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Author Topic: Working from home - an opportunity, or a risk of jobs going offshore?  (Read 1596 times)
grahame
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« on: February 14, 2021, 10:38:36 »

Background post

This initial post will appear to have little or nothing to do with transport. It's an example, it sets a scene, it updates friends ... and it sets the background for a follow up post which does get into a transport question for, perhaps, forward discussion.



I enjoyed a wonderful 35 years plus delivering IT training courses for groups of delegate in training centres in London and Harwell (Oxfordshire) and then our own training centre in Melksham.  Initially, courses were on operating system use and admin (Solaris and Linux) but we moved on to niche open source programming languages and I had the opportunity to meet people from many places and walks of life, and travel extensively in the British Isles and sometimes a little beyond.  We were winding down anyway for several years before Coronavirus with just a few courses running on more limited subjects; open source programming languages don't change all that much - at least in their basics and at intermediate levels, as investment in code in the languages needs to have a reasonably long life, but eventually a course re-write becomes due then overdue, and the lockdown of March 2020 was a good time - 2 months ahead of plan - to finally close the doors to new code clients leaving just a "tail" of work training people who have systems to be maintained / enhanced using mature infrastructure and existing code base.  Plan had been to enjoy an active retirement - replacing training with travel, largely home based in the UK (United Kingdom) but perhaps with significant spells going, overland, a little further. Plans torpedoed by Coronavirus; apart from a day out to Ventnor between lockdowns, I have not been out of our county and close neighbours for nearly a year. But that has meant a lot more time at the keyboard and, ironically, becoming far, far more familiar and experienced in PHP 7(.4), Python 3(.7 and .8 ) and MySQL 8 - in fact up to date in a way that was not intended!

Face to face training has worked exceedingly well over the years - taking a group of people out of their normal weekly cycle (be it at their place or ours) and - with them putting aside day to day work and issues, learning something new. With open source languages, there tends to be a certain minimum number of elements to teach before anything useful can be done, and for most people a need to practise a bit and explore with their own data.

A classroom environment has helped avoid early loss of interest, allowed for dynamic and tailored revision within small group lectures. I can reword things to help people as appropriate, with specific reference to their feedback and with small groups of colleagues.  Interactive coding - writing examples with delegate shouting out suggestions for the next like ... all helps.

A classroom environment also helps when it comes to exercises - alternating them with lectures to keep the flow running, interruptions to a minimum, and a learning environment. Delegates can be paired / grouped up to work with each other and this does wonders too as they discuss and explain there understanding to each other.  And doing the exercises there and then avoids the distractions of other work that people are demanding you do, family, friends and colleagues all around you as you try to concentrate away from the training environment.  The kids may be used to doing homework and become effective in time.  For those new to the routine, it can be pretty hard and perhaps too easy to give up if there is no exam at the end.

A classroom environment allows the tutor to 'pick up' the delegates who need more help, perhaps watching their quietness in class and looking over their shoulder as he walks around during exercises - picking up a clue here and there from comments made that they need some reinforcement, or (on the other hand) that the whole thing is far too basic for them, and being able to deal with that too.

But - the classroom environment has gone and is impractical at present.  Counter that with new and unexpected experience gathered using online, and the new and unexpected modern experience of practical use of the leading edge versions of the technologies, and perhaps I am in a position to offer excellent tailored training once again. Certainly I have had a couple of recent approaches from long-standing client companies.   And I have given it some considerable thought.  On how to ensure that we take best advantage of the new technologies, and how we avoid the potential pitfalls described above ... and so, in bullet points, I offer you ...

Overview of offering

* 6 to 8 sessions of 1.5 hours each, weekly, same time each week.
* Presentation to be mixed slide set and dynamic demonstrations
* Maximum one "screen" of attendees. I believe that would be 14 once you take our 2 tutor seats

* "Open mike" so that anyone can butt in with questions
* In addition, following 30 minutes around for detailed questions
* In addition, a prior 30 minutes to review / answer from previous week
* Tutor available for one or two further slots during the week to take questions / help on exercises
* Accessible via email too - promised response within 12 hours. Target - answer 90% question fully in that time

* Presentation slides and full source code examples available online after each session
* ALSO - data sets for the examples
* ALSO - exercises/ideas to try out between sessions

* Using a recent Python 3 (3.7?) unless otherwise advised (what is your minimum spec?)
* Intentionally NOT majoring on 3.8 / 3.9 extras in case your systems are not at that level but could mention and show them
* Delegate to have access to 3.7, 3.8 or 3.9 to try things out (not vital during 90 minutes, but needed between sessions)
* Sessions to be presented in English

