
The unintended consequences of working from home - Ice_cream_suit
https://www.smh.com.au/business/workplace/the-unintended-consequences-of-working-from-home-20200519-p54ugp.html
======
CoolGuySteve
I've spent a lot of time working with people in London and Asia. I'm based in
New York.

I can't speak to other professions, but for programming it's extremely
difficult to work with people on the other side of the Earth. The 10-12 hour
time difference makes any small issue or missing files/data that should take
20 minutes instead take a day to get resolved.

Working with people in Europe isn't as bad, you can sync up all morning. But
the same applies to any issue that happens in the New York afternoon.

It pretty much guarantees your software will become architected around time
zones due to Conway's Law:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law)

~~~
biztos
I normally work in the middle of four time zones my team is spread amongst.

Yes, it can be a pain. Sometimes you have a 6am meeting and sometimes an 11pm
meeting and sometimes both in the same day. You have to have your shit
together enough to deal with day-long lag for non-urgent stuff, and you have
to care enough to jump on urgent stuff at all hours.

Even if you might rather have a chummy relationship with your colleagues, you
have to be a bit more distanced and professional in order to accommodate the
time difference.

But if you have a good team, you also should ask yourself: is the convenience
of collocation worth losing the team?

At the risk of veering OT: there’s a pretty good business in arbitrage around
these cultural blockers. For instance there are thousands of people working
for Indian companies in Central-Eastern Europe because (mostly) German
companies are a lot more comfortable if they can meet the dev manager on any
given day and fly home for supper.

~~~
kelnos
> _Sometimes you have a 6am meeting and sometimes an 11pm meeting and
> sometimes both in the same day._

I think we need to find a better way to deal with timezone-distributed teams.
I personally would never find a 6am or 11pm meeting to be acceptable. If you
require me anywhere from 9am to 5pm in my local time I'll be there; anything
outside that must be strictly optional. And I mean actually optional, not
"optional but we'll see you as not a team player if you don't show up".

~~~
biztos
Ok, that’s fine, and there are lots of places you can work if you’re good.

I’m not trying to virtue-signal about schedule flexibility, but if you have
part of your team in SF and part in Bangalore somebody will have to work weird
hours sometimes.

I fundamentally don’t accept that it should always be the non-western side,
and if you have a good team you will find a way to do this respectfully,
without destroying anyone’s private life.

Also, FWIW, during the 2/3 of my career I worked on site, a 9am to 5pm
requirement would have been an absolute nonstarter for me. Biorhythms are
diverse.

------
smt88
_Can_ be outsourced. Not _will_ or _should_ be outsourced.

If outsourcing were only an issue of money, then every all-remote company
would exclusively hire in places like the Phillippines, where there seem to be
an abundance of extremely low-cost, English-proficient workers.

Money isn't the only issue, of course. Language skills, culture, educational
background, security clearance, tax laws, infosec, time zones, law
enforcement, etc. are all also factors.

~~~
mdorazio
Thank you. Anyone who has worked extensively with offshore teams knows that
there are always trade-offs involved. You can save money, but often at the
cost of lower quality, lower maintainability, increased lag times due to time
differences and miscommunications, added PM overhead, etc. Sometimes it makes
sense, sometimes it doesn't.

~~~
mech422
it actually seems like the off-shoring craze has died down a bit in the U.S. I
think companies realized its not as easy to get right as they thought. I've
been working continuously with a team 10 hours away for the past 2-3 years,
and it takes some accommodation on both sides....

~~~
blaser-waffle
That has generally been my experience as well -- the concrete benefits in
terms of lowered OpEx (aka paying less for a worker) is offset by the
intangible inefficiencies. It's a lot harder and a lot more chaotic than
people realize.

Plus automation is eating away at the lower level stuff.

------
null_object
I think if working-from-home becomes the new normal, a lot of companies will
try off-shoring or outsourcing as a way to cut costs, but I'm not sure the
results will match expectations.

