Logos Stick said:
Pinochet said:
Dan Scott said:
WFH/remote work is so bad they say, but then corporations are laying off Americans and hiring Indians.
That makes no sense.
Chicken/egg. All those people who insisted they were more efficient remotely than in the office forced management to make the rational choice of hiring a different remote worker for 1/10 of the cost.
There are definitely industries that have been hurt by WFH. Stuff that depended on an apprentice type model has slowly gotten worse. In-person communication skills have slipped while electronic (email/zoom/etc) has gotten better. Not sure what the answer is but I do know that he's the guy in charge there. He was specifically responding to a petition that some people signed. He has every right to tell people the business is not a ****ing democracy. You don't get to vote to overturn his decisions.
How old are you? I've been in high tech since I graduated from a&m in the 80s. We started offshoring to reduce cost around the year 2000. WFH for American workers had nothing to do with it.
My industry is highly regulated and didn't even try offshoring until the mid 00s. It started as just a limited data entry role because we recognized that younger staff learned by doing and fixing the problems they created. The industry has gotten more and more flexible over time (with more flexibility as you moved up), and everyone was fine with the idea that you could never push all the entry level client work to even be done remotely in the US, let alone India or Argentina, because clients want to see you and new staff need the chance to do the easy stuff. They also move up to more and more of a selling role over time, which the Indians don't do. During covid, the push to be fully remote and all the "I'm just as efficient" stuff was accepted. Once all those staff were remote, there was no need to pay someone a Manhattan salary when a St Louis one would be just as good. The offshoring also ramped up. We even stopped separately stating US vs India/South America staff and just listed them all together.
At the beginning, the offshore work was **** compared to onshore work, but NYC stopped being able to say their people were better than Houston or Kansas City. Offshore work isn't as good but it's much closer to good now. I still think the bigger problem is that the 3-5 year people haven't had near the learning opportunities or ability to observe how more experienced folks solve clients' problems at this point in their careers because of WFH, but I also have an office that we've had to expand because we ran out of space with too many people wanting to be in the office. No mandates needed.
And just to be completely clear, I'm not a believer in mandating people be in the office. One of the reasons I got into this industry was the flexibility. I think it can also be true that in my industry, there is big value in being in the office more in the early part of your career. And the CEO can make whatever decision he wants; he shouldn't care that some low level staff started a petition to change a CEO decision.