Hacker News doesn't like to hear it, but remote work is a big part of this. All that effort convincing management you're just as effective working remotely was also a collective sales pitch to outsource your role.
Outsourcing comes and goes in waves. Good talent in India and the Philippines tend to work for FAANG companies, often at very comparable salaries to the west.
The remainder of the talent tends to struggle with some of the outsourced work, but with AI they can now give a semblance of competence.
In the UK a major retailer, Mark and Spencer got hacked after outsourcing work to India. They couldn't fulfill orders online for months, and they are now reducing the amount of work they outsource to India.
We will see something similar happen to other companies in a year or two, but until then we just have to tighten our belts and hope we don't get layed off before then.
They do though. My company hires in India and has had a hard time retaining talent there because anyone with mediocre talent can get western salaries by switching to larger companies than our own.
We've lost a decent number of engineers to Google, Facebook, and Amazon in India.
My company wants to pay roughly $50k USD in India per dev and that's just not enough. They've tried to compete by making nicer facilities and better in office benefits (like a cafeteria) but it's just not enough.
FAANG may offer those devs more than your company will in India but I'd be very surprised if they offer them similar compensation to FAANG devs in the West and specifically the US.
It's extremely level dependent. New grad salaries in India are way below Western levels, but senior talent can command Silicon Valley level packages. People switch companies at the drop of a hat to climb another rung on the ladder, which also makes retention very difficult.
Yea almost no one is making Bay Area level TCs in either location aside from those directly relocated from the Bay or working in HFT at Citadel, Jane Street, or DE Shaw, but you will be able to make Germany or UK level TC (US$50k-110k) with the right track record and experience. Ofc, an equally large cohort will be earning low salaries in the $5k-15k range, but those are largely employed at WITCH or EPAM type companies which employers are trying to cut out of the loop.
Then you're making the same mistake that Americans are increasingly making as well.
If you aren't top tier talent (Google, Citadel, Bloomberg, or sexy FinTech startup equivalent) we can get by offering £50k-£90k TC for 10-12 YoE in London. This is reflected in the annual TC distribution on levels.fyi [0] - London TC distributions are severely right skewed.
For top talent we are fine matching US salaries 1:1, but most of those roles are basically for people who worked in the US but faced visa issues.
The thing is, most American companies aren't interested in hiring "real talent" at scale in the UK because the salary ends up becoming the same as the US but the pool of candidates is shallower - especially when I can hop over to CEE and open an office in Warsaw, Cluj, or Prague and get significantly higher quality talent at the £50k-£80k range.
> Outsourcing comes and goes in waves. Good talent in India and the Philippines tend to work for FAANG companies, often at very comparable salaries to the west.
In those locations?
Based on sheer CS grad numbers why wouldn't companies just shift their r& operations there then?
> Based on sheer CS grad numbers why wouldn't companies just shift their r& operations there then?
There are lots of CS grads, yes. But most colleges out there are mostly degree mills, and this carries on to the workplace, where your average software engineer or engineering manager has very little understanding of what they’re actually doing (this[1] article was posted on HN, which will tell you the quality of engineering in India).
For anything slightly complicated, companies seem to be only interested in hiring from the best colleges and pay out of their nose in the process. A friend of a friend does some hardware work at a FAANG, and gets paid at almost that level.
Conversation about outsourcing aside, it isn’t fair to pick one example and generalize to say an entire country’s talent pool is poor.
The US has the best engineering talent pool in the world and you can find dozens of examples at major companies as bad (or worse) than the one you linked.
The FAANG I work for is trying to do just that. But while new grads are indeed a dime a dozen, you can't staff an R&D with only new grads, and finding and retaining skilled seniors is so tough that it has resorted to offering US-based Indians packages with US level comp to entice them to move back for a few years to bootstrap teams.
Yup! I've seen it at a big American cable company too - I was even a part of the initial team responsible for re-shoring, and now I'm seeing them offshoring everything back to (one of the worst) huge Indian outsourcing companies again.
One issue is that in many industries senior leadership just doesn't stick around for long enough. If your CEOs rotate out every 5-10 years then you're basically SOL; the next guy comes in, gets bamboozled by sweet talk of vastly reduced costs of offshoring and BOOM, round you go again!
