>Remote also greatly enhances the talent pool available for employers. It reduces cost too.
Neither of these things are good for an employee.
A world where none of your coworkers have any shared background with you or where you can lose an interview at a local company to someone 700 miles away sounds like hell.
> lose an interview at a local company to someone 700 miles away sounds like hell
I'd feel pretty terrible about my ability if one of the best things about me was proximity to a building. I live in the midwest and I like it in the midwest, and I'm quite happy with a ~future~ present where I'm competing with people around the world for a job I want and not stuck to the one of the 10 or so places I could do my kind of work here.
You might be in the top 1%, but 99% of people aren't. Not everyone is able to compete globally against 3 billion other people. Most people are unexceptional and average. And that's okay. Those are the workers keep the world moving forward.
It is perfectly okay to just be the best person at something in your town or local area. Telling people "you should feel pretty terrible about your ability if you aren't one of the best people in the world" is telling 99.99% of the population they should feel forever worthless.
> Telling people "you should feel pretty terrible about your ability if you aren't one of the best people in the world" is telling 99.99% of the population they should feel forever worthless.
but he did not say this at all. not even literally.
you merely think he implied it, which is still a leap, since all this person described to you was how they personally internalize their work.
your disdain for competition makes it harder to read.
I appreciate this reply and most definitely do not think I’m in the 1% if anything, let alone the talent pool. I come from a town that wasn’t a tech center growing up (and still isn’t, though we have some logos now), and am largely self-taught. I just like playing with computers and am lucky to have made a job doing that, and am glad to live in a time where I can do something I love, somewhere I love, but for companies not necessarily here. My only point was that if my best qualification was proximity, I’d feel pretty unaccomplished, but the flip side of that is that I welcome the challenge to apply for jobs that are far more challenging than I’d otherwise have access to.
You're not competing against the best of the best for every single job. Only 1% of people are in the 1%, and they'll largely be employed in high-wage, high-visibility positions at high-budget employers. In an idealized global market you'd be competing against other people for jobs with desirability commensurate with your own ability.
It's true that if in an absolute sense you're in the bottom rung of the labor pool then a global market will be more likely to sort you into a job with low desirability. I sympathize; I'm from Cincinnati, and if my employer were in the Bay Area (and paying Bay Area wages) it would have been harder for me to get a job there. But I'm not that sympathetic, because a global market means someone with a better fit but no local options can find a job. It means that if the market for data scientists in Cincinnati dries up I still have a chance.
Celebrating mediocrity while being privileged enough to make lots of $$$ is the definition of toxic mindset.
IMO, if a person somewhere in the world is better qualified for the job than me - it's ok.
They worked hard to get where they are and their work should be compensated fairly.
My company has employees all around Europe, and in north America too. Funny enough, even without the shared background, we kinda draw from the same principles and have a common understanding on how to behave an operate.
A world where I have to work with what the local market offers sounds like russian roulette. I don't want to be constrained by where my parents decided to live.
> A world where none of your coworkers have any shared background with you
So you're against diversity? Differing backgrounds and points of view can only be a good thing. For coworkers, for the product, for the company. I know it's en vogue now, but it really is important.
> where you can lose an interview at a local company to someone 700 miles away
Hiring is not zero-sum. With the current and likely future dev market, there's enough jobs for everyone. Companies should consider applicants regardless of location of residence, and offer the same compensation as well.
I think diversity has been pushed on the workplace because it massively opens up the labor supply and allows companies to plummet wages. As a native worker of a country it is completely against your self-interest to advocate for such changes.
All of the pro-diversity platitudes like "diversity is a strength" are never justified with data, they're just said as truisms you're supposed to blindly believe and repeat.
Why does nobody ever talk about how homogeneity is a strength? The comradery you used to have in mining villages where all workers had a tightly shared heritage and all grew up together was probably the strongest workforce you could hope for. But workers with those kinds of strong bonds do scary things like forming unions and going on strike, we don't want any of that! And that's why Amazon tracks lack of workplace diversity as a metric for risk of union formation :)
> Why does nobody ever talk about how homogeneity is a strength? The comradery you used to have in mining villages
As I'm sure you're aware, software development is very different from physical labor. For one, it's a creative endeavor, where different points of view stemming from different backgrounds can only have a positive effect on the end product.