I've worked at two previous companies that attempted to offshore coding
production, and both times it led to unexpected delays, surprising bugs, badly
written code, misunderstandings and cycling through multiple remote
programmers.

I certainly don't think I'm a specially talented programmer or that coders in
other countries are inferior to my skills (demonstrably untrue), it was just a
natural consequence of geographic distance, timezone differences, personal
commitment and cultural misunderstanding.

At both companies the experiment ended after just one project. If this is the
'normal' future then the infrastructure needed to really make offshoring work
might be put in place, but if past experience is anything to go by, then
simple geographic nearness - at least sharing timezone and the realistic
ability to turn up in person at least occassionally, together with the
personal commitment felt by 'real' employees - means I'm not sure whether
distributed workforces are gonna be as productive as some people may hope.

On the other hand, I think truly productive individuals may gain from the
situation: if you're a fast and effective 'production unit', then you're going
to be a valuable asset wherever you are, and your value will be set
accordingly. We'll see which of the two competing economic forces wins out.

~~~
jobigoud
I think it's not an issue with off shoring per se but with hiring. For some
reason when off-shoring companies use a different hiring process. As if they
were doing this to cut costs so they already start with a lower expectation
and no longer look for the perfect match.

The off shore remote devs that will make it work exist but you have to look
for them with a functional remote hiring mechanism.

------
ageek123
Am I the only one who goes crazy when they see someone write "outsourced" when
they mean "offshored"? These are different concepts.

~~~
mehrdadn
I'd become numb to the distinction at this point, but yes, now that you
reminded me it's bothering me too. Similar story with "disclaimer" and
"disclosure", "third world" and "developing world", etc.

------
imheretolearn
Speaking only for myself, most of my friends (from after university) are
people I have worked with. And these are the people I usually get a coffee
with, brainstorm ideas on whiteboards, go out for drinks or talk tech with
them. WFH permanently would definitely impact this. Even though I might get
along great with another dev from 100+ miles away, I cannot possibly do most
of the things I mentioned above with them.

Edit: Friends also include people working in other teams like project
managers, marketing, HR, support teams etc.

~~~
LockAndLol
Definitely not with that attitude. I've seen people organize virtual parties
with video conferencing software, have personally played games with my team
members while having drinks, had brain storming sessions with digital
whiteboards or a shared screen, and talked tech with friends for hours in one-
on-ones.

If you go in with the mentality of "this won't work", well mate, then it
won't.

~~~
imheretolearn
He said it better than I could:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jtk6DtkJhrA&t=4m23s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jtk6DtkJhrA&t=4m23s)

------
galaxyLogic
There are difficulties in communicating over the phone and video.

I don't know if others agree but during the Pandemic I've felt that the
quality of TV news programming has gone down considerably because of the
people interviewed or the reporters are behind a zoom etc. connections of
questionable quality. It is often hard to understand what they say and it is
not so pleasant trying to listen to them over the lo-fi connection.

So I think that until the tech of virtual meetings improves considerably
there's an extra cost for not being able to communicate in person.

~~~
bennyelv
Even on a fairly high quality connection, you still lose a significant
proportion of the non-verbal communication on a video call. The fidelity just
isn't the same when you're looking at the slightly laggy image of a person on
a small screen vs being able to see them in real life.

It presents real challenges working with people that you don't already know in
person.

------
cachestash
Come gather 'round people, wherever you roam

And admit that the waters around you have grown

And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone

If your time to you is worth saving

Then you better start swimmin' or you’ll sink like a stone

For the times they are a-changin'

~~~
galaxyLogic
Finally

------
biztos
A job that is done alone at a desk _can_ be outsourced.

Given the massive incentives for outsourcing and offshoring in the last couple
of decades, I think the fact that most of the HN audience has pretty good jobs
suggests that much of the tech world is more nuanced than that.

------
arkis22
The easiest part of my job is writing code. the hardest part is understanding
it. Distance doesn't help.

~~~
hewrin
but does it hurt?

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
Yes. It's much harder to perform complex communication across cultural,
language, and timezone gaps.

