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Extreme Telecommuting
wiredog writes: "The Washington Post has an article about a company in Chantilly Virginia, most of whose programmers telecommute from Novosibirsk, Russia." Anyone out there in a similarly distant job?
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Sure. I show up to work faithfully every day but my mind is always a million miles away...
My body may be physically here, but my mind is a million miles away, so I guess that's a pretty far telecommute, ain't it?
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
Da, torsavich.
We have quite a large staff that telecommutes from India to locations in cincinnati and orlando.
:)
too bad I can't go into more detail
A thousand a month. how so little amount here (DC area) goes so short while halfway around the world it's considered being rich and wealthy.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Anyone out there in a similarly distant job?
No, but I'm willing!
www.glowingplate.com/gnujobs_resume.html
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I would think the astronauts count as 'extreme telecommuters'. After all, it is their job to go live up in space for months on end (ISS astronauts anyways).
i can't read the article, it appears to be slashed at the moment, but i assume this is working from a faraway location... where can you get them telecommuting jobs? i am in portugal at the moment.
cheers,
soup
soup, the dragon.
dna.h:include "std_disclaimer.h"
The only reason this company is doing it is because they can pay the Russians the equivalent of minimum wage. ($1000/month /160 hours = $6.25/hour if they only work 40 hours/week!). There's nothign admirable about this company.
Is it considered telecommuting?
Je t'aime Stéphanie
... as an almost lifetime resident of the D.C. (we're not going to mention that NYC thing anymore !-) ... I find the article encouraging, but also ironic.
... but it's probably an old Gov't. mentality that employees need to be within range of the manager's to be effective.
Considering how bad traffic is in this region of the country, and how high-tech many of the jobs are, many employers in the area still balk at the thought of telecommuting.
Perhaps the image of employees leaning back in their ergo seats in sweats and undies writing important code is just too much
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
It is interesting to see tele-commuting playing such a large role. I am not sure that I have ever seen a business rely on remote people to such a large degree. The only concern I would have -- what happens when the network goes down. This is not a big stretch... I suppose if they were using something CVS like where they develop locally and commit changes for all to poke and prod at.
I telecommute every so often, but I like coming into the office, without it, some of the interaction that defines a company can't happen. Group meetings must be a lot of fun.
I guess it would clear up the whole H1-B visa issue quite nicely. Ain't globalization and corporatism grand!
That reminds me of something from The Cuckoo's Egg, where a programmer in Russia was telecommuting to some computers run by a defense contractor in the same area of Virginia. :-)
--
I like to watch.
I appears that some crapflooder commute from the Christmas Islands!
Some of them are staffed by senior scientists
from Novosibirsk's Akademgorodok, an academic community established by Nikita Khrushchev in the
1960s to promote the growth of Soviet science.
Random Musings at Rum Smuggler
Because the people I work with are from other planets.
;)
Posting anonymously for a reason
... because their competitors would have them arrested.
It's the American Way.
--
E_NOSIG
Good idea, Borris staying in mother Russia. Hearing reports of Gulag anal penetration of comrade Dimitry, makes Borris happy to being home on computer.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I used to work in Chantilly - I think I can understand why their programmers would want to stay in Novosibirsk .. (gotta wonder about a small hick town in N. VA where the local high school theme song is "Chantilly Lace")
Does it count that we all instant message each other vs walking over/turning our head to talk to each other?
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
It seems to me that paying these guys only what they ask for is rather short-sighted.
If I were employing coders in Russia, I'd pay what they would cost me here. Why? Because for that price, I'd be able to get the Russian equivalents of Donald Knuth, or (insert your favorite god of coding's name here).
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
With all the various laws that govern international workers and multinational businesses, I don't see many companies taking this route.
- Seen from the point of view of the company, they probably are the cheapest personnel around. They don't have the bureaucracy to deal with. They don't have to equip cubicles or expand parking. It keeps them ready to compete (especially as a small company).
- Seen from the point of view of the coders, this is probably as close to heaven as they can get. They get paid hard dollars, withour having to apply for visas, green cards, etc. They can stay home in their social environment to support their relatives. They can deliver their highquality work to someone who appreciates.
+++ath0
Telemetry ops in Houston?
.sig
I wish my manager was in Siberia ......
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
I telecommute - I could be dealing with a customer in Belgium, in Denver, CO or to the company down the street from my house (in Buffalo, NY) - who cares as far as I'm concerned? I'm sitting in my office @ home and I could be dealing with a client on Pluto, doesn't change much for me..
;-)
See, that's the whole point, telecommuting - you can work from anywhere. Who approves these submissions and why haven't they been shot?
I went to a guest architecture lecture (my wife's in grad school) recently where the (US-bound) speaker had collaborated with an architect in Finland for a particular contest. He attributed much of their success in winning the project to that partnership; they could work almost twice as much within the tight deadline over the other competitors, trading the work off as daylight reached the respective timezones.
My company has recently been working on a project in France which has had some of our workers colocated there. While it can be frustrating if you need answers (and they've already gone home) to have to wait until they wake up again, but OTOH when timelines were tight trading the development work back and forth more than made up for the overhead of communication.
IIRC, No Magic Inc. offers (or at least used to offer) Lithuanian Java/C++ programmers for hire. [And not only do you get the alternate-timezone benefit, but they were cheap, too...something like $25/hour (this was 2 years ago...I dunno what their pricing is like now).
Now how long until someone sets up a Nike-style (or kathy-lee-style) sweatshop where hundreds of chinese kids sweat it out over Apple IIe's pumping out lines and lines of turbo pascal...
~ now you know
I'm always happy to hear about success stories like these.
Especially after having graduated from a top 10
engineering school with a Computer Science degree,
and not finding work after nearly 4 months of looking.
Oh well, in ten years there will be no software
development in the United States, and US Citizens
can just go back to painting houses and working
towards that electricians certification.
Mommy, is it too late to be a fireman?
You probably mean something like äà, òîâàðèù but you can't type it, am I mistaken?
I've worked all over the world since the late 80's and rarely leave my little cottage by the sea.. telnet's a wonderful thing...
"Straddling the sword of technology..."
Can somebody here explain to me what it means to "cornhole" someone?
My company's doing a similar thing. We have a handful of engineers here in California (mostly senior or specialized/highly-educated juniors), but the bulk of our staff is in Egypt.
:)
It's not just about the cost savings. The company was founded by an Egyptian immigrant, and is staffed with several of his family members here and in Cairo. It's a way for them to give something back to their home community by providing well-paying jobs to people who simply don't have the opportunities we have.
It also poses some interesting problems. Egypt's internet infrastructure is sorely lacking. Since that's our main means of communication, it makes life difficult; a true broadband connection doesn't even exist; the 128kbps ISDN line they do use is laughably expensive, and goes down frequently.
Now imagine running the above connection over a VPN with Windows Active Directory. A small CVS check-in over the VPN takes anywhere from five to fifteen minutes -- which wouldn't be so bad if we could trust the network to stay up during that time. So one night, I set up my home Linux box (on an old P-233) with OpenSSH and CVS and did the same experiment...and it only took 20-30 seconds. Better security, better performance. Hooray for OpenSSH! Bad news for Win2k.
The Linux box for our future version control use should be arriving today.
I don't see what this little dramatic sentence adds to the story that the reporter had to make up these numbers...