Think of it in terms of code reviews. Does the product benefit more from being reviewed by teammates from the same schools and employment backgrounds, or by ones with different life and professional experiences? I can't point to any studies to prove this, but from personal experience I'd argue it's the latter.
Besides, getting to know people from different backgrounds and cultures can only expand your own view points and make you a better developer and person.
Your point about companies pushing diversity to prevent unions sounds conspiratorial at best. Strong bonds can and do form regardless of culture.
>For one, it's a creative endeavor, where different points of view stemming from different backgrounds can only have a positive effect on the end product.
I'd say it's far more engineering than creative. You're writing code to meet the specifications of a client. I don't think the race of the person writing that code makes a difference.
>Does the product benefit more from being reviewed by teammates from the same schools and employment backgrounds, or by ones with different life and professional experiences
It benefits from being reviewed by people who have lots of experience writing different types of software. Which has nothing to do with ethnic diversity.
>Besides, getting to know people from different backgrounds and cultures can only expand your own view points and make you a better developer
Meaningless platitude, unless you can back this up with data
>Your point about companies pushing diversity to prevent unions sounds conspiratorial at best.
I stand corrected. Corporations gonna corporate /shrug
However I disagree with the conclusion:
> It appears it's nothing more than a union busting tactic to divide and conquer their own workforce so they'll be easier to control and accept lower wages.
Quite the sensationalist take. Again, I don't have data to back this up, but IME a diverse team produces better results and I'd rather work in one than not.
> Does the product benefit more from being reviewed by teammates from the same schools and employment backgrounds, or by ones with different life and professional experiences?
In practice "diversity" is more often people from the same schools and employment backgrounds, with just a bit more variation in sex or race or ethnicity.
> The comradery you used to have in mining villages where all workers had a tightly shared heritage and all grew up together was probably the strongest workforce you could hope for.
It was certainly good for the owners of the mines and other extractive businesses to have their workers feel some sense of loyalty to each other based on where they were born. Not so much for the workers themselves that had fewer opportunities for growth, nor their families as the mines closed and the towns died.
> But workers with those kinds of strong bonds do scary things like forming unions and going on strike, we don't want any of that!
There are plenty of unions made up of people from all sorts of backgrounds. Some of them span states (or are at least affiliated with organizations that span states). I don't know where you got this idea that there's a connection between birthplace and unionization.
Diversity initiatives in tech have a strong bottoms-up component from a subset of employees. "Self interest" isn't really the point.
One motivator is societal good and fairness to ensure that great opportunities are as equally available as possible, and that nobody avoids or leaves the industry due to their race or gender.
The other is making sure you have more demographic variation that can make a better product for more people. A classic example is avoiding gaffs in ML models based on skin color. All else equal, the more representative your employees are of your target user base, the more likely someone is to raise the right questions early. This is especially true for consumer tech where engineers are part of the process of deciding what gets built, but also true in cases like thinking about ML fairness.
>Differing backgrounds and points of view can only be a good thing.
I assure you, diversity that would actually impact production in some big way is not the diversity being hired for. Just look at how many psychological tests emphasize a variety of personalities, meanwhile hiring tries to find the same car with a different paint job.
This really isn't the same "diversity" as "integrating marginalized communities", though.
So yes, I am against the particular kind of diversity that prefers hiring a wealthy brahman living in India over the inner-city kid who needs a leg up.
I'm also opposed to the kind of "diversity" that puts a substantial portion of our domestic workforce out of a job.
Neither of these is what "diversity" used to mean; the term is being coopted by those who would benefit from lowering working wages.
It's double edges all the way around. "shared background" has certainly been the cause of a lot of harm. It's one of those things that people want, but which is bad, like "Everything be more efficient if everyone would stop wasting time on their own different ideas and just did what I want.". There are no single simple correct answers.
Shared background can be a good thing and can apply to good things, but it is also the basis of all discrimination, tribalism, prejudice, or even at it's most benign, inconsideration or ignorance.
The examples are the rule and it's instead hard to think of any exceptions.
Neither of these things are good for an employee.
A world where none of your coworkers have any shared background with you or where you can lose an interview at a local company to someone 700 miles away sounds like hell.