I've maintained that everyone advocating for permanent remote work should reverse and advocate for office return.
Why? I've been traveling around the world. There are a ton of very talented, hardworking, and eager workers making 1/10th of what remote workers here make. Sooner or later, companies are going to figure out that they can get same, similar, or even better output from hiring workers outside of the US.
Once companies figure it out, there's no going back.
I predict that remote workers will want to return to the office very soon because of this threat.
In my experience the talent we've received from overseas big consultancies has been rough and awful. In contrast with talent that hire exclusively in from the UK and EU has been pretty good.
I understand this is highly subjective but I have seen the same story with at least 6 consultancies, two of which tried to rectify by cycling the teams before our company took legal action. We ran into the same issues where there was a huge language barrier, a different way of working, unwillingness to learn or just complete lack of pride in work, causing lots of hand holding and wasted time.
When you engage with a team that know what they're doing it's night and day and a joy. I think too many companies just don't know what to look out for to understand they're getting a bad deal.
Yes, I've seen those same problems. It's not so much that good engineers don't exist overseas, it's that the communication and legal barriers facilitate fraud and the channels get flooded with hustlers.
I've only seen one outsourcing shop that could make things work, and it was a small owner-operated operation where the guy who ran it kept flying back and forth and took a personal role in hiring, management, and communication. It was impressive to see but wouldn't scale.
It's going to be interesting to see if companies that facilitate US companies direct hiring of foreigners will change this or if the problems will persist.
If anything I would think it would be harder to outsource manufacturing than software engineering, more communication and real world problems to sort out in addition to legal, cultural and communication issues.
I've seen a lot of offshored work over the years and it is always a disaster. It comes down to a combination of language barrier, quality of hiring and general ability to communicate (i.e. can you bring your point across even if the other party speaks the same language).
Folks have been saying "once companies figure it out" for a really long time (at least 30 years), and it hasn't materialised because it doesn't work.
Managing remote work (let alone contractors) is far more difficult than in-person and geographic / time zone / cultural / legal differences only amplify this, but yes, I think far too many people who fight for remote work don't realize that they are fighting for their own commoditization, and that it will kill their career if they actually get what they think they want.
You are taking a narrow view of the possible problems, which include adversarial strategies from outsourcing firms. It's not a matter of can things go correctly -- of course they can -- it's a matter of can unscrupulous actors exploit the chaos to bilk their clients. Historically that has been the failure mode, and the fracture points I listed were their tools of trade.
"Just use a platform / reputation firm / ..."
Yeah, we had those in the last wave of outsourcing, too. They were not able to tackle the "fraud-lite" problem for the simple reason that it was much more profitable to become part of the problem and ride the bubble until it collapsed.
> I think far too many people who fight for remote work don't realize that they are fighting for their own commoditization, and that it will kill their career if they actually get what they think they want.
A reasonable argument, but it doesn't always hold true. I've been remote since 2014. I work more, not less, because of it. And I bring a lot to the table when it comes to solutions. A mid-level dev would have a much higher risk of replacement.
Working with a remote third-party introduces a layer of legal contracts plus a few timezones and will slow whatever pace a company has now with local-ish people to much slower with lower quality and communication issues.
If you work in a cost-center type of organization and your management doesn't care about quality then offshoring is more likely to happen. If you work in a profit center (aka creating products people pay to use) then offshoring to a third party makes zero sense and if management takes this approach - time to leave.
A concerted approach to take is to hire directly in that offshore location, this eliminates the legal contracts, middle-layer profits to a third party and if done right would reduce communication issues (people from both shores should do extended visits to each other). Companies cutting costs won't do this.
I think what companies like Deel and Remote offer though is to hire individuals that are citizens of other countries as your employees, not contracting with third parties
I've maintained that everyone advocating for permanent remote work should reverse and advocate for office return.
Why? I've been traveling around the world. There are a ton of very talented, hardworking, and eager workers making 1/10th of what remote workers here make. Sooner or later, companies are going to figure out that they can get same, similar, or even better output from hiring workers outside of the US.
Once companies figure it out, there's no going back.
I predict that remote workers will want to return to the office very soon because of this threat.