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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
Anyone out there in a similarly distant job?
No, but I'm willing!
www.glowingplate.com/gnujobs_resume.html
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
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.
... because their competitors would have them arrested.
It's the American Way.
--
E_NOSIG
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."
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Hmm, I always thought Microsoft had developed Windows 98 using the Chinese-hordes approach.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
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 too, have to deal with dc area traffic. it's beyond nuts out there sometimes. I typically am going 70 on the 55mph speed limit B/W Parkway, and a good number of people are still passing me.
ok, back on topic-
i once heard a company denied people telecommuting because the lawyers were scared if say the person's home desk broke or something, they would be liable. The company insurance didnt cover people doing work at home. BS if you ask me. If someone wants to do work at home, they should be permitted to do so and the employer insurance should allow a clause allowing someone to telecommute.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
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
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"?
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.
... 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
No, Microsoft used the 'million monkeys' method, and shipped the first thing that compiled.
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!
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.
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 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.
Though the double-negative is amusing ("non-asynchronous"), I believe that the opposite of "asynchronous" is "synchronous".
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
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.
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.
> 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
> 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
> 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
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.
> 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).
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?
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
Well free trade works both ways. Like it or not you have to compete with programmers all over the world.
Where did you get the idea that we had "free trade"? Have you ever examined the import tariffs on foreign goods? Try checking out this web page and maybe you'll have a better understanding of our "free trade" policies.
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.
There are many auto-workers employed in the U.S. Many foreign manufacturers, including Honda and Nissan, now have plants here that employ U.S. auto-workers. The reason for this is import tariffs on foreign cars and components made it more attractive to pay Americans a good wage than to pay a lower wage to foreign workers. And Japan has horrendous tariffs on American goods, so please don't portray America as the big bully in all of this.
Adapt and survive, adapt or die.
So by "adapt", do you mean "lower your standard of living, take a demeaningly low wage, and accept that it's too late for you to change professions"?
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."
[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
So you want the government to subsidize your industry so you can continue to have a "comfortable" salary? Instead of standing on your own two feet you want a government handout in the form of a tariff in your favor?
Put it a different way: Do I want to play "let's see who starves first" with someone who lives in a rented apartment the size of my kitchen? Hell no. I want a level playing field. If my house costs me $1700 per month for the mortgage, I don't want to compete with some guy living in a $150 per month apartment that would be condemned in the U.S.
No I mean find another way to make the amount of money you need other than from your day job. If you love programming to the extent you don't want to leave it even when it can't support you anymore you'll need to find something on the side to keep you afloat.
You are on drugs. I don't "love programming." I'm a 40 year old man and it's where my training and skills are. Listen to yourself. You are telling people who program to take second jobs just so a bunch of greedy business owners can line their pockets by paying low wages to overseas programmers.
> 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
Lastly I must say, if you don't love programming and you are already 40, its time to find something you DO love before too much more of your life passes you by.
;-)
Do you have any idea of how difficult it is to get an acting job in porn movies when you are 40?
But seriously, I like programming and computer hardware. I don't "love" it though and I doubt that I'm going to find a job that I love. I'm pretty happy in my chosen field and don't want to change careers.
I submit that the field is anything but level. Try to find a $150/month apartment in the United States. The cost of living in other countries makes $1,000 U.S. per month really attractive. In the U.S., you would be homeless if that's what you earned. It's simply not possible to compete on a wage basis with someone that can feed, clothe, and shelter his family with a $6/hour job.
We have government-mandated regulations that cover everything from airbags in cars to USDA food safety standards to strict building codes. All of that improves our safety and standard of living, but it also drives up the cost of goods and services. That's why I believe that companies that use foreign labor should pay a fee (tax, tariff, or whatever term suits) to bring their labor costs into line with U.S. costs. You can't expect U.S. citizens to compete on a cost basis with countries where the standards of living are far below our own.
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.