Quote Originally Posted by Sanlmar View Post
don’t spend much time on reddit. Just a time allocation issue not an editorial.

A week ago at 2AM I hit reddit and on the front page “live right now” was a 24 year old kid walking down the road in a Nigerian village with a gerry jug in his hand.

He was on his way to get “petrol“ from the gas station down the street. He just got a new phone and had some time to kill. He just walked and talked answering questions from chat too. Girls, drugs, rap, Covid.

It was 8AM in Nigeria and folks were headed to work. 3-up on a motorcycle. Roads were dusty and in poor repair.

So the kid was a software developer. Power was out in the village and he needed gas for his generator. He had a certification test that morning. Parenthetically, he claimed 5G was everywhere in Nigeria.

He spoke excellent English. Grammatically correct. Knew all our idioms. Pop culture. Was funny and self effacing. One of the most impactful things I have ever seen on the Internet. Not kidding. Still processing what I watched. I wish I could find it again. Not practiced at navigating reddit.

I have a grand unifying theory regarding remote work. I have offered it before here. It states that remote work is going to accelerate the presence of the foreign work force. If you are working remote, particularly in tech you are experiencing a good news bad news development. There exist worldwide bright educated kids who will work cheap.

I don’t share my negativity with my kids. My tech daughter, the Tony Hseih alumn, hit the lottery. She thinks. She’s coding on some hill in Colorado now. She needs to save every freaking penny cause the gravy train ain’t gonna last for long.

Her father is going to go broke so she better not count on me. #2021_national_shutdown

Covid massively accelerated a shift in the landscape of the intellectual work force that was going to mimic the blue collar changes.

Tell me I’m wrong Sonatine.

im kinda with your daughter here; i dont think remote work is going anywhere, and i dont think anyones coming for coding jobs, and i think by the time someone _does_ come for coding jobs the solution will be AI based, not foreign labor based, and we will have UBI taxing the shit out of it.

regarding our nigerian friend coming for her job, its been my experience that hes probably going to end up on fiverr writing hacky C# for $20 a day which is going to make him more or less a millionaire in a week, relatively speaking. or he will end up working for startups for pennies on the dollar plus equity. its a curious reality; visa shit is a pain in the fucking ass and costs money by way of cycles / paperwork to deal with. larger, more stable, more funded orgs will always prefer locals. not just because of the savings but also because they can be vetted more easily. i remember working with an israeli dba early on in the 90s and he was fucking great at his job and one day he vanished and the boss was like sigh yeah he got called up for military service. i mean they probably spent 3 months of his salary just to get him legally hired and in 6 months he had to bounce. its something you deal with in this line of work but the person who replaced him was local.

re covid... the crazy thing is that covid hasnt changed my work lifestyle at all, its only legitimized it. my friends do what i do now. albeit from apartments. so in typical fashion your daughter has seized the day and positioned herself to make the absolute most of the incumbent normal.

id suggest she take the pepsi challenge and get some solar / battery set up and some form of hotspot eg google fi or some established satellite solution because when the entire team is out because rolling brownouts are suddenly national not regional, they are going to notice her bopping around the work slack getting shit done while everyone else is busy filling their bathtubs with water 'just in case', and thats a Good Look.