Comment by Bjorkbat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bjorkbat | Hacker News Reader

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>I'll tell you that I'm getting overseas talent for roles where 10 years ago I would have hired entry level talent in the US. But since my company is fully remote and distributed, the downside to hiring in LatAm and Eastern Europe has been significantly reduced.

I really don't get the argument that remote work means that it's easier to outsource jobs or hire overseas talent. The fact that you can get overseas talent for a fraction of the cost of hiring domestic talent sounds to me like a vastly more compelling reason to hire overseas or outsource, and yet companies nonetheless hired a lot of US talent despite this fact. Microsoft and Google had the experience and know-how necessary to make a globally distributed workforce work, and yet the headcount at their overseas offices were paltry compared to the number of staff employed at home. Why is that?

How does a change in work culture tip the scales in any meaningful way? Especially compared to that?

Yeah, sure, you hear stories about companies hiring more overseas talent now that remote work has been normalized, but I have a hard time believing that things would be completely different and they'd be a largely US-based shop if it weren't for remote work being a widely accepted thing.

If you aren't convinced by now that this argument is bullshit, take a look at those companies who were fully-remote and distributed waaaaay before it got popular, especially those who have maps of where all their employees are located. One thing you'll note is that, despite being fully remote, most of their workforce is domestic, and a relatively small portion of their workforce lives in countries that have gained notoriety as outsourcing destinations.

Automattic, is a great example of what I'm talking about: https://automattic.com/about/

Just to clarify, I'm not dismissing overseas talent, I'm dismissing the idea of overseas talent being used a bogeyman that might suppress wages and take our jobs. If it were that easy, it would have happened already.

> How does a change in work culture tip the scales in any meaningful way? Especially compared to that?

Two ways:

First, when everyone is remote, it puts everyone on an equal footing. When you have mixed onsite and remote resourcing it's much easier for a divide to creep in.

Second, the technology to support true remote work really accelerated during the pandemic and feels practical in a way that it hadn't before.

Large companies in any industry are generally not trendsetters but laggards because they have so much invested in the systems they already have in place. Moving all of Google or Microsoft remote is a daunting task. Starting a new company fully remote and then growing to Google or Microsoft's scale is much more practical and I think something we'll see over the next 10 to 15 years.

>Large companies in any industry are generally not trendsetters but laggards because they have so much invested in the systems they already have in place. Moving all of Google or Microsoft remote is a daunting task. Starting a new company fully remote and then growing to Google or Microsoft's scale is much more practical and I think something we'll see over the next 10 to 15 years.

Yeah, but Google and Microsoft both already have offices in India. They have logistics and infrastructure that have been in place not just for years, but for 2 decades. Nonetheless, latest figures I could pull for Microsoft's total headcount in India was 18,000. Impressive, until you consider that they employ 238,000 employees.

I'm not saying it's curious that they haven't gone fully remote by now. What I'm saying is that it's curious that their talent pool isn't more evenly distributed across the globe despite the fact that they've had a 20 year head start.

Sure, large companies aren't trendsetters, but by this point outsourcing is pretty conservative. Just within tech alone it was something that was talked about in the very early 2000s.

Regarding the two points you bring up, agree in that it makes hiring globally distributed talent easier. It's no longer inconvenient to make special accommodations for an employee in LatAm when you're making the same accommodations as everyone else.

Nonetheless, you still have companies that were fully-distributed and fully-remote well before it became trendy. They made the same special accommodations for everyone. The technology available at the time was already good enough to allow them to hire talent from anywhere across the globe. Even so in many cases it's the exception rather than the rule that their employees live in a low CoL country rather than a high one. Most of the employees tend to work either in the US or Europe. Take any prominent company that's been remote since the early 2010s, look at their about page, you generally see this trend.

> Second, the technology to support true remote work really accelerated during the pandemic and feels practical in a way that it hadn't before.

I've been working remote for the better part of 14 years and I completely disagree.

Slack existed before the pandemic, Jira existed before the pandemic, video calls existed before Zoom.

What tech are you referring to?

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