* Lead time - 3 weeks to first session
* Pricing - we are probably looking at [redacted] per week inclusive.
* Invoicing perhaps 4 weekly in arrears, payment due within 14 days
* "Break out" clause - if it's not working at any point, chargeable only up to the time delivered
* BACS transfer please - we are no longer VAT (Value Added Tax) registered, nor set up to take debit or credit cards
* This suggestion / quotation available for acceptance until 31st March 2021
* Course to run at dates prior agreed - needs to be completed by late summer

Concerns

* Delegates not able to attend session(s) spread over multiple weeks getting lost
(elements above designed to help catching up)
* so much else going on that delegates don't have time to exercise
(30 minute review ahead of time should sort this as best we can

Details

Wednesday afternoon:
14:15 - 14:45 Catch up - review and exercises (very first week - getting to know you)
15:00 - 16:30 New lecture / interactive session
and to 17:00 ish Follow up questions

Extra slots - Friday then Monday from 14:15 for "as long as needed"
(variable by agreement - for example bank holiday weeks; weekend, morning, evening sessions NOT ruled out by me)

Running order - first draft - to vary depending of pre-agreed delegate background
(i.e. - is this for people with prior programming experience, or totally new to coding?)
( Week 0 - Learning to program in Python - first principles)
Week 1 - Hello Python World, featuring "everything is an object"
Week 2 - Loops, conditionals, finding and using built in functions and methods
Week 3 - Collections. Also importing code. Exceptions.
Week 4 - Structuring code into manageable blocks and units; your own objects
Week 5 - data handling - files, data structures; regular expressions in Python
Week 6 - object subclasses, inheritance, static and dynamic, decorators
Week 7 - good re-usable code, with test harnesses, design for easy maintenance, efficiency
( Week 8 - Using Python with XML / on the web / graphics / SciPy / MatPlotLib, etc)

Very happy to tune the above - it is just a first cut on timing and content - nothing there fixed in stone!

Missing from my proposal

- CV of tutor and references (they know me well)
- Provision of printed notes to accompany the course (on line lecture slides and examples instead)
- Provision of computers for each trainee to use during course (own systems these days. The topics to be taught in this case do NOT include security stuff of breaking into and fixing systems!)

Read on ... next post to follow ...

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grahame
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« Reply #1 on: February 14, 2021, 10:41:35 »

We talk on the Coffee Shop of changing lifestyle - working from home rather than an office for some, or even all, of the time.  And where someone's travelling into their base perhaps 1 or 2 days per week, they can live much further away.   Settling in the "new normal", do we expect to find people living further from London / Bristol / Cardiff / Birmingham / Manchester / Leeds / Newcastle / Edinburgh / Glasgow - a rejuvenation of the countryside, with cities, suburbs, and immediate regions dropping back in relative importance, to the benefit of the further-out locations.  Come live at Roman Bridge. Life in the countryside at Commondale. Buy the old station house at Georgemas and do it up. A life of relative luxury at Luxulyan rather than commuting daily from Luton.

But ... how far does that go?   Is there a need to go to the office at all?  Will some of the jobs be 100% remote, and does that mean remote can be outside the UK (United Kingdom)?   In 1998, Lisa moved from Naples, Florida to Easterton, Wiltshire and even in those days was able to remote work on a contract based there, with a client visit perhaps every six month.  It worked well - in terms of support, issues reported during the USA day were looked at while they slept and answers given by the next morning. And it really helped that they were already a highly distributed organisation providing specialist support at some 20 locations spread right across north America with a team of just 35 staff.

How far does it go? One of several similar bids like the above has been turned down, with "cost" given as the reason. I am now 'competing' if you call it that from Melksham with the whole world - and the training they're taking will be coming from Malaysia - where the cost of living is a quarter of the UK cost, and I'm told their pricing is a quarter of mine. Now - I have plenty to do and was looking at this for fun as well as income, but somehow I don't want to drop to around £6 per delegate per week.

Offshoring became very popular at one time, though we have seen a migration of some elements back to the UK - especially in elements which are "near customer" such as some call centres.   Do members see a new phase of offshoring of jobs now that the need to be "in the office" has reduced?  So is that going to mean that people working from home at present will give way to people working from home in distant lands?   Can we do the same thing the other way round?   Could I, if 10 years younger in Melksham, be offering courses in Memphis, Munich, Manhattan, Mombassa or Mandalay?
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« Reply #2 on: February 14, 2021, 11:36:59 »

It is happening already.

A colleague of mine is Greek and although he is back in the UK (United Kingdom) now, he has worked from Greece for much of the last few months. We remarked that it was no different to another colleague who was working from home in North Somerset.

