but IMO, more than likely, the majority of the great folks are already in tech hubs. I think the risk is overstated.

This isn't supported by the research. American university graduates have much better knowledge of computer science than their Indian, Chinese and Russian counterparts.[1]

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/116/14/6732

For instance, is someone who moves to the US from Malaysia, goes to UIUC, then moves back to Malaysia a "trained foreign", "trained domestic", or "foreign, trained" engineer in your view?

Nuanced, but important, and might be why people are talking past eachother.

There are excellent engineers in SF, but that's not the standard. It's the result of strict selection processes.

As I said in my comment, this is the big shift I would be looking for. The shift in the top dogs. The top dog could become a Chinese company snagging US expertise rather than the other way around. That could then create effects where US workers are applying to jobs abroad.

The real competition might not be positioning yourself as the talent. The real competition of the future might be attracting the talent. Once you get _that_ shift, then this conversation takes a totally different turn.

No US worker is going to get set to a re-education camp for a 2-5 day set of business meetings in Shanghai. Bug your phone or capture all your internet traffic? Maybe. Arresting a foreign national working for a Chinese firm? Unlikely.

Anyone who is 'unreliable' enough for the Chinese government to arrest them isn't going to get hired by a Chinese firm -- doubly so because the largest firms in CN are state-owned.

What is not solved, of course, is how a remote-only employee can build trust and relationships with peers.

In my opinion that’s the reason a lot of remote work is working well right now. Everybody already knows each other.

You're saying that trust can't be built virtually? I think there are online communities whose members would say they trust each other, and can collaborate and work together just fine. A lot of open source communities certainly work on this basis.

Besides, working remote-only doesn't mean occasional meetups or virtual events (gaming, etc.) couldn't be held to bring the team more socially together, but I don't think this is a requirement.

Of course, trust is subjective, so others will feel differently about what it takes to establish it for all involved, but that applies for physical communication as well.

Remote and in person can reach the same level of trust and productivity, but I do believe that people reach that level faster in person as opposed to oddly forced zoom happy hours.

I can see how english fluent Mexican, South American and Canadian employees will be in competition - this is already happening, but I think that China might be one of the last places I would higher a developer due to the huge time difference and their poor english speaking ability.

Personally I think that non technical project managers are the bigger problem, remote or not.

We still have a thousand developers there and we pay $2500/mo for each of them. There are plenty of nice people, and a few rockstars, but on average this money doesn't buy top talent in India.

Two kids go to school at Ohio State in the same program. One moves to SF and makes 200k right out of school. The other stays in Ohio and has a starting salary of 55k doing similar work. I don't think you need to worry about the Chinese coming for your tech jobs. In a remote world, the Buckeyes will get there first.

If you really want offshoring to work, you at least have to move 100% of your development staff overseas. Really you need to move 100% of your engineering altogether, and maybe a good chunk of your leadership as well.

Tennessee has a huge advantage over places like China and India simply due to communication. Language fluency, cultural similarity, and a low timezone offset all very much contribute to a successful team.

I disagree, at least if we are talking about what tools to use. But many people who are used to being face-to-face aren't used to async. Async communications require patience, foresight, and good writing skills. You need to envision the end result of the collaboration, provide as much of your perspective as possible without writing a wall of text, and ask good questions. Then, in 8 hours, your coworkers do the same. And over a few days, consensus arrives.

Easier said than done, I admit. It takes time and deliberate practice to do this well. It is not how people are used to collaborating. But that does not mean it doesn't work - it means people only succeed when they put in the effort learn new communication skills.

As you improve, you'll also find that the urgency of decisions often isn't what it appears to be. That is where the patience comes in. If you truly constantly need consensus on problems within 30 minutes to prevent your business from crashing, then I'd suggest your organization may have deeper problems that need resolution.

Having worked with a distributed team (13 hours time difference) working on the same product under the same deadlines, it's not possible to just hop on a call because e.g. someone accidentally changed a config on a development API which I don't have direct access to because it would knock us out of SOC2 compliance. This is an issue which needs to be resolved immediately and blocks any further work on my end, which means I can't do my work until they wake up and get into the office.

> If you truly constantly need consensus on problems within 30 minutes to prevent your business from crashing, then I'd suggest your organization may have deeper problems that need resolution.

When you're overextended, working under an intense deadline to deliver a product to a client, tight turnaround is absolutely necessary. In theory all of this could be fixed with proper management, but small- to mid-size startups don't usually have the time or resources to do that.

They will pay more. But Facebook has already announced they'll readjust salaries to people who work from home in lower COL areas.

This sucks for people living in London, for example, where developer salaries are low but the cost of living is high.

True, but the workaround is I'm willing to adjust my work hour to fit my team. In a big city, life can still be 'lively' during the night.

The company I work for has offices in Europe an throughout the US and Canada. We span 11 time zones, and we are absolutely able to make it work. My team has 7 people and only 2 are in the same office.

The trick is to have multiple communications channels, good collaboration tools, and to hire excellent communicators.

I agree from experience that straight outsourcing, where you throw a language barrier in with the time zone issue, is not a solved problem, but purely working across timezones is very doable,

By focusing on excellent written communication.