> In the UK a major retailer, Mark and Spencer got hacked after outsourcing work to India.
Does sound more like correllation than causation. Was there evidence that the Indian devs made the mistakes that led to the hack or was it just the good old 'let's fall back on racism to avoid blame' by management? I still remember the articles where Boeing tried to peg the 737 MAX crashes on Indian engineers who worked for $10 an hour.
Its more about social engineering (this was the case for the m&s hack), if you outsource your work, you have less visibility over the people that work for you and it becomes more of a black box. This leads to worse employee awareness in general.
> Good talent in India and the Philippines tend to work for FAANG companies, often at very comparable salaries to the west.
As other commenters have pointed out, this is simply bullshit. Good talent in India and the Philippines earn nowhere near US dev salaries. Unless by "very comparable" you mean 1/3 - 1/2.
Yeah. One of the most ridiculous things in my entire life of 40 years was seeing 90% of my fellow SW industry workers using the 2 or so years during/after COVID where we had more power than we’ve ever had to advocate hard for making ourselves much more easy to replace by insisting on remote work, and insisting on reducing our productivity (even if not actually, at least in the eyes of the employers) so we couldn’t justify our higher salaries anymore.
1. It enables them to live in lower cost of living cities. This makes them more competitive relative to outsourcing because a lower wage in a cheaper city goes farther.
2. It opens up the job pool. If you work remote, you can work at any company that takes remote workers regardless of where you live.
3. It reduces the cost of switching jobs. Many people are stuck in jobs they don't want because there are few other local opportunities and switching jobs means uprooting and moving. For a single 20-something in an apartment, that doesn't sound so bad. But once you have a partner with their own career, kids with meaningful friendships, a mortgage, etc. then moving can be extremely disruptive.
In general, more job flexibility increases the efficiency of the job market for employees.
1. The cheapest American city is maybe half thr cost of the most expensive. Meanwhile in the most expensive Indian city, one could live like a king at 1/3 the cost of the cheapest American city with far more culture and things to do. And if you were willing to move to the cheapest Indian cities you could halve that again.
2. Correct. Given that the majority of SW jobs, especially the highest paying ones, were located in the U.S. this is a net benefit to anyone living outside the U.S. even before you take cost into consideration. More American jobs opened up to a Londoner than global jobs opened up to someone living in SF.
3. Efficiency approximately = lower costs. In this case costs = developer salaries.
So you’re right. We got more efficient. We reduced the average cost of developer salaries per job. Since very few people are willing to take a pay cut this means jobs are moving/will move to places where people are willing to work for less.
As someone who is Indian and frequently visits the sub continent (writing this from a suburb in Delhi) I can categorically tell you that no one actively wants to live in the cheapest Indian cities (just left my family’s home city which falls into this bracket).
I’m not sure if you’ve travelled much around the sub continent but I’d say you’re quite badly romanticising it. Yes we have our own culture which is different to that of the USA but, as with all things, there are A Lot of aspects of the culture here which are not admirable.
Well, no, not really. Top tier Indian cities like Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai are expensive and horribly dysfunctional when it comes to pollution, traffic, hygiene, dealing with government bureaucracy, etc. Having money insulates you from some but by no means all of this.
Real estate is about 2x-1x the price (I bet the cheap stuff is much worse than in the US though).
Cars and more expensive big purchases are cheaper in the US. And don't forget, the US has absolutely first-class-bar-none access to financial services, with abundant cheap loans, so you can support a much nicer lifestyle on the same income.
> More American jobs opened up to a Londoner than global jobs opened up to someone living in SF.
As someone living in EU and working (and job hunting) for American companies for the last N years I just have never seen it happen. American companies were opening subsidiaries in Europe long before COVID - they were just making everyone go to office there. Surge of remote work didn't seem to bring new American jobs to Europe as far as I could see - if anyone was hiring remotely, it were the same companies that already were hiring for in-office jobs before. Meanwhile, most remote jobs by American companies seem to be open for American residents only.
Thing is, for most locations, you still need to establish a legal presense to hire there, and that is enough of bureacratic burden for most companies to expand their geography very sparingly
> The cheapest American city is maybe half thr cost of the most expensive.
