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Google went from you have to be in Mountain View at least three days a week to do this job to you can do it from India and Mexico in less than a year.
@carnage4life The arguments for #BTW were disingenuous. If workers had any power to act on it, fraudulent.
@carnage4life Wait, did they make this decision for labour day to support international unionisation efforts?
@odoruhako @carnage4life That's not until September though? (The US has its own labor day holiday on a different day, because acknowledging May 1st would be communism or something)
@carnage4life Hypocrites no doubt, but it does underscore the point that a remote worker sitting in the U.S. will struggle to compete with a remote worker sitting in Mexico.
@cford @carnage4life they shouldn’t be in competition at all. Their boss is the one with the problem.
@manchicken @carnage4life I'm afraid in the long run, they are in economic competition. And all other things being equal, a remote worker in Mexico offers an identical service to a remote worker in the US. Wouldn't that lead to wage convergence between the two?
@cford @manchicken @carnage4life well we and Google’s executives are going to find out in a few months why one is paid more than the other and why some core stuff shouldn’t be offshored. I hope you are ready for some randomly catastrophic broken updates in your favorite Google products/services.
@ppn @manchicken @carnage4life I will very happily depend on the excellence of Mexican and Indian engineers - as I no doubt already am given how international the tech workforce in the US is.
@cford @ppn @carnage4life absolutely! Solidarity and collegiality should be the norm.
@ppn @cford @carnage4life yeah, I imagine there will be issues. I’m sure they’ll figure it out, there are a lot of talented people in Mexico and India. Country of origin is a notoriously bad predictor of talent and competence.
@carnage4life @manchicken @cford I think Chris and you slightly misread what I mean. I come from one of the countries where a lot of tech companies usually off-shore their devs and engineers and saw the shoddy local formation outside of reputable schools. In a world where remote work is still not the norm, most of the talented ones have already tried to emigrate either to study or to work. Executives are going to get “exactly” what they paid for.
@ppn @carnage4life @manchicken Ah, apologies if I misconstrued. In my experience, there is a big gap between offshoring well i.e. respecting the talent and creativity of the offshore workers, and offshoring badly i.e. treating them as order-takers.
@manchicken @cford @carnage4life from my first-hand experience I have not seen a single company I work for do the right thing. Executives all went for cheap order-takers from consulting companies that do a horrible job of hiring the right profil and giving them the adequate formation. Also often underestimating language barrier and time zones. After a year or 2 of things going off the rail, they are quick to give up and blame anyone but themselves.
@ppn @cford @carnage4life a person can do what is right. In the long run, a company can only do what is profitable.
@cford @carnage4life they aren’t in economic competition, their employers are. There’s no need for us to internalize the positions of our employers.
@manchicken @carnage4life A nice distinction, especially on May 1st.
@cford @carnage4life indeed. Happy worker’s day.
@cford @manchicken @carnage4life 25 years in the industry here… pace of wage convergence is about the same as the pace of trickle down economics! So no! At the slightest sign of that they will go further off… until they are in North Korea 
@piofthings @cford what are you saying? Sorry, I didn’t understand your remarks.
@manchicken @cford Chris here was talking about wage convergence, referring to the notion that if more and more tech jobs move to Mexico the wages in Mexico will move closer and closer to wages in US… and my point is, that never happens… they keep shipping the job off to cheaper and cheaper places…
@piofthings @cford ah; thanks for that. I agree with you, I appreciate the clarification.
@cford I turned down a pre-IPO job offer from Google because they wouldn’t allow me to commute 3 days a week from somewhere nearer Davis, California (where Dawn could have gotten a faculty position) than Mountain View.
It’s my opinion I dodged a bullet. I think I’d have ended up a richer but less happy person if I’d accepted.
@carnage4life We learned we didn't need to be in the office during the pandemic.
Businesses learned they don't need to pay the local salaries to get the same amount of work done, and can save on rent in the process.
It wasn't the work/life balance revolution we thought it was going to be.
As it turns out, the labor pool in the Bay area isn't actually that much better than elsewhere. At least, it's not better enough to justify the salary disparity.
@lucas @carnage4life Indont habe a problem with those base points - it should be an incentive to companies to save money on office space rent and coastal salaries. That’s why they do it, and I’m here for it. Just wish more were doing do
@carnage4life If a company is building the largest campus building outside its HQ, then it must be staffed. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/telangana/google-to-have-largest-campus-outside-of-us-in-hyderabad/article65362919.ece
@carnage4life “immigrants are taking American jobs!” UHHH, No. American CEOs are increasing their profits by firing Americans and replacing them with cheaper workers overseas. It isn’t the government’s fault. Personally I’m glad that Biden is financially incentivizing corporations to keep jobs in the US.
@carnage4life Geez. Whatever happened to "Do no evil?"
It was "don't be evil". And then they scrubbed it so hard that people started misremembering it in all sorts of ways and the "Mandela effect" urban legend arrived from the future, Meltdown-style.
@carnage4life From an office, though.
@carnage4life
It's just about making money and then making even more money! 
Gulotta @carnage4life I don't need to tell you that it was all designed to reduce workforce size
@carnage4life To be fair, they never walked back the you have to be in Mountain View at least three days a week part. /s
@carnage4life well, I'm pretty sure those teams in India and Mexico are going to be going to their offices. Google seems OK with inter team distribution, but not intra team distribution?
@carnage4life @tanepiper “Don’t be evil.“