Ñ'
I work with marketing people in California; they are so far away from the reality here in Flyover, America, that they might as well be on the third planet out on Barbard's Star.
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
So which one is it?
One's a liiiitle bit farther away from Cincinnati and Orlando than the other. Of course, with the power of the Internet, I suppose it makes no difference if you're in India or in Indiana.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
is that there is actually a company in West Virginia!
It doesn't matter much if you are across the building form me, or across the world. We won't talk face to face so who cares. I know that I work with and talk face to face with people within 50 feet of my cube, but farther then that, I have better things to do.
Not that I'm lazy, just that Curt is across the wall, and I don't have to move to ask a simple question, and when I realize it wasn't simple I'm motivated to get up. John is a little farther, but I can look out the window on the way. I don't even know where Adam is, and the odds that he isn't there at the moment make it not worth my while to check, I send email. Bob is in Arizona (I'm in Minnesota), and I'll contact him and Adam the same way: email or phone.
When we set up this location we found some studies, that showed the above is typical. So they tried to put me and Adam o different projects (this helps, but even still I sometimes need him), while Curt should work on the same projects.
My boss has ordered me to work from home though at times. If you want something done, nothing is better then sitting at home and cranking it out. I can't solve every problem at home, but time at work is best spent with others planning how things will work.
Plesk is providing consumers with what they want and, perhaps most importantly, very solid jobs in a country that rife with corruption, poverty, and starvation. Those kinds of wages put each one of those 25 year old kids into the top economic brackets in their region. It'd be like handing a 25 year old kid here 150k a year salary. Anyways, Russia needs MORE jobs like that, not less.
Save your outrage for someone else.
One nice thing about telecommuting this far is that you won't be called to come in to the office in the middle of the night when something breaks that can't be fixed online.
Being on call sucks!
...used to have teams of programmers, including a team in Siberia, working tag-team shifts around the globe to get rush projects finished. (I wonder if they were among the 30,000 that got laid off?)
I have a friend who works for an online magazine headquartered in MD. When her husband moved out to CA for grad school, they let telecommute from there.
I forgot to add--while the above comment details some non-obvious benefits of a remote telecommuting force, there are some side-effects you should be aware of before deciding to telecommute from home.
I have been telecommuting from St. Louis to Philadelphia for over 2 years now. I've gotta say, full-time isolated telecommuting is NOT what it's all cracked up to by. From my own experience I've accumulated a good sized list of pros and cons of working at home.
it was the first thought that jumped in my mind when I saw "Novosibirsk".
--iamnotayam
Well, not quite as far, but I live in New York
and work for a company in California. East
Coast cost of living on a West Coast salary.
It's nice.
--
Wherever you go, there you are.
Lomeiko acknowledged a problem with vacations. Under Russian law each employee is entitled to 24 days of paid holiday, but Plesk can't afford the disruption that would bring, so the company tries to "limit" vacations to 10 days. The work ethic here is pretty intense.
I'm not one to crow about exploitation, but come on: they're paying Russian wages, can't they accept Russian vacations? It's not like 24 days is that much anyway, for most of the world.
sulli
RTFJ.
I used to work for a large company (20,000+ employees). My boss's cube was no more than 20 feet from mine; however, he refused human contact with all subordinates. Everything was done via email from coding requests to reports to "meetings". I only talked to him face to face a couple of times for the year that I worked there.
I mean, the position and authority sounded great. But who'd want to manage a group of people halfway across the globe? Even if there were no language barrier to overcome, I'd be "managing" a group of programmers whose clock was off of mine by nearly twelve hours. We'd do almost all our interaction by e-mail, asynchronously.
I know from having worked only in production that unless you can meet face-to-face with your immediate supervisor on a regular basis, it's difficult if not impossible to develop any cohesion as a team. I could have told those guys what to do, and I'm sure they'd have done it, but I'd never have been able to get a sense of who they were and what they were truly capable of. I'd be managing a big black box.
Sending programming labor overseas is no new concept, and it has obvious financial advantages. But practically speaking, I'd much rather have a highly-paid programmer next door to me than an inexpensive one several thousand miles away.
I was hired as the "Webmaster" for a non-profit organization in DC about a year and a half ago, and doing web design and some small development projects was wonderfully easy, even though I lived 2,000 miles from the home office. I had to travel to DC about once a month to synch up and attend various meetings, but email and phone calls were sufficient otherwise.
However, now I'm in a "whole new world" - we re-designed our staff structure in May, I was promoted to a management position, and now I supervise two staff and a consultant (our SysAdmin and two developers). My phone bills have tripled in size and I've been doing my best to stay "plugged in" to my staff through email and instant messaging as much as possible. But sometimes I wonder - would my team be more or less productive if I was sitting in the same building with them? How much do they miss the opportunity to walk into my office to discuss problems or concerns? Or is this an ideal situation for both of us? In this arrangement, I can stay focused on my work full-time with limited interruptions, and they can come in late without worrying about angering The Boss. ;-)
I can't imagine that this kind of remote supervision is a common practice... or is it? If anyone else out there has had this kind of experience, I'd love to hear about it. I'd also be curious to know how people communicate with their staff - is everything done via phone and email, or are there other media that you find useful?
I have a Development team in USA and France. I also have a team of business analsysts all over the world. Which means that I get a break on Saturday for the business people.... from Saturday night (Sunday in Israel is a work day ) till Friday night (end of US work day). And 24x7 for the Development team. (because they work whenever)
My advise...
If they offer you a PM position for a global project say NO!.
virtual teams suck
People need to have some interaction in order to have a group goal and synergy. It is much easier to yell across the cube for the database call then to send an email to someone who is asleep.
It is not impossible to have a team work virtually, but it is not as effective as a group that works in the same room.
/Andy
-- Andy
My former company is doing a similar thing, but a bit more intriguing IMHO: They've set up a subsidiary in Havanna, Cuba, but are actually based in Zurich, Switzerland. As far as I've heard (never been there) the circumstances are similar to the ones in Egypt - 128k connection, unreliable, etc.
I do live in Romania, but work for a German company. Indeed, telnet is a wonderful thing. ;)
Of course, I'm doing that because nobody offered me a H1-B yet. Anybody???
OK -- I haven't read the article and don't plan to, but lend me an ear anyway:
Most programmers like to bang on the keyboards at night. It's a phenomenon; hackers burn midnight oil more efficiently. Most management likes to work during the day. This could be due to things like family, evening television, whatever.
Now, they can work in their timespace of preference, at the same time. Sure enough, it would also work if management was in Russia and the programmers were in Honolulu, although that seems like a perfectly good way to waste a lei joke.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Calling telecommuting extreme because it's far away doesn't make much sense. After all, when we add the "tele" prefix we're supposed to assume it's distant. I have to agree with an earlier poster who raised this question.
But whatever, I'll still take the bait. I'm an American living in Taiwan and I work for a company in France. (not Dassault, I swear)
Ta Da! Did I win?
In fact, I did. It's rad. It's not the kind of situation you find in the local paper help wanted section, but if things work out that way, so be it.
Gratified to have shared my exotic little post card better-than-that-russia-stuff image, I return to the fact that this was a ridiculous premise. Anybody anywhere on the face of the earth with a working phone may as well be anywhere else where there's another working phone and that's hardly a news story.
Hang the DJ!