~~~
globular-toast
I've worked with non-native English speakers my entire career. Time zones just
aren't as big of a problem as you think. You have to learn asynchronous
communication. That means writing which, by the way, is by far the best way to
perform complex communication.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
I don't really understand the response. I'm not talking from a position of
ignorance here; time zones are exactly as big of a problem as I think, because
what I think has been informed by my experience working across time zones.
There are certainly mitigation strategies, which improve the situation far
beyond the naive solution of "let's pretend they're locals who just never come
to the office". But no mitigation will make communication with someone you've
never met in Shanghai as easy as it is with your buddy in the desk across the
hallway.

~~~
globular-toast
I've worked across time zones too. Your problem is that you try to fight their
existence and want it to be like "your buddy across the hallway". But it's
not. If you accept that then you can find effective ways to communicate with
them.

------
WheelsAtLarge
People are focusing on the good side of working from home but the fact is that
a job from home can be done anywhere in the world. Why would a company limit
it self to the U.S? Work from home jobs are going to go to the people that are
can do the work and are willing to work for the least compensation.

~~~
cachestash
> Why would a company limit it self to the U.S

So this is essentially protectionism. I mean if engineers outside the US are
just as talented and productive, why should a company only use US engineers,
especially if their marketplace is global.

~~~
runawaybottle
They should. The concern US developers have is that devaluation doesn’t always
occur in sanitary ways.

Let’s say you have the same talent elsewhere, it’s likely a company will pay
_considerably_ less, and may also take advantage of other factors due to that
person’s desperation - overwork, given less input/influence, less career
growth/trajectory, more contract based, less full-time, less or no benefits,
less laws, etc.

So the quality of life for the US developer will not only come down in terms
of pay, but also for all those other reasons. The worst part about it is that
the off shore workers won’t regain those improvements for awhile (as in, until
their standards go up over time - higher pay, etc).

It’s a regression on more fronts than compensation, with the enemy not
necessarily being developers (where ever they are), but more so the ruthless
market mechanisms.

------
foogazi
It’s already happening

Call centers, office assistants are both getting outsourced to other countries
or to AI

> If your job can be done from anywhere, that doesn’t necessarily mean you get
> to keep your job with the city salary and have a sea change.

It also means a “you” will get a chance at a remote job that you didn’t have
access in your region

------
dang
The submitted title ("A job that can be done from home, is a job that can be
outsourced") broke the site guidelines by editorializing. Accounts that do
that eventually lose submission privileges, so please read
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
and please don't do that.

------
analog31
If the newspapers are to be believed, my job has been in danger of offshoring
to countries overflowing with "engineering" talent for 20+ years. This is
nothing new.

~~~
mech422
^^^ - too true

------
runawaybottle
For a tech oriented site, I feel like some old hats need to drop some
knowledge on the first age of outsourcing. How did it go down, what were the
results?

~~~
goatinaboat
_How did it go down, what were the results?_

The fundamental problem is a misalignment of incentives. Noone has yet figured
this out and there is no technological solution to it - it may actually be
impossible and it ALWAYS bites the company that outsources on the arse
eventually.

If your "trusted solutions provider" bills by the hour... they will seek to
maximise billable hours. If they charge per ticket, they will drown you in
paperwork for the most trivial changes. Anything that your in-house staff used
to do that isn't explicitly stated in the contract, they either won't do or
will charge a punitive rate for. If your needs change faster than the length
of the contract, well you are stuck on the old contract. If you need some code
written the spec you will need to write will be so detailed that it might as
well be the code.

And after a few years you will have lost the capability to take the work back
in-house and they will hold you to ransom, because they can, and because that
was the plan all along...

But the short-term incentives to do it are strong, as a manager in a large
corporation or a government department, you can sign that outsourcing deal and
it will look good enough in the first year to win you your next promotion, or
a guaranteed sinecure in the outsourcing company when you retire, by the time
the truth comes out you will be long gone .

------
goatinaboat
The particular vulnerability of programming jobs to outsourcing and offshoring
has been well known for a long time. And yet we feign surprise that people
would rather do medicine or law or other jobs that can’t be.

