Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 199: Offshore team influence and time zone fun

Episode Date: March 2, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work at a large public company. Two years ago, they hired a new CEO who immediately started a development center in a different country. Much of the knowledge transfer is complete and this new team outnumbers us by 3 to 1. It feels that we have lost much of our influence. They turn out decent work and cost less than 1/10th to employ. I am ramping up a job search but in the mean time what steps can we take to keep influence and control? Also, is this the future for the industry in the US? Hi Jamison and Dave. Your voices have been bringing sanity into my head for the last 2 years. I’d like to get your thoughts about something that’s driving me a little crazy. I work for a company based in Europe, and work in the Asian office. The Asian office, and only the Asian office, has a fixed time schedule. To overlap with Europe, the Asian team has to be at the office from 2PM to 11PM. However, the European team comes in at 10AM and leaves at 7PM. When our team mates in Europe decide to do overtime, we have to stay later to work with them, often very late in the night but I tolerate it because I love software development. However, whenever we have company “fun” events, the Asian managers schedule it in the morning so that our regular work schedule won’t be consumed. So we’ll do badminton or wall-climbing from 9AM to 12 and then have to do the 2PM to 11PM shift. This is very tiring. The events usually happen every two weeks, but our schedule makes me dread them. It’s even worse if the “fun” events happen on the same day as the overtime. At the end of work, I feel like a zombie! Is this reasonable?

it takes more than sifting through org charts like they're genealogical trees to be a great engineer this is episode 199 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer all of your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development and sometimes you have to find who your bosses bosses bosses reports reports reports reports boss is and then you trace through them sometimes when i send emails i feel like i'm giving my lineage to where i say like i am jameson report of john report of wendy report of steve who you know because they both report to your boss's boss's boss and then yeah like there's a there's a delicate big company dance

and there's actually no top right just like genealogy keep going yeah exactly yeah you you can never make it back all the way up this episode is brought to you by veteri which is an online marketplace to help you find a new job if you've decided to take the soft skills engineering advice of quitting your job and we'll hear a little bit more about them later thanks to veteri for sponsoring the show yeah thank you and thank you to these wonderful people who are also sponsoring the show thank you to bin lock matthew voidovich taras haruk luke bayless zechran and louis santos stanley tactical radio chris hogan ivo robot nick braden canes philip john basile steven armand lee john grant nick cantar ted nugent the agile ventures charity maple syrup

sonic the hedgehog travis dennis bogdanov sean evgeny sledkowski and thank you to everyone else who has supported the show you can do that by going to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon and if you do you get to join our slack cult team starship slack starship as it journeys to a better life but not in a way that we're all going to commit suicide like i got a little too culty i had to back it off a little yeah no we'll journey to a better life by telling each other good advice and fun stories that's right no kool-aid involved yeah no the the only kool-aid we drink is the kool-aid of the new technology that will come surely solve all our problems surely this framework won't have any downsides okay yeah i'll read our first question now

this comes from an anonymous listener who says i work at a large public company two years ago they hired a new ceo who immediately started a development center in a different country much of the knowledge transfer is complete and this new team outnumbers us three to one it feels that we have lost much of our influence they turn out pretty decent work and cost less than one tenth to employ i am ramping up a job search but in the meantime what steps can we take to keep influence and control also is this the future for the industry in the united states i assume that means the question asker is from the u.s not that their jobs are being offshored to the yeah that would be a that would be an interesting reversal outnumbered three to one but they cost one tenth

it sounds like they should outnumber you ten to one yeah sounds like there's some room to to take advantage of those cost savings have you ever worked somewhere that went through an offshoring process like this or an outsourcing process like this well it's not outsourcing because they're they're still in your company but moving development to a different country these are sounds like these are full-time employees that are just located in a different country that apparently one-tenth the cost that that's a bit of a stretch honestly i have never heard of that good a couple weeks ago by the time this releases was big outpouring of salary sharing on twitter from developers and yeah if you go to the right expensive country and compare it to the