I've been working as a sysadmin/programmer for a nyc based company for the last 4 or 5 years during my undergraduate and (currently) graduate study in the netherlands. They pay me a good salary (for new york standards, which is great for european standards) but most importantly: my job hardly conflicts with school. Telecommuting gives me a lot of flexibility in planning my time.
GNU/Linux has shown us that telecomuting for software development is unnecisary, since having an actual office is no longer a requirement for a software project.
How many succesful large FreeSoftware projects have actual offices? Not very many.
I think in the future we will see people who actualy commute to be the novelty.
How would you like to go to a job interview and be told "you have to work 55 hours per week for $12,000 per year or we'll give this job to some guy in Kiev"? Sure, it's annoying if it occurs once, but what happens if the majority of high-tech firms start doing this to "remain competitive"?
The company I worked for (http://www.webmind.com) was located on NY and had satellite workers scattered around the world :
Brazil, Russia, Romania, Australia and New Zealand. I worked in Brazil. Too bad it got belly up. It was really a dream job. The salary ($ 2000)
was much higher than brazilian average.
I can go into some... It's amazing how many people live in Franklin county (Brookville, IN area), and work in Ohio. Dearborn county is the same way.
I grew up in Brookville. When I go back to visit my parents these days, it's impossible to not notice how much that area has grown in population over the past ten years. Fields that I used to help my father plow/disc/plant/mow are now huge subdivisions.
I guess that's progress.
Sure, the company is taking advantage of the developers, and they are taking advantage of the company. Just like any normal employment situation, or other business deal for that matter.
The idea that it's better to give rich americans a job than to give it to poor foreigners is based on the idea that americans are worth more than other people, and have an inherent right to be the richest people on the planet.
It is no less reprehensible because it comes from people who think of themselves as leftists.
Its at least 5k miles from my job to my seat. Both of which I'm on right now. And for what its worth, I wonder about their connection speed in Novosibisk. When I tried to get a DSL here in souther Germany I got the same "aye aye, its coming in two weeks" crap that I got in the states when I tried. Needless to say it still is not here, over one year later. I've given up an settled for isdn. It just floored me that normally excrutiatingly honest Germans would lie to me in good old american fashion. "yeah yeah, check's in the mail"
... the more people I have "taking advantage of me" the more money I'll make? That's cool. I've got six people who act like my direct supervisors now. If I stay home and only listen to five bosses, I would earn a sweet $5,000 a month. Sign me up! Sign up my other address too!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I know it has been said before, but $12,000 a year for a programmer position makes me feel icky. Where are all the people chanting in front of the world trade center complaining about the "russians taking our jobs?" :)
Seriously though, how can the company feel even the least bit of pride in knowing that they are exploiting the naivety of the foriegn job market by the order of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars? It's not like they really need to pay them an exhorbant amount of money (hell they could even pay them half as much as an American programmer and still save money) but they should at least be fair. Is "Business
Ethics 101" still taught in universities?
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I have his job now, he moved on to a different position within the company... and still lives in Greece. He's been a HUGE contributor, is accessible through the early afternoon by phone or email, and generally it worked very very well.
Just anecdotal, but it can work with the right person.
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
Yeah bitch this is what tilly computer skill is all about. Rock on!!! Hell yeah!
Thanks,
Travis
travis_hadley@hotmail.com
I live in Western Australia, I work in New York. I get paid what is an OK rate for New York, but a great rate when converted into Australian Dollars. It would be hard to find as interesting a company to work for here. And I get to live here, which has a fantastic climate (if you like heat, which I do), great quality of life, etc. And, of course, live with my family, I'm not the only one in the company, either, we have a few in the same position, and the COO also lives in a different city to everyone else. The time zone is a pain, but I tend to be nocturnal anyway. Cheers David
How does one get into telecommuting? I currently live in a place that is completely void of IT (you know, a place that has more cows then people) without the option to move. It'd be nice to have job options outside of McDonald's or working at a dairy heh. Any guidance and nudgeing in the right direction would be highly appreciated.
i am working for a company in reston, VA while i am at school in clemson, SC
They work almost 12 hour days, don't get the government mandated number of days off per year, and live in a country run by the mob.
You don't have any idea what you are talking about. I've seen Americans work more than 12 hours a day. I've seen them taking money instead of vacation (at least partly). Yes, they have the freedom to wear themselves out. SO DO THE RUSSIANS. Do you have a problem with that?
Now about the mob crap. Laws, like DMCA, UCITA, and on and on... sound very much like the "corporate mob" rule to me. Are your pitiful 50K a year still sound appealing?
You have the right to remain silent...
I work on g77 from home in the Netherlands.
That's nine hours ahead of PDT, where the GCC
server resides.
Toon Moene.
Does anyone have any real good studies of the productivity of working at home? I can do my entire job via VPN, and do it quicker. But since Im not a programmer, they dont feel inclined to do it, so I need to come up with a proposal. ANy help?
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
A huge number of firms have been farming out development work to India, and while the results have largely been dismal, it has been a major asset to management in North America to "put programmers in their place" ("Gee Tom maybe we should farm out our development to India...what's that? We're a pure software company? Oh well it's the management that makes this company!"). I don't doubt that there are a lot of very smart people in India, and I think it's great that they are finding a market in this, but it is sad that the reason that they're competitive is because of the extremely low standard of living that most Indians live in.
The reality, as mentioned in another post, is that with the increasingly wired world there is no reason why almost any job can't be farmed out to countries where the standard of living is so bad that they'll happily take $1/hour: Why not move the HR department to Haiti. Middle management should go to China (oh wait: Middle Management are the people who so often believe themselves to be the heart of the operation...couldn't ever replace THEM...oh hey, they're the MOST replacable), accounting should go to Peru. Hey while we're at it why don't we just undermine the entire basis of the advanced nations and all lower our standard of living to India's, then we'll be hyper competitive!
P.S. I mean no disrespect to India, however the standard of living is significantly lower than North America.
This is certainly true of difficult or complex jobs, but sometimes the reduced expense more than compensates for the lack of control. In fact the job, if paid on merit levels or completion, gives a sense of self determination to the programmers and spurs them on to better and faster work. And as a final thought, how many programmers do you know that do well face to face. Sorry guys, its not exactly politics.
I worry about this a great deal because the potential for abuse and exploitation seems very great. The vacation issue is really only the tip of the iceberg.
I had an experience about four years ago that has left a bad feeling ever since. I was working on a project where a headhunter brought in about 30 highly-trained programmers from a single Asian country--at a fraction of the hourly rate a U.S. programmer could command. They were all young men in their early twenties.
About a week into the project, one of them came down with measles--the old-fashioned "red measles" that U.S. kids are immunized for in infancy. Far from being just an annoying childhood disease, measles can rob you of your sight. It requires bed rest and protection for the eyes. This man's illness didn't slow the headhunter down for a second; his computer was moved to his apartment so he could code right there in his sickroom. No amount of reasoning, argument, pointing to medical articles, or petitions to management could make this idiot listen to reason. I didn't have any authority in the matter, and all those who were concerned were helpless.
I don't know the outcome. But I will always wonder if somewhere there is a talented individual robbed of his sight by callous and ignorant exploitation. So I have to ask: Whether locally or remotely, are we turning the talented people of other countries into a technological version of plain old-fashioned cheap/exploited labor?
DUCT TAPE: The Election Supervisors' Secret Weapon
I'm going to ignore the economic implications of this story for a moment because others have already discuss this.
