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Remote work in post-Covid: The global demand for Taiwanese talent remains high
Advanced digitalization has made the option of remote work prevalent for employers and employees during the Covid-19 outbreak when startups in Silicon Valley have started to seek global talents actively. Taiwanese remote workers seize the chance to meet Silicon Valley’s talent shortage. As time flies, now as a post-pandemic era, what is the working pattern like in tech companies and the demand for Taiwanese remote talents?
A lot of tech companies are using hybrid working as a model right now. “I am not sure how long would it stay, but it seems that more companies have gotten used to hybrid and remote working models,” says Chen-Ping Yu, the founder of Phiar, a Taiwanese-founded AI startup which is developing vehicle navigation systems using AR technology. Phiar was acquired by Google in 2022. Concerning the market condition of Taiwan’s remote tech talents in post-Covid, “I don’t think the need for Taiwanese remote workers is declining, because we already did that [hire Taiwanese remote workers] even before the pandemic”, says Yu.
“I used to be uncertain about remote working, because I have a strong value in face-to-face communication, and I felt that many questions and issues that we have were difficult to discuss over the video without drawing together on the whiteboard and without explaining in person. But then the pandemic forced us to be remote, I change my mind drastically after the pandemic, I felt that we can work really effectively remotely,” recalls Yu.
Return to office wave in late 2022
In November 2022, Elon Musk ended Twitter’s remote work, disrupting the company’s previous policy of allowing employees to work from anywhere. With the return to the office (RTO) wave in late 2022, many tech companies followed the trend to asked employees to go back to the offices.“But still, some startups which started remotely from the beginning have not changed,” says, Yang, the lead product manager at Softr, a startup providing a no-code platform for the user to build apps on top of Google Sheets databases. “Overall, companies are more open to hiring remote workers now, because everyone kind of tried it, and it proved that it worked. Some people still don't believe it, but I think it worked for a lot of companies,” says, Yang.
“You can get relatively affordable talents within the same level outside of the US, even in Europe”, says Yang who determines remote-working trend would not fade but will be more prevalent, especially for smaller companies.
Soon after Elon Musk’s “return to office” policy, the ongoing cost-cutting measures that he adopt brought the close of Twitter’s Seattle and Singapore offices in late 2022 and January 2023. The employees were informed to work remotely as Musk’s continued effort on cutting costs globally. It again underpins the advantage and well-adaptation of remote working globally as an inevitable measure to counter the recession which hit the tech industry worldwide, affected by the outbreak of the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War, soaring inflation, oil prices and interest rates.
The demand for Taiwanese remote talents in post-Covid
“The majority of tech giants prefer to hire talents within their own countries, even when they went remote during Covid, it didn’t mean that they start hiring talents from countries that they didn’t hire before because it is still quite painful. Hiring internationally is difficult for companies which are not familiar with the knowledge and process, but I think they had learnt a lot during Covid,” says Yang.
“A lot of new generations of tech companies know how to work remotely, like Gitlab which started remote-working from day one, before Covid, everyone works across time zones. It proves remote working can be done well, and a lot of companies and talents started to learn how to do it more efficiently,” continues Yang. Gitlab has offices located throughout the US, Europe, and Asia, and the employees are able to choose to work wherever they are.
“During the Covid-19, that was a decent time for Taiwanese talents to get connected to the US tech company because every company got much more funding than they were ever gotten before. Moreover, there was a tech talent shortage in the US meaning they had to hire globally, the tech giants are overhiring by tens of thousands of headcounts, and the same thing happened in startups,” says Ti-Wen Lin, the CEO of Worca, a startup providing HR solutions connecting US tech companies with the remote talent to help them scale their business internationally.
The layoff has made the headlines from 2022 and into 2023, the tech sector in particular increased its layoffs by 649% in 2022. Although, the layoff has not impacted hiring remote talents directly, “all of the layoff news affects everyone’s expectations in the future so everyone is slowing down their hiring operations now. It has become harder [to connect Taiwanese talents to US companies] on the employee side, it’s not specifically to Taiwan, since the entire market is in the correction stage,” explains Lin.
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