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Comment by mooreds | Hacker News Reader

I agree with a lot of his points about the value of remote work, but the biggest one is that the labor pool is much much larger. This is such an advantage that I believe it outweighs the higher bandwidth conversations and the deep talent pool in the Bay area, but it does require reconfiguration of the company. Sharing of data, leveraging of online tools, trust in employees, adjustment to communication differences.

In fact, I don't know if you can take a company that is built onsite and revamp it to succeed in a 100% remote manner. Perhaps, if you replace one department at a time? I don't know, and haven't encountered any stories of such a transformation.

Anyway, congrats to the OP. I don't know if we need another remote job board, but heaven knows we need more remote jobs.

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> I agree with a lot of his points about the value of remote work, but the biggest one is that the labor pool is much much larger.

That's clearly an advantage for the employer, but not necessarily for the employees who live in globally-more-expensive places. Taken to the obvious conclusion, remote developers in India can do the same remote work for a lot less money than remote workers in the US can afford to.

I know it sounds crass and protectionist, but US workers cannot afford globalization despite the increase in profits for employers.

Ah, that's fair. I guess I'd say it's still a big advantage for an employee, because the number of firms that are available for remote work is most likely larger than the number of firms in any one locality (especially if you limit commute time). Maybe not the Bay area, I have never lived there. The pool is large for both companies and employees.

But the biggest advantage to employees I'd say would be the lack of commute. Even with a quick commute (15 min) you are gaining 2.5 hours a week. That is a huge amount of time that employees are not compensated for.

When I worked remote, I found I worked more hours than the days I went into the office and spent 40 minutes each day commuting. It's a lot harder to walk away from work when it is embedded in your home life. I actually quit my most recent job when they decided to close the office and move to full time remote work, so YMMV.

A compromise could be a co-working space or separate office in the house. It is very beneficial to have a clear divider between home and work life, so if you felt you weren't achieving it I totally understand the departure.

If the time difference isn't a problem, there are people with a much lower cost of living who are willing to work for 20 times less money than anyone in the Bay Area.

The ones that are worth hiring don't charge 20 times less regardless of their cost of living, because why would they?

I agree, but it takes a while for us to realize how much we are worth. Impostor syndrome is a big thing.

Market value is different in different parts of the world. It's called arbitrage

I'm always amazed at all the developers who are in favor of remote work....as long as you don't offshore....

If I'm going to hire remote workers why wouldn't I hire great talent in Vietnam or China or Poland instead of in the US?

Because many tech companies are not looking for sweatworkers but people who fully understand the context in which the product they are working on exists...from my expierence you won’t find these folks offshore

I don't work in the US. I guarantee you those people exist outside of the US.

You think the engineering team behind Alibaba's singles day sale are just a bunch of sweat workers? You think people in Bulgaria can't understand context? Engineers in Canada can't?

I should have been more clear, I meant in your typical engineering offshoring shop.

Of course you can find talented engineers with product sense elsewhere...though so far a majority keeps flocking to the pacific north west.

Kind of backing yourself into a corner. You can find competent people anywhere, so if you are advocating remote work, just realize that there is no longer anything unique about living in the USA.

If that were the case itd have happened already.

The old joke:

Two economists walk down a road and they see a twenty dollar bill lying on the side-walk. One of them asks “is that a twenty dollar bill?” Then the other one answers “It can’t be, because someone would have picked it up already,” and they keep walking.

The rarity of finding $20 bills on the ground, let alone smaller valued bills such as $1, proves my point.

Why can't it be in the process of happening? Is there a global on/off switch somewhere?

Its a moving target!

Of course todays top skills will be broadly available in 10-20 years...it will all be common sense. But what ever the next frontier will be, again only a bunch of experts will exist for it.

As a contrary anecdote, I once worked on a project where we had a method with a cyclomatic complexity of over 200. (The company had a tool that stopped counting at 200.)

I was not allowed to change it, or even add tests to it, because it was written by the NY office and they would have complained about it.

Bad programmers are everywhere.

There are often legal, contract, or regulatory restrictions on outsourcing software development to other countries. For example, most grants from the Department of Energy require that funds be spent in the United States.

While I'm sure restrictions like this exist in government contracts everywhere, I suspect companies working government contracts are a tiny proportion of the whole. i.e. in the general case, these restrictions don't exist & companies are free to hire their permanent staff from anywhere they please.

