This again. If this was truly the case, then they would put an immediate stop to the offshoring / nearshoring that has been rampant in the industry for the last 20 years.
Not a single push back against the H1B/Offshoring happening in the US. Keep it up corporate america... you going to have your next competiton being created by you from those remote workers banding together.
Money talks. If I'm paying $150k for a US-based engineer and I'm getting poor output as a result of them working remotely, the downside is considerable and I have a strong incentive to improve their output, especially since I can, assuming they are located near an office. If I'm paying $40k for an off/near-shore engineer, the financial downside is lower, and besides what can I really do about it since they don't live near an office?
All caveats apply, of course. It kinda depends on how bad it is with each worker.
Worth mentioning, by the way, that many professional off/near-shoring agencies have offices that the workers can work from -- often a necessity if home internet is not available or stable in their countries. So while these workers remain remote to YOU, they're presumably getting the benefit of being without the distraction of home, and the opportunity to collaborate and build relationships with colleagues in-person.
Money doesn't always talk. Me (programmer) a sysadmin and a DBA ran a Visa level 1 merchant's credit card processing for 2 years. The last year we had zero downtime outside of scheduled maintenance windows. The company offshored my job ("we can pay 3-4 people in Bangalore with your salary"). The next year they had lots of downtime, probably more than enough to pay my salary. I expect offshoring was considered a success, because that company has outsourced and offshores everything but lawyers and C-levels. Now, they can no longer offer static IP addresses to customers, and haven't managed to do IPv6.
Absolutely. Something is different between the very-very-remote worker and the remote worker and the news will do anything to keep from making that comparison.
Or against satellite offices. I drive 30 minutes into the office twice a week per corporate standards... and spend the whole day on zoom calls with co-workers in other offices in different cities.
> This again. If this was truly the case, then they would put an immediate stop to the offshoring / nearshoring that has been rampant in the industry for the last 20 years.
I'm on your side but your logic doesn't really follow here. Firstly because most offshoring arrangements are not work-from-home arrangements, they involve hiring people working in an office, just in another country. Secondly because it's a lot more palatable to pay someone who you suspect isn't giving the job 100% when you're paying them one tenth the salary of a local hire.
I too hit the 50. For the last 8 years I been 100% remote and seen the office ONE time only and that was just to hug a buddy happy retirement. Later on I found out his wages were cut and he found a new job. I quickly joined him with a competitor.
The pro RTO people are nothing short of power hungry. They like flexing their will against others. That’s why having leverage and a huge f*ck you fund is necessary. Especially when it’s going to take a year to un frack this IT job economy. A quick fix would be removal of all IT h1b. The that would get Americans back to work. We all know they use it to keep wages down.
> The pro RTO people are nothing short of power hungry.
It depends. I have no issue with companies that RTO'd after lockdowns ended. Some teams and orgs work better in person, others can work fine remotely.
But promising new hires that they can work remotely only to renege on that promise a few years later when the job market tightens is a despicable bait-and-switch.
Exactly this. If you worked in the office, then went remote after Covid and the company made no promises about being permanently remote, I have no issues with that.
In my case, Amazon Retail reached out to me in mid 2020 about an SDE position. They made it clear I would have to relocate eventually. There was no way in hell I was going to uproot my life and move to Seattle for Amazon already knowing there reputation.
They then suggested I apply for a role in Professional Services that was “field be design” and that would be permanently remote. That department was exempted from the first round of RTO requirements while I was still there.
As of this year, even those positions are required to be in an office even though it’s more than likely no one on a project will be in the same office and the clients will definitely be remote. It means you are either at a customer site or on a call with a client from the office. I got Amazoned in late 2023. The RTO mandate from them just came into affect this year.
The equivalent positions at GCP are also hybrid. They reached out to me. But when they said that, I said no thanks
Dell does this but continues to outsource to India and China where communication is an epic problem that has never been solved. This is nothing short of a stealth layoff. If they were so interested in communicating they would hire all US and stop the outsourcing.
