this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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Work Reform
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I had a friend who made a point of "needing" to go into the office an average of one day every week during the pandemic. His logic was that, if his job could be done entirely from the comfort of his living room in the suburbs, eventually the bosses would realize that it could also be done entirely from the comfort of someone else's living room in the Philippines or India.
It's a valid point.
Most practical examples of out-sourcing has however failed to show any worthwhile savings, while working from home has shown remarkable increases in productivity.
Other time zones and that makes communication difficult, so no quick IM with "by the end of the day" as that means something different over there. Different culture and way of doing things, so have to spend a lot more effort in communication being very clear. Even then they're far away where it's a lot easier to hide stuff until the hole is very deep. Travel expenses going up very quickly for a little training for a new guy. It can be so fun to work with teams in a different continent.
Besides that, you also get what you paid for.
Hiring someone in India means that the person is gonna give you as much dedication as their wage will allow. If they produced top of the line stuff they would want close to top of the line compensation.
Is it valid? If they could outsource they already would have. They already have with heavy industry.
Perhaps true with office work (so many tales of people saying they got shit code from overseas developers) and such, but I think the savings were very real for manufacturing, at least for a period of time. Happy to be corrected if that's wrong.
While the work could be outsourced to foreign countries there is still some hurdles to overcome. Language barriers, cultural barriers, time zones, labor laws, the paperwork involved with taxes, worker reliability, the threat of scams (see N. Korea), etc. But hey, let them find out for themselves.
Quality issues alone are a major disincentive to outsourcing.
It was never a barrier to cost savings
Ya but work quality from India and Philippines is pretty bad. They aren’t equal.
The bosses don't care when 3 of them cost the same as 1 of u
Some do. The ones that don’t are garbage companies not worth the time to begin with. It depends heavily on the type of work you do. If your company can squeak by with shit quality work, then you probably don’t belong there to begin with.
You’re assuming 3 of them produce 33% or more compared to me.
In my experience, the math doesn’t add up and you just get what you paid for
The recent AI LLM goldrush has shown that things don't need to be good to be used.
If it makes the line go up, no matter how short term it is, it gets done.
It has also showed when things aren’t good and are used, users notice slowly, but the trust is gone for a long while.
Yeah but they still haven't found a way to assign a monetary value to consumer trust, so it doesn't show up on the spreadsheets that are used to make decisuons. Only thing that matters is line go up, shareholders can always find a different company to squeeze later.
There is no value for trust, there is just a negative value for mistrust. Once it goes to 0, line go down.
That's why you don't fire the whole department, just implement a hiring freeze while your US staff train the Indian and Filipino staff.
My company has a large presence in India and exclusively hires there now as far as I know, but I will concede that the employees from there are very good in general. They're actual employees though, not contractors. And there are a lot of issues that arise from the language barrier, timezones, management etc
His fears happened to me. I worked a fully remote job for 5 years and ended up getting a horrible boss who worked me insane hours and liked to remind me that he could replace me with someone in India for 1/10th my salary.
I left and got a hybrid job that is 2 days in office. It pays 50% more, has a free gym, free EV charging, 30 days of vacation, and better health insurance. And I have a niche specialty so they won't be able to replace me easily. Feels much more secure.
Fuck your ex boss. What a horrible person!
This makes no sense. What could possibly be in the office that's needed AND can't be purchased in the Philippines? Is your friend working for a government agency building military or spy equipment which can't be shipped overseas?
The moment boss man can do this, is the moment it will do it... your friend does not understand what game he is playing. It is rather sad for adult people to think like this but here we are.