I consider someone to be extreme telecommuting if they work from a <i>home office</i> more than 75% of their time. Distance from the corporate office doesn't necessarily dictate this.
I currently live in Spokane, WA and do customer support for a large company any geek would recognize the name of. The office I report into is in the San Francisco Bay Area. The good thing about this (for me at least) is no time difference. However, I deal with people in just about every timezone, so I'm quite familar with asyncronous communications. Anyone working for or with large multinational corporations will have to deal with the timezone thing, even if they don't telecommute, so I don't see this being a big deal.
One thing my boss makes a point of doing with all of the remote employees that work for our group is to have everyone come into the office for one week every so often. The economy of late has dictated this occur less frequently than he wants, but he does make it happen. Aside from training, we make it a point to do some non-work things together. Face time is important.
The other thing that goes along with "extreme telecommuting" is making sure is constant communication so that you feel "in the loop" with what's going on. As someone who has been telecommuting successfully for the past three years, I can tell you that it does take some work, but it is possible to telecommute and be "in the loop," at least on the important things. We've had to set up a few things like instant messaging, internal email aliases, and so forth to help this along.
In short, I look at this story and go "yeah, and tell me something I don't already know."
-- PhoneBoy
The views expressed herein are not necessarily those of anyone, including the poster.
I think my ex-boss has the record for distance. As far as I could tell he was on either the Moon, Space Station Alpha or Mars and was using an android as his interface with us "mundanes." I suppose he could have been a small creature inside of the android, but he definitely wasn't either here on Earth or from Earth - if you catch my drift.
The company I work for has moved most of their Helpdesk and a good number of programmers over to India. Now, they speak English, but not well enough to have a fluent conversation with them. Most of them, anyways. Add to that the 500ms delay on the phone lines, and you have one annoying conversation.
Needless to say, the 'normal' users hate it for the most part, as many things take longer to get done.
But, from a business standpoint, it makes perfect sence. These people have the skills, usually, to get the job done just as efficiently.
Now, whether or not it's ethical/fair, well, that's not my place to say. As an aside, I will mention that they have moved some processes back here due to problems with response time and comprehension of certain problems. They're just not familiar with some of our processes.
With a Slow U.S. economy and many U.S. programmers out of work it makes PERFECT sense to send money OUT of the country instead of hiring evil greedy Americans.
I'm glad I don't need an application written in an old version of PHP to manage my servers -- because there is no way that I'd help fund Plesk.
They are worried about somone taking 24 business days off in a row, with no one to cover that area. I doubt it's much to do with the money.
Infuriate left and right
Suppose a Russian company offered you, an American, a Russion salary. Would you laugh at them, or accept?
If the Russian programmer accepted the deal, why is it any of your concern? If he's making the Russian equivalent of what an American would make here, and has what he considers a good enough life style, what makes it any of your business?
It's their contract, not yours. Show he was forced at gunpoint to work cheap or shut up.
Infuriate left and right
Oh, great, a firm in Chantilly has people telecommuting from Russia. This is what the internet is all about. I'm glad to see it. If more people could do this, we'd reduce traffic, road rage, pollution, and all that rot.
Of course, since I live next door to Chantilly (and will be moving into a Chantilly zip-code next year), I have only one question:
Why the hell can't we get broadband HERE!??
Gr. Less than 10 miles from, like, AOL, WorldCom, and even MAE-East, and most of us can't get DSL or Cable Modem. You'd think....
I work in Chantilly, VA, my local home is Reston, VA and real home is Knoxville, TN.
Not even allowed to telecomute on snow days!
UGH!
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
At the last company I worked for (before it went south with much of the rest of the high tech sector), there were programmers in California, Washington and Germany. Plus we were looking at hiring some consultants from Russia, and I kept getting calls from a consulting group with programmers based in India (until I had to tell him the bad news about the company).
I'm a Delphi programer who also does some web developement. I could do my job from anywhere just as well as i can do it from my office, but my boss feels the need to have a warm body in the office (It's only two of us).
I would be willing to take a 50% pay cut (carribian any one), if I got to choose where I could live, and could telecommute 100% of the time.
Does that mean by only paying me 50% of what Im worth he woul dbe taking advantage of me? I think not.
-J
I work for a company that, despite our proximity, limits non-asynchronous communication (voice) to a once-a-week two hour phone call. It works wonderfully. Asyncronous communitation is usually quicker, more complete, easier to save for future reference, and less prone to topic devolution. I rue the day I have a job that mistakenly beleives meetings are good for more than drinking bad coffee.
is very hard. If you're a consultant, it is often difficult to get a sense of what exactly your client wants. I say this as most clients aren't even sure themselves what it is they need/want/desire. It often takes an n-way meeting to iron these things out. If, otoh, you're an employee, you often get left out of things. You have to be *very* proactive in most organizations to make sure that you are still in the loop. In addition, it is very easy to get fucked as you're not around to defend yourself.
The cost of living in America is higher, period. I need to feed my kids and pay for my house and it costs a crapload to live here. I need a fair wage. $6.25/hr ain't gonna cut it, I couldn't even live in the most unsafe areas in America at that rate.
I can tell you that this ain't healthy stuff and the only way to keep your brain from melting is a decent amount of nice cool Heineken at nite to ease into dreamland.
Apart from the jetlag there is also a physical downside. Business class seats (or first class in the US) may sound comfortable but when you fly more than 150 times a year (mostly international) but they are not. My back broke down which had to be mended by quite a lovely physiotherapist (lucky upside)
The simple solution would have been to relocate but would anyone trade Amsterdam for Dallas :)
Lowlands
Though the double-negative is amusing ("non-asynchronous"), I believe that the opposite of "asynchronous" is "synchronous".
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
A little over a year ago, I moved to Fremont, CA from North Carolina to take a regular (non-telecommuting) senior development job at a 4-yr-old software startup. After the not-unexpected layoff this past January, I almost immediately became a telecommuting developer for a software startup near Pittsburgh, PA. Imagine this: Working in California but for a Pennsylvania company. A couple years ago, this would have sounded very strange, as the reverse makes a whole lot more sense!
Since this was my first telecommuting position, there were a lot of things to adjust to. First, I had to spend a few months away from home (and my spouse) working in PA (with a harsh winter... well to me, anyway) to learn about the requirements, designs and code I was to work on. Second, I didn't exactly have a home office that was suitable or comfortable enough for doing all-day software development at home. Thus, there was quite a large investment of travel time and expenses just to get it all going.
But of course, with the recent slowdown in the jobs market, I've come to the conclusion that I need to add more short-term or part-time contracts to the mix, in case the current job goes south. If anyone is looking for an excellent Delphi developer with 12 years of overall experience who rarely faced a challenge he couldn't handle, take a look at my resume... you won't be disappointed.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
I think the use of non-asynchronous can be defended in much the same way 'not-unattractive' is. This common phrase is used to describe something that is not-ugly, but isn't necessarily pretty. Similarly, I'd say non-asynchronous would include both syncronous communication (voice) and the wide variety of semi-synchronous communication systems (IRC, IMs, etc.).
In the case of my company, we farm out a lot of engineering work to Cairo -- but it's not just because of money.
See, our CEO, and several key employees, are Egyptian immigrants. By making jobs in Cairo, he's giving something back to the community that raised him.
It's a charitable thing to do.
I telecommute from Manchester, NH to Fayetteville, AR for the University of Arkansas
Coming soon to ESPN2!
