"you'd better be paying me extra to cover my increased rent"
I have some sorry news for Americans thinking this way on this one: you just outsourced yourselves.
There are people 2x as smart and who will work 2x as hard for 1/2 the salary among remaining 7 Billion people on this planet and if the bank can hire them instead of you, eventually they will.
In some aspects, relationships do matter, so those have face-to-face types of interactions will be obviously harder to displace.
The US saw a giant outsourcing of manufacturing, and now that US Megacorps are globalized and not locally owned, they don't have any reason to care about local talent, the same will start to happen in services.
I do however think that communicating matters a lot, and people will just find themselves back at the office.
I don't think people realize how quickly this can happen.
Now that we can work 'remote' - everyone is thinking about all the projects they can do for x% the cost, they're looking to trim the budget, and there's a pile of solid applications from Canada, Taiwan, Poland, Brazil, Spain on their desks.
> I have some sorry news for Americans thinking this way on this one: you just outsourced yourselves.
> There are people 2x as smart and who will work 2x as hard for 1/2 the salary among remaining 7 Billion people on this planet and if the bank can hire them instead of you, eventually they will.
> In some aspects, relationships do matter, so those have face-to-face types of interactions will be obviously harder to displace.
I have some sorry news for non-Americans who think most of the high-paying American jobs (especially at banks) have anything to do with being smart or working hard or getting paid half as much.
Those personal, face-to-face relationships referred to matter a lot. As humans, they will always matter.
The main way that remote will impact workers is by allowing people (mostly Americans or folks who could live/work here via a visa) who would already be naturally good fits for the job to live and work in a different place, but probably close enough to travel to meetings and clients as necessary (with a lot of necessary).
Back office work may be sent abroad or (more likely) contracted out, but the core of the businesses that involve trust and/or personal relationships will be collocated for many many decades to come.
So being a 'contractor' and 'not connected' is a problem.
But once they have the PM, designers, architect and devs. 'on staff' and all 'over there' - then you are the 'not connected' contractor.
Moreover 'they' are getting better across the board.
Japan made crap until they made the best cars in the world.
China made crap but now they have the top 5G gear and all of the patents, and would wipe out a big chunk of Western companies were it not for 'security' and other issues.
Americans are fairly instantly replaceable with Canadians, Aussies, Brits, and almost as easily replaceable with French, Italian and Germans etc.
'Remote Work' is like an 'unlimited, free H1B' program.
> Remote Work' is like an 'unlimited, free H1B' program.
As someone who manages people in many different countries from the US I can definitively say this is not true. You have to comply with local labor laws wherever you hire your employees. For example, many countries like Poland, England, and France require very longer notice periods and changes in job responsibilities can be a sticky legal issue. HR has to be equipped to handle all of these nuances.
Japan made crap and then they made the best cars in the world. And then they also starting making some real good salaries. This was a great development all round.
If every third-world country follows the South Korea / Japan playbook, the world economy would absolutely explode with growth, and US workers would certainly benefit from this.
The problem with overseas contractors is - you get what you pay for. There are still excellent contractors out there who charge more, but still less than what employees get paid here. The second problem is discoverability. It is difficult to find those excellent contractors from all the not-so-good ones out there.
In typical SFBA companies I meet mostly token Americans. So there's a huge foreign workforce with many years of local experience, a non-trivial proportion with already with citizenship. With the current trends in American politics I'd expect a large number of them to be open to going back home for only $100K or so. I would. Living 10-11 time zones from CA is a big deal though.
In every post about remote work, this argument always gets trotted out. The easiest retort is “if it were that advantageous for companies, it would have happened already.”
Outsourcing has been around for decades now and the overwhelming evidence is that it only gets you so far. “You get what you pay for.”
Sure there’s probably some offshore/nearshore firms that hire great developers but the lions share of them are low-skilled, associate-level developers that are usually paraded around as senior/architects. I say this as someone whose worked in a large consulting firm and had to work with numerous offshore/nearshore teams.
> There are people 2x as smart and who will work 2x as hard for 1/2 the salary among remaining 7 Billion people on this planet and if the bank can hire them instead of you, eventually they will.
Citation needed. My experience working with both proves the exact opposite. I think the Human Development Index of a person is more important in a knowledge economy than whether they're willing to work for 23 hours a day for 24 cents. And the first world countries absolutely dominate the world in this regard.
When I moved from the third to the first world, I was shocked by the high standard of personal "development" - for lack of a better term - of the average person, or even people lower down on the social ladder.
> There are people 2x as smart and who will work 2x as hard for 1/2 the salary among remaining 7 Billion people on this planet and if the bank can hire them instead of you, eventually they will.
I've worked with remote developers from Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia in US companies, and talent in those areas can command SV-level compensation.
Truth is, if you can compete with domestic US talent, you can command US-level compensation, either through immigration or the "outsourcing" you're trying to spook people with.
If the work being done doesn't require talent that commands US-level compensation, then that work was already outsourced 20 to 30+ years ago.
Well, I worked for “megabank” back in the 00s and they tried to outsource to India. It failed miserably, and cost more than it saved. Time zones didn’t work. Language problems. Lack of communication.