right cheaper developer salary country i could easily see that from some of the numbers i saw there doesn't in other words if you compare like the highest bay area salaries to the lowest outsourced or lowest like country i don't even know if it was lowest but yeah like yeah i saw i saw over 10x difference between places okay well so i believe all right okay well then yeah it sounds like they've got some room to grow i want to know who got a huge bonus because they saved the company like millions and millions of dollars i mean it doesn't sound like they they like laid off a bunch of people in the u.s it sounds like this is just a thing to grow the team yet yeah i guess that's always the fear right the

fear behind the the question at the end like if it's that much cheaper to employ people there why would they need me who costs 10 times someone there yeah you just need to be 10 times better i could be a 10x developer finally it's your time to shine so i want to push back a little bit on the question asker because the question asker says it feels like we've lost much of our influence how do we regain control like it feels kind of like there's this underlying assumption that we here are smart and right and good and need to run things and we need to make sure we control it so this group in this other country doesn't like take over and there are certainly some communication barriers that come with having teams in separate countries but it feels like there's

this base assumption that they are incapable of doing as good of a job as as i am with this control or as we are in the u.s with control it's it's very like us versus them feeling which feels a little weird to me like why do you assume that you have to have control that's one way to interpret it another way is to say i want to work at a company where i am influential and can make a difference and how can i preserve that yeah not necessarily and just i'm just saying we maybe could cut out the part where you say and the other country people are inferior yeah yeah like you you would have that same problem if your company grew and and people do have that problem if the company grows they they used to run a bigger piece of the company and own

a bigger piece and now the company is bigger than the same size the same piece they own is a much smaller chunk yeah for sure but it it does feel weird to say like yeah i i deserve this because i am in the u.s and and folks outside the u.s clearly should not have as much control or influence like maybe there's some assumptions you need to question maybe or maybe it's just i was here first yeah that's true it's a human thing but yeah i mean i agree with what you're saying if if there is just this base assumption that somehow you deserve it magically by where you happen to be born i don't think that's great but at the same time we're probably going to say quit your job and go find one where you can be influential yeah that's you know it's coming

prepare yourself i mean there is another option here i mean you could move to that country join them and let me just tell you i've been to a few countries and with the exception of england they all have better food than the u.s what are you not a fan of beans on toast dave oh man fried tomatoes dipped in gravy or something i don't know i don't know beans on toast is the only thing i know yeah yeah there's an option there i think one question you could try and answer is what problem is the company trying to solve by moving more development over to this other country or by expanding into this other country is it literally just a cost savings thing where we need more developers but we will get more developers by hiring them in this other country

are they saying this other office will own some specific project or initiative and and it just so happens that they're in a different country but like they're they're a team just like you're a team and and they have their area of defined responsibility like those feel like two different approaches and two different things to investigate if it's just they're kind of we're going to kind of like sprinkle people from all over the world onto projects or we're gonna kind of carve them out things don't i feel like it's i don't know i'm gonna prognosticate with no experience as we do but it feels like it might work better if there's a little bit more ownership where because of time zones are hard it's really hard to communicate effectively across time zones it's a little bit

easier if they can work if teams in different time zones can work a little bit independently and then and then just communicate over yeah some kind of shared interface or understanding but i could see that i mean if if this team in a different country owns this important initiative for your company then maybe you feel like you're getting left behind by not getting to work on it or you just kind of have to follow along with the work they're doing or things like that what should they do oh man i you say it's a large publicly traded company which tells me unless you're one of the executives of said company there's probably nothing you can do i mean nihilism we haven't reached for that answer in a while well seriously i mean it's like