This quite literally cuts both ways, and workers know it.
If you can outsource work abroad, then you cannot justify mandating everyone be in the office. If you’re mandating everyone be in the office, then you can’t be outsourcing work abroad.
Workers aren’t stupid, and ignoring them is what leads to Unions.
I think the underlying problem here is that despite what the stock market would have you believe, sales are down, moral is down, and many industries are experiencing light to moderate headwinds.
RTO is an (desperate) attempt to resuscitate businesses experiencing economic woes.
From the inside, RTO feels more like a way to reclaim leverage from highly paid technical employees who have become too uppity. Summoning us back to the office is about putting us in our place - but in the social hierarchy, not physically.
I genuinely wonder if that is actually the case. Our team ( fairly technical team within a non-technical type company ) repeatedly ( edit: and successfully) pushed back against any kind of RTO ( I personally sent rather non-corporate email asking why the RTO calls if they can't even get enough desks for rotation ). I am sure bosses hate being questioned, but I don't see anyone begging to do my job. In other words, something has got to give.
I don't know what is going to happen exactly. I feel the push from bigger corps will give smaller one a "permission" to do it as well, but I know I am already doing what I can to make sure I am ready. Last time the company tried to call me back in specifically, I was lucky enough to secure current position and was able to tell them no.
That said, even today, I know I would not be able to get my job back there and I didn't burn bridges in any conventional way ( unless you consider saying no to RTO burning a bridge ).
Nah, RTO is in no way trying to fix business sales. It's entirely a way to layoff workers or to control them. Trying to put an economic reason behind this power play is Febreezing a turd.
management wants to execute their fancy plan to make more money, and see control, supervision, faster iteration, tighter feedback loops, blablabla ... as one part of it, hence the amazing "all hands on deck" idea that today is "everyone in the office".
Yes, I have heard that as well, because having people on the office is going to magically ramp up sales, as that is the missing factor why they aren't taking off. /s
You're misunderstanding what was said. It's about costs/income. RTO (probably) doesn't increase income - but people will (most likely) quit, reducing costs. Thus the ratio gets better.
Most likely, because no one on this thread has been in company meetings from Fortune 500s where this is reason being told for RTO, while they keep doing good old outsourcing as always.
"Collaboration in the office strengthens opportunities for sales" is the message.
It’s not even just a matter of being all in the US, they would need to have everyone in a single office. The second teams need to work together between offices, the in-person pop-in chat is dead. Of course this doesn’t mean it turns into a days long email chain, in be a quick call.
People randomly stopping at my desk was a huge productivity killer when I was in the office. Working from home, that killer turns to meetings and group chats. Both arrangements have their issues when it comes to interruptions. At least at home I can control if those apps are open and allowing notifications, if I really do need to be heads down to meet a deadline.
When outsourcing across timezones, that’s when those quick chats, regardless of the medium, start to take days, because each reply takes a day.
Absolutely. They should just stop pretending. They know they are lying as they say it's all about collaborating closer and communication. The workers know they are lying. They workers know the leaders know they are lying. But it's still not allowed to be acknowledged publicly.
If it really was all about collaboration and communication this would be uniformly enforced as much as possible globally and the budget to travel and in-person meetups for teams would have been greatly increased. If neither one of those is happening, it's just too obvious.
"The workers know they are lying. They workers know the leaders know they are lying. But it's still not allowed to be acknowledged publicly."
Man it reads SO much like Soviet days when the bureaucrats would say one thing, but the people would know it's bullshit, as did the leaders and everyone had to pretend it's "real".
Yes, as soon as you have a regular paycheck you should start building an emergency fund. This should be taught to everyone in high school (or earlier) but we don't do it, among many other "life skills" that we do not teach because they aren't on the state standardized tests.