~~~
shuckles
Lawyers can practice remotely. Outside counsel is probably more common than
(outside) contract engineering.

~~~
goatinaboat
True but it is not easy to pass the relevant bar remotely, so there is that
moat. Same with practicing medicine.

~~~
shuckles
The bar exam is probably easier to sit remotely than software development.

------
echlebek
I have to say, the gently threatening tone of this article really rubs me the
wrong way. And it coincides with "stay in town or take a pay cut" rhetoric
that was on my feed earlier today, from Facebook.

(Despite this development, the article doesn't mention it... maybe it will be
updated at some point.)

I guess, after reflecting, what I don't like about it is that it tells us to
be afraid. Be afraid about a way of working that might work really well for
some, or even a lot, of people.

Here's a fun quote from the article:

> But the big challenge is how to safely move thousands of people to and from
> the suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne and their offices in George or Collins
> streets.

They're saying this in the context of a population living under pandemic
protocols, but it's true all of the other time anyways. It takes a massive
amount of engineering and energy to move masses of people from one place to
another. Doing it needlessly is insane.

I suspect that what it comes down to is control, or apparent control, of a
workforce. Especially in large organizations. We're going to see who is
comfortable with giving up control and who isn't, and that's going to be
interesting.

~~~
runawaybottle
It also boils down what should be an accommodation for worksite preference to
a sudden demotion to ‘you are no longer worth it on a global scale and that
changes everything’.

Companies are what they are, and they will optimize for this. To remain
optimistic, we have to continue believing in the startup space to continuously
innovate software standards, where users are unwilling to accept substandard
software experiences. That will keep this field moving forward versus a wage
race to the bottom.

Entrenched corporate companies would love tech to stagnate, that way they
won’t ever have to innovate and can cost optimize developers down to the bone.

------
consp
back in the early 00's when I was in university I did some research
assignments concerning the outsourcing and offshoring of it jobs in small and
medium sized businesses. The main gist of it is that most ended up switching
back to local or hiring back part of the staff. The main problems I was told
were:

Cultural (mostly with eastern Europe) which introduces additional overhead due
to cultural things not being equal especially for custom software for things
like school districts as an example. You have to specify more which you
assumed was common knowledge. Also things like meeting hours are somewhat more
flexible in other places than in N/W Europe.

Timezones: many things have been said about it but it didn't work for most
companies combining Europe with (South)-East Asia. Ukraine and Russia was not
a problem.

Management capability: a managerial job locally is not the same remotely and
most could not adapt or required more people offsetting the cost savings. This
tended to count more for smaller businesses.

Emotional: lack of affinity with the product, remote workers are counting just
hours spend and thus the TCO was ignoring the hours local people spend in
their own time working on the product. This is not a given for all but was one
of the reasons companies switched back.

These are just some examples. Most companies, especially the smaller ones,
switched back to local hiring. Some made it work but not at the expected
savings. The most successfull were the bigger businesses and my guess would be
they had/took a longer time to prepare and hired the correct people for the
job instead of relying on already hired employees which is not something you
can always do in smaller businesses due to continuity.

I really wonder what is going to be the effect this time as everybody is
forced at least to train all the soft skills like remote communication and
scheduling.

------
lifeisstillgood
You know people keep talking about how to "recreate Silicon Valley at location
X" \- here is an idea for making your small country / tourist hotspot way less
reliant on tourism

\- implement world beating virus testing and tracking \- invest so heavily in
child care and education it makes your head swim \- build out offices for rent
and look at your building codes

Now start saying you are a remote work friendly area.

My wife and I choose to sit in London's metro area for one main reason - kids
schools. A second one is the health system. Nothing to do with commute times
(god no) or access to job choices.

Want to replace tourism as an industry - focus on office based remote workers.

------
gabagoo
If someone can do your job better than you, they should have your job.