There’s a reason London and New York work well together. Time zones and language. And a relatively short plane hop.
My "anecdote" isn't "pretty meaningless". The bank I worked for didn't spend hundreds of millions of pounds on a whim. They spent the money with the aim of saving more money by outsourcing technology work to India.
It failed, and it failed miserably, and my former employer learnt a very expensive lesson. My colleagues in other investment banks reported similar stories in the 00s. That's far more than one data point.
Investment banks are not like other companies. They particularly enjoy writing their own code and systems, so when they tried to outsource and discovered that they weren't correct, or on time, they brought it all back in house.
> you just need to look at the revenue of Indian outsourcing companies, it keeps going up.
That's "pretty meaningless" without any data backing it - what's driving that revenue? Does Wipro, for example, publish its revenue figures for its IT outsourcing arm, and break that down further with key indicators? I can say with some confidence, that Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup, won't be the "drivers" of that revenue, and that's what the original article in this thread was talking about.
You are just adding more anecdotes which I already told you is meaningless.
> That's "pretty meaningless" without any data backing it - what's driving that revenue?
All the big IT Outsourcing companies are listed on the Indian stock exchanges, you can go to their sites and read the annual reports to see what is driving that revenue. Majority of their revenue comes from the US. Also check the share price of those companies for the last 20 years, where your bank failed, other succeeded in outsourcing their operations.
Its not my analysis, those are the facts, their revenue keeps going up, their profits keep going up, their share price keeps going up, their clients keep going up. Now you do the math.
That has nothing to do with quality of work. Ok their financials are going up. Maybe they’re charging more, maybe they’ve reorg’d, maybe they laid off a ton of people, maybe they made good investments and sold. I’m not taking “they’re making more money” to mean anything other than the sole fact that a number on the balance sheet went up.
You dont have to speculate with maybe's. You need to look at the facts
All the big IT outsourcing companies are publicly listed, you can go to their website and check their annual reports to see how their revenue is going up for. You can see the number of employees keeps going up, the number of clients keeps going up. All these figures are available for 20 years now.
> There are people 2x as smart and who will work 2x as hard for 1/2 the salary among remaining 7 Billion people on this planet and if the bank can hire them instead of you, eventually they will.
I think the bank can and does hire them already. In big tech companies, a lot of employees come from developing countries and they're paid the same market rate as anyone else (and companies pay for their relocation).
Moving staff from China or Poland to the US is a non-trivial exercise with all sorts of limitations, and FYI, that definitely lowers the local market rate.
The 'True Shift To Remote' is a big game changer because institutionally, people at the office had a kind of existential value proposition: "We are Here!" - but that prop is distinctly diminished if they don't think they have to be.
You responded to something the author did not write using a quote taken entirely out of context. While the text of your message is fair and probably true (although outsourcing comes with chunky quality issues that frankly have not been solved yet), it is not at all topical.
I disagree that it was out of context either of the comment, or in the issue at large.
It doesn't matter that in this comment, the particular context was ostensibly 'move to the city to work in the office then get paid more'.
It's irrelevant - excessive demands in whatever form will be acquiesced by hiring better talent, elsewhere.
American workers making any kinds of special demands are going to get outsourced.
The tone of the article (and others is): "American Workers Leverage Over Big Corps" just like in this article: "Wall Street Grudgingly etc.". We saw the same with Apple yesterday.
In reality, the articles should be: "American Corps. looking overseas to diversity talent". Because that's what's about to happen. Anyone who thinks that these companies have any loyalty to their local nations, founding staff or culture, (and this applies broadly to the modern world) is mistaken.
It is possible to find companies that indeed do have loyalty. Personally, I have long ago resolved not to work for companies that outsource (offshore, same thing) engineering. It seems there may be a resurgence here in America of people willing to put their money where their mouth is: Buy local, hire local, keep the money here.
> I disagree that it was out of context [...] of the comment
It is not about your opinion, you are quite simply not responding to the posted comment. Because charitable reading of your comment required it, I have read the original comment that you claim to speak of again.
That comment says:
- Remote work can be done for a lower salary, because you can live anywhere
- If you demand that I come to the office, you should pay for the difference
You have responded to these points by saying that if you want more money, cheaper workers can be found "elsewhere" (i.e. abroad, so remote). This is not topical, because you address a claim that was never made.
I have some sorry news for Americans thinking this way on this one: you just outsourced yourselves.
There are people 2x as smart and who will work 2x as hard for 1/2 the salary among remaining 7 Billion people on this planet and if the bank can hire them instead of you, eventually they will.
In some aspects, relationships do matter, so those have face-to-face types of interactions will be obviously harder to displace.
The US saw a giant outsourcing of manufacturing, and now that US Megacorps are globalized and not locally owned, they don't have any reason to care about local talent, the same will start to happen in services.
I do however think that communicating matters a lot, and people will just find themselves back at the office.
I don't think people realize how quickly this can happen.
Now that we can work 'remote' - everyone is thinking about all the projects they can do for x% the cost, they're looking to trim the budget, and there's a pile of solid applications from Canada, Taiwan, Poland, Brazil, Spain on their desks.