Great written comms is hard, and (like coding) requires lots of deliberate practice and training.

Most people and companies gloss over this, but it makes a world of difference if you're operating across time zones.

Great internal writing is what separate the great companies from the average.

Suppose you have two engineers, one in America, one in India. PRs cannot be merged without an approval. Suppose the average PR requires 3 back-and-forth comments before it gets merged.

In the same timezone this gets merged in an hour. In a different timezones its days.

I think there's more to this. There's a "network effect" of living in a place like SV. I felt that the bar was much higher in the West Coast due to the high density of companies and talent attracted.

This is bait. It's taken as a given rather than a hypothesis to be proven, which invalidates most of this post for me.

Issues with the analogy:

- Offshoring existed before remote work was popularized. For the many of "your jobs" up to be "taken" that shift has already occurred.

- Outsourcing is not a magic bullet. Timezone gaps, communication style, expert knowledge, and legal compliance are all issues that previous outsourcers to call centers have already discovered.

- Significant gaps remain between "tier-1" and "tier-2" support. Effective deployment of offshoring requires using the two to complement one another, not trying to use the latter to replace the former.

No matter what it is that your company is selling, tricky situations will come up that needed to be escalated to an experienced customer success team, whether that's the founder or a dedicated team. Being able to recruit globally doesn't magically make building that team any easier.

This is different though, because those companies weren't 'remote' so offshoring is not viable without that prerequiste.

But if company goes 'remote' much more work becomes outsourcing worthy.

Again, there's a difference between "outsourcing worthy" and "can reliably outsourced for enough cost savings for the whole thing to not be ROI negative". And, that's my point. Companies going remote doesn't magically jump start geographic labor arbitrage from zero. That geographic labor arbitrage has been ongoing for a long time.

This depends on the assumption that there's a big supply of workers in Omaha that are able to step in and do the job. I'm an outsider, but I'd guess that the people worth $600,000 Facebook salaries are already living there and working for Facebook. And then there's the question of whether those jobs are the ones that can be done remote as well as in a specific location. You have to ask why, if there were such big savings on the table, these companies hadn't already moved in this direction. I don't think it's as clear-cut as many are making this out to be.

It's no different than college football players that spend their four years in well run systems that run pro style offenses. Sure, there may be a kid that has insane athletic ability that is playing at Calhoun Community College, but someone like Jerry Juedy ( wide receiver for Alabama ) is the player that the Denver Broncos will choose if they can get him.

There simply aren't as many well run software companies in Omaha as there are in Seattle. And one could argue that the best free agents are going to be the ones coming out of those cities who can command higher market rates because companies believe there is higher ROI.

One critical thing to I've really come to experience in my travels is that all humans are basically the same. Those Ivy League engineers are no more intelligent or hard-working or creative than the guy in his garage or the site engineer from the Mexican or Chinese state university, instead it's often the opposite. If they're able to use the people, tools, and budget their position affords them, they can be more productive, but on the spot without those aids if anything they're less productive.

The only differences are social connections, credentials, resources, the value multiplier from the volume that goes through their business, and the fraction of that value they're able to extract.

The former three factors stack up against the engineer from Omaha. The last two mean that Facebook or Ford can easily afford those higher salaries while the Omaha garage cannot.

I also think people are overestimating the impact that FAANG going full remote will have on the tech world. I know that they're trend setters, but a lot of companies have already been operating full remote/remote friendly and offering perfectly fine wages.

I really only see net-positive from this cultural shift. Frankly its obscene that location matters more than talent currently.

Yes! I think this is true. However, the more interesting development to me is what happens 10 years from now. The engineers who are making $600k in SF are typically 10 years into their career (if not more). This is the biggest knock against expanding into places like Omaha- there's plenty of entry-level talent, but little, if any, mid-level to senior talent.

In Edmonton (Canada), where I'm from, there's an awesome university that graduates tons of CS grads who immediately head to the Bay Area, because they can make 4x more there. As such, most of the work in town isn't sophisticated- there's lots of web development shops, but not many jobs doing sophisticated engineering at the level of, say, Facebook or Google.

As a result, you're right, there's not many people who could get a $600k offer from Facebook. But! If these companies start supporting remote work, we could see tech ecosystems developing, and we could see new grads staying in these places, and building ecosystems around them.

To answer your question about:

"why, if there were such big savings on the table, these companies hadn't already moved in this direction."

I think the answer is as follows:

1. New grads need more experienced talent to help mentor them and ensure that they're seen as productive.

2. All of the companies' offices have historically been in certain locations, so we either need to a) have the new grads move to somewhere we have experienced talent, or b) need to have experienced people move to where the new grads are.

We see both of these- companies regularly will start new offices once they can get sufficiently experienced people to move there, but only when they can get that. This is the main reason (aiui) why many of the large tech cos in the Bay Area are concentrated in the Bay- there are no senior level people who are interested/willing to move.

Granted, I am just one data point, but it's hard to imagine I am alone...

If you can find decision-makers and demonstrate quality work to them, and start planting the seeds that you would be available for contracting, there is a good chance you can make your move back to Omaha within a year.

