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?

Comments

Taking advantage of the developers

[NineNine]

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.

Useful for tight deadlines!

[Phrogz]

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).

Sweatshop?

[sulli]

What about the following:

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.

Good for the programmers, bad for their managers

[mblase]

Last year while I was on a job search, I was offered a position as an information architect for a small Chicago firm. Since I'd only worked in production up till then, I was definitely intrigued. But when I heard that all the developers who'd be working under me were located in India, I declined.

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.