Let me guess.
You were supposed to manage a dot com that didn't fail because of too many spendings!?!?
Many Open Source projects are run successfully with programmers distributed all over the globe.
a common practice in india is for a company in india to send someone to the US to create a US "presence" which is usually maintained by one person. Then, after US clients are enlisted, the US presence sends all the work back to India, where it is completed and sent back to US, all without the knowledge of the hiring company.
I currently telecommute (we call it virtual office) and have been for about 5 years. The team I work with is in NJ, I'm in Georgia.
It works with the right folks. Problem is, it's usually the wrong folks in the management positions that put the brakes on this productive environment.
Later,,,
Isn't this what Ross Perot predicted when debating NAFTA, all of our jobs going to lower wage countries? Kinda sounds like 'all your jobs are belong to Russia'. Makes ya think!
Chuck Bucket
'touch me I'm sick' - it's funny because it's true.
Do you work for GE power systems by chance?
Strieber claims a lot of undocumented things
have happened to him:
Check out:
www.whitleystrieber.com"
No really. There are lots of offshore jobs located there. Lots of college grads.
Come to sweet sweet Bangalore. There are call centers there that teach their employees how to speak with flat midwestern US accents so the callers can't tell they're talking to someone in India.
Most of my team is out of the state and many are out of the country including the UK, France, Israel, Oz, Singapore, Japan, Brazil and Canada. Seems to work as long as you don't mind calling people at midnight.
Come to think of it Hawaii should be the next great thing because you can conduct business in the same business day with both the US and East Asia.
Isn't novosibirsk the key to controlling Asia in Axis and Allies? sort of like Kamchatka is the gateway to Asia in Risk?
:-)
--sam
--sam
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
> There is something wrong when a "U.S. company" can actively discriminate against Americans in its hiring practices (how many of those jobs were offered to U.S. citizens?) while circumventing OSHA, FLSA, and other labor regulations.
Here's the fatal flaw in your argument, pointed up by the simple question, "how many of those jobs were offered to U.S. citizens?" In response, how many of those jobs were offered to British, or German, or Japanese citizens? The answer is "none", and for exactly the same reason. They aren't discriminating against Americans, they're discriminating against expensive programmers. Yes, it sucks that they can take a job offshore and get it done for less money, but that's not a new practice by any means, and it's a short-term problem anyway. Your solution has an abvious flaw as well. If the U.S. government forces U.S. companies to use U.S. talent only, they're going to have to charge more for the finished product. That means that they can't compete as well with U.S. companies who use offshore talent (which your solution will fix), but it also means they can't compete as well with Russian companies who use Russian programmers. It's easy to say that that's not a problem, since the U.S. software is better, but that's just pro-U.S. bias, and besides, what if U.S. companies want to sell their software to the rest of the world?
> How would you like to go to a job interview and be told "you have to work 55 hours per week for $12,000 per year or we'll give this job to some guy in Kiev"?
Again, this argument doesn't make any sense, on two levels. Firstly, to compare apples to apples (we'll use year 2000-value apples), you'd have to say, "you have to work 55 hours per week for $134,000 a year in purchasing power, or we'll give this job to some guy in Kiev" which is the equivalent earning power. Conversely, as companies compete in the world market, these nests of underpaid resources will rise to levels more in line with the U.S. and other countries. For now, there are lots of programmers willing to work for peanuts in Russia and India, but the talent pool is going to get tapped eventually to the point where salaries will have to rise, as companies battle for the talent in these locations. For now, there is a wild discrepancy between the developed world and the developing world, and because of that the U.S. job market is going to suffer. While it seems to make sense on the surface, your solution is historically referred to as "economic isolationism", and our country's history shows that it simply does not work in the long term. See the automotive industry for a pointed example, or the garment industry, wherein government protections drove prices so far out of line with reality that, instead of forcing U.S. companies to hire US-ians, it forced many of the companies to move to other countries entirely, which, of course, did not help the U.S. workers who now had no company from which to demand a job. The only way to solve such an imbalance is to adjust prices, and again, historically prices don't fall on the whole. What will end up happening is that prices for good programmers outside the U.S. will rise as local demand exceeds local supply.
In short, while it's a very feel-good gesture, government protection of U.S. jobs will not be worth the stunting of the U.S. programming industry that such sanctions will engender.
Virg
I agree. Don't compare money, compare purchasing power.
Bush's education improvements were
Quit your job and get one with a vacation plan you like; or
Become self-employee and then create a vacation plan you can live with. Bah!
> computers, cars, etc, all cost about the same no matter where you live.
Not so at all. Don't you recall the Levi's commercial, where there's this guy tooling around in a little car, and then he gets out, and he's not wearing pants. The caption reads, "In Prague, you can trade them for a car." The funny part of that is that it's still true.
Virg
I live in Tampa, and telecommute to my job in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Chris "Hack Naked" Knight
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
I'm the only US-based employee, I work from home, the dev office is in Israel, the content office is in Moscow, and I'm in charge. It's a mess, but I can go out and play basketball in the afternoon and then work at night to sync with my coworkers.
> The cost of living in America is higher, period.
And this fact is the problem of a programmer in Novosibirsk in what way, exactly?
> I need to feed my kids and pay for my house and it costs a crapload to live here. I need a fair wage.
Then move somewhere cheaper. $6.25 an hour cuts it well in Russia (and Mexico and India and quite a few other places as well). Oh, don't want to move? As Gorimek said, why does the fact that you live in the U.S. and don't want to leave qualify you as intrinsically more valuable?
Sorry, but your arguments serve only to prove Gorimek's point. If you don't like competing with foreign programmers, you have two choices. Be cheaper, or be better. If you can't do one of these, you need to find a different line of work.
Virg
We can drive our robotic mining vehicles, located in Germany, from here in Canada.
Avoiding the ickier parts of the etymology, "cornholing" is slang for anal sex.
There, wasn't that tasteful?
Virg
If the U.S. government forces U.S. companies to use U.S. talent only, they're going to have to charge more for the finished product.
The products sold by Plesk are priced at what the U.S. economy will bear, not at the measly sum that they pay their engineers.
Firstly, to compare apples to apples (we'll use year 2000-value apples), you'd have to say, "you have to work 55 hours per week for $134,000 a year in purchasing power, or we'll give this job to some guy in Kiev" which is the equivalent earning power.
The purchasing power in Kiev is irrelevent. Corporations do not care about the cost of living here or overseas. Their sole concern appears to be the cost of labor. They aren't about to pay me $134,000 to do the same job that some guy in Kiev would do for $12,000.
What will end up happening is that prices for good programmers outside the U.S. will rise as local demand exceeds local supply.
Let's not oversimplify. The following will also happen:
1. More people in those countries will start majoring in computer science, increasing the labor pool.
2. Software engineers in the U.S., displaced by overseas competition, will start taking jobs at lower wages, driving down the standard of living here.
3. As the wages for software engineering jobs in the U.S. go down, fewer U.S. citizens will major in computer science.
The end result will be that there will be a world-wage for software engineers -- minus the minor costs associated with telecommuting inefficiencies. Poor countries will see their wages increase while those living in wealthy countries like the U.S. will see their pay slashed.
While economic isolationism does not work for commodity goods like textiles and grains, it can work very well for software. The vast majority of software is purchased by "first world" companies and individuals. If, for example, Microsoft discovered that they could cut their engineering expenses in half by hiring Russian programmers, it is highly unlikely that the price of Office would drop. Bill Gates and the other Microsoft executives would just pocket a higher percentage of each sale.