I'm sure there is not a big supply of folks like me anywhere, and most of us are probably doing work at FAANGs and such. Truth is, FAANGs can't afford me because I'm not jumping ship for anything less than full time remote with good people on a product I think is worthwhile for anything under $600k/yr. I'd actually like to start something around edtech, so maybe I'll look into that if I lose my golden gig.

Before covid most companies were hiring like crazy, it is not either/or, they want all those workers, both the people in SF and in Omaha too.

So which is it?

As someone who is unable to move to California due to family, I've always seen the biggest benefit I am missing to be not applying to jobs close by, but being the proximity to people I can connect with who can help me (and my ideas) grow.

It's an old cliche, but true, that if you surround yourself with people smarter/better than yourself then you will likely get better yourself; conversely, if you are the smartest person in the room on X (no one is the smartest in the room on everything), then there is no forcing function driving you to get better other than one you artificially create for yourself.

I don't think so. Trust and sense of shared purpose and ability are still largely built in person. The continued productivity people claim during the pandemic lockdown is mostly coasting off what was largely established in person before.

Websites, chat-rooms, and video calls are no substitute for the environment created by the physical agglomerations of people found in industry hubs.

That's not specific to the tech industry, either. It's true for any industry whose progress is dictated by hubs of creativity, including health, energy, entertainment, and transportation.

Before the internet, you had to go live in a metropolis to even know of these other people that were also interested in what you like, much less talk to or work with them. That has changed dramatically, and you absolutely can work with very bright people on very advanced things while you live somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

Don't get me wrong, it's still nice to meet people in person, but if you can't find a community online where people are smarter than you and/or better than you in whatever you do, you're either a super genius or you're not looking.

I find the preoccupation over chasing the vaguely defined, but often bandied definition of "smart" a bit dull.

What matters more in my opinion is being in an intellectually stimulating and also psychologically safe environment. Other "smarter" people than me have made this observation too.

I'm not saying it has to be SF, NYC, or London, but the environment matters immensely, and it can turn a motivated person who might not appear "smart" in another context into a much more creative person.

> Oh sure, for networking and contacts etc, in person is still the thing.

It's for far more important things than just yukking it up with people and trading business cards.

> if you can't find a community online where people are smarter than you and/or better than you in whatever you do, you're either a super genius or you're not looking.

I personally have yet to see an purely online community that fosters creativity without some fundamental anchoring in creative communities in the real world. The only exception I can think of are online game-building communities and competitions (i.e. Ludum Dare), but that's an unusual case. Is it impossible to find more example that? No. But I'd argue that strictly or even primarily online creative communities are unusual, and the online part is more about networking and cross-pollinating between in-person creative communities.

I live out in the provinces, and we pay 20-30% of the rate for SV talent. My lifestyle in SV would require 7x the compensation without me being any smarter or skilled than I am. NYC is more of a real place and is probably less inflated, alot of the premium there is really about domain expertise.

We'll see. I'm betting you're wrong - NYC has nothing on SF in tech expertise and the rest of the country (especially outside of the West coast) doesn't have much on it either.

The problem with DC is that the talent pool is extremely diluted by disillusioned, rent-seeking government contractors who get a certification, claim a bunch of stuff on their resume, and get bid as part of a 20-person team on a contract that really only requires 5-6 committed (for the sake of argument, "SV caliber") people.

The problem is, hardly anyone that is "SV caliber" wants to work on pokey gov't contracts, but enough people on that team care enough about the mission, the project, or their company to allow the freeloaders to get away with it.

There's no incentive to firing them because a) the client understands that govt work is extremely inefficient so they tolerate it b) the freeloaders are very good at not pissing anyone off (they are very friendly and dress well, etc) and c) their employer literally loses money if they are removed.

So the cycle continues.

Having said all that, in amongst the chaff there is a significant kernel of wheat in the DC area, both in the contracting as well as private sector space.

Capital One has a really good engineering culture and hires a lot of very smart kids straight out of school and trains them very well. Many of them don't stay in DC, however, and go on to work at GOOG, MSFT, AMZN, etc for big salaries after their 2-year stint at COF is over.

NoVa definitely has some strong talent and you're correct in highlighting Capital One specifically (they recruit heavily at my alma mater and I know a number of talented people who work there). You're also correct about talent dilution - I worked for a brief stint at a government agency doing tech work and I would say the majority of contractors are unfortunately, quite untalented and love to hide behind buzzwords.

> what are the other West Coast tech hubs

I would say the Bay is several different tech hubs rolled into one, Portland has a fair bit of tech work, and LA is overlooked but increasingly becoming a big one.

The people who worry that remote work will be a disaster are the ones who never believed SV engineers were more talented in the first place.

Or that technical talent does not really contribute to success as much as the prevailing theories believe?

From a purely technical standpoint, we'll see, but tbh, as others have said, outsourcing has been happening for decades now and if anything the wave is currently retreating.

The NIMBYs in SF are going to get their wish: shrinking the city and collapsing its major industry. As another poster stated: things that don't make sense get adjusted in bad economic times. Things like paying 7-10X for real estate when you're in a digital industry...