Don't call it 'outsourcing': Hiring employees globally is getting easier

https://www.axios.com/remote-work-deel-seitzgold-9d16e8dc-a250-40ef-a405-1b22d9a03f2d.html

by hhs • 5 years ago

32 43 5 years ago

If your job in SFO can be done from Sacramento or Portland, why can’t it be done from Manila? Or Warsaw? If your answer is “time zones”, then why not Bogota? Or Buenos Aries?

It may seem fun and flexible now, but the acceptance of fully-remote work will lead to jobs being hired globally, at lower cost to the company than hiring domestically.

And don’t fool yourself, that developer in Colombia is just as talented but can work for half the cost.

CheezeIt2• 5 years ago

You’re vastly overestimating the quantity of high talent internationally. Take a look at the proportion of Colombia’s students that can answer these math problems:

https://www.oecd.org/pisa/test-2012/form/

For example, 25% of Americans could solve problem 4, and 39% of Canadians, but only 2% of Colombians. (But 8% of Chileans, 15% of Serbians, 21% of Croatians.) Problem 5 is USA 9% to Colombia ~0% (Chile 2%). Problem 6, Taiwan is at 18%, USA 2%.

Colombia’s IMO team, drawn from its 50 million people, also gets trounced by Mongolia, population 6 million. And Mongolia isn’t just poor and polluted, half of that 6 million are horses. Only 3.3 million Mongolians are human.

Taking the 25% vs. 2% comparison, we could say Colombia’s quality-weighted population is effectively 50 million divided by 12.5, so it’s effectively a 4 million person country, measured in Americans.

abraxas• 5 years ago

China is scoring very well and has a population that trounces all of the western world

reidjs• 5 years ago

Do you think math ability is the most important metric to hire by? I guess it’s correlated to intelligence but I’m not sure if many businesses are looking for intelligence, unfortunately.

addicted4• 5 years ago

If 25% of Americans can solve a problem, you only need 2.5% of the rest of the world to be able solve that problem to have double the absolute number of non Americans vs Americans who can solve that problem.

You might need maybe 5% of the non US/non EU countries if we also exclude the EU countries, to get double the absolute number of non Americans who can solve it.

addicted4• 5 years ago

Also, that test is almost entirely culturally driven. The kind of problem is far more common in North America with its standardized testing driven education, than pretty much anywhere else in the world.

I suspect if you asked someone to perform long division, or adding large numbers with decimals and carry overs by hand, instead, the non US countries would perform far better than Americans, who may not even have been taught how to do that.

akomtu3• 5 years ago

Three reasons: timezones, language barrier and legal barrier. First two are clear. As for the last one, if you do anything remotely important and sensitive to your business, you don't want a dude from Bogota to have access to your project.

Edit. I should add that if your project really matters, the dude from Bogota will be a spy or a blackhat with nearly complete certainty. He will be well spoken, likeable, presentable, competent, he will even appear to believe in your company values and will ask for a very moderate salary. And you will brag about how you've got such a superstar for 10% of going payrate here, except that one day he'll stop responding to emails after having collected all the info he needed.

void_mint5• 5 years ago

If your job in SFO can be done from Sacramento or Portland, why can’t it be done from Manila? Or Warsaw?

In theory, nothing. In practice, a dramatic reduction in quality.

And don’t fool yourself, that developer in Colombia is just as talented but can work for half the cost.

Again in theory, yes. In practice, not usually.

sneak• 5 years ago

In theory, nothing. In practice, a dramatic reduction in quality.

There are talented and smart people in every country.

There are also tons of low quality, low experience, cheap devs in the US, just like the countries you seem to be maligning.

This really seems like simple racism to me.

atatatat• 5 years ago

The average developer in country A isn't always as talented as the average developer in country B.

Always outliers, but environment and opportunity fuckin matter.

and customer service positions in phone banks, it'll never be 1:1 due to colloquial lack of familiarity with non country A dialects.

fourseventy• 5 years ago

Language barrier, time zone difference, these are real things

commandlinefan• 5 years ago

why not Bogota? Or Buenos Aries?

Language, for one - although there are fluent English speakers in Colombia and Argentina, there are far fewer there than in the US.

thomaskcr• 5 years ago

We've been hiring in Panama and its not cheaper really at the end of the day but there's a lot more people to hire. I might do 10 interviews for a position there and find someone vs over 50 in the US and not find anyone.