~~~
elygre
The law of comparative advantage disagrees.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage)

------
manifoldgeo
I know this doesn’t contribute anything meaningful to the conversation at
hand, but that comma in the title is super unnecessary.

Edit: my work here is done.

~~~
hazeii
In case this comment is puzzling anyone, the title was changed by a mod (dang,
[0])

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23269061](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23269061)

------
jshaqaw
I find a difference (dare I say flaw) with Zoom type communication for
unstructured team conversations is that without physical cues and without the
ability to break into quick subconversations, chats among say 9 people are
more likely to be dominated by a handful of leaders/big talkers than in real
life.

~~~
baumandm
In my opinion this is a benefit, subconversations during a meeting are
distracting. If it doesn't need to be discussed by the entire group, that
conversation should happen after the meeting.

Zoom meetings where everyone is on a separate camera/mic make that basically
impossible, which keeps the meeting more focused.

------
ajuc
Yes. And that's a good thing. It makes the world a little less unequal.

~~~
Barrin92
Yeah I find the dismissive attitude towards outsourcing, in particular in tech
hilarious. Disruption is not so fun if you're the person being disrupted.

Bringing down employment borders would be one of the most transformative
things we could do to raise global standards of living. Everyone should go and
read Bryan Caplan's recent book on open borders.

~~~
toohotatopic
It's not only the hopefully temporal inconvenience of being replaced. There is
a finite amount of resources. If more people have the means to access them,
less is available for those who currently consume them.

Having 9 billion people sharing the earth will lead to huge improvements in
replaceable resources. E.g. movies will be better, appliances will be better,
etc. However, if you want to see the Mona Lisa, it's most likely that you will
never get close.

------
oxfordmale
Facebook have already indicated they will cut pay for their remote work force,
as their cost of living goes down. It seems a cynical ploy to cut costs more
than a drive to home working.

~~~
joelbluminator
Well that's capitalism right?

~~~
cmdshiftf4
>Well that's capitalism right?

It is indeed. It's quite a risky hand to play at a time where

\- cynicism about the tech industry has never been higher

\- there's a magnifying glass on the inequality wrought by the hands of
hardheaded capitalism in the West

\- globalism is being rejected

\- million of jobs have been lost

\- everything is being propped up with fiscal stimulus, in the coming months
the true cost of the financial damage on the economy will come to fruition

But if Tobias Lutke, Zuckerberg, etc. want to be the face of moving jobs out
of the US and Canada in these times then by all means they can go ahead.
Hopefully, if there's consequences to bear then it'll be on their heads too,
and not the staff they've decided to drag along for the ride.

~~~
joelbluminator
Facebook already has R&D centers around the world, you're talking as if this
hasn't already happened.

\- cynicism about the tech industry has never been higher

Exactly. That's why I don't think the average American is going to care about
250K a year jobs in Silicon Valley moving somewhere else. I don't see a lot of
empathy to the millionaire class in the U.S

~~~
cmdshiftf4
>Facebook already has R&D centers around the world, you're talking as if this
hasn't already happened.

Developed at a time where they could feasibly say there just wasn't the volume
of talent in the US to support their ambitions. With all the startups going
bust, big companies laying people off, etc. the same argument won't be
feasible. In my eyes at least.

>Exactly. That's why I don't think the average American is going to care about
250K a year jobs in Silicon Valley moving somewhere else. I don't see a lot of
empathy to the millionaire class in the U.S

That's one way of looking at it. Another is that FB and others moving the work
away will directly impact the large swathes of people who work for these
companies not in tech roles, and also decimate the local economy around their
offices by dropping demand for local goods, services and by extension the jobs
that exist to provide and fulfill the same.

