RTO is there to remind you that despite claims of talent shortages and after taking into account the fact that a substantial portion of the workforce is okay with returning to the office, for many companies the supply of talent is greater than the demand for talent.
Hilarious that companies were complaining about tech shortages while simultaneously having interview processes consisting of multiple rounds of absurd competitive programming questions that require months of preparation for and have nothing to do with the job. There was never a talent shortage, that's just a narrative companies pushed to increase labor supply, lobby for more visas, and justify outsourcing
A lot of this is because of WFM, 5 years ago when you applied for a job you had to compete with all the bozos within 50 miles looking for a job but now you have to compete with all the bozos in the country looking for a job. five years ago they'd get 20 CVs for a job and now they are getting 1000. Even if they job market is tighter companies don't notice because they are getting 50X the number of resumes for a job. Further they can hire some guy in South Dakota who will happily work for half of what some guy in Manhattan will work for. In short WFH has fucked things up, it's a lot like how online dating hasn't helped people find love people are lonelier than ever even though they have a much larger selection. We work better in person and in smaller groups.
This isn't a new thing that just started in the last few years. The tech job interview process five years already had all of the bad things that it does today. Cracking the Coding Interview was published in 2008.
I find it ridiculous that at a time when US workers had all the power after decades of no
power at all (the last couple of years), they prioritized WFH benefits which only serve to weaken any individual worker’s standing in the market.
If there is no advantage to your job being done while being physically collocated within the US, there is no advantage to your job being done by someone in the US.
What 90% of the people commenting here don’t seem to realize is that their argument for WFH implicitly states that the fact that they were being paid more than their counterparts in cheaper locales means they were being overpaid. And yeah, some of the LCOL folks are going Amen to that, except even the lowest cost of living employees is a few times more expensive than counterparts in Asia, South America, Eastern Europe and even Western Europe.
Jobs are more likely to move from LCOL and HCOL US locations to cheaper places abroad than from HCOL to LCOL US locations because the HCOL/LCOL US cost multiple is somewhere at 1.25 to 1.5 at most, whereas the US LCOL/place abroad cost multiple is closer to 2-4x.
"If there is no advantage to your job being done while being physically collocated within the US, there is no advantage to your job being done by someone in the US."
Time zone still makes a difference, there are very few jobs that can be completely or largely asynchronous.
Then, the assumptions are that talent is everywhere, which is true if we ignore the numbers but focus only on the existence of talent (i.e., 1 talented person is enough), and that the work culture is somewhat irrelevant, i.e., what matters is throwing warm bodies, cannon fodder if you will, at the problem.
Now, anyone who has dealt with outsourced in-house IT services to India or other cheaper countries in terms of wages has quickly recognized that companies have traded paying more and having problems solved for paying less and having the problems persist. I am speaking generally and without any trace of discrimination in my thinking, I am just observing.
If you allow me an analogy, for many decades African soccer teams have been on the verge of "exploding" on the international stage, perhaps winning the World Cup (think of the Nigerian team in 1994) because of their undeniable raw talent. But we are still here, 30 years later, hoping for that victory, with the best results achieved by a Moroccan team full of players raised professionally elsewhere.
Culture is important, and not easy to transmit or acquire, especially when physically elsewhere. If I had stayed in my home country and worked remotely for a U.S. company, I would have done a much poorer job at work, due to my lack of knowledge of U.S. work culture and "proper" ways of working.
Canada has most of the cultural and timezone compatibility and yet their wages are <40% of the SF wages. No wonder bulk of the new hiring in our team has been in Canada after doing two rounds of layoffs in the US.
Add to that, Canada has been inviting talented migrants in bulk (good for Canada and those migrants!) and that is a recipe for disaster for high tech wages in the US. Again, asking for remote work is just digging your own graveyard.
Also there’s a massive continent called South America in the same time zone. Further, there’s also large swathes of Central America.
But this claim that time zone matters isn’t even true in the way the GP thinks. If time zone does indeed matter, it strengthens the case to move the entire team wholesale to cheaper locales than keep anyone hired in the US.
This is all very theoretical in nature. In fact, I don't know of any U.S.-based company who successfully outsourced their whole operations to South America, India, or, as the comment above the one I am responding to proposed, Canada.
Time zone is one reason.
The other is about work culture, ways of culture, schools, the academic world, the media, the circle of friends that often overlaps with the circle of professional acquaintances, the expectations.
A big chunk of our engineering and product headcount has moved to Canada. Looking at our engineering org, Canada has disproportionate number of employees compared to the US.
> Culture is important, and not easy to transmit or acquire, especially when physically elsewhere. If I had stayed in my home country and worked remotely for a U.S. company, I would have done a much poorer job at work, due to my lack of knowledge of U.S. work culture and "proper" ways of working.