In the past two years, it seems like the only quality US candidates come from active recruitment - job ads do not seem to produce a high quality of applicant. Even after initial screening I still get people who can't parse a simple CSV applying for senior dev positions (you can use google, you get full credit if you copy-paste from stack overflow, you get full credit if you launch into a monologue about how parsing CSVs seems simple but there are a lot of hidden pitfalls, you can use any language you want, you can use a library or read the file and parse line by line and split (no trick cells with commas, all numeric), it's not meant to be a hard test). Some of the interviews are just brutal.

So really the only difference I've been experiencing is it's a lot easier to passively recruit in less competitive markets (specifically overseas), in the US I have to spend a lot more time ensuring I do things like volunteering for pitch event mentorship so I can find people I can encourage to interview for us or keep in contact with so I can actively recruit them if they don't enjoy their job.

paulryanrogers• 5 years ago

Keep it to a nearby time zone, call it "near shore", quietly pay less than half the in-country rate.

phist_mcgee• 5 years ago

In Australia, people have referred to hiring Tasmanian developers (an island state several hundreds KMs off the Australian mainland) as near-shoring. Culturally identical, economically ~30% cheaper than the major cities.

bediger4000• 5 years ago

This makes great sense in the economic sense (at least maybe short-term) but what about the contradiction between demanding people show up to offices, then laying them off because the work can be done cheaper elsewhere?

This contradiction makes executive personnel decisions look like the execs choose personal power over their employees every time.

akomtu3• 5 years ago

That would be an amazing discovery if it's true.

aynyc3• 5 years ago

We saw this a few times over the last two decades. This is just another form of offshore outsourcing. It failed every time. My personal take? Culture, as in American culture. I worked with internationals people my entire career. American culture is very different than other countries. Be mindful that it’s different, not better or worse. That difference can be overwhelming to the middle management.

TheAdamAndChe• 5 years ago

In your experience, how is American culture different?

aynyc3• 5 years ago

Americans tend to speak their minds more freely than others. Just in general, we tend to speak what's on our mind, and that can create some discomfort and confusion. When I run design meetings, I really have to call on engineers who are non-Americans to speak up, otherwise, they won't add their contributions. Now, it might be language barrier, or cultural upbringing, but I saw this in Europeans as well as Asians.

This cultural issue with management tends to bring up "whiteness", but most middle management in Finance/Tech are older white males, many of them are totally awesome, but majority of them lack cultural understandings and "offshoring" can create massive frictions.

valdiorn• 5 years ago

I'm an expat from a Nordic country who moved to the UK, working with very mutlicultural teams. I took up managing a remote team in Poland recently. I completely agree!

It's ALL about culture. Do your employees and co-workers share your values? Do they have the same priorities as you and the company? Do they overshare or undershare when they have problems?

Different cultures have very different expectations of how you talk to your peers. Some of the SE-Asian people I've worked with will work very hard but never ask clarifying questions, so they might slave away for a week building the wrong thing unless you check in on them. The Polish people I've worked with are straight shooters and always ask really good questions. They're very blunt but great to work with. The Brits are more cautious but generally do a good job, but they're formal to a fault. The Americans are the worst for "toeing the company line". To me they come off as insincere suck-ups, but I know it's just the culture. I myself enjoy being the slightly loony "weird foreign guy" on the office. I'm quite blunt and tell jokes at inopportune times to troll the Brits :) - but ONLY if I know everyone there knows me well and understands my style of humour.

It's all fine if you know your team intimately but unless you know the culture, that new guy who joins you remote is going to be a pain to work with, and they also won't understand what's expected of them, making it difficult for them to do a good job. I've also found that a lot of people who've never left their original environment (i.e. never worked abroad) are totally deaf to this and will always interpret cultural differences as insubordination or arrogance.

If you're going to effectively manage a multi-national team you need to very quickly gauge people's style of working and communicating or you're doomed to fail.

aynyc3• 5 years ago

I see that you share my sick sense of joy when trolling the Brits, especially about their football team.

dkobia• 5 years ago

Depending on the sensitivity of your project or for compliance purposes, background checks might be necessary. The efficacy of doing this with global employees is questionable at best. That said it is possible to design siloed systems that grant access based on trust.

tupac_speedrap• 5 years ago

I've worked with non-native English speakers before and I think some people underestimate how much jargon and dialect that native English speakers use on a daily basis that people that live in non-English speaking countries don't get exposed to.

For example saying: "how are you getting on?" seems to be a rarer expression than simply asking "how are you?" and is more difficult for non-native speakers to parse, of course they can learn specific British and American expressions, dialect and office jargon but it's another hurdle to communication.

Don't call it 'outsourcing': Hiring employees globally is getting easier

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