But there are some things that are so big that unless you've already earned a seat at the table, it's going to be really hard to steer that ship, you know? Yeah. What if you, I mean, we said be a 10X developer tongue in cheek, but one way to grow influence is to be more impactful. And then you're not as much worried about competing with other people. It's just, you just do more that has a better impact and then you get more influence because of that. and I found that I don't know if it's more true or not but I found it a more helpful way to think about it because I get demotivated when I think of things outside my control that affect my ability to be successful yeah like if if there's this shadowy executive group that is playing politics

that is just ruining my career that's a bummer and I'm not gonna feel good about doing good work but if I think I mean how can I affect this and improve this then yeah and one way you could do that is by traveling to the other country and working alongside these people and earning their trust and then you could have more of a partnership where you're sharing in the influence instead of saying i want to arrest control back from you and bring it back to me you can say hey we're in this together and let's work on some cool stuff yeah that's such a good point i mean large public companies are effectively remote or distributed anyways up to a certain when they get to a certain point there's always a bunch of different offices and like it's so much easier to work with people

you've seen oh yeah especially if there's potential for misunderstanding or or conflict i guess where there's there's this latent it's like political energy kind of like swirling around this relationship where it could turn turn gross and just meeting someone in person wipes that out quite a bit i've found yeah and even even being in their office space and then later you know in person and then later when you join them via like video conference or whatever just knowing where they are kind of having like a spot in your mind where you can geometrically say i know where you are it changes the dynamic it humanizes both sides i don't know it just makes me when i do that i work better together with people and i've seen the same thing when leaders come to visit like

remote satellite offices that i work at the relationship changes from that point forward because they've been there they've seen where we work yeah i don't know why that is a thing but it definitely is a thing yeah i've landed on a novel new technique to help simulate this so the meeting the the video chat client that we use at work lets you put in an arbitrary image as your background it'll kind of like green screen composite you in and so i've ended up asking lots of my co-workers to take pictures of their background and then i can just switch my background to be that picture of their background it looks like i'm in their office on their couch hanging out in their kitchen and that really helps build empathy i'm in your house yeah hey we can't fight i'm here

would you you wouldn't say those things to me because look look where i'm sitting i'm i'm literally in your seat so you're you're walking a mile in their shoes or on their couch yeah i'm i'm typing a line of code on their keyboard that is such a good idea this is the evolution of it started as just like goofy backgrounds and now it's evolved to making people question like wait i thought jameson had this thing behind him but i recognize that one has he always been like in a garage with an airplane what you're in an airplane hangar does it ever get creepy where they're like jameson how did you get a picture of my kitchen i know that's the only thing that would make it funnier is if i somehow got it

without them providing it to me you could take a picture of get get like get their one of their spouse or something to take a picture of their attic and then use that i'm just on your porch don't worry oh man that would be so good no i i won't come in i'll just sit here yeah i like that i mean i suppose if i could convince them to step away for a moment and then i get i like have that second where the the screen is empty of the head i can quick take a screenshot and then that'd be good anyways so that's a good way to build relationships. Yes. Okay. So we've basically said either, you know, try to build a relationship or there's nothing you can do because it's too big. Should we give any other answers before we move

on to the second half of this question, which I also think is very interesting? No, there's more to say on this, but I want to talk about the second half too. Okay. So the second half of the question is, is this the future for the industry? I think software industry in the United States. And I just want to say that I've been around the block more than a little bit longer than the median software developer today, I think, because we've had so many people joining the industry. And as we've said before, people join the industry with zero years of experience by definition. So the median always moves down if the industry is growing. And I have been watching this question for 20 years. And 20 years ago, this was a huge question.

It was asked all the time. And the answer was always, yes, software jobs are definitely leaving the united states and they're definitely going to these countries that have less expensive labor and all of those predictions have been wrong because what has happened is jobs have grown in both locations and so there's like tons of software jobs in many countries around the world but there's still more jobs than there were 20 years ago for software developers in the united states so it's been very interesting to watch that happen it's just non-stop question and actually that question went away for a while but it's back yeah i i remember that too i wasn't a developer but i remember i i read a lot of dilbert when i was a kid because i was just a huge loser

and i remember lots of jokes about offshoring and then kind of like as i grew up it felt like it wasn't in the culture anymore it didn't show up in dilbert anymore oh which was my pulse on the tech industry yeah so it kind of disappeared for a while i i feel like maybe it's back but i think what's happened is a lot of these, I'm actually surprised this one 10th thing is really got me thinking because what was happening 20 years ago was that the labor markets in other countries outside of the U.S. were seeing salaries increase. And those increasing salaries made it less attractive for U.S. companies to engage in these kinds of relationships because it's difficult. There is a certain amount of overhead that comes with managing a team that's 13 and a half hours