I currently live in Seattle. On Zillow, I can find a house in the small town where I grew up with the same stats as mine (square footage, number of bedrooms, baths). That house is about a fourth of the cost that Zillow says my current home is worth.
Oh, and the house in the small town has a 750' storage building out back. And another 1,500' shop. And five acres of land. And a fish pond.
Efficiency does not necessarily mean lower costs. More efficient workers could mean more valuable workers, and thus something employers are willing to pay more for in a competitive labor market.
>In general, more job flexibility increases the efficiency of the job market for employees.
It increases the efficiency of the market as a whole, but that's not the same as saying that first world software engineers (already highly paid and previously protected from foreign competition) would be better off.
Claims 1 would be difficult to back with evidence.
Some may accept a significantly lower pay (to go such a long way), but many wouldn't.
Overall my observation is that costs of living doesn't proportionally follow compensation. The far stretched example is how offshore staff often live in countries with costs of living at about a fifth, earning a third of their counterparts in the U.S or other top paying countries
Of course for skilled jobs perfectly doable remote such as software engineers.
I may be biased by the fact it also makes sense, a worker understands the value provided to the business is more or less equal, and since we live in a market society, why wouldn't it be expected to earn the same. In effect we don't earn the same no matter the location, but it is somewhere between that and aligned to location comp.
I find that some tech workers don't understand economics that well. In general more efficiency for an industry means less wages per unit of output worked across a whole industry. The benefit of "efficiency" usually accrues to customers of a service, not providers.
Efficiency benefits society at large, at the expense of the people being made more efficient. This is just capitalism and the result of price (and also sometimes societal respect) being a function of scarcity of a product/skill.
There's a reason construction unions, doctor's associations, and the like exist - to promote members interests (i.e. predominately money). If you can cartel an industry to produce lower efficiencies; assuming that a disruptor can't break into your market and ruin your party your members will accrue higher salaries and usually given our system more respect from peers in society. Locally I'm hearing "get a trade"; and when I say I'm a SWE people sneer - the respect for the profession IMO due to "efficiency/AI" has crashed over the last decade.
> when I say I'm a SWE people sneer - the respect for the profession IMO due to "efficiency/AI" has crashed over the last decade.
Tbf, a lot of SWEs sneered at other professions getting automated by AI - even on HN.
There isn't much sympathy to be given to SWEs and techies simply because we are paid significantly higher than other white collar roles with comparable or worse working hours like accounting, marketing, other engineering disciplines, dentistry, nursing, and even various subfields of medicine like primary care physicians.
A lot of techies who are complaining on HN need to realize that in reality they are the elite even though they don't think they are.
Why does Jeff in Cary NC deserve a $200K TC working 40 hours and remote first and just a BS in CS when a CPA at PwC makes $120K TC with added debt from a masters in accounting, a Management Consultant at BCG makes $175K TC with added MBA debt, an Biomedical Engineer at Biogen earning around $120K TC with added debt from bio undergrad and grad school, a journalist working for a local newspaper earning $30k-50k with debt from journalism school, and a teacher earns $50K with debt from getting an education credential on top of a bachelors?
That may be true in the US, but isn't that true worldwide in general. In fact in many countries techies are a bit of a underclass. But I get your point.
My comment was more I think that "sneer" is more around the profession's worth. A few years ago people would go "wow, that's cool". Very different now which shows status of a job is determined by perceived job prospects, security, and impact.
It was going to happen anyways. I was working remote 2-3 days a week before 2020 hit and that was mainly due to how bad my commute was time-wise. It was exhausting. But it's because the team I was working with was all in other cities and countries and so I was driving to an office location just to badge in. I barely even talked to anyone there. It became a terrible job for that reason alone. Much of what made my career was developing professional contacts and colleagues and Covid took all that away from me to the point that it killed my career. Now a lot of us are in the same situation and I'm here to tell you, I think this is it--it's never coming back this time. You can hope it does, but hope is not a strategy.
The people I worked with were pretty distributed before COVID--partially because functions (and geo regions) were distributed anyway--and partly for other reasons. When COVID hit there was basically very little effort to co-locate most teams. Some companies did try to pull people back but in a lot of cases, it was a matter of RTO but that was a good way to do a mass layoff. Many companies didn't want to do that.
