Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

One of the things I'm wary about, as someone who has a first-world standard of living, is that if my employers think my job can be done over the internet from 50 miles away, they think it can be done over the internet from 5,000 miles away in some country with lower costs of living.

Those of you who work remotely: How do you differentiate yourself, in the employment market, from people in asia, eastern europe etc?

View on HN

If you can't quickly, confidently, and credibly answer that question right now – you _really_ ought to spend some time working out why, and what you _ought_ to have ready to say to your manager if they propose exactly that. Either they are right, and your job _can_ be outsourced to the other side of the planet of 10% for what you need to be paid, and it will be eventually - or there's a very good reason why you (or someone else with the skills and compensation requirements like you) needs to be doing your role.

What is it that you do, that a dedicated educated and intelligent resident of Mumbai or Beijing or Bangkok or Kyiv can't do for your employer? You _really_should know that, at least for yourself…

I think it really depends on the kind of work you do. Part of the reason why remote working is great is economic - you have to prove you are a better programmer/designer/marketer/support person compared to anyone in the world with an internet connection.

A big part of why a firm might choose a US/Western worker is communication style and understanding of cultural norms, though that is changing too.

For me it has to go beyond programming. When you hire me to help automate some process or improve some system, you are going to get a good programmer but you are also going to get someone who seeks to deeply understand your business and find ways to improve beyond what you put in front of me.

If 'outsource' to someone in another part of the world your need for a detailed specification is much higher, your need to mitigate communications risks are much higher. Something I have trouble putting into words but I know from experience is there - when I am working on some process I try to understand it deeply and ask questions that are often more business related than technical. Technology is a means to solving business challenges and you have to be part analyst and part developer to approach problems that way. A coder across the world who needs a very detailed spec will almost never give you that benefit.

I can't speak for larger companies, but as a small remoter company, we don't see much gain in saving a few thousand bucks each year trying to hire cheap. It's comparatively rare for us to find someone who's a good fit, it's not like there's a surplus of great developers with relevant experience.

That said, cultural differences exist, and coupled with timezone differences, it can get quite tricky. From my experience, at the end of the day, hiring people in the same (or a neighbour) country is cheaper anyway.

In my experience, employers are very bad at judging what the appropriate salary in that other country should be. They get greedy about cost savings, lowball the market, take what they can get, and then are shocked that the work is shoddy and not up to standards.

So that's one practical reason a US remote worker often still has a job.

First, some of what I do in my consulting practice is very specialized, but even for work that is commodity work, there's a difference between good, high-quality work and the product of the lowest bidder. Good, quality work is expensive everywhere. If a customer can't understand the difference between you as a $100/hr resource and a $10/hr offshore resource, then either you aren't providing enough value or you don't want them as a customer because they don't understand the difference in terms of quality and delivery. Even in lower-cost nations, the cost alone for getting senior, experienced resources is not sufficient enough for cost alone to be the deciding factor.

1) Being one or two time zones away is pretty critical to having more overlap during the day. While it's possible (in some cases) to work completely asynchronously, it's notoriously difficult to pull off in the early stages.

2) Bandwidth and latency is a real problem when trying to do video conferencing across continents or do some pair programming.

3) Cultural fit still applies with interpersonal interactions. Being able to identify with coworkers in similar life stages (mid 30s, small kids at home, living in suburbia) makes a huge difference when trying to plan and execute work.

50 miles vs 5000 miles is still a big difference.

I do contract work, most of it is at home, but most client work I can be on site with enough notice (like... a morning phone call). Same time zone, same language, but can also be on site for f2f meetings.

In other words, if your job can be done from home, it can be done from India.

People promoting a world where telecommuting is widespread better be careful what they wish for.

Pretty much every big tech company already has an office in India so why does this matter? The reality is the number of people in India who can compete for your job is limited and their standard of living and salary will keep getting higher. The other thing is that this is not a zero sum game. The demand for software developers isn't constant. It keeps growing and the availability of more developers will accelerate it's growth. Think of how much bad code is written right now that will need a complete rewrite in two years ;-) or x10 people to maintain.

Sorry, but that's just wrong. To work with people in different time zones, you have to be truly asynchronous and somewhat spread out. To work with people with different cultures and native languages, you need to put some extra effort in.

And at the end of a day, a good remote worker in India knows what they're worth - not much less than a US remote worker. Free markets and all that. If that's not true now, I'll convinced it'll be true as soon as remote working becomes really popular.

And while we're at it - have you noticed how many Indians go to the US to do tech jobs on-site? What's the big difference?

> People promoting a world where telecommuting is widespread better be careful what they wish for.

I imagine many HN participants who live in India would be quite happy to be able to remotely work for some of the various companies represented here without having to leave their friends and family, and deal with things like US immigration.

Differentation: skills, demonstrable experience (across multiple markets), previously successful experience remote working, communicative capacity, cultural comprehension.

Financial competition: charge less than 9-to-5ers, but live outside of the western spendzone (ie. Asia, Eastern Europe, etc.). This allows you to take equity-linked packages without sacrificing quality of life (or indeed, with higher net quality of life).

I think it comes down to a couple tangible, measurable metrics: language barriers and time of work barriers (ie you send an employee an email and the reply back at 2am your time).

Then, I think anecdotally, quality of work is another perceived advantage for not going with the complete outsourcing route.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com