Software is a vast sea of mini-monopolies. It doesn't matter that Software 602, StarOffice, WordPerfect Office and other office suites exist. Even though some of them are totally free, Microsoft still enjoys the highest user base with its expensive Office product and that's largely unaffected by price. Believing that S/W engineering costs savings will drive the price down is naive.
If we don't take action, we will find that our standard of living will plummet -- excluding those of us who are corporate executives -- as the world economy sets a price for software engineering.
Figure it this way. The average monthly salary is around $200 US / Month in Russia and Ukraine. $1000 per month means that at least 4 family memebers don't also have to work OR the whole family is driving in pimped out stretch Ladas. (hmm, side note, I wonder if there is a web site that features pimped out stretch ladas!?! Holy Shyt there is! http://www.caranddriver.com/xp/Caranddriver/autosh ows/Geneva/autoshows_geneva_2001_day1_page2.xml)
Anyway, my point is, this kind of money where they live is phenomenal. When their economy gets back on track and starts to chug along I am sure they will demand more but for now this is a great boon for everyone involved.
--Peter
Right, I can go live in somewhere that has a lower standard of living.
That was written almost tongue in cheek. I'd like to see either lower costs in America (ain't gonna happen, we have nice stuff) or people in Mexico, India, whateverland, have our standard of living, then they'll need the same wages.
Paying someone living in a cave and feeding them dogfood would not require much money, but would you want to be that person? It's some company making money off cheap (slave) labor.
> The purchasing power in Kiev is irrelevent.
You are right. This part belonged to another reply. Damn those cut-and-paste gremlins!
> While economic isolationism does not work for commodity goods like textiles and grains, it can work very well for software.
Bad planning for precisely the same reason you stated. If Microsoft decided to use Russian programmers, and the government enforced some economic penalty on them for it, do you think it would be difficult for them to relocate to Canada or Mexico (or Russia, for that matter)? Unlike companies that make "real" goods, software companies can relocate very easily, and in history even companies that produced "real" goods relocated to avoid such sanctions (which is the driving force behind Ford (or GM, I don't recall which) building most of its engines in Brazil). If it's naive to assume price reductions based on lowering developer cost, it's just as naive to think that heavy governmental protectionism will do anything other than chase away software companies.
> If we don't take action, we will find that our standard of living will plummet
If you can suggest any particular action that works any better than the failures we've seen so far, you would be one up on every economist in the country. It's easy to say "take action", but what exactly do you suggest?
Virg
This isn't exactly news that matters.
Yeah, I work from Norway, for a New York start-up. Technically it works well: CVS, SSH, web, instant messaging, email, NetMeeting, phone -- technically there is no reason for me to be physically located alongside my coworkers.
However, the psychological effects are dire. Somebody else in this discussion has already catalogued them pretty well (though the thing about bad breath was surprising to me). I never see my co-workers. Communication mostly consist of typing, aside from daily phone meeting and the odd call. I spend all my waking time alone in a rented office. Since I started on this project, my personal life has fallen into ruin, I basically have no friends anymore. Et cetera. It is fun, rewarding work, but man, it can be painful.
On the other hand, I live in one of the world's nicest countries, and I get to sleep late (I'm basically on an EST schedule).
I work for a small startup and our development and test teams are spread between UK, Europe, USA and Australia.
Apart from the odd hours we hold meetings, it is pretty cool. We don't have the sweatshop attitude to any of the team, regardless of where they live. Everyone is paid better than the going rate in their own country and everyone has the same input into design and project direction you would have were they all in the same office.
We made the choice of full telecommuting for all the teams so we could get the best people from anywhere and let them work when they are 'in the zone' rather than when the office is open.
We use a combination of SourceOffSite, Bugzilla, Netmeeting, ICQ and lots of email and telephone to keep it going.
...and don't flame me that our (unreleased) corporate product is 'censorware' - this one was designed by a bunch of slashdot reading geeks so satisfy the legal requirements of management without snooping on everything you do and stopping you reading your favourite sites.
IS it just me or is slashdot now the hide out of communist social theorists, socialist economists, isolationists and downright morons.
Who gives a fuck about comparative cost of lving? i would hire a programmer for $1000 in russia if it meant i could avoid the arrogance, greed and 'my rights' crap i have to deal with in my $90000 a year US programmers who all think they shold be running the company and thus dont need to do anything they dont like.
I fucking swear the next C++ coder who comes to me and asks why he cant use linux on his machine is going to get a punch in the nose. (answer - we develop products for windows dipshit so thats what you use)
The us market has done this to isteslf with high wage demands, arrogant views on technology, a dot com feeding frenzy and the irrational idea that they are the greatest country on earth and thus everyone else needs to kiss their asses. (nope i wasnt born here)
Russian coders on the other hand seem to want to actually work, do what they are told to do by management (shock horror !) and are greatfull for the job and experience - hmmm maybe i need to show this to my CEO.
Company gets developers dirt cheap ($1000/Mo and no health care, 401K, etc, to worry about) and the developers make 5 times their national average salary. Nevermind that their stock is tanking because consumer spending is plumetting because unemployment is on the rise. I wonder why that could be...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Now that they've managed to outsource those high paid IS/IT jobs, the next step is to start moving those even higher paid managerial jobs over there. It's the next logical step, right?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I like Linux because Linux is the best operating system.
In the communist era, the leaders decided (god knows why, it's lost in middle of deserted Siberia) to make Novosibirsk the center of russian science. A huge new village - completely scientists only (several tens of thousands of them) - was created on the boundary of the town and called Akademgorodok - Academic Village.
It has lots of university buildings and lots of trees. It's a nice place (as much as it can be in todays strugling Russia).
... that Capitalism Is Gay?
Well free trade works both ways. Like it or not you have to compete with programmers all over the world. The longer you bitch, the less time you have to learn new skills to keep yourself relevant.
You can try to fight it all you want. It didn't work for the 80's auto-workers and it won't work for you. Adapt and survive, adapt or die.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I work in San Francisco. Physically, my body is in San Francisco. My mind is someone on the second star to the right and straight on until morning. I think that puts me somewhere in Betelguese or Andromeda. I've got those Russians beat by a mile.
I mean, how do we *know* they're not required to
show up at work (in russia) in suite and tie.
If they are, then they're not telecommuting,
they're just stealing jobs from Americans who
would be willing to show up in suite and tie.
However, when I care to visit earth my minions drop a few neutron bombs, killing all life for dozens of miles around. My giant lander comes down and I enjoy a peaceful weekend in the mountains, and then to my lunar retreat I return.
It's not like living in Russia or anything like that, but, hey... --Bill Gates, 2032
--hongpong.com
Feces!!
I love how all the programmers describe themselves as "white-collar".
YOU WISH.
Do you wear a tie to work? Nope, don't know many programmers who do. Stop trying to inflate your ignorant (me, me, me!) American ego.
At Chilliware [www.Chillliware.net], (before we went bankrupt due to incredibly poor management) all of our developers were located abroad, including:
*110 programmers in Yerevan [Former Boomerang employees, formed as 'Chilli Technologies]
*The 400+ employees of MoreLinux (which also went under due to Chilliwares poor management practices). They performed web duties for LinuxOnly.com and Chilliware.net.