I did (and sometimes still do) attend professional events but the level of interpersonal-contact pre-COVID was gone long before I semi-retired.
I started a company during COVID and we hired: one engineer in SF, one in NY, three in different areas of Israel, plus co-Founders in Boston and Baltimore. There’s no way we could have hired all this specialized talent in any one city at a price we could afford. I also missed the in-person dynamics, but I can’t imagine how you’d build this kind of team without remote work.
Startups are a different deal. Everyone knows everyone, people are hired for their specific talents, management barely exists, there are no executive types disconnected from the reality in the lower levels of the company, no turf wars of middle management, etc. (This is why I prefer working for startups.)
Big corporations are the opposite. Doing something that looks good locally / helps a quarterly report but works to the detriment of the company as a whole is often par of the course :(
I am an offshore worker (I live in Europe and generally work for American companies) and make a good deal less than Americans with the same job (but more than I would at a European company) - it’s not just outsourcing for 10% the cost to a developing country.
Sure, but many companies outsourcing aren't looking for the best, they are looking for the cheapest, and surprise-surprise the cheapest are not the best. Some of them are goddamn awful - close to zero value, but upper management typically never hears about that and just thinks they are saving money because they are cheap.
There is also a big difference in mindset between an employee hoping to advance their career at a company, trying to become a SME, pushing initiatives, incentivized by stock grants, actually caring about customers, etc, and a vendor employee - even a good one - to who this is just a temporary gig, and has no vested interest in the quality of the codebase or building value for the company.
In many companies there is little flow of real information from the bottom up. Upper management only hears what everyone understands they want to hear.
If the top down message is "this is the direction, make it work", and people further down in the hierarchy understand that the boss doesn't want to hear that his plan (e.g. hire the cheapest to save money) isn't working, then he is not going to hear it.
Companies don't even care, honestly. Some have uptime requirements that they get fined over if things go sideways, but besides that, they don't even care.
If you work in the Bay Area, want to raise kids in a house you own, and don't own one yet, then "can report to a Bay Area office" isn't going to work as your competitive advantage for much longer anyway.
This argument would make a lot more sense if you replaced remote work with unions. All that power and opportunity and they squandered it thinking their bosses and management was on their side.
Go ahead, downvote. As if working in the office would have magically protected you these layoffs.
> The only way to stop the race to the bottom in wages and standards is for working people of all races, religions and immigration status to stand together
> Find resources to help union members know their rights and ensure they are prepared to defend themselves and the immigrant members of their families and communities in the event of workplace or community raids
What about this one that explicitly advocates for non-Americans?
The first article you link has the following explaining their stance on immigration [0]:
“This approach will ensure that immigration does not depress wages and working conditions or encourage marginal low-wage industries that depend heavily on substandard wages, benefits and working conditions.”
And:
(1) an independent commission to assess and manage future flows, based on labor market shortages that are determined on the basis of actual need;
(2) a secure and effective worker authorization mechanism;
(3) rational operational control of the border;
(4) adjustment of status for the current undocumented population; and
(5) improvement, not expansion, of temporary worker programs, limited to temporary or seasonal, not permanent, jobs.
Imagine if there was a push to create a professional organization to handle qualification, certifications etc. Like there is for doctors, dentist, accountants and other fields
I'd be more inclined to work in the office if most of my coworkers weren't in India anyways. I can't exactly have water cooler talk with Manglesh while he's asleep on the opposite side of the planet. At least at home I don't have to spend 10 minutes of each meeting finding an empty conference room and getting the audio/video setup to barely function.
If you do work with folks in India a lot, it is a really good boost to your group productivity to go visit them in India, as an IC programmer. It is a safe place, people are very good at hospitality, and you can forge much stronger bonds of connection and of shared technical vision when people are people not just arbitrary strings in Slack (video conferencing can sustain connections but it is hard to make them over laggy video at inconvenient times of day).
I have been working from home to various degrees since 1997 or so and I go in more when I need more work to do and work from home more when I am super busy with coding stuff or similar that can be done better and faster from home.
