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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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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."
This brings up an interesting point. Are they working in Russia, or are they working in the US? So are they subject to Russian labor law, or American? Could they legally be paid under US min wage this way? While they're physically located in Russia, by telecommuting to the US, it isnt *that* different from someone who crosses a border physically each day to go to work.
-J5K
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
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
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
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?
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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.
> 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
And I get frustrated at dumbasses who say "If you don't like it, quit your job."
1) There is no job in America with a vacation plan equal to Europe's. I could move to Europe, get a similar job and double to triple my vacation.
2) Moving to Europe costs more money than I can currently afford. Plus there is no guarantee of employment once one arrives. I may not like my vacation compared to theirs, but at least I have a stable income.
So, I ask you this, Einstein, find me a job in America where I get 28 or more vacation days a year, doing my same job (univeristy web design) for the same salary range (~$35,000) a year. Or, give me the money to move to Europe and a job as mentioned above.
You see, some people can't just quit their jobs out of the blue because they dislike the vacation policy. You know why? Because these people have to support others and aren't so selfish as to take their own desires over the needs of others. You can post a response once you have the responsibilities of an adult and you can understand situations outside your lonely, self-centered life.
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."