I respectfully think you overestimate the impact this will have.
Like with the H1-B cap discussions there were murmurs about some time back (Not actually reducing the cap, but instead priority-weighting it by salary instead of difficulty to fill the position, something that'd actually _hurt_ US workers in the positions they can actually compete and be paid well for) this change feels a lot more like a performative money grab than something that will actually change the economics.
Indian headcount is not 25% cheaper for the roles I've seen it used for. It is integer-N cheaper, where N can sometimes be >3-5. Additionally, there simply is not the functional, social, or business infrastructure to spin up a new 10k person business center overnight in the US, meaning that for many use cases even if individual labor is findable, it's not realistic in the same respect.
If anything my fear (and what I've observed thus far) is that businesses will see overseas staffing as critical enough that the cuts will come out of the highest cost center: US employment.
We can try it and see what happens. If the results are suboptimal, the taxes on offshoring can be cranked up. In theory, corporations are forced to operate in a market governed by voters and their representatives, and the resulting policy. We expect citizens to follow laws, why not companies? Why would they get a free pass to evade the spirit of the law (out of “cost efficiency” and shareholder profits)? Keep the corporate labor spend in the country or make the business suffer economically.
Companies can hire remote domestically, the talent exists in the US. There is no need to spin up hubs for thousands of people to drive to offices to Zoom from. If you want access to the market, you can hire in the market.
While "try it and see what happens" may work for low-risk efforts, the costs and chaos associated with this in a system as complex as global employment seems eminently short-sighted. We've already seen how "Try it and see what happens" works for tariffs, have we not?
To your point of cranking it up, I argue that there simply is not a clearing cost that makes US labor viable for many of these positions in the modern world without effectively rendering that service non-viable or dropping US worker purchasing power by a similar multiplier to the salary gap.
In that respect, last I heard, voters and representatives were _viscerally_ opposed to anything that sounded like "Degrowth" which would be the practical outcome of such a policy. (Not making a personal statement here beyond addressing your theory)
In short, my thesis is that if we really want to fix the offshoring issue, there are fundamentally more significant issues that need to be addressed, and absent fixing those, we're only harming ourselves.
Edit: your parent post substantially changed in between my response and now, so I'll address it as currently stands as well:
I'm not sure where "spirit of the law" comes in vs. being a convenient phrase for whatever is being advocated for. I've seen it used innumerably on this very site to defend pushback against worker protections for the last decade in defense of duty to shareholders, certainly.
There is no law that dictates fiscal decisions without regard for practical outcome; that's just bad policy. We appear to not even expect our executive to follow laws at this moment, so the rest of your statement seems to be even more of a non-sequitur. The business-as-a-conceptual-entity will not "suffer" as it's not a human being as much as we'd like the schadenfreude. While it may take a hit in revenue, it has the ability to act globally, it has the ability to shift costs, individuals do not have nearly as much ability to arbitrage, and often have their hands forced.
(Look at how UPS is dramatically raising their fees, and will likely profit substantially despite reduced volume. Who is hurting there, the business or the people?)
I'm also not sure what your statement about zoom is in respect to; these business centers are often self-contained entire LOB or call center vs. working across borders. Just on a basis of population, companies like india can provide services that are not realistic for the US , and we are now taxing ourselves for needing to take advantage of that in a globally competitive environment.
(It feels weird to be arguing this since I'm largely pro-supporting-local-labor-markets, and extremely pro-labor broadly, but frankly this is just counterproductive legislation and not the way to go about it. We need to lean on our comparative advantages, not cut off our hand to spite our face.
To make this even more explicit with an example: I would not have this argument were the legislation targeted at specific tactical sectors where the US currently has a meaningful moat or margin, and were an all-out ban against offshoring within those sectors alongside concrete measures to support onshoring, vs. a tactlessly-broad half-measure.)
While tone on the internet admittedly makes it hard to tell if your comment was tongue-in-cheek, I'm going to take this in good faith and express my appreciation that you even read through that entire ramble above :)
My comment was genuine, and I read every reply in their entirety. I also reference them as citations in my notes in some cases, such as your comment. I appreciate the discourse.
I've appreciated reading your posts broadly/for years prior to this as well, so definitely same statement back your way. If you're ever in the PNW, beers/coffee is on me.
Chiming in with a slightly different perspective: I often bookmark things I see in passing that might not be useful now but may in the future based on things I know I want to do.
Case studies in certain engineering/programming tasks, something I read that I found useful and want to have handy to share with others in the future, project ideas or notes for long-running efforts I pursue and sometimes want a "bucket to pull from" for instance.
While it's certainly true that I probably _use_ 10-20% of what I bookmark, I don't think it would be possible to realize the same positive outcomes without the 80% that I don't. (Just last week I was able to braindump a large piles of 'examples/essays I found helpful learning about neural network optimization' to one of my engineers because I'd kept them handy after they helped me.)
I should say though, I sense this is a slightly different use case than the "I want to read this article just to read it" bookmarks where I know I never will, which is certainly something I've experienced but is a minority case in my life nowadays, so I wanted to vouch for productive scenarios too.
