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Comment by spoonjim | Hacker News Reader

The “rise of remote work” is a greatly misunderstood phenomenon. At the high end, the most talented slice of software engineers will be able to define the terms and location of their employment to an extent never seen before. On a much larger scale, corporate drones like those seen in “The Office” will lose their jobs to people in Argentina or the Philippines. We are just not going to move to a world where a substantial part of the workforce is living in Wyoming with a view is Grand Teton pulling down $600k a year.

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The rise of remote work is 100% misunderstood. Good software engineers can work anymore but I haven't met many engineers that can mentor well remotely.

If you're Netflix or Google and can afford to only hire senior engineers it's fine to let everyone work from home. Most organizations need to organically level up talent via mentorship and in house training.

Basically, work is going to get more flexible but the idea that nobody ever needs to interact with humans in real life again is insanity. People may spend fewer days in the office but in the end, most of us will be back in offices at least a few times a week.

As a consultant, I have to say that this is true of our industry as well. Our company has always been full remote due to the "on site" nature of our work. Given that, it has always been a pain point to spend time mentoring and training. many hours of zoom calls for training just doesn't foment the kind of quick Q&A than in person does. For us, the net effect has been that the people who do well tend to be autodidactic to at least some degree.

FWIW, Google hires a lot of bright graduates straight from universities, who cannot yet work as senior engineers, even after 2-3 years of being interns before that. Mentoring plays a huge part here.

> The rise of remote work is 100% misunderstood. Good software engineers can work anymore but I haven't met many engineers that can mentor well remotely.

Absolutely this. I love working remotely and will probably not go back to an office until at least the kids are out of school. But both being new and training new people are skills that are just _different_ from being in the office.

Open offices were not a good fit for me, but one valuable thing from a past job was sitting close to both my manager and their manager. That was a way to learn "Oh, that's how you talk to <client A, department B, etc>" without having to be told "this is how you talk to these people." Training a remote new person requires so much more intentionality that most people are not accustomed to.

> Open offices were not a good fit for me

Open offices are not a good fit for anybody.

IBM studied this back in the Dinosaur Age. Bell studied this back in the Dinosaur Age. Dedicated offices with a door are the most productive. Period.

What open offices are is "cheap".

I haven't met many engineers who can mentor well, period. My guess is your perception is biased. I know SDEs who prefer conversations remotely. An extreme example would be that there's no chance of physical harassment on Zoom. Another would be the "raise a hand" button seems to be more acceptable to use than actually raising a hand in a meeting, with the result that voices are heard that would otherwise not be.

And just fundamentally, think of the site you're on. How unimaginative. How big is your data set? Why can't your sample mentor well remotely? Are there bigger data sets or published analyses? What can you do to improve your model?

Or is it just that you prefer to work in an office, or you don't trust your employees?

Your argument is the "Think of the children^H^H^H interns" argument from the Cathy Merrill's Washingtonian op ed. [1] It doesn't hold water with anyone seriously trying to improve the productivity and happiness of a diverse workforce comprised of people who have different preferences for home or office; in person or zoom.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2021/05/07/cathy-merril...

>I haven't met many engineers that can mentor well remotely

Aren't there engineers who grow and evolve through the sort of "mentoring" (ad-hoc or otherwise) they get through remote open source contributions? To the extent that a github presence is increasingly a prerequisite for certain engineering jobs I wonder if this shift isn't already under way.

I'm not saying it's a direct or even desirable replacement for IRL mentoring, but it does seem like there is at least a rough framework in place for helping people grow as engineers outside of a workplace. It's a little more self directed and rough and tumble, but then work in general seems to be going in that direction over the last few decades.

No one hires junior engineers anyway, getting that first job is miserable. Everyone only wants armies of experienced workers.

