Yep. I've said it many times here and basically anywhere I can: Clamoring for remote-only work, maximum-introvert, never fly somewhere, don't value in-person communication/meetings/etc is a dangerous game to be playing. People vastly overestimate how talented they are and how hard the problems they are solving may be.

Not today, and not tomorrow. But if face to face communication, meetings, and the other sociable stuff goes away, it won't take long for domestic management to realize where the cost savings could come from, and international management to realize they need to upskill their people in English and code quality to earn "huge" [0] salaries consistently.

[0] Huge salaries to them being a high-five figure salary.

What's interesting is that I flew in for a meeting with my company recently, the first I've had since I've been hired.

This took hours upon hours of my time. Time I could have spent working.

We spent it between a conference room and at restaurants, and much of the time was spent discussing things with the larger team that were not relevant to me. So I spent that time on my laptop fixing bugs, in the conference room.

There was zero benefit to any of this outside of a solid handshake and getting to "meet people in person".

However, I have 3 meetings a week with the entire team on HD video, so I already knew exactly who I was meeting and what their mannerisms and personalities were.

That included walking through an office where people jumped out of the cubicles and offices when they saw me and said "hey! Great to finally see you in person!" without a second thought. They knew exactly who I was without having ever met me.

Is this really necessary? This was a huge waste of company money that I could have spent working.

What engineers and people on this site seem to not grasp is that "working" is not a strict definition that maps to "writing code" to management, business operations, marketing, sales... basically every non-engineering department.

If that concept starts to take root in the mind, then it becomes a bit more clear why people like the office. Engineers on HN seem to be incapable of considering that the social aspect of work is important to most non-introvert non-engineers in an office and that a lot of "work" is forming bonds, developing relationships, and yes, "playing politics" to some extent.

I don't doubt that the 10x engineer is well-represented on this site and that their worth is quite high for their work output. Lesser engineers and developers who work on glorified CRUD apps and mobile adware can easily be replaced, and the issue is that often they think they are also elite 10x engineers who have the same type of nobility and don't have to play the office game.

Time will tell if they're right, but I'm betting not. Especially since I know a lot of hiring managers exploring outsourcing during the Great Resignation and Remote Work Only craze and finding results being... quite good.

There can be a lot of ideas that a stated in way that makes it seem like most people would totally agree, like that "socializing at the office is obviously a chore that's a waste of time", that "work is about maximizing your programming output", or that "managers want employees back at the office is because they feel insecure about their value and don't trust their employees to get work done". But I don't think the vast majority of the workforce would necessarily agree to those ideas. As much as HN types like to make fun of MBAs and their bean-counting, there's the feeling that in their own heads the primary directive is to try to maximize the throughput of neatly parceled work units and would deride those who disagree as "time wasters".

The risk with this kind of thinking is that you end up not being nearly as objective as you think you are, and worse, you will fail to predict how things are going to happen. If you were reading Reddit during the 2016 and 2020 democratic primary; you would have been sure that Bernie was going to be the nominee. My workplace surveyed whether people want to do full-remote, hybrid, or full-office. Reading HN, you'd think the obvious top choice would have been full-remote, since most of us could actually work fully remote. As it turns out, it was not the winner. (Before saying that management fudged the numbers: The outcome was supported by my informal questioning of my coworkers as to how they voted.)

I do this all day in private Slack communications, 1-1 video conferences, and everything else.

This "watercooler effect" myth may seem important to some, but I know my team members closely because I am talking to them all day, whether we're staring at each other face to face or not. I already know their kids are in college, or the sports teams they are interested in, or the typical company rumor mill.

I'm 2+ decades in this game and I am familiar with the office. I spent 10 years driving an hour-each-way commute to spend 10+ hours in an office to help start a company with one other person. Which ended up growing to 20+ employees.

What is the purpose of "in person"? I have friends and a life outside the office. That doesn't make me an "introvert", it makes me a person who wants to spend the company's money wisely, especially against tight deadlines.

They need me writing code, or architecting a project, or leading a team.

That doesn't just happen. I'm glad your company/team has apparently figured it out; mine certainly hasn't.

