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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday April 04 2017, @11:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the flock-that dept.

Politicians and economists lament that certain alpha regions — SF, LA, NYC, Boston, Toronto, London, Paris — attract all the best jobs while becoming repellently expensive, reducing economic mobility and contributing to further bifurcation between haves and have-nots. But why don't the best jobs move elsewhere?

Of course, many of them can't. The average financier in NYC or London (until Brexit annihilates London's banking industry, of course...) would be laughed out of the office, and not invited back, if they told their boss they wanted to henceforth work from Chiang Mai.

But this isn't true of (much of) the software field. The average web/app developer might have such a request declined; but they would not be laughed at, or fired. The demand for good developers greatly outstrips supply, and in this era of Skype and Slack, there's nothing about software development that requires meatspace interactions.

[...]Some people will tell you that remote teams are inherently less effective and productive than localized ones, or that "serendipitous collisions" are so important that every employee must be forced to the same physical location every day so that these collisions can be manufactured. These people are wrong, as long as the team in question is small — on the order of handfuls, dozens or scores, rather than hundreds or thousands — and flexible.

Because the feedlot isn't hiring for Ruby?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2017, @02:10AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 05 2017, @02:10AM (#488959)

    We went with the big offshore companies and a few small ones. The contractor companies do. not. care. If your project eats it then 'oh well'. They may even comp your money back. But you have lost 6 months of time with nothing but a kiss and a promise. We tried pair programming them, intense waterfall, agile, 24/7 rotation monitoring, micromanaging, everything. We could not get these companies to deliver quality. We would have to re-QA the whole project and double the dev time. We gave up on it. It may work for others but it did not for us. Everything internal was doing good we were able to manage that.