> What globalization did to manufacturing jobs, remote work will do to many service jobs.
This is bait. It's taken as a given rather than a hypothesis to be proven, which invalidates most of this post for me.
Issues with the analogy:
- Offshoring existed before remote work was popularized. For the many of "your jobs" up to be "taken" that shift has already occurred.
- Outsourcing is not a magic bullet. Timezone gaps, communication style, expert knowledge, and legal compliance are all issues that previous outsourcers to call centers have already discovered.
- Significant gaps remain between "tier-1" and "tier-2" support. Effective deployment of offshoring requires using the two to complement one another, not trying to use the latter to replace the former.
No matter what it is that your company is selling, tricky situations will come up that needed to be escalated to an experienced customer success team, whether that's the founder or a dedicated team. Being able to recruit globally doesn't magically make building that team any easier.
> But if company goes 'remote' much more work becomes outsourcing worthy.
Again, there's a difference between "outsourcing worthy" and "can reliably outsourced for enough cost savings for the whole thing to not be ROI negative". And, that's my point. Companies going remote doesn't magically jump start geographic labor arbitrage from zero. That geographic labor arbitrage has been ongoing for a long time.
This is bait. It's taken as a given rather than a hypothesis to be proven, which invalidates most of this post for me.
Issues with the analogy:
- Offshoring existed before remote work was popularized. For the many of "your jobs" up to be "taken" that shift has already occurred.
- Outsourcing is not a magic bullet. Timezone gaps, communication style, expert knowledge, and legal compliance are all issues that previous outsourcers to call centers have already discovered.
- Significant gaps remain between "tier-1" and "tier-2" support. Effective deployment of offshoring requires using the two to complement one another, not trying to use the latter to replace the former.
No matter what it is that your company is selling, tricky situations will come up that needed to be escalated to an experienced customer success team, whether that's the founder or a dedicated team. Being able to recruit globally doesn't magically make building that team any easier.