It's one thing if your job is to stay at the assembly line punching holes in metal sheets 40 hours a week. And another thing if you have the capacity for improving the overall process (and profits), while still spending 10 hours punching holes part-time because it brings you joy. From management perspective, it's those 10 hours that are wasted.

Or if you're taken out of your dear assembly line and flown to the other part of the country in business class, to attend a week-long series of meeting with a customer. Somehow that ends up helping to secure a huge contract, just because your presence affected the customer's perception. From your perspective, that might look like the company has wasted a fine week of your work on useless meetings and communication. From company's perspective, just with that they have made more money than you'd bring them in a two years otherwise.

When there was friction involved in organizing a meeting (Needing to gather participants all in one place, book conference room, get projector working etc.) people were reluctant to call trivial meetings.

Now it feels like everyone has discovered Microsoft Teams and people feel obligated to call meetings for all manner of things that would have previously been solved by email or 'water cooler conversations'.

The volume of meetings I find myself attending now has skyrocketed compared to how often I'd be physically present in meetings when I worked in office. The only saving grace is you can mute yourself and alt-tab which is much more difficult when you are physically present at a meeting.

My current job is 100% remote; I've never met my coworkers or my users. I love not commuting, but the lack of personal bonding and the need for all communication to be 100% intentional is a real drawback. I think it's especially limiting for people that I don't work very closely with. E.g., I can't just go hang out with users and watch them work. Which makes it much harder to build relationships where I say, "Hey, let me show you something."

So... what you like is making it harder for other people to work by forcing them to pay attention to you according to your whims. I much prefer a coworker reaching out to me on Slack and saying "When you have time, let me show you something." And then I get back to them when I've finished what I am working on.

Do you have empathy towards 90% of the remainder of a company who doesn't like that?

You clearly want other people to show empathy and try to honor the way you like to work. So I'll repeat icelander's question: Do you have empathy towards 90% of the remainder of a company who doesn't like that?

It doesn't matter much in the good times when everything is going smoothly. But when the crap hits the fan and you don't have that connection - things tend to get contentious a lot faster. If you're the only one on the team without a human connection to the rest of the team, you're set up to be the scapegoat when things go wrong. It's just human nature.

Is it necessary? Definitely not. But I have the opportunity and I think it’s great to do, and great to plan together.

Consider how you define yourself, and where you see your life going over the long term.

Different strengths/reservoirs of energy and motivation are needed to "make it happen" in the real world.

How can you ensure your team will be there when you need them?

The irony of writing this doesn't escape me, as I weigh the frankly-more-time-efficient-for-me working at home I have now, versus the team-efficiencies of being in the office.

That’s a lot of benefit to me? I like knowing that the person on the other end of the camera actually exists in 3D.

CheckSalary.co.uk puts the average salary for "a programmer" in the UK at £43K, Reed.co.uk says £41k, Glassdoor says £35K, Payscale says £31K... maybe devs here should upskill in English?

https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/programmer-salary-SRCH_...

Of course, attitudes differ wildly from individual to individual, but the average can be quite hard to work with. It took me a few years to really adjust.

  1. *Something straightforward*
  2. *Straightforward reply*
  3. "Zomg! Hypocrite!"

May be, Germans (and most Europe) are "straightforward" from an American perspective. I find Europeans with their own shade of "subtlety" which you could only learn if you were part of the culture. Otherwise, they are "subtle" and "measured" too.

What seems missing from this discussion are the social connections remote workers pursue in the absence of water cooler conversations and company social events.

For many office workers, their co-workers are their main source of social interaction.

For remote workers, it's a deliberate decision to keep their social lives separate from work. They very well may be extroverts in their personal social activities.

Management has been looking at off-shoring whatever they can for the past decades already. Having a bigger pool of talent willing to work remotely is a boon, but most of the new influx is not from lower level countries (they already were 99% ok with full remote), and more from places with high level salaries.

Management will find cheaper people, but only marginally, and not that different from the people they already had. Except most of the people they will find will be the ones playing the full-remote "dangerous game" you warn about

This is a dangerous assumption rooted in past failures. I can personally tell you that I have a lot of evidence that points to it no longer being true. Eastern European developers are good enough to do CRUD and basic work that is massively overpaid here in the US, and speak English quite well.