While I normally keep the political threads at arms length, this is an interesting enough game/voting-theory question that I'm honestly surprised no one has linked the fact that this is a well-studied effect, to the point that it has a specific name: Duverger's Law. [0]
I take a very mechanical view on this, but take this with a grain of salt as my success has been "banal" at best. You have people paying you for your product. This is more fit than most people achieve.
Some good advice I heard is to find and focus on a KPI that aligns with the sort of use that'd indicate healthy consumption of your product+costs, with a guiding principle of "if people are paying us and using it with a trendline moving the right direction, we're succeeding."
Have you thought about what you'd need to do to get more users/get more eyes? (Presuming you've proven enough traction+lack of churn from existing users that it wouldn't be premature) Similarly, are you talking to users who find value in your product and identifying ways you could provide more value?
I personally see tons of potential avenues for growth given what you've said; but obviously saying this ignorant of much of the reality on the ground so take it with a major grain of salt.
Ok, that's a good point. We are offering 2 week free trial, so I think we will know a little more next week. We have been using ads to drive traffic to our site. We are spending like $2 per sign-up and not sure how sustainable it will be in long run. We are thinking of conferences or community events where we can meet more users. We want to talk to more users and get more feedback, but I'm not sure how to approach this.
This is a bit orthogonal to the broader conversation, but you've hooked me with your predicament: Can you allow for preorders or "Expressed interest" at a new price point? (or at a hand-wavy price point to assess interest re: overhead/bulk/etc.) If tariffs come down, you can refund/credit, but for customers who wanted this, something-at-some-price may be better than nothing-at-any-price.
I'm going to disagree with this as a long-term ARPG fan and a long-since-washed-up game dev.
Up through the last few years, I was playing Path of Exile rather regularly. The grind in that game puts what we used to do in D2 to shame, to me at least.
(Comparing the amount of time I used to spend baal/cow/key/pindle running to gear a character sufficiently for e.g. ubers vs. what I'd consider equiv endgame bosses in POE from tree-boosted maven/Sirus/ubers/etc, outside of explicitly low-gear bossers like trapping)
I also regularly wish I could go _Back_ to playing it, specifically 1.13-1.15 (harvest) as it was, in my opinion, the peak of ARPG gameplay, as it turned progression from pure RNG where a wrong roll would brick an item or where you had to rely on the market to find your gear into something slightly less punishing where we could experiment with a far wider variety of builds. But the powers that be in POE saw it differently, that it watered down the endgame and made progression too easy, and proceeded to remove the vast bulk of the mechanic, while doubling down on other mechanics that were, frankly, not respectful of anyone's time. (e.g. scourge.)
This to say, I think game incentives have changed over the last few decades. Something subtle, motivated by microtransactions, subscriptions and streamers, has changed the nature of grind from primarily something that needs to be kept fun to make the game meaty enough to play, to something that must sufficiently extend gameplay to keep the microtransaction faucet going and keep certain goals effectively out of reach.
As another hybrid "TLM->EM" with a similarly sized team, over a similarly sized product, I definitely feel many of the same pain points you call out.
BUT. And I say this with all respect, since I broadly find a lot of value in your comments: I strongly disagree to your assertion that remote "is less efficient."
My theory to what is happening is that there are existing methodologies people are used to working in, including 'hacks' to build consensus that were developed in an in-person environment. (Namely, pulling a bunch of people into a room and arguing it out.) My perspective is that remote work makes a bunch of things that are just as critical in-person (shared documentation, good communication channels, trust and rapport, etc etc) non-optional, and your previous hacks far less effective. But I don't see this as a bad thing. If anything, it's like a strongly typed language: It forces you into a more effective pathway. (For instance, imagine how remote folks or even folks-just-not-around-at-the-moment felt in not being able to participate evenly in the "in-person-bash-it-out" sessions or hallway chats without a strong culture of proliferating knowledge and documentation?)
While you may reasonably say "Ok, that's fine, people built up methodologies, why flip it on its head and disrupt a status quo that works" to which I'd emphasize the "we were relying on suboptimal ways to build consensus, and it was a local maxima." I would also propose that I believe a good manager _HAS_ to change their methodologies in some ways more disruptively than just the local/remote shift when dealing with certain styles of employee, (their own) manager, and org+busines structure/process/incentives, and as such, this should just be part and parcel with the constant process of adapting to refine your own methods and style.
