Stonks & Bonds. lol fundamentals, sir this is a Taco Bell

A bunch of the Infosys devs I met in Chennai spent 3+ hours each way commuting. It was insane.

I recently had to go to an actual office for the first time in 3 years for a pep rally.

Holy shit the amount of time people waste bullshitting. Assuming you hire decently, companies should be thrilled with remote work. I don’t take a lunch, no commute to waste time, I remain convinced the push to office is almost all driven by useless middle managers.

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Yeah I’m sure it can work I just think it’s harder like I said. For instance at my work, no one is putting in that extra effort to keep the new guy engaged or give him stuff to do. I’m the only one even trying and he’s not supposed to work under me.

For all I know he’s either thinking he made a huge mistake, or he’s thinking sweetest gig ever I’ll never have to work. Both aren’t great.

Basically I’m sick of working like this - boring shit, not very busy, fully remote. I want to feel like I’m a part of something again. I want to be on a team again. That’s what motivates me. I’m not sure I can get that fulfilled starting over anywhere that’s 100% remote, since I won’t already know the people IRL. I can’t be the only dev who feels this way.

I guess you could do that in law, but I don’t think any good law schools offer a completely online law degree*. So right of the bat, you’re going to get an Indian lawyer from a shitty law school. The job market is pretty rough for lawyers that come out of shitty law schools, so when you add the fact that the lawyer isn’t even actually here, that’s not a recipe for someone who is going to be in high demand.

Doctoring on the other hand is different. While it’s true that a doctor from even the shittiest medical school has relatively good job prospects, I don’t think it is possible to obtain an fully online medical degree.

As surf correctly points out, the biggest problem is the protectionism. There are things that are totally outsourceable right now, that simply aren’t because of pesky things like licensure. For example, if there were no barriers, a hospital could hypothetically get rid of almost all of their radiologists and have some Indian radiologists just read the xrays, MRIs, etc. The pay differential is massive, so there is a huge arbitrage opportunity there. However, there are tons of legal barriers to adopting a system like this, so it really isn’t done to any significant extent.

*It has been a while since I’ve looked into this. It’s possible this may no longer be accurate.

One thing we did that worked well.

We hired in remote clusters.

I.e. we recruited 12 people all within one small remote town in aus.

They all work from home, but can easily get together for a beer or a coffee. And every 6 weeks we drive or fly out to see them and do a day in a rented office space and take them for dinner.

We got access to a completely new talent pool, while keeping some of the connection and engagement aspects of working face to face.

I’m mostly joking, but Mumbai is an alpha level global city while Omaha barely qualifies as ‘sufficient’. People who want a quiet life in the 'burbs may enjoy Nebraska. People who like vibrant cities are probably going to be a lot happier in Mumbai. It’s not all slums, or even mostly slums. There’s an awful lot of money there, and an awful lot to spend it on.

This is another trend going into the same direction.

As developing world cities get better and better, brain drain will start to slow, and could even reverse very quickly.

Even Americans who like big cities tend to not like large metros in the developing world. The generally poor infrastructure and the language barrier (which isn’t that terrible in Mumbai) tend to put people off of places like Mumbai and Bangkok. That’s not to say they aren’t great cities. But they aren’t London or Paris.

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please don’t bank at Wells Fargo

Visited Bangkok once. Have no desire to go back, and certainly no desire to ever live there.

Guillotines.

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Everybody’s also about 5 times better off now than they’re going to be in 2 years.

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https://twitter.com/InternetHippo/status/1607861526068875265

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Hot take incoming: There is some validity to his point.

Flame on.

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The food is amazing, tho.

Buffett is a PR master but it’s a near certainty he agrees.

There is some validity to it, but there is even more validity to the point that we don’t need to have more and more and more of the collective gains of humanity accrue to people that are already billionaires.

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Who says we aren’t five times happier? (lol, dnr). Actually with Tesla down 70%, I’d say I’m six times happier.

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I don’t think he would disagree with that.

Here’s what I think would be hard for him to understand. Let’s say you could choose between two futures

  1. On Jan 1, 2024, every American’s life is exactly 10% better than it is now.
  2. On Jan 1, 2024, 99% of American’s have an 11% improvement in their lives. The top 1% has a 200% improvement in their lives.

Which future would you prefer? Obviously this is very contrived as “life improvement” isn’t discretely measurable like this. And often improvement for the top 1% comes at the expense of everyone else. But let’s just pretend. It would seem that everyone should prefer #2, but I think that there are a lot of people who would prefer #1.