I would tread lightly. It's still very early.

I don't think engineers in France or London (and I assume the US) are getting paid big bucks for actual basic work, that ship has long sailed IMO.

It's actually more or less the market rate.

The more you eliminate synchronous communication, in-person interaction, and office work... the less those cultural differences are going to matter.

Some email that was sent and misunderstood? Your entire project can go off-rails. People can hold grudges over something that was not intended at all. Etc. You're much more likely to catch these things early in face-to-face communication due to body language, tone of voice, etc.

Text communication is pretty hard to get right in general and text communication in a non-native language is even harder, doubly so when you're talking to a native speaker and there's an asymmetry in language skills, which there often is, even with fairly proficient non-native speakers. Add to that cultural differences on what is or isn't "appropriate" or different interpretations on various things and it can become quite tricky to communicate effectively.

This table is a good example of this: https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2014/02/angl...

Then in 2008 when the economy crashed I had one bizdev guy tell me that pretty soon everyone was going to be able to code with these new 'no code apps' and that I was going to be a fossil and I should move into management.

Then in 2012 people talked about how many brilliant chinese programmers there were and how all the jobs were going to be outsourced to china.

I think about this sometimes, because while I did have a successful stint as a team lead, now i'm just a senior SWE. Things have turned out pretty well so far. I've only seen salaries go up.

This is different because Covid-19 has shown to everyone that they can do their jobs remotely.

And if they can do their jobs remotely, why can't an equally skilled engineer in a country with a cost of living 1/10th of the "rich countries" do the same?

They are realizing they can, and handing this off.

I too was around in 2000, writing applications in C# beta before 1.0.

Still here but noticing the trends.

I'm an American expat and one of the things that I quickly discovered when I left and started traveling is that skilled engineers (and designers, etc.) in countries with significantly lower costs end up figuring out how much they're worth to employers/clients in richer countries. When they do and they have enough of a track record to prove their worth, their rates go up.

So if you think you're going to take your freelance developer in the US who charges $150/hour and replace him with an equally skilled freelance web developer in, say, Brazil for $15/hour, good luck. Any such developer in the Brazil will eventually discover that he's able to command much more. Except in a few rare instances it won't be $150/hour, but when you factor in time zones, cultural differences and language, there is far less of a difference in cost than you'd think.

Anecdotally, I have a few friends that run companies in the US that have expanded their hiring to consider remote candidates outside of the US and Canada and they still struggle to find suitable candidates even though the rates they're offering are based on qualifications, not location. In other words, they're willing to pay $100+/hour to the right people no matter where they live. Good people are in demand everywhere, and they know it.

I think people underestimate the demand for talent and think that globally we can fill that hole. We can’t, yet. Humans don’t scale well enough and eventually automation will be the real problem. (But I also think that is further away than currently advertised, but different topic.)

I’m dealing with a company that decided to try outsourcing for a second time starting just before covid hit and it’s just as miserable as it was the last time they tried in 2009. “But video conferencing” doesn’t bridge cultural friction and timezones.

This is far different than then.

In 2000, remote work was almost an impossibility... between bandwidth, protocols and everything else.

These days it's as easy as enabling your built-in HD cam and mic and getting to business.

I've had my share of severe pushbacks with "management" over the years.

They've often been burned by shopping projects out to the lowest bidder and suddenly realize you need competent engineers to make it happen.

The problem is you can find competent engineers now across the planet for far less than what you would pay a US-based engineer, forget about whatever is going on in SF/SV.

A lot of people would like to stick their fingers in their ears and say "nah nah nah" rather than realize what is going on, but I deal with it daily.

But are you really saying that it's only in 2020 that people put effort into outsourcing to cheaper foreign talent?

Or that the technology of remote work is now what makes it possible? I dispute that as well, good remote collaboration has been happening in open source for forever. People who can make it work make it work. It's not the issue and never has been.

Citation needed.

We're on HN, a technology site.

Many of us have realized we can do our jobs the exact same way as we did before.

I'm not talking about construction workers, police, fast food, etc.

I'm not sure this needs a citation.

"Many of us" with decades into this career and who have managed such teams would disagree.