I worked at home for a small startup that was saving money on an office. It worked out so well that we kept doing it for many years later after we became successful. We would find a spot to spend the day together once every two weeks. I started as a junior programmer and felt I was mentored effectively. One of my favorite programming memories occured when my mentor, a senior, introduced me to exceptions, which he had implemented in assembly language. I learned a lot from him, and never felt that not being in an office everyday, all day, with him was a detriment to my learning.

Good mentors are rare, but I don't think being remote is much of a hindrance. IME, the world-class tooling for frictionless remote pair-programming built into VSCode is actually an improvement over peering over someone's shoulder in a shared office. And most mentoring is naturally more async than that.

IDK maybe I've never had good mentors, but I honestly can't think of much that I've learned to "level up my talent" from the people I work with. I do learn from reading code and from books by experts in whatever areas I'm involved in.

Sure I learn where the bathroom is, what the specific local dev workflow is, etc. but in terms of fundamentally improving my skills as a developer that has always been to a very large degree due to my own efforts at seeking out knowledge.

I agree. I don't know that skill growth can be provided by "mentorship". At most, I think mentorship can provide (or is perhaps conflated with providing) direction & guidance.

I've never been in the situation where someone can magically grow my skills for me, or download information into my brain for me.

Sure, there's exposure to ideas regarding programming frameworks, ways of doing things, system design ideas to receive from colleagues & supervisors. And communication & leadership knowledge & experience gained as well.

Agreed. The mentoring I benefitted from was never from other programmers. Most of my colleagues have been antagonists. Elders to learn from were few. I started a book club just to have some peeps to geek with.

Maybe it's a cohort thing. I've definitely coached, mentored a lot of other people.

I agree. I'd say the vast majority of any mentoring I've gotten hasn't been technical. It's been more along the lines of "this how to manage your work in Jira." Or softer skills like learning how to prioritize tasks given the org goals.

But covid hit when I was maybe 6 months into my tech career, and I honestly don't feel like it had any negative impact. All of these things were transmitted just as effectively in a zoom call as they were in person.

> Basically, work is going to get more flexible but the idea that nobody ever needs to interact with humans in real life again is insanity.

I still find this assumption baked in to a lot of the criticisms of remote work. I'll give the benefit of the doubt here that you don't thing remote = never talking to people, so the assumption would seem then to be that video conferencing and text chat is not "interacting" with people.

It very much is, and a lot of people have made it work in a lot of different contexts for a long time. Most of the drawbacks that still exist in certain situations are things that, given time, we'll solve.

Already in the past year, we've seen at least one report showing WFH productivity increasing 46% relative to the productivity in offices.[0] I can't think of any reason why this trend wouldn't continue--we're still at a stage where there's a _lot_ of low hanging fruit.

[0] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28461/w284...

I don't understand how mentoring via slack and zoom is any different than mentoring leaning over tha back of an aeron. Actually I do: I think the slack/zoom way is significantly better.

> On a much larger scale, corporate drones like those seen in “The Office” will lose their jobs to people in Argentina or the Philippines.

It's not going to be so dramatic. What will happen for sure is that groups will start hiring in lower cost countries and hire less in the US. That offshoring trend has been going on for 2 decades+.

The big issues with offshoring are culture and timezone, and the first can be rectified to some measure, but the 2nd can only be mitigated (could be a benefit for support centers, etc).

That Wyoming posting will be for folks who have decided that maybe pulling $2-300k instead of $600k may be an acceptable loss for an ongoing lifestyle.

> That Wyoming posting will be for folks who have decided that maybe pulling $2-300k instead of $600k may be an acceptable loss for an ongoing lifestyle.

Which in itself will affect the market and how much those positions pay in general. You can't have a large chunk of a workforce decide that they're willing to take a 20%-50% pay reduction for other benefits and expect it not to affect the entire workforce.

I don't think that means people in and around SF will have to work at the same pay rate as those working remotely necessarily, but I do think it might result in lowering the high-end of the scale, and spreading the distribution quite a bit.

As a developer from a Poland - yes, both on national and international level the salaries in IT will equalize. It's already happening and it's not a slow process. I'm on the growing side so far but it's a matter of time. Already my company outsources to Ukraine.

