Agreed. The "worst" I see happening is some US tech jobs will go to Canada, since the time zones are "compatible" and culture is similar. People from Central and South America will get in the game somewhat as well, but I still think cultural and language barriers cause enough problems that there's still a bit of a moat.
We've already been offshoring to Asia and Eastern Europe for decades now, and even though we should have a good handle on what does and doesn't work by now, I still see companies making the same mistakes, and either having to pull back, or just fail and be too blinded by hubris to figure out why.
As someone from a second-tier Canadian city that had relatively few tech employers, this has definitely been a boon. Previously there was one game in town, and they attracted talent with a fancy office and above-market salaries for the region. I left after a couple years and joined a bay area startup remotely for a ~30% pay raise, and several of my former coworkers have as well. The company in question is suffering from a brain drain as old-time employees leave for greener pastures, and they struggle to attract international talent - because they didn't have much cross-polination with other tech companies in the past, there's a ton of NIH built by very smart new grads with no real world experience, and experienced engineers tend to take off once they realize the extent of the problems.
Language and cultural barriers are not a problem if you hire people to directly work in the team.
They are not problem if you do hiring directly and select right people.
Biggest problem is that companies want to hire bunch of worm bodies and dump trash tasks on them.
Managers expect that they will be able to throw vague requirements and bunch of people who are not part of their company will figure out what to do. What is especially funny that bad things happen even with people inside companies when manager tries to just throw vague requirements at dev team.
It is also problem with big "software houses" where you hire bunch of people - nowadays people have good internet at homes are much more conscious and one can hire specialists directly from other country and skip BS providers.
>They are not problem if you do hiring directly and select right people.
Hiring directly in other countries is difficult for all but the biggest companies (who probably already have offices in those countries and have been hiring in those countries for years).
Not if you hire sole proprietor. You just have to pay such person an invoice like you would buy something from abroad.
I work in Poland for company from the Netherlands and I know other people who have "single person company" that are working for companies in UK and US. I even did some work for company based in UAE.
You just have to spend time looking where to find such people. Then of course you have to do trial period to see if they won't flake out but that would be the same as if you would hire someone from US.
We have contractors in the US as well. But we also have labor laws that govern who can be considered a contractor, as do other countries. It’s more complex than this, but in general treating someone like an employee and paying them as a contractor isn’t legal. If this arrangement gets popular enough to disrupt the labor market, you can expect more enforcement actions.
Regardless of any actual enforcement, most US companies don’t want to deal with the potential issues of getting tangled up in foreign labor disputes, or getting tangled up in foreign courts over IP disputes.
time zones are probably the biggest issue i see coming up.
as someone in PST/PDT with a sleep disorder, its pretty easy to work with east coast people. i've had a boss in the UK before and it worked because he was okay with ending his day with a 6pm meeting his time. but working with people on india time is going to be a mess one way or the other.
All the qualified Canadians move to the USA for USA incomes. Canada is going to be an immigration station for people companies want to bring in but can't get US visas for. Its already a thing.
This is already slightly out of date. Lots of Bay Area companies hiring in Canada and boosting salaries across the board + RSU grants. The wave started just before COVID and job openings are exploding.
shopify is literally hiring kids still in school at Carleton and Yorke to fill their teams through their devdegree program because they can't get enough graduated and qualified coders who want to stay in canada.
That isn't bad in and of itself, merely that they're having so much trouble hiring they need to programs with multiple universities to get people to stay working for them. They have undergraduate students working on production - its not normal.
Like in America, few Canadians are ever going to move more than 50 km from where they were born and raised. Your precious jobs are still safe for the right kinds of people.
I think this really isn't true for people who go into 'professional' careers. People who are in high-paying white-collar jobs are fairly willing to move.
We've already been offshoring to Asia and Eastern Europe for decades now, and even though we should have a good handle on what does and doesn't work by now, I still see companies making the same mistakes, and either having to pull back, or just fail and be too blinded by hubris to figure out why.