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440 points pseudolus | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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fibers ◴[] No.45052852[source]
The accounting note is not true in the traditional sense. The field in the US is just getting offshored to India/PH/Eastern Europe for better or for worse. There is even a big push to lower the educational requirements to attain licensure in the US (Big 4 partners want more bodies and are destroying the pipeline for US students). Audit quality will continue to suffer and public filers will issue bunk financials if they aren't properly attested to.
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raincole ◴[] No.45059205[source]
It's amusing to see programmers in the US promoting remote work.

Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?

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jedberg ◴[] No.45060070[source]
> what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?

I've worked with remote workers from around the world. Let me preface by saying there are of course exceptions but:

What I've found is that most often Americans exhibit self-starting and creativity. What I mean by that is non-us workers are great if you give them a specific task, even a really hard task.

But if you give them a nebulous problem, or worse, a business outcome, they tend to perform much more poorly. And I rarely see non-americans say something like "I think our customers would like it if we added X to the product, can I work on that?".

I don't think it's because Americans are better at this -- I think it's cultural. America has a much higher risk tolerance than the rest of the world. Failing is considered a good thing in the USA. And the USA is much more entrepreneurial than the rest of the world.

These two things combined create a culture difference that makes a business difference.

Additionally, what I've found is that the exceptions tend to move here because their risk taking is much more acceptable here (or they are risk takers willing to move across the world, hard to say which way the causation goes).

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laughing_man ◴[] No.45060365[source]
>What I've found is that only Americans exhibit self-starting and creativity.

Isn't that mostly a function of how incentives are aligned? I had a job with a lot of outsourcing to India. The Indians were given specific bits of code to write. They didn't even know how their code fit into the application.

Their entire incentive structure was geared toward getting them to write those bits of code as quickly as possible, finish, and take another task. There just wasn't any room for "self-starting and creativity".

I have a feeling if the entire application had been moved to India things would have been different.

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jedberg ◴[] No.45060562[source]
It could be. But I worked at companies where we had full time employees all around the world, all of whom had full access to the same information the rest of us had. And I still saw this behavior generally. There were of course exceptions.

Interestingly the biggest exceptions were ones that had at some point lived and worked in the USA, and then had returned to their home country for some reason or another.

> I have a feeling if the entire application had been moved to India things would have been different.

I had direct experience with this. We had an office of full time employees in India tasked with a project, but I still had to hand hold them through most of the key decisions (which I didn't have to do with the US based teams nearly as much).

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1. rompic ◴[] No.45061848{5}[source]
IBM / Hofstede has a lot of studies on this.