I can't believe he skipped over the real elephant in the offshoring room - the time difference. All of those countries have almost no overlap with any part of the United States. If we schedule an 8 AM CST meeting with India (which is super early for some of the people here), it's already 7 PM at night there, and they're completely exhausted and ready to go home. And that's _if_ you can schedule a meeting far enough in advance that somebody else hasn't already taken up that precious 8 AM spot... usually you'll have to go out later in their day, sometimes as late as 10 PM there. Which really hurts when you consider how many of them rely on public transportation... which stops running before 10 PM. I've been told that some people have ended up sleeping in the office rather than push back on a very late meeting request.
My wife once worked for an Australian company which was having enterprise software customized by an Indian company. The time zone was definitely an issue, compounded by the fact that (due to rush hour and other factors) the Indian company kept relatively late office hours (~10am to 7pm local time).
The net effect was that if she sent an email during the day, the earliest she could expect a response from the Indian office was about 3pm Perth time, which realistically (giving an hour turnaround time) meant one round of communication in per day unless she stayed back past 5pm.
A lot of organization ignore time zone, though are crucial. They can be double edge sword. If you run 24/7 SaaS they can help you deliver better reliability and avoid waking up at night, but they also created all sort of challenges.
12h time difference is the worst one, but in fact any cause some changes to your organization and you may need to learn to rely on async/writting skills.
Here's a question. You're in the US and your employer has decided to out source some work.
Why are you, the American worker, tolerating your employer's request to stay late to talk to their outsourced lackeys? Whenever I've been asked to stay late for a time zone crossing meeting with outsourced employees, I've refused. WE are THEIR customers, not the other way around. They can damn well get up at 3am and WebEx-in if we're going to have a meeting. No way am I going to stay late in the evening and miss my family so I can chat with our offshore labour.
Well, in some cases people will do it because otherwise their employer may fire them. Living in the US most of us are at will, and don't have that much luxury to give employers the finger.
If you're not willing to stay late to do a cross time zone meeting then I agree that you're worth a bit less to your boss than you otherwise would be.
Personally I would rather accept a bit less pay to be rid of a nuisance like a boss who thinks I'll inconvenience myself and my family for stupid shit like adjusting myself to his outsourced labour's schedule. I do stay late when shipping a release or working on an urgent bug. But stay late so some delicate flower off in India can work 9-5? Fuck that.
But, reflexively, why are you putting yourself above the "delicate flower" in India, who, by the way, probably has a hell of a lot worse working conditions than you do? I'm entirely okay with staying late for an overseas call because I recognize that the price I'm paying for staying late is probably less than the price they'd pay for staying late, and I'm more able to pay it. It's a simple matter of not being a wanton asshole towards people I'm supposed to be cooperating with.
Sure if you're 99% confident you can walk into another job of comparable total comp, then you have the luxury to walk out. If you're the sole or main breadwinner, deep in a mortgage, possibly with healthcare issues, and living in an area where comparable employers are slim to none, then you may do much worse things than stay up late or work odd hours for an employer.
We don't have much of a safety net in the US...
Don't get me wrong I'd much prefer if it was E.g. Germany where your boss can't email you after work.
I hear you. I took a pay cut (albeit with the possibility of a pension after 5 years), largely so I would not have to deal with offshore hours.
That said, the guys in India on our support team were fairly accommodating about working what was for them swing shift, so that their schedule pretty much matched NY Stock Exchange hours. 6 AM Pacific Time would have been pretty brutal for me, personally. 7 AM was bad enough.
> But stay late so some delicate flower off in India can work 9-5? Fuck that.
Um, you realize clifanatic was talking about this "delicate flower" sleeping in their office because of an 10 am CST meeting and not the other way around?
Um, yes I do realize that. But think about what his employer is asking of him. Is the wellbeing of these offshore workers his charity? Why should clifanatic EVER be put in the position of saving the offshore workers that his boss hired?
Clifanatic's boss can ask those offshore workers to stay late, and then he can damn well shell out for them to take a taxi home. Maybe he can even let them come in late, given what an amazing savings he's realizing in labour costs.
>> Is the wellbeing of these offshore workers his charity? Why should clifanatic EVER be put in the position of saving the offshore workers that his boss hired?
But that is _not_ what the GP is saying. You're creating a strawman argument where The Boss forces his employees to stay late in office while the 'labour' gets to work within his time.
If anything, based on the work timings mentioned in his post - the work-life balance of the offshore employees is screwed and not of clifanatic's him/herself.
The USA is a country of some 300 million people, and if you think the 20% of the country's population that voted for him somehow represents everyone here you're completely wrong.
Globalization works the other way too. I'm working at a Danish company that offshored Danish jobs to the US. Before that I was at an Australian firm that offshored Aussie jobs to the US. Before that I was at a firm founded by two immigrants. Globalization cuts both ways.
Of course it does. But in that case you were the US company's customer - they absolutely should bend over backwards to accommodate you.
In most cases bosses are hoping to externalize a cost to their local employees - if their outsourced labour has to wake up early for a call, they'll probably do it happily but then charge him for it. He's happier trying to make his salaried US employees 'stretch' a bit to help him out and make the cost savings work for him.
Outsourcing works best when you treat the people you're working with like people. Expecting them to regularly call into 3AM meetings is a recipe for disaster.
What I find works well is:
1: Find some common overlap times
2: Defend the overlap times against bullshit meetings