They're definitely not the majority, could be as high as 20-30% of jobs being secondary to the government (varying by location). The US Gov't employs nearly 1% of the population as direct employees and roughly the same as contractors.

Not all of the 20-30% would be bound to US employment for all projects, but wouldn't be surprised if a large portion have U.S. only requirements by locality (citizen + visa employees).

Note: I currently work for an election services company, and have worked in eLearning development though am no expert on the field of labor, law or guesstimates, just going from past reading and other loose knowledge. I did a brief google search to try and track down sourcing, but unable to find anything firm.

Absolutely. Hire the very best. The disadvantage to hiring within a specific geography is that your talent pool is limited and you are forced to compromise your internal standards to the capabilities of the available candidates.

Companies are willing to pay more for competence and I am willing to accept less pay to work with a more competent team.

Hopefully those employees in Vietnam or Poland would soon start demanding higher salaries. If you're selling your labor into a global market, charge what the market will bear, which is evidently a small fortune.

It is already happening. In Poland the salaries among developers are getting closer and closer to salaries in Germany or UK. The reasons are that developers can find a job for foreign companies (therefore local companies need to increase salaries in order to compete), but also that local companies get more foreign customers, therefore they can quote higher prices and offer higher salaries.

I don't know how reliable Payscale is but it's showing software development salaries in Germany to be 2x those in Poland.

Time zones make a big difference to remote collaboration. South and Central America are likely to become increasingly popular for offshoring for that reason, IMO.

Timezones are a drawback for quick slack style discussion but can be a plus sometimes when work on a project can be done by both sides of the team. You can work while they sleep and they take the relay when it's their "shift", and it can increase throughtput.

Also, I've been working on an US EST schedule since 2000 (from Eastern Europe). It's great for waking up late (I hate early mornings) and having the day free for shopping or whatever.

It definitely encourages asynchronous communication if the time difference is large.

It really depends on the project in my experience. Sometimes, or at least initially, you need a lot of back and forth contact and without that it really slows the project down.

Are there that really all that many? The pushback I see from developers against "offshore" is specifically directed at cheap outsourced offshoring. That's an entirely different kettle of fish to hiring people to work for you directly.

I don't know why, but it just doesn't work. My guess is that the top tier candidates from those places are capable of moving to a place with higher standard of living. At least that's the case where I'm working now. The best Indian candidates have been able to demand relocation to the US and the rest are still in India.

People seem really set on reading this as "hire developers from a 3rd world country". But no one said that was the only option.

Go hire some French or Belgian or Danish developers or New Zealand developers, you'll find the salaries are nothing like Bay Area salaries... And few of them would consider the US as having a higher standard of living.

If you're just trying to get good candidates for salaries below the Bay area rates, basically pick any 2nd tier city in the US. It may still be more expensive than France/Germany etc, but there's no language barrier, closer time zones, similar holidays, better labor laws (for the employer), etc. In my personal opinion the cost difference doesn't make up for those hurdles until you get much cheaper salaries like India, China, Brazil, etc. Obviously individual circumstances apply.

As a remote developer from (and living in) Poland, working from an US company, please do offshore :). You can pay us 2x less than you would your local devs, and we still earn 2x more than we would working for a local shop :). (EDIT: but see replies)

WRT. timezones, they sometimes are a problem, but in my experience, they actually force better work arrangements. You can get an uninterrupted stretch of time for focused work before the people from another zone start asking you stuff, and after the overlap passes and you're done for the day, they get uninterrupted time too. Also this puts a bit extra pressure on writing things down, which is almost always positive IMO (in every place I've worked so far, there's way too little documenting happening, which causes lots of waste for everyone).

In a game theoretic way it would be more beneficial if we all align our compensation demands to US salaries, independently of location, and in your case you get 4x above local shop salaries.

Yes absolutely. At the very least, workers at offshore divisions of the SV giants (e.g. Facebook London) should be demanding compensation to match their Bay Area colleagues.

I’m curious, how far off are they today?

It seems like there can be a >100,000USD difference in total compensation. Take it with a grain of salt, but there's some self-reported numbers at https://www.levels.fyi

If you click on an individual position, you can filter reports by location. If I were a SWE working for Google/Facebook/Uber in London, I'd be irked.