It's just that good people aren't cheap, even remote ones. And they're hard to find.

I think the reason is that many people conflate "remote" with "asynchronous". Having a company go fully remote is one thing, having a company move to a culture of asynchronous work is something completely different.

Some tech companies will be able to do this, but the problems really arise for companies that have to keep "business hours" here in the US. Take a major chain store, a healthcare company, a <insert traditional buisness> software provider.

These businesses have to balance and on-shore workforce with an off-shore workforce. There will be people that work on the ground, and they will obviously have to be on-shore, so will upper management most likely. What about the other layers in the organization. From a high level it sounds simple but when you dive down into which teams support which teams and report to which managers and yada yada yada, where you draw the line all of a sudden becomes much harder and fuzzier.

Most companies that will do what you are talking about have already done so. The reason the water hasn't leveled off more to other parts of the world like you are saying is either due to existing business constraints or risk aversion to possible constraints an offshore team may impose.

In my company it's also very difficult to hire a full time employee in another country due to all kinds of regulations and the overhead they entail.

My prediction is that in the long run a lot of companies will still prefer people who are close. Managing remote people effectively is very difficult. A lot of managers will fail doing so. And a lot of people are also not cut out for remote work and need interaction at the office.

I remember when offshoring became popular in the 90s it looked all work would go to India but this didn't happen either.

On the other side of this, I feel like I'm seeing I'm seeing "leverage time zone differences to accelerate the development process" in hardware engineering job postings with increasing frequency. I can definitely see where there's an efficiency gain for heavily sequential tasks like PCB design bring-up to have teams working in shifts without anybody losing brain power by working outside of normal hours.

"When things need to get done quickly or a problem can only be resolved by talking directly"... and that problem occurs at night in my timezone, a team mate who's awake can deal with it with a rested head and no burnout in her or his day.

Admittedly, there are many companies who don't need 24x7 business continuity and are perfectly content with 10x5. For them, this is unnecessary complexity.

As long as we can find good enough people in our state, it’s just not worth the hassle to add more HR challenges than we have to.

The rich countries still prefer to hire in rich countries, because of:

* similar timezone/working hours

* similar work culture

* less language barriers

* rich countries still got better skilled workers

* less legislative overhead with employments, payments, firing

* if you get a really good person in third world, he will in the end cost similarly as good person in first world

Inevitably. Because a person like that will very quickly move to the first world.

Maybe not in 100 years, but right now that's how it is.

You also have to take into account that working for US company is not that desirable because of the employer culture, for example. Some of us like worker protection laws, for example, or government-mandated guaranteed vacation time or double pay for overtime or some weeks off when you have a newborn on your hands. Or be informed months in advance about your lay-off and be compensated hansomely for that (if the company isn't folding).

In the US these things are under the employers' discretion, and it's considered something amazing and impossible, like ambulance rides that don't cost more than your kidney on black market.

And lose that over 1/10th of what you guys get? Hahaha, oh wow, you're insane. If I have no guarantees, I want to be compensated accordingly! So don't get your knickers in a knot and perpetuate the "omg remote is killing workers" meme. Remote is better for everyone.

Oh and by the way, you know what protects you from %worker apocalypse reason%? UNIONS. There's a reason the bald fuck's afraid of them.

Jesus.

That's not how global economics works.

on the other hand, it's interesting to take note of what the big tech companies are doing. for the most part, they seem to have developed an increase tolerance for WFH, but continue to invest heavily in building new offices. not sure what that says long term.

even pre-COVID, big tech companies had offices outside the US. if you could already find enough engineers worth hiring to set up an office in brazil, how much does full remote change things? either way, talent is pretty densely clustered in the biggest cities to begin with.

It really does feel like there is a gigantic competency bubble that is about to pop.

The amount of people who are willing to learn the hard systems and businesses is dwindling by the day. You think its difficult to find airline pilots and truckers? Try to find a developer with both the domain knowledge and technical skills to fix a custom piece of code in a community bank's core system that was written in 1994. Oh, and we need it fixed before close of business or our fedwire files are going to be totally fucked...