A meeting last year that would normally have been in London, was attended by a London based academic, who opened the blind to reveal that it was dark outside - she was in her sister's house in Australia!

Also a friend of mine who does IT training and normally travels the world doing training. In one recent course on Zoom or whatever platform he uses, to a group in India, a participant was surprised when he said he was doing the course from home in Wiltshire rather than from Delhi where he was used to him doing courses!

The only barriers are time zones the London academic was very late to bed that night and while Greece is only 2 hours different to us Delhi is over 5 hours different as is eastern US (the other way). 

Many civil engineering consultants have offshored work to India for a number of years and may have found that their management do not need to visit as often as they once did.

You point about competitiveness is well made. The high cost of living here may become a bigger problem than it is now.  Much of that is down to the cost of property. 
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Bmblbzzz
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« Reply #3 on: February 14, 2021, 14:01:26 »

It's been happening for years and it goes in all directions. I've been wfh for years and my "bosses" are in London – also Chicago, Singapore and Romania. The people whose work comes to me are in all those places and more. But it does make work impersonal. I forget whether Maria or Anna is in Romania or Chicago and I don't even get to know a lot of people's names. On the upside, this means no office politics and backstabbing.

Ironically, I've recently been watching The Office (the American series, which IMO (in my opinion) is far funnier than the UK (United Kingdom) version) with my teenage son.
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Robin Summerhill
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« Reply #4 on: February 14, 2021, 15:46:56 »

It's been happening for years and it goes in all directions.

Quite

Since I became self employed in 2004 I have carried out commissions for UK (United Kingdom) local authorities and housing associations whilst sitting in hotel rooms in South Africa, Greece, Cyprus and the USA, and I have also done some quantity surveying for a proposed club house for a yacht club in the Bahamas from my home PC in Wiltshire. There is nothing new about remote working; the only new aspect is that more people have cottoned on to it.

So the real question that arises is “now that they’ve found it what are they going to do with it?” The answer will vary and will depend on countless thousands of individual decisions and individual circumstances, and even different times in individual life cycles.

There are people who are counting the days before they can go back to the office. When in my 30s with four young children around the place I would have been one of them, as I got more peace in the office than I did at home!

There will be many who don’t need to go into the office at all. I think by and large these will be the people that will be lost to commuter transport providers. Where they choose to live may be affected by not having to commute, but is more likely to be more affected by housing costs, local amenities, proximity to friends and relatives etc.

Then there will be those who will only go to their main base occasionally. Personally I doubt that many of these will decide to change their places of residence purely because they only go in once or twice a week. Perhaps it is more likely that they will realise what a total waste of time and money commuting actually is and I doubt, for example, that thousand s of these will decide to leave the greater London area and buy places in Great Malvern or Market Lavington or Nempnett Thrubwell just because they now theoretically can, on the basis of commuting time only.

Amenities are an important factor for many people. One odd quirk of the housing market, for example, is that private housing in rural areas tends to attract a premium, whilst housing associations with rural properties often find them harder to let. The preference for living close to the shops, the Post Office, theatres, a bus route or a railway station is not just confined to social housing tenants.

Always remember too that living in rural locations is not necessarily a bed of roses all the time, and I speak from experience here after moving from Yate/ Chipping Sodbury to West Tytherton between Chippenham and Calne back in 1980. Although only 4 miles from either place, they can feel a very long way away if the car breaks down one frosty morning, when the electricity has been off for two days because icing on the power lines has brought them down, or when the overnight temperature is 3 degrees below what it says on the forecast because you live in a rural area. I won’t elaborate on sitting in fog next to the river Avon for the best part of a week whilst there is glorious sunshine a mile away!

Caveat Emptor...

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Bmblbzzz
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« Reply #5 on: February 14, 2021, 16:34:52 »

Always remember too that living in rural locations is not necessarily a bed of roses all the time,
Definitely. Poland is an interesting example here, which I'm familiar with. Before WWII (World War 2 - 1939 to 1945) only a quarter to a third of the population was urban, and almost everyone in rural areas was engaged in agriculture either directly or in serving it in some way. After the war the urban population gradually grew as government policies developed industries and also favoured towns in various ways from education to transport. The country reached urban-rural equilibrium at the end of the 1960s and at the start of this century about two-thirds of the population was in towns and cities. But over the last 15 years or so, there's been a slow movement back to villages. Factors such as rising car ownership, faster public transport, new roads, all made it easier to live in a village and have access to city facilities when needed. Factors such as changing retail patterns, mobile phones, internet, and improved public services from water to rubbish collection to better schools, meant it wasn't even so necessary to access the town. The urban population is now down to around 60% of total (before Covid) and might even continue to fall.
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« Reply #6 on: February 15, 2021, 07:02:03 »

I am sure that is increasingly likely that the services sector will work from home or be off-shored.

