> How does a change in work culture tip the scales in any meaningful way? Especially compared to that?
Two ways:
First, when everyone is remote, it puts everyone on an equal footing. When you have mixed onsite and remote resourcing it's much easier for a divide to creep in.
Second, the technology to support true remote work really accelerated during the pandemic and feels practical in a way that it hadn't before.
Large companies in any industry are generally not trendsetters but laggards because they have so much invested in the systems they already have in place. Moving all of Google or Microsoft remote is a daunting task. Starting a new company fully remote and then growing to Google or Microsoft's scale is much more practical and I think something we'll see over the next 10 to 15 years.
>Large companies in any industry are generally not trendsetters but laggards because they have so much invested in the systems they already have in place. Moving all of Google or Microsoft remote is a daunting task. Starting a new company fully remote and then growing to Google or Microsoft's scale is much more practical and I think something we'll see over the next 10 to 15 years.
Yeah, but Google and Microsoft both already have offices in India. They have logistics and infrastructure that have been in place not just for years, but for 2 decades. Nonetheless, latest figures I could pull for Microsoft's total headcount in India was 18,000. Impressive, until you consider that they employ 238,000 employees.
I'm not saying it's curious that they haven't gone fully remote by now. What I'm saying is that it's curious that their talent pool isn't more evenly distributed across the globe despite the fact that they've had a 20 year head start.
Sure, large companies aren't trendsetters, but by this point outsourcing is pretty conservative. Just within tech alone it was something that was talked about in the very early 2000s.
Regarding the two points you bring up, agree in that it makes hiring globally distributed talent easier. It's no longer inconvenient to make special accommodations for an employee in LatAm when you're making the same accommodations as everyone else.
Nonetheless, you still have companies that were fully-distributed and fully-remote well before it became trendy. They made the same special accommodations for everyone. The technology available at the time was already good enough to allow them to hire talent from anywhere across the globe. Even so in many cases it's the exception rather than the rule that their employees live in a low CoL country rather than a high one. Most of the employees tend to work either in the US or Europe. Take any prominent company that's been remote since the early 2010s, look at their about page, you generally see this trend.
Two ways:
First, when everyone is remote, it puts everyone on an equal footing. When you have mixed onsite and remote resourcing it's much easier for a divide to creep in.
Second, the technology to support true remote work really accelerated during the pandemic and feels practical in a way that it hadn't before.
Large companies in any industry are generally not trendsetters but laggards because they have so much invested in the systems they already have in place. Moving all of Google or Microsoft remote is a daunting task. Starting a new company fully remote and then growing to Google or Microsoft's scale is much more practical and I think something we'll see over the next 10 to 15 years.