You're absolutely right, and thanks for pointing this out!

That would require you to convince all other worker to do the same, which is I don't think is feasible.

Depends on your location though... A senior developer in some areas in the U.S. will be under $80k/year, in SF/SV it could be over $240k/year. Which is already a lot of variance (3X). In the end, I chose to live in a city where even local development jobs are at the higher end of the pay range in the area (top 5-8%) and better ratio to the cost of living for the area compared to say SF/SV and other places where the lower income for dev is closer to median (20-30% position).

It depends on a lot of things, and it's always negotiation. In the end, know what others are making as best as you can and ask for 10% more than you think you may get. In the end, you may lose 75% of the opportunities, but you only need 1 job at a time.

> I'm always amazed at all the developers who are in favor of remote work....as long as you don't offshore....

Think of it rather as "who are in favor of remote work as long as it doesn't end up pushing them out of a job if they don't leave their home country" and it might make more sense. The answer is because it harms _my_ financial prospect in favor of someone _else_'s just so that executives can further consolidate wealth at the top.

> If I'm going to hire remote workers why wouldn't I hire great talent in Vietnam or China or Poland instead of in the US

Right. If you're going to hire. But that ignores the "if I'm going to get hired" side of the equation which affects significantly more people.

You can replace "remote" with "manufacturing" and trace the economic collapse of middle America. Hiring great talent in Vietnam, China, or Poland may be great for people in Vietnam, China, and Poland, but that doesn't come for free for US workers. Are US workers more important than Vietnamese workers? No, of course not. But if you live anywhere in the US then you literally cannot live on a typical Hanoi salary, and that has real consequences.

OTOH half the articles on HN are about how SF is made unliveable by the high salaries in software engineering, so maybe this will self correct, making some of the most expensive places in the US cheaper (I guess the process would not be painless though)

Because, assuming similar skill, as by living in cheap place I can afford to undercut other people living in more expensive place. That makes me more attractive to the employer.

I first encountered this idea reading VoxDay. He was against free markets because - to paraphrase - US workers are too stupid to compete.

This tribalism is so strange to me. I can sort of understand the US-vs-the-world thing (the US is huge), but being from Europe, with dozens of tiny countries, the ideas that Belgians are intrinsically worth more protection than Albanians is just nuts.

> the ideas that Belgians are intrinsically worth more protection than Albanians is just nuts

They aren't intrinsically worth more, but it matters if you happen to be one of those Belgians who loses your job to an Albanian who earns less than it costs for you to not live on the street.

You can't lose your job; it's not something you owned in the first place.

> I know it sounds crass and protectionist, but US workers cannot afford globalization despite the increase in profits for employers.

That's because it is.

Frankly, I think culture and localization have value. There will always be companies that prefer local. There are definite advantages to having people in proximity together for at least a portion of a given week.

In terms of working with remote workers. I've done it in several environments. Often it's time zone differences and differences in approach and culture that wind up costing more, which may or may not offset other needs. The total cost may go down, but the time to complete a project often goes up. It depends on the needs of given project(s) to the company, as well as the distribution and size/scale of management.

In the end, I'm happier to see offshore workers ask for more. I live in a city which has a higher pay to cost of income ration (for my field)... I stay here for that reason. I'm not taking less because the average is less.

Thanks - goal is not to build a job board. Goal is to move remote working forward. A job board is an obvious start if done well (note: we have a long way to go, right now).

Hiring from anywhere is amazing, but there are many challenges in paying and employing people from different countries. We hope to make some dent in that, but I'm aware that's going to be very hard.

I think this is why so many people have a negative view of remote work. They worked at companies that hired remote workers but the majority of people were in-office. That rarely works out well. You need commitment from the top all the way down and throughout the organization.

I’ve worked at 100% remote companies most of my career and they are excellent. Every person is invested in making communication work.

My last gig was where we were a remote team but most employees were in-office. It was impossible to get even the slightest bit of adjustment on how work gets done (write stuff down, don’t have private meetings without us, etc). Eventually it created hostility and not much of anything got done.

I agree with a lot of his points about the value of remote work, but the biggest one is that the labor pool is much much larger.

Also, those people can bring their own connections even establishing remote teams.

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