this post was submitted on 02 May 2024
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Even during the height of the pandemic, a friend of mine found a 'reason' that they had to be in the office one day each week (usually Friday, because almost no one else was there on Fridays). Their reasoning was, "If I can do my job entirely from the comfort of my own living room, there's nothing that would prevent the company from hiring someone to do my job from the comfort of their own living room, in India or the Philippines."
There isn't a reason the company couldn't hire someone to do their job from an office in India or the Philippines either though.
Availability of talent used to be the traditional issue. Judging from the current trend of growing teams in these areas, either the talent pool has been growing there or the outsourced jobs are not the talent seeking ones. India, especially, has a low reputation as an outsourcing target.
Outsourcing was a thing way before the pandemic, but it was always a failure for, they never dared replace us when they noticed the bad results.
To be fair there are still a bunch of other aspects that may prevent even full remote jobs to be outsourced to other countries. Among others: language skills, time zone differences, cultural differences, legal frameworks and probably many more.
To give an example for issues that may arise from these differences:
An employee might cost your german company triple the salary in Germany compared to India. On paper it seems like an easy choice, you just outsource and even if you have to pay 2 person to do the job you still save money. But suddenly you run into many problems:
They will likely not speak German and maybe not even great English. This might be irrelevant for the actual work to be done. But do they exactly understand what the task is, can they give accurate feedback, can they make use of existing resources or do those need to be translated, can they communicate with the rest of the company or your customers?
They work in different time zones. And while most remote work is probably time agnostic, meetings with other team members, departments or your customers suddenly become much harder to schedule.
Their culture might be different. So e.g. they might not be as straight forward when running into problems and instead try to hide them, which will mean everything looks fine until the house of cards suddenly crumbles.
Having employees in different countries means you will need to have different workflows for hr to deal with contracts, payrolls, retirement plans, health insurance and so on. Also how does the other country handle IP, patents and non compete clauses? Could the employee just walk away and start their own business or go to your competitor? Or in reverse can you ensure that they e.g. don't copy/paste code from somewhere else ignoring licenses.
That's one of the reasons I went into a field of technology where the work is mostly hands-on.
Hardware maintenence, troubleshooting, installation and repair isn't something that can effectively be done remotely.
Clever human!