its discussed literally every time a remote work/rto post comes up on this site. And then the usual responses about how international offshoring has been tried before various times and it mostly doesnt work for XYZ reasons etc etc
Sort of - the outsourcing problems are usually described as in descending order: cultural differences, timezone differences, language challenges, general communication overhead and talent availability.
All those could be true with remote, but that’s probably why most companies limit remote to same culture (eg nth am) , close timezone, same language.
You’re left with “just” general communication overhead in that case.
You could collapse all those to communication - apart from talent availability.
So remote working increases talent availability and increases communication overhead ( through one mechanism or another - language, timezone, shared culture ).
So the right balance then depends on how important communication is for the particular role versus talent, factored by how good the talent is at communicating.
One of the things I've heard about remote working is it helps people stay focused on task and hence be productive. These people like the reduction in communication ( noise ).
The other side I've heard is that it atomises the organisation to those headline tasks, but loses the element of the sum being greater than the whole - the stuff that happens off task.
If you truly believe in remote working, then you could argue that companies shouldn't exist in terms of perm employees - you contract everything out on a per task basis.