I had 6 months saved . It's been 13 months. School did not prepare me for the fact that my college degree in STEM could still leave me on the market for an entire caledar year
Yep, this is what I do. Individual responsibility is an unpopular idea these days but the way I look at it, I am the one who is ultimately in charge of my family's wellbeing. That is far too important to entrust to a corporation's generosity or the whims of lawmakers.
I don't think its an unpopular idea. But the fact is, being an employee is a lopsided relationship. You only have one employer but they have many employees. You leave and they still have an army to keep the business going but you get laid off and your income goes to 0. So yeah you can keep some money in the bank but still being without work especially with a family and mortgage, is a terrible spot to be in.
I have first hand experience with this product for over 2 years. It is a PITA from a SRE/Devops Security point of view. Things constantly break, the indexes, emailing reports, just general bit rot. The source code is at best a good first attempt, but sorely lacking.
I used their docker based installation. Upgraded it a couple of times, takes me 1h each time (mostly because I am more of a PHB and not a devops)
Never had a single issue with indexes, though we only ingest 500k+ events per day for ~endpoints.
Don’t use email but notifications by Slack. Never had it fail in one year.
Honestly, I almost feel bad for the amount of value I’m getting for free. So I’m happy to give back: made an integration that recovers all Google Workdspace events (https://github.com/avanwouwe/wazuh-gworkspace) if anyone’s using Wazuh? I also plan on publishing my Chrome extension integration (behavioral analysis and malware and shadow it detection) in a couple of days!
I tested this out on my workload ( SRE/Devops/C#/Golang/C++ ). it started responding about non-sense on a simple write me boto python script that changes x ,y,z value.
Then I tried other questions in my past to compare... However, I believe the engineer who did the LLM, just used the questions in benchmarks.
One instance after a hour of use ( I stopped then ) it answered one question with 4 different programming languages, and answers that was no way related to the question.
Turns out that Ollama on windows will run multiple models in parallell consuming all available VRAM and RAM. Changing it to 1 fixed the issue, now it's working great! However, the context length for the output is very small - only 1024 tokens.
That's some really strange behavior, I don't know why that would cause poor results rather than just poor performance.
Can you configure the context size with `/set parameter num_ctx N`? On my laptop with an RTX A3000 12GB I can run `yi-coder:9b-chat` (Q4_0) with 32768 context and it produces good results quickly. That uses 11GB of VRAM so it's maxed out for this setup.
the author(s) of the article, completely ignore the cpu itself can be patched. there is microcode underneath the ARM instructions for such scenarios. Look at intel, there has been undocumented microcode for decades I beleive these articles are just hype for street cred.
Listen to me, what hurts most people. is DEBT and run away spending. Stop both of it.
I been through 2000,2008, 20015(:) and 2023, layoff a few times, and my answer now is, shut up and pay me. Build a 1 or 2 year F-U fund and have zero debt. You know what happens after a layoff if you have that? Nothing. you sleep well and start looking for a Gig or FTE without the pressure of bills. It shows up in interviews.
he is not the only one, or will be the last. Having your name on the main line of the kernel is really worth $$$. However here is a pro tip.
FreeBSD, being a kernel commit, and having your name in it, you will be snatched up by various companies that use it, and not only puts a footnote that they do.
Example, Apple, Playstation, Juniper, Oracle, etc.
I love FreeBSD on personal servers and workstations. But lean into FreeBSD not into macOS look and feel. The m2 macs make it the best workstation out there. If you have that there is no business need for this os.
Run it for fun but it’s never going to reach mass appeal
Don’t know what people expect from an operating system like FreeBSD. Will joe average install it on their family computer? Probably not.
Still FreeBSD quietly powers so many things, and has been used for so many platforms(Hotmail, Yahoo, WhatsApp, Netflix, etc). plus PlayStation, userland in OS X… plus all the network appliances(and storage).
It seems to me FreeBSD gives you a great platform to do your own thing without getting in your way.
Not a single push back against the H1B/Offshoring happening in the US. Keep it up corporate america... you going to have your next competiton being created by you from those remote workers banding together.