I seem to remember that the manufacturing sector caught a bit of a cold at the beginning of Covid, and there was talk of on-shoring the supply chain more.
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grahame
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« Reply #7 on: February 15, 2021, 11:09:16 »

Some very interesting feedback there.  Continuing on my micro example of the macro situation

"If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!" But I already have. Thinking back, I have largely worked from home since 1980! 

In 1980, I (and family) made a big decision and moved from the Luton area to Chippenham - a transfer within the company I was working for - a promotion from "Technical Support Specialist" to "Sales Executive".  With the West Country as my territory and an office base in Maidenhead, I visited that office just once every couple of week. An excellent secretarial team there, and no need to consult with the technical specialist doing what I had previously done, it worked well. Easy access to the M4 and A303; just allow extra time in the summer if headed into Cornwall!

Having left that company (to run the technical end of our own startup for a number of years), it was "programming in the spare room" - rather more than a box room, and a move to Easterton near Devizes as the family expanded. I did open an office - with a peak of three staff - in east Bristol, but was never there more than half the time with "work from home" coding and once again excellent staff, who similarly worked some of the time from home - office days being on an overlapping rota so we always had the phones manned, one person knowing their coding was going to be interrupted by support calls and the rest working on code.

A period of a couple of years where I was very much office based. I could drive from Easterton to Basingstoke with my eyes close. Very much an interactive support function covering Europe for technical products coming in from the USA, fighting for support from a stretched HQ (Headquarters) in California, and helping the technical team I inherited (and initially thought they should have got the tech support manager role) be effective in their roles as well as technically excellent, which they were.

Theory goes that when I moved into training (for a company, not our own) I was in their training centre or on site each working day. But even then, there were occasions it was sensible to sit at home to update and write course materials, rather than driving 50 miles each way.  I lived near to Devizes Gateway at the time, but that was an era when suggesting such a station would have been seen as nutcase's madness, and it would have been suggested that the station be staffed with unicorns and fairies.

Our own "Well House Consultants" was set up in 1996, and it's been "working from home" to a greater or lesser extent even since. But what a home setup at times - big, duplexing, 40 pages per minute laser printers, binding machines, training rooms and customer loos from 2000 to 2006, at which point we expanded, taking over a B&B and setting up a full training and overnight accommodation there - we got our home back, but still home remained the head office and much work done from home!


So ... our business website updated (wonderful to have put in a template system before such things were common as it makes changes easy!) ... and I will provide you with Python 3 training on the current version all around the world.  http://www.wellho.net/course/python3.html . Realistically, training is for word-of-mouth people who know me/us and being done because it's enjoyable to do; Python has moved up from being a niche language in the past to pretty much a standard one these days, and the Well House Consultants model was always geared to niche topics.

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« Reply #8 on: February 16, 2021, 10:38:03 »

Well I've just put my remote working request in. Previously I did 3 weeks in London where my base is and a week in rural Wales. This was pre-covid but seemed to work well for all parties. Bit expensive in travel costs.

My current plan would probably see that ratio reversed. Most of the hold up seems to be unrelated to the actual work - what are the tax implications? How much will my employer contribute to hotels and travel? London Weighting? Where's the line for expenses? I'm pleasantly surprised that no one has questioned whether the role can be done remotely.

With regards to off shoring its never really come up for me or any of my colleagues. I'm probably in a niche industry where we struggle to hire suitable freelancers let alone moving roles off shore. Some of the out sourced support functions were off shored but its not really been a great success. In fact quite a lot of the 'expert' roles have been brought back in house and only the repetitive tasks have moved to Poland or India. We did have to go through the motions though to prove it didn't  work and it took a while before anyone senior would look at anything other than the direct cost.

Most of my colleagues are planning on moving from original one day working from home to one day in the office and off shoring hasn't come up. There were rumours of being sold off but that's been there for the last 20 years.
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« Reply #9 on: February 16, 2021, 12:18:08 »

I am sure that is increasingly likely that the services sector will work from home or be off-shored.

I seem to remember that the manufacturing sector caught a bit of a cold at the beginning of Covid, and there was talk of on-shoring the supply chain more.
Yes, but then the physical aspects of manufacturing – the actual manufacturing, as well as warehousing and so on – can't be done from home anyway. The paperwork can and we could in time find Chinese manufacturers offshoring their administrative jobs to Europe and America. Probably not this decade but sometime.
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