I expect trade unions and calls for mandatory certification in next decade.

> I expect trade unions and calls for mandatory certification in next decade.

That makes sense. Certification, or more specifically licensing, is ever the go to tool for people protecting their industries from what they see as encroachment by others.

Planet Money had an interesting episode on this long ago, which used Hair Salons as an example.[1]

1: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/524007928

I think it will have an impact but not as much as you're implying.

Where companies can offshore, they may already have. If a massive saving could have been made offshoring, there was nothing to stop them before. Maybe those companies that were reluctant because of the worries about remote workforces may be influenced by the success of the WFH experiment so I concede that point. I think this will have an impact but I predict it won't be massive.

The other constraining factor on this is that offshoring often doesn't work that well whenever I've seen it applied to software at least. Maybe it's just my own experience but in certain professions it seems it's good to have a majority of the workforce being fluent or near-fluent in the company's main language and relatively integrated into the culture. This can be achieved with people in different countries but its not just a straight forward question of replacing people.

I think it's a mistake to assume that 'offshoring' as understood for the last few decades and 'wfh' as currently understood are fundamentally the same thing.

I'm not sure what will happen, but it's quite plausible that the dynamic has changed.

I think this year has proven that a lot of people simply aren’t missed when they aren’t in the office.

If US developers saw the level of talent interviewing from South and Latin America, they would start campaigning against remote work immediately.

I’m sure there’s selection bias at play, but I did a huge interviewing stint recently and US engineers were on average bad and entitled, LATAM were amazing and eager. Guess who interviews better?

There are a lot of jobs and companies where they don't want to go through the additional effort of hiring an individual from another country that has different tax laws, worker protection, insurance requirements, infrastructure availability... along with the implications of the company having a presence in that country.

There are sufficiently many companies in the US that don't even like doing this across state lines - much less international boundaries.

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I won't argue with the "bad and entitled" aspect. I've seen that when doing interviews myself. There's a bit of "if you've got 1000 applications for three different positions, 900 of them are the same across those positions that are having difficulty getting hired". From https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve...

> Astute readers, I expect, will point out that I’m leaving out the largest group yet, the solid, competent people. They’re on the market more than the great people, but less than the incompetent, and all in all they will show up in small numbers in your 1000 resume pile, but for the most part, almost every hiring manager in Palo Alto right now with 1000 resumes on their desk has the same exact set of 970 resumes from the same minority of 970 incompetent people that are applying for every job in Palo Alto, and probably will be for life, and only 30 resumes even worth considering, of which maybe, rarely, one is a great programmer. OK, maybe not even one. And figuring out how to find those needles in a haystack, we shall see, is possible but not easy.

There's an entire thread to head off on for the why this is the case.

I will claim that for places where the salary isn't tech company stratospheric, the average entitlement goes down a bit.

I believe the typical solution for the paperwork problem is hiring people as freelancers/contractors. From the company’s perspective they’re a vendor that sends an invoice, from the worker’s perspective they’re a business handling their own taxes and whatnot.

This works extremely well and everyone is happy. Even a low US salary is often huge by local standards and more than makes up for the overhead of running yourself as a business.

Some countries even incentivize this. In Slovenia for example (where I started my career with this exact model), your effective income tax is 5% if you’re a solo business making under $100k/year. Typical local engineering salaries are $30k by comparison.

I asssume (I'm very much not an expert) that there have to be security considerations too, particularly if you're hoping to hire from the sorts of countries where Google or Adobe wouldn't consider opening an office and hiring developers for in-person work. And in the kind of places where Google or SAP or whoever is hiring for local work, presumably you'll have to compete with those locally-based opportunities.

I've heard this before. Recently discussed on HN relating to US CS skills vs major nations we outsource to: https://www.pnas.org/content/116/14/6732

Outsourcing is not new. Many companies have tried it. Not just in CS, but extensively in CS.

