> Shouldn't the workers in the rich countries be terrified of remote work? You essentially open up against competition from much cheaper places and you might end up moving there to be able to match the margins.

Offshoring hasn’t been an amazing success story so far, what you save in cost you spend in fixing low quality, bridging cultural gaps, and herding workers with no skin in the game who can’t afford to gaf because they’re paid so little in comparison.

Companies will always offshore but I think it’s the jobs at the crappier companies that are offshored and these aren’t the places we typically want to work at anyway.

I’m talking about large body shops whose value proposition is “we’re cheaper and we work harder”, not about individuals around the world who are hired by 100% remote companies. The latter are typically pretty good.

I agree, it wasn't a mainstream success so far but there are teams who cracked it. There are some companies who are proudly WFH-only and global.

The sweatshop model surely doesn't lead to quality but there are other models where companies open a local branch where they actually can have the company culture and yield just as good results.

I wouldn't trust too much on the "secret sauce that makes us special" theory, the secret might have been the culture which forms when working from the office.

In my opinion, it’s more about the local culture.

People in different countries/continents work differently, have different expectations around how much initiative non-managers should take, etc.

I’m not saying one is worse than the other. What I’m saying is that trying to mix these levels and hoping to exploit cheap labor to offshore doesn’t work well in my experience and what’s saved on paper is paid tenfold in customer attrition, employee turnover, high severity outages, that kind of thing.

For example, having had experience with Indian sweatshops, the people working there were paid a pitance compared to us, had to use their own equipment, no paid sick days, forced to commute several hours to work and back… imagine how interested they were in the work, being treated like subhumans by their employer. And whenever we’d talk about technical problems, they’d always say yes even if it turned out they had no clue what needed to be done or how to do it. I believe it was a factor of the tyrannical management there, but also a cultural thing. Same with asking for feedback, we had a culture (country, not corporate) where it’s common to ask for and receive honest feedback. The offshored staff could never wrap their heads around it. Or being asked to do something unclear/stupid: onshore would bring it up/challenge it/ask for clarifications, offshore would just go ahead and do… something, anything. Then we’d have to spend time redoing it and rethinking it losing weeks of work. But it was cheap, look how much were saving!!

I hope this doesn’t come as racist. I do t mean that the Indian offshores were worse people than onshore employees! What I mean is that there was a huge values gap between the two, very different ways of working, different expectations, different power dynamics and that they absolutely didn’t mesh together well at all.

We were appalled at the conditions offshore had to work under. One of the workers had cancer and couldn’t really afford the treatment because apparently health insurance isn’t really a thing in India and had to come work sick because they couldn’t afford the treatment otherwise… it was a disgrace and we tried to pressure management to face the human cost of their penny pinching.

It’s not impossible to have offshore and onshore working together and save money but I’ve never seen it done well so I’m very doubtful it can work.

And I think that’s our moat: we work differently, have different values, and different levels of initiative that local comapnies benefit from more than the marginal amount saved on exploiting offshore labor (in the context of sweatshops)

Completely agree on the culture, it's not that people in one place are inferior to the other - it's just that that's the way how work is done in their country and they keep doing it as long as they are in that environment. When the same people physically move to another country, they end up absorbing the local culture and adopt and behave like the rest of the team.

That said, with all the communications in place today I think the culture is becoming global with newer generations having less and less difference between countries.

Time zones still matter though. I have been in same-time-zone remote teams and different-time-zone ones. The dynamic is very different.

Things that take minutes or hours when everyone is on roughly the same schedule, could easily drag on to a multiple day delay in a remote team that crosses many timezones.

As for fully outsourced teams... They always could have done that even before remote work. Other factors seem to affect why that doesn't work.

Right, the time zone differences are a hard one. In some places people work in the hours of the client when doing remote work but it's still hard and taxing.

We've all been there:

  Them: Hello, <name>

  8-16 hours pass

  Me: Hello, did you need something?

  8-16 hours pass

  Them: How are you?

  8- 16 hours pass

.....

https://www.nohello.com

Exactly. When you do async comms and have a question, skip the chit chat and just send the question and an appropriate infodump.

As a matter of fact, even when you chit chat do it in self contained units. You don't know how much time passes till your co workers read your joke in #general.

Somewhat, but I suspect that it’s not as bad as it may seem.

The pandemic made it clear that there are naturally forming windows of better collaboration around longitudinal time zones. Outside of +/- 2 time zones becomes fairly difficult on a regular basis. West coast to East coast is difficult.

For Americans, there may be some interesting competition coming out Mexico and perhaps a few of the more advanced countries of South America like Brazil and Argentina.

For Europeans I would expect the same from Africa, from countries like South Africa, Morocco, Kenya, etc.

But once you are outside of +/- 2 time zones you either need one side to shift schedules or have zone local orgs.

At that point it’s less about remote work and more about outsourcing. We already know what outsourcing looks like, and it’s very different from remote work.

Bottom line, I do expect to see increased competition for remote jobs, but for the good roles that matter the competition is not truly global.

Read Wealth of Nations for an explanation of why this might not be the disaster for the wealthy countries as most mercantlists think it will.

Basically what's likely to happen in the long term is that shipping high skill jobs oversees will increase the world market size to a point where it's not going to actually leed to poverty in the rich regions.

Even the much hated exit of manufacturing jobs to Asia did not leed to an quantifiable decline in living standards in America as a whole and exiting the EU is not leading to an rise in working class wages across Britain.

With sensible management increasing industrial activity in the poorer regions can actually happen without a whole lot of negative side effect for the wealthy regions, but that require an kind of rational, fact based policy making that the current western political culture cannot produce as emotional irationalism seems to be an far better way to get elected then calm rationalism.

A mitigating factor is that a lot of engineers are from low cost areas, and yearn to return. India, China, exurbs from across the US.