away from your headquarters right in terms of time zone so yep so that happens but those salaries have grown a lot and i think what has happened is that that that industry has become very diverse and there's a bunch of people who are inexpensive in the labor market but also some very expensive people and companies have set up shop in those countries but they've also stayed in the united states it's just a huge mix of things that are going on but what i think is very interesting is that with the over the last four or five years we've seen just a meteoric rise on the top end of engineering salaries and that i think might tip the scales back to where it was 20 years ago and people were talking about offshoring a lot so i don't know i i think i think we might be at a

tipping point where the incentives align to do that some more yeah it's like you can you can i don't know what the number would be but theoretically you could say there's there's the salary cost difference between two different countries but there's also the the like communication overhead cost that having people separate is so so distributed ads and and you're saying that once the salary gets high enough in one of these countries that that communication cost becomes worth it yes because that's that's the narrative i've seen for why this died out is like especially these like companies trying to build products that are so collab like they work so collaboratively and it's all about communication and figuring out ideas and quick turnarounds and stuff

that you're willing to pay the cost of expensive labor because that's the only way you can deliver as fast as you need to. I mean, we don't even have this problem. We have this problem within the United States, right? There's San Francisco and New York City where salaries are like twice as high as everywhere else in the US for developers.

And you still see these companies that have gigantic San Francisco and New York City offices and they'll like kind of still hire and build up offices in other places and and but but it's not like they're letting go of their expensive bay area or new york city labor like they're still hiring in those places and and that's still their headquarters for a lot of them yeah exactly and and that's without that's that just adds a small amount of time and kind of remote communication overhead it doesn't add the whole way different time zone so everything takes a day to resolve overhead and we still

have that kind of smoothed out. So I don't think this will go away. Yeah. So you're saying you don't think it'll become big? Okay. No, I mean, I think it'll keep happening. But I don't think it will be hard to find a job as a developer in the United States, because United States developers salaries are higher. Okay. Do you think that there is a tipping point where what if it was like, you know, we've seen a 10x spread in this case, but what if it was like a 50x spread? Would that be enough to get your board of directors to say, okay, screw it, we're firing all the developers in the u.s maybe i mean there's it i think it depends on the identity of the company if they're a tech company no maybe if they're a non-tech company that has some it or

technical requirements then it's not it's not part of their identity to have this like team with a shared defined culture that has come up through the company and and they can say like we'll just move all this somewhere else and that's fine but there's also there's a lot of complex things here there's there's like cultural issues there's time zone issues there's like perception of value where if if someone costs 1 50th what someone else costs then you you can't help but question like wait is it because they're bad why why is it so much cheaper price signaling yeah you value things more if you pay more money i think that probably comes into play a little bit and and frankly in some of the power dynamics too where there's almost everywhere i've seen this happen it's

not everyone that feels this way but you can always find someone that feels like we are better because we are from a country that pays developers more and i think the wages do go into that a little bit i see yeah i think i agree with you it's not good well i sort of agree with you i don't think it'll tip okay ever i don't think so i think what's going to happen is that these are not independent markets so like the united states developer market salaries influence the salaries of other countries' developers as well. It's not like a strong influence and it's not immediate,

but over time, I think that the global economy will force some of these market dynamics to bring these salaries up. So you'll probably never see a 50x spread, is my guess. And I think the 10x spread is probably short-lived.

