[taylodl]

Let's not pretend life offshoring is a new phenomena. It's been going on for 30 years now. It's been going on long enough that many of those jobs came back onshore and legions of books have been written as to why somehow the purported savings never materialized.

[matwood]

The big win for US companies going remote isn't offshoring, but hiring people outside of big cities. The southeast and midwest are much cheaper than CA and the company doesn't have to deal with language, culture, and timezone issues.

[erik_seaberg]

I expect some cultural and experience differences between people who did and didn’t relocate to prioritize their careers, in some ways more than people who tried to immigrate but couldn’t get permission.

[SoftTalker]

Yes but the pandemic forced nearly everyone to figure out how to get work done with nearly everyone remote. A lot of the roadblocks to remote work in the last two decades finally got solved. There are really no technical barriers of any kind anymore.

[taylodl]

There aren't technical barriers but two huge social barriers immediately come to mind:

- Timezone

- Culture

Working with people in vastly different timezones is difficult. Just ask anybody working with people from the the US East coast and West coast. That's only a 3 hour time difference and it gets difficult.

Culture is another barrier. One of the things that's been hard for US-based companies to learn with working with people from India is in their culture it's impolite to say "no." They use other signals to indicate no. Americans miss those cues. They don't hear what the think is pushback and so they proceed as though everything were fine. Americans also find it difficult to work with Germans as their bluntness is seen as being rude. This is just scratching the surface for the culture barriers that abound.

This is why I say remote work != offshoring. They're two completely different animals.