You’re literally making my argument for me. Like you say, culture is important and not easy to transmit online. Americans working remote will have no company culture whereas the Europeans and Asians (who have returned to office in much larger numbers) will actually build company and working culture and will start outperforming their U.S. counterparts. As a bonus, they won’t even cost as much.
Again, one does not need to argue that remote work is superior or inferior than in office work to see that pushing to eliminate in office work in the short period of time American workers had power in decades, was eliminating the only advantage they had that justified their higher earnings. Whether remote work is superior or not, pushing for it is a great example of turkeys voting for Christmas.
I’ve worked remotely for almost a decade and for the last 2 years, I worked at a fully remote company. The company had just as much “company culture” as the precious primarily in person companies I’ve worked at.
And from our survey results, our completely US based teams reported higher team cohesion (and demonstrated better performance) than teams with a mix of nationalities.
Unless a company is willing to completely relocate offshore, there is always going to be an advantage for US based developers. And as long as a company is targeting primarily US consumers, their is an advantage to being located here.
If you’re argument is that workplace culture distinguishes US workers and foreign workers, wouldn’t you be pushing for some in office presence?
Either:
a) workplace culture is hard to transmit online, in which case you’d need in-office for new workers
b) workplace culture can be transmitted online, in which case foreign workers can be integrated well into the company (even if this process takes decades)
c) the workplace culture is not transmitted just at work, or in the specific company one works for. It is a matter of expectations, the circle of friends overlapping with the circle of professional acquaintances, of media consumed, of etiquette.
Working remotely does not mean being in a cave since birth and communicate with a radio with your manager and co-workers.
There are some cultures, and I come from one of them, who are different, and let's limit ourselves to work culture informed by the culture of the country at large, from the U.S. work culture. For instance, Indian culture is very hierarchical, more title-oriented than the U.S. work culture, and largely people don't like--or straight-up refuse--to admit they don't know something.
Honestly all of the stuff you listed comes from work (except consumed media). It might not be from a specific workplace, but from a career at similar workplaces, but with the same idea more or less.
For example, expectations may come from work, but not from your work, but from the work of others not at similar workplaces (the "work culture" more in general).
One of the (mildly) "shocking" cultural moments I experienced when I first came to the U.S. more than a decade ago was that shops were mostly open at all times during the day and on Sundays (and some supermarkets 24/7, which was very new to me).
Did it inform me, rather brutally, about the way people in the United States view work? Yes. If I had had a conversation about the same work culture living all my life in Spain, would I have been informed in the same way? No.
I met some of my professional acquaintances in tech at the gym, not at work. It is much harder to get the same exposure in Mendoza, Argentina (first name that came to my mind, I am looking for wine).
Amen to that. I have written about this a few times before. US workers clamoring for WFH/remote are thinking only in the short-term. If jobs can be shipped to South Dakota, they can be shipped to Colombia or Mexico as well.
WFH either works or it doesn’t. If it works, it will happen. Outsourcing either works or it doesn’t. Short of regulation, if it works, it will happen.
Workers pushing for work from home isn’t going to change this. If in office is a competitive advantage, companies will pay more for in office employees. If it’s not a competitive advantage, no amount of workers not pushing for WFH will cause companies to pay for offices.
Who is forcing them to offer universal WFH? Are you saying people pushing for WFH are going to be able to force WFH on every employee and every company?
No one is pushing for universal work from home, so there’s nothing to succeed at. I’ve never heard anyone say that they think no one should be allowed to work from an office.
You can logically continue that argument all the way to its conclusion. If Jobs can be shipped to Mexico, why not the entire corporation? If the only thing that matters is cost, clearly LCOL countries should be leading the world in tech innovation. But they don’t.
Because a corporation needs officers and senior management. Those people are typically in the owner class who benefit from cheap labor. Owner class still prefers to live in rich urban metros.
I haven’t noticed hiring has gotten any worse since 2020. If anything I think 2020 was the peak of multiple rounds of ridiculous competitive programming challenges. The last few interviews I’ve had didn’t have any leet code style problems.
Unionization is more likely to occur when the variance of workers' wages (in the technology sector, this is total compensation) is low. In tech, the variance of workers' wages is high.
Only need a simple majority. By definition, the majority isn't high earning in a cohort. Agree we're just arguing over likelihood, won't know how serious people are until they're tired of being ground down by people like Jassy.
> By definition, the majority isn't high earning in a cohort
I don't think that's true here. A cohort doesn't have to have a particular distribution, and even if it does in this case, that doesn't mean the cohort isn't high earning relative to the rest of the population.
Most workers in the tech sector are young, and young people earning below-median salaries are salivating at the idea of moving, at some point in the near future, due to their skills, market conditions, luck or wishful thinking, into the above-median bracket.
Add to that the fact that the job market for tech workers is extremely fluid, and I don't think unionization is going to happen anytime soon.