Not only are US CS skills higher, but communication is the most important skill in the industry. Good communicators add more value and do it faster than people with whom you struggle to communicate. People that don't understand that now will understand it after a few years of working with a company in a different time zone without a native grasp on English.

Another problem you'll face is that outsourcing means that another company (since you usually just contract with a foreign company) is gaining expertise in your product, domain, and tech stack. That knowledge gained doesn't stick with your company. If you're unhappy with that company or they fail to perform in the future, you have to train a new team from scratch.

A common pattern I've seen is that companies will outsource as a fledgling startup then move to insourcing after the MVP is up because it's easier to work with an internal, local team, and the initial team falls short once you get to the hard stuff.

I do suspect there's selection bias. Most US devs are employed and well paid already. It's hard to get the good ones to apply for new jobs because tech hiring is a pain in the ass. Imagine having a full time job, family, life, and taking a day off for interviews (while working! what, we're supposed to take PTO?), or spending your weekend on a coding challenge? Most of the remaining applicants are probably the lower end of the talent pool - younger or bad. Your individual sample size is also likely too small to make broad judgments about entire nations.

There's certainly bias. If for no other reason, because an entry level salary on some FAANG is often larger than most senior developers can dream on receiving in Latin America.

I see a further class divide between people who work from home and those that need to work at a place, either blue collar or service jobs or white collar jobs that require some public interaction (banks, teaching, etc.). This isn't a reason not to shift to remote work, it's just a problem we need to be aware will occur. Workplaces will divide along "office" and "home" lines (they already are, in my observation, with a fair amount of resentment tied in on both sides), and service jobs will shift to where people are living.

> living in Wyoming with a view is Grand Teton pulling down $600k a year.

The number increases again. Every time I see someone quote a hypothetical salary on HN it's bigger than anyone has ever said before. It used to "six figures". Then people started to be more specific, 120k. Then 200k started to be the norm. Now it's over half a million. 600k! What's next, "seven figures"?

500k is common for senior engineers

> On a much larger scale, corporate drones like those seen in “The Office” will lose their jobs to people in Argentina or the Philippines.

Not really. Too many companies have been badly burned by IT outsourcing clusterfucks, additionally as soon as customer data is handled stuff like GDPR and whatever the US plans to follow suit (and they will have to, in order for a successor to the Privacy Shield deal to pass the EU court system) come into play which makes outsourcing "drones" ... not really worth the time.

I think the presence of international standards like the one potentially being established by GDPR makes outsourcing easier, not harder.

It would make little sense for an Argentine developer to learn the intricacies of Slovenian data protection regulations. It makes a lot more sense for her to learn the intricacies of GDPR (and whatever the US comes up with).

Even if there are international treaties (which is not going to come soon, given the state of global diplomacy) one day, the core principle of GDPR is to minimize data holding and transfer.

Saving a couple dollars on wages for corp drones? I highly doubt this reason is going to fly well under that principle.

Outsourcing to budget contracting houses in India is a very different experience to hiring individual remote employees from overseas.

yeah but the real question is how is remote work reshaping where people work. And by that I mean on a more granular level: How many of those jobs in big cities will go elsewhere and where to exactly? And that's why I like the idea of this article in that it does make sense that people who study for 3-x years in a city and learn to love it want to stay there after their studies. Remote work makes this easier. Also, what I'm interested in is how much of remote work will be outsourced within one country and how much will be outsourced to different countries. I suspect that many typical roles that go "100% remote ok" will first say "but please in this country" before they say "yeah, another country is fine as well" but maybe the latter will happen more often soon. There have been studies for Europe (from Ernst&Young etc.) that say something along the lines of "you have to offshore 50% of your workforce [developers] to stay competitive" (well, that is for Germany and other high-labor-cost-countries.) although I'm a little suspect about these studies but well.. that's what management of some international companies is listening to...

Exactly. As a person living in Eastern Europe, I welcome WFH movement, it will open up a number of possibilities and level up the play field.

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