The amount of money they will have to offer to capture the appropriate talent to keep their businesses running is going to become astronomical. The executives sometimes try to take a quick path out of this hell and usually wind up with 1 additional reason they have to stay. The most common mistake is attempting a full vertical swap-out, followed by paying some firm to explain that your shit sucks by way of installing some middleware in your infrastructure and telling you things you already know.

So why would they hire workers in their own country? People in this thread already have said it. Time zones, cultural business norms and understanding, native communication ability, tax and legal issues regarding employment (already annoying enough to hire employees in other states in the US for example), ability to connect with clients in the same locale, etc.

Now I’ll give you that this MIGHT shift things to a degree. I don’t think it’ll be the race to the bottom you and others are saying.

Maybe in the "rich world", but not globally :-) I've been hearing lots and lots of stories of growing salaries across places that were historically underpaid (Brazil, Portugal, Berlin, etc) - maybe we'll have a thousand gold rushes, as the water level rises to meet the "rich world" levels!

People have been saying this since the 1990's

The same may hit some highly-paid professionals in the future. If tech keeps making things easier while the rest of the world grows wealthier and more competitive, they may find that their skills are no longer in demand. The job is not as demanding as it used to be, and there are more people in the market capable of doing it just as well.

Those at the top are safe, but the top is slowly getting narrower.

This has been happening for decades. It is an inherent property of technology AIG automation driving down marginal costs and increasing yields, all benefiting owners of capital or those who have the ability to help automate.

I've spoken to a lot of recruiters over the last year and they're primarily indicating that a hybrid 2 days in the office model is the preference.

Integrating new staff is hard at the best of times, let alone half fully-remote and half hybrid.

Sounds familiar... I think you still get what you pay for.

There are certainly a lot of products where it doesn't matter at all, but in other areas you really need to be careful with what you send to the contractor and what you do in-house.

I moved back when I reached a point where my skills were good enough that I could secure a job remotely due to social proof/references.

The thing people are missing here is that not everyone that is living everywhere in the world is equally good and those that are 10x as good get paid between 4-5x as much (it should be more but the world is inefficient, overpays for poor quality, underpays for high quality in many cases).

I'm not worried that increasing remote hiring will affect my compensation.

Also, their English was almost indecipherable from a native speaker.

Communication is still a gigantic issue to overcome. So is managing teams and availability during the work day.

If anything, it might push more really smart people to start their own companies instead of working for someone else to achieve a lesser level of prosperity.

Communication is huge but I can assure you I've worked with teams on the opposite side of the globe asynchronously without issue. The concept of "workday" can be tossed aside if we are thinking 9-5 M-F.

Global teams can adjust schedules and work effectively. I know because I've managed teams like this in very complex software projects and it has worked.

You seem to believe there are no political dynamics to this situation. On a small scale, sure. On a large scale I think you’ll find the political stability that executives in the US have come to rely on will quickly disappear. The 2016 elections were already a reflection of the general populace growing tired of offshoring jobs. When that hits the middle and upper middle class as well, shit will hit the fan globally.

This is freakishly hard to manage effectively. Sounds good in theory but most will fail trying.

Stop going to work.

Switch to open source projects.

Let social media crash.

K8s clusters with Kilo hosted on laptops, desktops.

We have the tools to blackout the web and bring a whole huge part of the economy down.

Zuckerberg could be Pauperberg if the internet gathered round chanting “this is the new way”.

I mean you know DC has no clue how anything works beyond quid pro quo.

The US tech worker is about to get NAFTA'd.

So previously being able to utilize offshore talent was basically a skill unto itself. Now you did two interviews with similarly skills candidates and one wants 50% less pay, they just have a british accent.

Other commenters have addressed this, but the term is normally used for teams within +/- the same timezone but at far lower rates for (hopefully) good engineering quality.

So if you are US EST, there are "near shore" companies in the US that will coordinate you with South American teams.

They generally have a PM in the US and developers outside.

In terms of European talent being paid less, yes I agree they are, but there are hidden costs in terms of taxes and compliance that means that companies would rather go to countries which promise an order of magnitude cheaper resources rather than just 50% off.

Another term is “best shoring”, which is code for wherever you can find talent capable of doing the job for the least amount.