Yeah, secure that money. Get paid, folks that live outside the US. I'll do my part by trying to make more money and driving up developer salaries. overall i mean it's the most charitable thing you could do it's just earn more it really is i'll be thinking of you just laugh wipe your tears away with the free health care napkins you get if you've been a software developer at the same job for a few years it might be time to start looking around quit your job is our favorite advice but first you should probably find a new

job trust me it is better this way check out a service called veteri which matches developers with employers based on what you want like your location salary requirements and technologies you want to work with i actually signed up myself and within a week they sent me an opportunity that looked really good my current approach to job seeking is tweet dumb stuff and hope the company notices me so this sounds like an improvement i think yeah once you sign up you get a consultant to help you find opportunities i also like that veteri lets you specify your salary requirements early rather than going through the whole interview process only to find out your salary expectations were way off. That actually happened to me in an interview. Would have been nice to

avoid that. You can start using Vetteri without reversing a link list on a whiteboard too. They don't have a coding test to sign up. If you are thinking about taking our advice, the soft skills engineering patented advice and quitting your job, check out Vetteri. Go to vetteri.com slash soft skills to sign up. That's V-E-T-T-E-R-Y.com slash soft skills. If you use that link, you will help to support the show. And if you get a job through Vetri, they will send you $300. Thank you so much to Vetri for sponsoring the show. Okay, should we read our next question? Yes, let's do it. All right, I will read this. This is from an anonymous listener who says, Hey, Jameson and Dave, your voices have been bringing sanity in my head for the last two years.

I'd like to get your thoughts on something that's driving me a little crazy. If we are the voices in your head, you have a weird definition of sanity. yeah all right i work for a company based in europe and work in their asian office the asian office and only the asian office has a fixed time schedule to overlap with europe the asian team has to be in the office from 2 p.m to 11 p.m however the european team comes in at 10 a.m and leaves at 7 p.m when our teammates in europe decide to do overtime we have to stay later to work with them often very late into the night but i tolerate it because i love software development however whenever we have company fun events the asian managers schedule it in the morning so that our

regular work schedule won't be consumed so we'll do badminton or wall climbing from 9 a.m to 11 or 9 a.m to 12 sorry and then we have to do the 2 p.m to 11 p.m shift this is very tiring the events usually happen every two weeks but our schedule makes me dread them it's even worse when the fun events happen on the same day as the overtime at the end of work i feel like a zombie is this reasonable? So let me make sure I got this. You got fun events that start at 9 a.m., go till noon, and then you work from 2 p.m. to 11 p.m., unless you're also in an overtime period, in which case you work even later. And so you end up basically with your company for nine to nine, like 15 hours a day. Yeah. I know that all of the most fun events start at nine.

that's one of the criteria for how i determine if something is fun does it start at 9 a.m or not well i like rock climbing but it's not 9 a.m there's just something different about the rocks is this where the phrase it's 9 a.m somewhere comes from yeah that's true that's what you should say when you argue that they should be scheduled at a different time listen it's 9 a.m in some time zone it's fine if it's at a more humane hour yeah fun is in air quotes here well they're not air quotes if they're written those are called quote quotes oh no my brain fun is in quotes here which yeah i could i could see this sucking the fun out of an event if as you're climbing rocks you know like each movement i

make is less energy i'll have to put into my 18 hour day that is just now starting you're like rationing your energy because you know yeah sorry i didn't dive for that shot because i'm gonna need that energy in 15 hours oh man let that one go i'm pacing myself oh this sucks yes this sounds awful i mean meanwhile it's all driven by the european schedule right it starts at 10 oh yeah we gotta get to that i mean yeah that fits my stereotypes of european work hours 10 to 7 10 to 7 i mean i assume that there's a healthy lunch in there yeah yeah it does feel weird that they don't just shift back an hour or two or say like there's

just less overlap i don't know we we overlap some time and not the whole time and yeah that will preserve sanity yeah i i have not worked it at a place where the time zone was resolved by saying you just have to work this other time zone that's horrible for you sorry for for like kind of like a whole office i work with a team in india and they just we just mostly each work our time zone and then we kind of have some collaboration and communication sometimes in times we pick that are usually inconvenient for everybody yeah but it would be horrible if i worked 1 a.m to 9 a.m or something to overlap with time zones like that i i just wonder i wonder what their justification is it's probably they just haven't thought about it you know i mean there's there's a cost right

the cost is like burnout and exhaustion and it's hard to write good code when you've been working so long and this is knowledge work and your brain needs to be well rested to produce good caliber of good quality knowledge yeah maybe that's the answer to fixing it is is if you can help communicate the cost this is having and even the cost these fun activities are having like if you say hey i understand you want to create team unity and help us relax and unwind a little bit but if i work 18 hour days like look at our defect rate on days that we have overtime and fun activities on the same day or something oh that would be interesting yeah that would be some very interesting data i'm assuming you don't have that data because that would that would make this too

easy yeah if you could tie it directly back it turns out our defect rate actually goes down after we do these fun activities on Overtime Weeks. Oh no, oh no. Yeah, only look at that data if you have it and if it helps you. Right. But saying we're tired sadly might not work as well as saying, hey, this is costing the business money.