It was a freaking nightmare, with employees waiting weeks for pay, supplies and feedback.
Of course, alot of that had to do with Chilliwares incredibly poor management.
To take an example less close to home: If I were a car dealership and you as a consumer walked in and told me "I can get the same car for less if I buy it at the dealership down the road," should I blame you for making that choice? Similarly, if someone is willing to do the same job as you for less money, what basis do you have to complain?
Also, you say: The U.S. needs to make U.S. firms hire U.S. workers. I'd like you to try to explain, from a moral or ethical foundation, how you come to that conclusion. It's far from obvious to me. Is a citizen of India, for example, any less worthy of getting a decent job than a U.S. citizen? If that Indian citizen can do the job better, for less, than a U.S. citizen, why should I deny him the opportunity to do so? Simply because the U.S. citizen happens to have been born in the U.S.?
Incidentally, adding more labor laws is likely to have an effect exactly opposite what you desire: It will drive companies to other locations where they can get cheap labor entirely unfettered. Do some reading about the labor situation in France and you'll see what I mean. With the labor laws in place there (among other things, it is illegal to work more than 35 hours a week, even if you *want* to), companies should be -- and are -- loathe to locate in France or hire people there unless they have absolutely no alternative. And you see that in the ridiculously high unemployment rate, for example.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
That said, I'm inclined to believe that certain projects could work in spite of the distances involved. If the problem domain is sufficiently well defined that developers can work on a solution without needing constant interaction with management, for example, I could imagine it working.
Incidentally, Boeing designed the 777 using engineering teams in three different parts of the world, if I remember correctly. That's a bigger project than most of us will ever work on, but it sort of demonstrates that physical proximity is not absolutely essential to success.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
I telecommute between my home office - here in South West England, and the ISP I work for in the West of Ireland. I have no troubles with timezones, because we're both in the same timezone (which doesn't really matter anyway as I live on a timezone in the 6th dimension...)
I saw some posts concerning management, and this is where I'd like to contribute my tuppence. I work very closely with my immediate supervisor, even though I've never actually met the guy. (Apparently, he's an ex-RAF technician covered in tatoos.) We communicate mainly via e-mail, but once a week on a Monday morning I have a "meeting" with my colleages and supervisor. This "meeting" (I use quotes because we don't _actually_ meet) is conducted via IRC (yes, it's actually true, IRC _can_ be used for things other than wasting large amounts of time!)
I'm not really sure what the point of this post was anymore...
-chris
I live right in the heart of 20151, with Mae-East about a mile away, with my only broadband option as shitty shitty Cox RoadRunner service. And the funny thing is, everyone here is computer literate, so EVERYONE has Cox RoadRunner. (Can you say 400ms pings to the first hop?)
If you would ever want to play Quake with your coworkers, it would matter.
Working in a "decentralized" manner constitutes a huge change in how companies operate, a "paradigm shift" if you pardon the expression.
What makes you think that managers have the necessary knowledge and training to manage such decentralized projects? A new kind of manager is necessary for this kind of work. An ulimate networker/communicator.
If you think about it, the best positioned people to do this kind of work are... programmers themselves. They will have to train themselves more in verbal/written communications and become more of their own managers. Conversely, the contemporary managers would have to learn coding, which is more difficult.
The software project manager as we know him is an endangered specie.
I have the oposite problem. I live in Baltimore, MD but work in Columbus, OH I fly home ever other week (if possible) and work long days. As it stands, I got to work at 8:00 AM EST and still haven't left. God this sucks.
I telecommuted from London to San Francisco.
It was a real bear because I was very quickly out of the loop as far as office goings on, and the hours were so strange. About 4pm my time they'd just be getting to work, so they'd send email, expecting that the emails would be answered during their business day.
So, I ended up shifting the work day around so that I started around 2, and finished around 10pm which didn't set well with the wife.
On top of that, there was a huge envy among co-workers, so we got into email wars. We'd copy 7/8 of the company to tell someone else off. Absolutely completely non-productive, in addition to being just stupid.
Though flexible work hours only makes sense in this day of long commutes, I'm a big believer in face time. At my current company I allow my employees to work from home as appropriate (1 day a week on average), but Mondays are sacrosanct, we talk a lot during the week, and have a open-plan desk layout where we can see each other when we are in the office. This leads to even more interaction when in the office.
Making telecommuting work well is very hard and only seems to make sense when you're working on project type work.
Go, Springboard, Go!
The best telecommuting I've done was spending 3 months working remotely from Guatemala for a Silicon Valley company. I had quit my job to go study Spanish there and realized I had a fair amount of time on my hands. My former company agreed to let me work come back as a contractor from down there. I didn't need a laptop or anything. I just went to internet cafes and used telnet and a web browser. I also worked remotely from Turkey for about a month in the same manner.
It's worked well for me, but the main thing to realize is that it's *not* as good as being in the office. I don't care what anyone says about being able to concentrate without distractions. People are reluctant to contact you. There may be timezone lags reducing communication to one email back-and-forth per day. What can be drawn quickly on a whiteboard takes time on to draw in some tool or a web-whiteboard.
I think it can work, but only if there is already good communication between the worker and the rest of the team. It's very difficult to build a good working rapport with people you've never met face-to-face.
I've been working remotely for almost a year now from Australia for the same company and now I'm opening a small development office over here. We're trying to take advantage of the better availability of developers compared to Silicon Valley and also take advantage of the good exchange rate.
But I won't tell you the name of the company because it's still viewed with a bit of suspicion. Investors might see it as an inability to recruit locally. Lawyers worry about intellectual property laws of foreign countries. Executives might be concerned about whether the isolate groups are properly focused on the company goals.
I think it's an area which is slowly growing, but probably won't change the world overnight. Most of the major offshore outsourcing is in labor-intensive areas such as support call centers and regional areas such as localization. I expect sending core development overseas will remain on the periphery for a while.
-Bruce
*sigh* buried under 300+ posts
These poeple go to an OFFICE in Russia, they don't work from their home.
They have managers, right there, looking over their shoulder.
They produce a product that is sold by a branch office in the US.
... in adittion to the 1 week i already took
... and this still leaves me with 1 1/2 weeks vacations during Christmas and New Year
... Plus i can do it every year.
Ain't i a stinker!??
[ot - tried sending email, it bounced...]
Just out of curiousity, where do you live? We're building behind EC Lawrence Park (east of Rt. 28 between 66 and Westfields). We're hoping we might be able to sneak in IDSL, but are doubtful 'cause the folks on the communties on either side are just on the fringes, too.
Anyway, where's your central office? Or is the only one out here the one at Union Mill?
Your original argument only holds true in the very limited case of direct comparison of models. For an example, I defy you to find a new car, any model or equipment package at all, in the U.S. for $4,000 or less. There are equivalent vehicles in most of Eastern Europe, but the fact is that a car can be had for less there than here (although it'll be a cheaper car than you can find in the states).
Virg
> By putting tariffs in place on imported software,
> you could take away the economic incentive for software
> companies to move operations to other countries. The
> idea is to make it an economic wash to move jobs out of the
> country. You don't want there to be some kind of tremendous
> financial reward for employing foreign labor over American labor.
Nice thought, but very limited in scope. For example, if import tariffs are put in place on software such that it's financially a wash to sell product X in the U.S., but there's still money to be made by reducing overhead in other markets (like selling to every country in the world other than the U.S.), there's still economic incentive, and not diddly squat the U.S. government can do about it.
