Comment by addicted
2 days ago
This was unsurprising when American employees decided to use the significant power they gained over the pandemic to insist on WFH.
Whether working collaboratively in an office was beneficial or not, employers certainly believed it to be so. They believed it so much that employers, pre pandemic, were willing to hire employees a single time zone away from SF, and then pay them a significant one time amount along with a much higher annual salary to relocate them to SF.
This belief in higher productivity when teams were geographically collocated was the entire basis for which employers were willing to pay American employees several multiples of what they would pay employees abroad.
But the same employees who were benefiting from this decided they didn’t want to keep that advantage anymore.
And now since WFH has become the norm in the US, employers are realizing there’s no need to pay to keep employees in the U.S. and outsourcing to significantly cheaper locations instead.
That doesn't explain why many execs were keen on RTO. If it was reducing costs, you would thing they would've wanted to draw out WFH for as long as possible. But there a clear rush to end WFH as soon as possible and implement unilateral mandates to get everyone back to office.
The explanation is that they wanted the (perceived) productivity back. Alternatively, they may have wanted to push overall compensation down (e.g. having some employees quit and only luring back the ones they actually like). Of course, it varies a lot from market to market, depending on how hard it is to reduce headcount in the first place (e.g., in Germany, it is much harder than in the US).
I'm the end the point is : if it can be done anywhere it will be done anywhere else
It’s really hard to see what a team/people on it is actually doing if people are remote.
It’s also much harder in general to communicate less formally and form deep relationships.
For execs and managers, this can be a big problem.
If it isn’t possible to do it the ‘old way’, remote work can and does work (albeit in different ways and with different constraints). But if doing remote work, why not do it somewhere else?
> It’s really hard to see what a team/people on it is actually doing if people are remote.
If you're totally disconnected from the work, sure. But for someone actually paying, it shouldn't be that hard to see whether the list of priorities for this month is actually getting finished or not.
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> It’s really hard to see what a team/people on it is actually doing if people are remote.
Only if you are thinking like a McDonald’s shift manager. Measuring software developers by time-in-seat is tacitly acknowledging that your managers aren’t doing their jobs up to the C-suite.
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> And now since WFH has become the norm in the US, employers are realizing there’s no need to pay to keep employees in the U.S. and outsourcing to significantly cheaper locations instead.
“Whoa we can do this cheaper in another country???” is not a new phenomenon. Companies have been trying to do this for literally decades at this point. The reason so many jobs still exist in the US is because it doesn’t end up working that well. I’m not _that_ old and I was around at IBM for two separate rounds of “outsource-it-to-India-no-wait-bring-it-back” and IBM was and still is very keen to ship everything overseas.
I’m not saying it won’t eventually stick, but I think it’s important to dispel this notion that WFH made everyone have this sudden epiphany that US workers aren’t necessary anymore. It’s been going on for ages.
The work force abroad has caught up a lot though. Online learning has made it much easier to improve skills and their English has also improved. And since everyone has become more used to remote work, communication is also much better now. One reason a lot of outsourcing efforts in the early 90s failed was also because the Indian teams weren't properly kept in the loop.
I was doing remote work with indian offshore teams in 2020 and they were abysmal
5 years won't change that lol. tata is still going to suck, the difference is now there is TCS in LATAM. same for cap gemini, cognizant, hcl, etc.
I’m talking about the 2000s and 2010s though.
It goes in cycles, often depending on the business focus at the time.
Right now (and back then), primary focus was on cost. Got to juice those margins somehow, and it isn’t going to happen by opening new markets (probably!).
When outsourcing is less envogue, it’s usually because there is some big growth opportunity and they are trying to get things moving as fast as possible. That tends to require higher end (but more expensive!) staff working in closer communication with management/execs.
It’s the difference between trying to improve margins on an existing product, and trying to grow the top end of a new product.