People might be burning out and quitting. Maybe there's conflict partially caused by tiredness because of these hours. I mean, if I worked in the Asian office, I would be like mad at the European office. I'd be like, you consider us less than you. And I don't know, it feels crappy to work in that relationship. Like I would have this underlying resentment.

I'm sure that doesn't help. Yeah, that's probably happening. Here's something that's interesting. Let's see. There's a seven hour time difference between China and most of Europe. So that's a pretty substantial, but it's not untenable. You know, it's not like 12 hours, you know. So with seven hour time difference, if the European folks would just come in two hours

earlier that would give them quite a bit of overlap and then the in the china office they could come in two hours earlier as well that seems like it could be a pretty good deal but it would cut into their fun time yeah i mean you'd have to give some badminton to start work earlier those two things really baffle my mind why they're saying this office in asia has to work like exactly the same overlapping hours as the office in europe and why they're saying you have to overlap 100 well they don't they don't quite overlap they don't overlap 100 it looks like it's It looks like the European office starts a few hours before the China office. I'm doing times on math in public, and this is a bad idea.

Yeah, this is recorded forever. Surely this will help you not mess up. Yeah, there are several hours of overlap, but it's not 100%. If it was 100%, they would start even later, three hours later. They'd start at 5 p.m. Yeah, I think this feels like worth raising as a pain point. It's very tiring. I feel like a zombie.

i bet you feel like a zombie during work not just at the end of work too like i'm assuming that the hours from like 11 p.m to 3 a.m are usually not peak productivity time yeah where you're just really churning through these hard problems schedule makes me dread them i also know very little about asian culture from from personal experience so it's possible i mean my advice is going to be like agitate right make a scene like go go bug people and and it's possible that that's difficult to do because of the way that culture is over there but i don't know how to solve that because i don't know how to i have like an unknown unknown here yeah i mean i do think it's worth bringing up the cost that these fun events are having because they might not be

fulfilling their purpose if they're to build team unity if they're to help people blow off steam and really they're just like this this pre-work slog that adds to your pain that that feels like a thing that you can bring up could at least kill that part of it maybe yeah like if life would be more fun if you never had these fun events again they're not doing it yeah maybe you can make them start later if it's too hard to cancel them or move to instead of every two weeks a more lengthy gap between them so the pain is less we're gonna move from a monthly fun event schedule to a once per decade really save up all your good ideas for how to have fun it's gotta it's gotta count for a lot i like how this question is in some ways the flip side of the other question where the other

question was from the the perspective of the person in the home office working with people in other other country and this is the inverse of someone in the other country working with the home office yeah there are different challenges on each side yeah it's a it's a it's a tough thing to be on either side that's right it's just hard it's just hard i think that means we've answered the question yeah we have no ideas that's but we do have that's usually how a question gets answered yeah yeah i'm sorry that doesn't sound very fun can can you can you get an injury these both sound physical badminton and wall climbing are both kind of physical activities can you get like i don't know repetitive stress injury from typing that prevents you from doing rock climbing and badminton

can you get a doctor's note that excuses you from these yes my client is not to have any fun please excuse them from fun great idea you also say you feel like a zombie i think the last option is to be a zombie and eat people's brains and then you won't have to work or go to fun activities you just hunger for flesh and just wander the streets which is fun all of its own okay have we answered the question i think so good luck good luck if you want your own questions answered. You can go to softskills.audio and click ask us a question. And if you like the show, please share it with people. Please tell people about it. Maybe write down the URL by hand and

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