(As an aside, I was tempted to make this comment on your upstream comment[0] talking about "maybe I'm not actually succeeding, it feels like winning at a fucked up system" since I definitely feel you there. I got into management in large part out of a "I'm frustrated by how management is often done and how it ends up percolating down to ICs, and I want to put my money where my mouth is that there's a better approach", and while I definitely feel like I've succeeded in some respects, and continue to get "rewarded" as you say, I'm intimately aware that I'm likely still screwing things up/finding the optimal way to balance pathological incentives, and still have a ton to learn. In short, I'd not be surprised if both of us are "doing fine but still have blind spots," so please take my above just as one person's opinions/"attempt to draw the elephant" :) )
I will admit your response gave me a little whiplash :P
When I started reading I was getting very ready to disagree vehemently ("remote work is overhyped and only works for a tiny sliver of the workforce")
But your last paragraph seems to describe far more what I've seen in reality; that it's often risk-aversion/not-wanting-to-commit-to-change/leaning-on-what-they-know/wanting-to-look-like-they're-doing-something that I've seen driving RTO in various locations. This hypothesis is supported by, as you point out, the increasing, albeit incrementally, list of companies and teams that have implemented remote successfully (my own included, obviously only speaking for myself/not for my employer).
So, to be clear, I don't think you're wrong that there's intentional focus on communication and collaboration that is _absolutely_ needed to make remote work, and that's harder for someone who doesn't know what that looks like (or for someone junior without experience working in that modality).
HOWEVER I would object to is the assertion that it's "overhyped and only works for a tiny sliver of the workforce."
Since starting to lead remote teams ~5 years back (after having been a dev on one for a few years prior) the delta between remote vs. in-person has been a _negligible_ friction point vs. much more "typical" aspects of management: Individual work habits, motivations, life externalities, team and org dynamic, "standard" disagreement or conflict, etc.
I'd be lying if I said the remote aspect was zero cost, but not only was much of it recouped in building better processes as you may have suggested above, but this enabled both hiring some amazing folks who likely wouldn't have been options if we only looked local, and supporting all of our lives with significantly increased flexibility, both in terms of personal life and in things like time-zone based coverage for outages and on-call. All-in-all, a massive benefit.
(Obvious disclaimer all views are my own and not my employer's)
First, let me say that I don't disagree, pragmatically, with the truth of what you're saying, in terms of increasing your odds on the whole as a candidate.
But that said, as another hiring manager, let me respectfully disagree with this as a strong hiring signal. I say this, to boot, as an engineer with an, in my experience, above average OSS contribution, research, and patent portfolio, although these things are a bit power-law-esque so obviously I'm nothing next to many.
When I interview, I want to know you have a track record of high quality delivery, and are good for the skills you attest to. I can understand some folks looking at the public displays as a proxy to that, but I'd argue, at that point, indexing on the "public" part is orthogonal to what we're looking for it to display, and carries both false positives and negatives.
To some degree we may be agreeing loudly here, where you'd say "well that's what them putting it in public is" but I'd worry that by caring about the public component vs. a more generalized examination of professionalism and accomplishment, we preclude folks who have no time or interest in curating that sort of profile.
If I put myself into the absolute edge case of two candidates all things being equal but one seems to have also made a more visible portfolio of work, MAYBE, MAYBE that would move the needle in terms of establishing a degree of external validation, but I think I'd be looking _hard_ for other aspects to differentiate that would seem to have more direct applicability to our day-to-day needs, and am hard pressed to think of a time in the last few hundred interviews I've had to make such a choice without a stronger differentiator for any candidate above a very junior level.
Documenting everything ruthlessly (meeting summaries, action items, personal knowledge, TODOs, passing thoughts ala things I want to discuss with peers, etc) in a centralized and easily searchable/cross-linkable/organizable fashion.
Build this doc repo as well as the TODO component within it for absolutely minimal mental overhead. In fact, optimize for minimal mental overhead in all things, and ability to reenter/pick up where you left off effectively "on autopilot." This (low mental overhead, reentrency) applies to things like email triage as well.
I realize this is both very terse and very open ended, but it's really the crux of my ability to deal with exponential levels of randomization, complexity, and parallel tasks. If there's any "Secret sauce" this doesn't contain, it's the need to adjust your systems/organization/methods to whatever is "natural" for you (this perhaps goes hand in hand with low mental overhead and reentrency, even the process must be low-overhead and easily 'reentrent', for instance, preparing for forgetting where I put something, I should know my own tendencies for where I'd look such that I buid my organization upfront that I'd readily find it again.)
I'll cap this with one more meta item before I turn this into an essay: Retrospect. regularly ask yourself "how are things? how is what I'm doing? can it be improved? has anything gone wrong/should I be paying attention to anything I'm not? are there any questions I'm not asking?"
Like with the H1-B cap discussions there were murmurs about some time back (Not actually reducing the cap, but instead priority-weighting it by salary instead of difficulty to fill the position, something that'd actually _hurt_ US workers in the positions they can actually compete and be paid well for) this change feels a lot more like a performative money grab than something that will actually change the economics.
Indian headcount is not 25% cheaper for the roles I've seen it used for. It is integer-N cheaper, where N can sometimes be >3-5. Additionally, there simply is not the functional, social, or business infrastructure to spin up a new 10k person business center overnight in the US, meaning that for many use cases even if individual labor is findable, it's not realistic in the same respect.
If anything my fear (and what I've observed thus far) is that businesses will see overseas staffing as critical enough that the cuts will come out of the highest cost center: US employment.