All it takes is a couple of Democratic figureheads to get on TV and say that
Zuckerberg et al's actions will dis-proportionally throttle the lives of
minorities and the socially disadvantaged, which is true, and presto, you
further the ire toward them at a time when they can least afford it.

~~~
joelbluminator
They don't even have to fire anyone. They can just freeze hiring and hire more
outside SV (which seems to be what they're doing). In 10 years 90% of their
developers would work outside SV.

------
deeblering4
s/from home,// \- ftfy

Any job or task can be outsourced, but there are tradeoffs involved. It’s
nothing new.

------
cmdshiftf4
I'm a strong advocate for remote, and retain huge admiration for the fully-
remote companies that existed and drove thought leadership in the area prior
to this mass experiment we now find ourselves in, but the speed at which
things appear to be moving draw an uneasy cynicism in me at this point.

I'm not worried about jobs being outsourced across the world to places like
India. It's just not going to happen en masse. I'm sure some companies will
try it and learn the same lessons others have previously about engaging in
this behaviour.

It would also be political suicide, if not worse, if world leaders saw their
companies trying to move locally held jobs outside their borders and did not
drop the hammer on the companies involved. We're already in a time of mass
unemployment, in which:

\- many were already heralding the death of globalism

\- we've learned very dear lessons about outsourcing the supply chain

\- people are become so much more aware of the risen inequality that even
formerly hardline capitalist media are running headlines about the
billionaires profiting massively off the pandemic while millions register for
unemployment checks

So if the leaders want to prevent large scale social unrest, a gun which I
believe we're already looking down the barrel of, then they would be wise to
keep a very close eye on the movements carried out by companies within their
governance.

That said, I do foresee some significant, lasting consequences should there be
a mass shift to working from home or even a 4 days at home / 1 day in the
office situation:

\- Today's cities face a real threat of ending up as Detroit did.

\-- People will flee for better pastures immediately. Why live in a shoebox in
the sky when your money gets you far better elsewhere?

\-- Commercial real estate, and nearby residential real estate, has the
potential to collapse and rapidly so. If I were living in Toronto, working for
Shopify and owned a condo now I would likely be putting it on the market ASAP.

\-- Taxes, be it through indirect sales taxes or VAT, land transfer taxes,
property taxes, etc. would crater leaving a massive hole in public funding
through which no reasonable measure will fill.

\-- Public transit fare revenue will evaporate.

\-- Small businesses, restaurants, retail etc. will be wiped out with the lack
of casual foot traffic

When the above potentially happens, those who wanted to live in a city for the
benefits of living in a city would also likely flee.

\- A permanent, wide scale loss of jobs in retail, food & beverage, etc.

You could argue that those jobs will be replaced by new demands for new supply
in the new areas previous city dwellers move to, but if everyone is WFH I
would imagine they won't be frequenting such stores in anywhere near the
volume that was provided previously.

Given the above I believe it's pretty self-centered and reckless of large
companies to be making such announcements as Shopify, Facebook et al. have
made at a time where cities and countries are merely trying to ward off a
pandemic and are already facing an employment and budget crisis as a result of
it. They're essentially doing one of the most damaging, potentially impactful
things they could be by doing so right now.

These announcements, for me personally and despite my previous hopes of seeing
more remote opportunities become available over time, are only furthering my
cynicism toward this industry in general at this point.

------
buzzkillington
Sounds like the writer is scared that their bullshit job is on the line.

People have tried outsourcing programming forever. The last visible result was
planes falling out of the sky. These jobs are highly paid not because they are
done in the CBD, but because they require traits most people don't have.

------
cable2600
Or a job that can be automated by an AI program or robots.

~~~
function_seven
I don't see how that follows. If I can do _X_ in any location, that doesn't
mean _X_ is something that is a target for automation.

Offshoring and automation are partially orthogonal. Offshore the jobs that
can't be automated, automate the jobs that can't be done elsewhere, retain the
humans for high-skill or high-touch jobs that resist the first two threats.

------
clavalle
True. And if I move to another country I'll let my employer know.

Until then, good luck finding another me.

~~~
pasquinelli
The graveyard is filled with indispensable men.

~~~
zizee
I had never heard this quote before:

[https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/21/graveyards-
full/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/21/graveyards-full/)

