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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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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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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