> Why do you think that GM, Chrysler, and Ford aren't all having their cars produced at a fraction of the cost overseas? One reason is that there are protective tariffs in place.
Again, only true in a very limited scope. Chrysler became DaimlerChrysler, which is a huge multinational car builder which produces car parts in other parts of the world at a fraction of the cost of building them in the U.S. and Ford and GM offloaded most of the expensive work to other countries as well. In case you're unfamiliar with that market, assembling the cars, which is what happens in the U.S., is only a tiny fraction of the labor cost of building a car, and it's actually cheaper to build a car in the U.S. in most cases (due to factory automation technology and economies of scale) than it is to build it elsewhere and ship it to the states. Most of the labor cost is in making the parts, which happens overseas because even with import duties and protective tariffs, U.S. labor is still far too costly.
But all of this is beside the point. Software is very different from cars, in that the shipping cost is negligible and there is zero cost to getting materials together. Its cost is virtually all buried in the labor cost (with tiny percentages embedded in infrastructure). Since it's not a physical good, software does not play by the same rules, which means that it resonds entirely differently to tariffs, and so any analogy with the auto industry is bound to break down at the border.
Also, your idea of import tariffs only seems to fit for shrink-wrapped packages, and so does not encompass programming jobs done on a custom basis. For example, If I have a corporation that needs a special billing package, and I contract with another company to write it, there's no real transfer of any package that the government can tariff. About the only thing they could do is charge me a tax on using a foreign company for contract work, which is already done, with little effect.
In short, my original challenge is unmet. You still need to provide a workable solution that hasn't already failed and that fits the market in which our discussion takes place. Keep trying.
Virg
BOOHOOHOO.
No, I'm not going to find you a job that gives you everything you want.
YOU need to do that. Don't whine to me, go DO IT. Or are you just one of those "Give it to me because I deserve it" bleeding ass crybabies?
The point is that I can't buy that $4,000 car anywhere in the U.S. because they don't sell them here. Since your statement was "cars cost the same..." and you did not qualify it with a model match, the point becomes simple. If I want to own a car (any car) in the U.S., I can't get a new one for $4,000. Period. It's simply not possible. The fact that the same model costs the same doesn't matter. If I want my own new car, the entry cost is higher in the U.S. than elsewhere.
My point is that the availability of cheaper goods is lower here, so the minimum cost of living is higher, which is what the original discussion entailed. If I earn $12,000 a year, I can live comfortably in Novosibirsk, but not anywhere in the states. To draw from the original,which is not true. By my example, transportation is cheaper, by $9,000. I could extend this same example to food and other essentials (like insurance), but I think you get the point.
Virg
What I despise is the belief that it is right and proper to attempt to influence government to force other people to do things that benefit you, when they've used no force against you.
But it's government legislation that is largely to blame for the cost of living in the U.S. How am I supposed to compete for a job with someone who pays $150/month for rent, $50 per month for food, and has a Lada (car) that he bought used for $350?
If you don't like tariffs, let's look at what can be done to level the playing field by cutting back on regulations.
The U.S. could eliminate pollution regulations. Those drive up the cost of cars, trucks, vans, and consumer goods (due to both increased manufacturing and transportation costs).
We could eliminate 5mph bumpers.
We could get rid of safety inspections on vehicles.
Roads could be maintained to the same level that they are in third world countries, reducing taxes spent on maintenance.
We could relax building codes so that they were in line with third world countries. That would significantly reduce the cost of housing and office space.
We could eliminate the minimum wage. This would reduce the costs for fast-food, janitorial services, and goods produced by low-skill workers.
We could relax or eliminate health regulations as related to food, drinking water, and medicines.
...
Great! We can turn the U.S. into a third-world country and then we can be labor cost competitive with war-ravaged countries full of starving people.
We are a lot better off telling some multi-millionaire CEO that he will have to hire American workers and make up for it by purchasing a yacht that's "only" 50 feet long instead of the 67 foot yacht he had his eye on. You can come back and cry on my shoulder when Microsoft, Lotus, Borland, and the other software manufacturers have been forced to cut back to the point that their CEOs make less than a million dollars per year. Until then, they can afford to pay American software engineers to produce their products.
Raising the tax doesn't help, because it's not going to induce me to pay the higher price for local programmers. What'll happen is just what happened with the company in the article. I'll use a local programming consultancy, but that local programming company will begin using telecommuters from other countries (which is not at this time covered by the tax), which then allows them to underbid their competitors. This highlights a real problem with economic protectionism, in that it must be reactive (proactive laws are laws that protect against economic situations that don't exist, and if you advocate that then you'd need to be willing to, for example, pay tax dollars to an agency to oversee the limitation of mineral imports from the Moon), and every time someone finds a loophole there's a lead time to passing laws to close it. Trying to pass laws that have no loopholes only results in laws that are so draconian that they're quickly overturned or laws that are so generalized that they're ineffective.
The simple fact is that such protective taxes and tariffs serve the purpose of preventing rampant shifting of the means of production, but historically there's always been a limit to their effectiveness, and (for the most part, and in the software industry in this case) that limit has been reached. We're long past the point where raising the tax would stimulate local demand, and well into the area where raising the tax will simply cause those who are newly subject to the tax to find a different way around it. If you think of protectionism as a bucket with a hole halfway up, you'll get the idea. It holds water well at first, but after you reach the hole, more water isn't going to add to your storage capacity in the long term.
Virg
Damn, I didn't get this post in metamod today. Whoever moderated the parent as troll, you're an idiot! A troll is a well constructed argument that is made to look legitimate (but is actually not) for the sole purpose of riling people up and getting them whipped into a big religious war-type frenzy, causing lots of irate replies. This does none of that. It's offtopic. Moron. I hope somebody is smart enough to metamod you as unfair.
Yuck, that email address has been dead forever. Try carywiedemann at yahoo dot no instead.
I'm near the intersection of Walney and Poplar Tree (yes, by that big business park that has countless fiber lines [including a huge one to WorldCom] running through it). And yet, I still can't get anything but Cox RoadRunner.
CO Stats:
Serving CO CLLI Code: CNVIVACT
Serving CO Location: CENTREVILLE, VA
Distance from CO: 3.62 miles (19090 feet)
- Cary
I am not one of those "bleeding ass crybabies". If I were, I would've quit my job long ago to sit at home on my ass getting welfare. I'm someone who sees that I have other considerations to take into account before blindly quitting my job and hoping to find a better one, or to just quit to move to a job which may disappear in mere months.
I have a strong feeling that you're a stingle guy, no kids, no one relying on you for support, right? I feel sorry for any family you may have or come to have in the future. I'd love to see the look on their faces the day you say "I'm quitting my job because I don't like it. You all are on your own." Sorry, life doesn't work that way.
My discussions started with my wish to have vacation equal to that of the rest of the world. America has the most fucked up mindset of anywhere in the world. I want to have time to enjoy my life, but I want to keep my current pay and job. Don't give me this "go find another job" bullshit. Never said I hated my job, just the general American viewpoint of what is more important in life.
Anyway, I'm sure you'll respond with another half-assed knee-jerk response. More power to you. I'm sure you have plenty of time sitting in front of your computer to do so. And, once you have a real life with real responsibilities, I invite you to come back and re-read everything you've posted. Maybe then you'll understand just how far up your ass you have your head stuck.