But yeah going to office to sit in meetings with of people in other offices is silly.
physically being in the office is irrelevant. I can and do have water cooler chats with my remote teammates in the same tz as me while Manglesh is asleep in his
Offshoring didn't start in Covid and it still has the issues of time zone, culture, etc.
You're not wrong in that companies are looking to hire in cheaper geographies but I think the remote aspect is just a small part of it. Another part is that SV comp has shot through the roof because RSUs. There are also arguably more and better people available in the cheaper geographies.
But it's not a zero sum game and there are still a lot of tech jobs in North America. AI hasn't reduced that total number of jobs.
No one likes to hear it because it's not a part of it lol. Paying fair market wages is different than trying to exploit differences in vastly different standards of living between very very different economies.
Talented workers get talented pay -- a fact many company's and execs don't like.
It has very little to do with their literal position on earth in relation to a company's real estate foot print.
Workers need to be more intelligent and what was that word you used in your comment... "collective."
The U.S. managerial class has been GORGING off worker's labor for decades and workers are about to have nothing to show for it.
As someone who over the past couple of years was responsible for some of these hiring decisions, it absolutely is a part of it ... lol.
I've worked with absolutely fantastic developers in Argentina, Poland, Romania and Ukraine. You're right, talented workers get talented pay, but talented pay in Romania is a lot less than talented pay in San Francisco. Teams are used to working entirely remotely now, videoconferencing software is great, and teams mostly align to US timezones (not entirely, but for example Eastern European workers shifted their day a few hours later so we get at least 4-5 hours overlap every day).
I think companies are a lot smarter about outsourcing now than they were 15-20 years ago and focus more on developer quality, but I've absolutely seen that a company will be much happier to hire 2 excellent senior devs from Poland for what you could get for 1 junior college hire in a high cost of living area in the US.
I think you're contradicting yourself or getting some wires crossed.
>You're right, talented workers get talented pay, but talented pay in Romania is a lot less than talented pay in San Francisco.
But this is due to again, vastly different standards of living in different economies. Geo-based pay ranges have always been a thing, but I think it's a bit reasonable to draw the line here.
So it's not:
>it absolutely is a part of it ... lol.
Because you're not hiring people from elsewhere because of "well I don't need people HERE anymore." The calculus is the same it ever was, even before COVID.
Companies were already out-sourcing before great video conferencing software or an understanding of how to work with remote teams.
It's an exploitation of different economies, at the expense of the American working class.
It's the same thing, just under a shiny new label designed to absolve the managerial class from said exploitation.
I don’t think anyone is arguing that the basic idea of offshoring was invented after the COVID pandemic… But rather that workplaces and workforces geared towards remote working has made it more feasible and accelerated the process
Is it really hard to understand that the infrastructure for remote work, which I think everyone would agree got a major upgrade during the pandemic, would also make it much easier for companies to outsource software dev work?
Pre-2015 or so, yes, of course there was outsourcing, but it was honestly a major PITA in most cases. Most communication was done in conference calls, very little group video communication, lots of async chats, etc.. Any type of work where you needed a fairly frequent black-and-forth with various team members was rarely outsourced - the type of work that was outsourced was the type that was more likely to have static requirements.
But now, though, there is basically no difference working with a colleague who's working from home in the same city vs. working from home thousands of miles away (as long as there is good timezones overlap). And that is a change that only happened around the beginning of the pandemic, and I've personally seen companies much more willing to outsource because of it, and they're outsourcing a much wider type of work (e.g. brand new dev work that is frequently updated based on usage metrics) than they would in the past.
>Is it really hard to understand that the infrastructure for remote work, which I think everyone would agree got a major upgrade during the pandemic, would also make it much easier for companies to outsource software dev work?
No, because it wasn't actually upgraded.
Like be honest, the shift into remote work wasn't surrounded by massive tech advances or upgrades. All the tools that existed for remote work had been there, largely in the same fashion and capability, for decades.
So when you say the infra. and tooling has improved, you need to be specific because it's very hard to point to anything that was fundamentally or notably improved in the pandemic around remote work.
It all existed before. It was all used before. If you weren't using it before the pandemic that was by choice, not because it didn't exist.
Everything from our communication software, to developer collaboration tools, to how org's track and manage their employees all existed well, well before the pandemic.
It was a cultural change -- not a technological one.
> And that is a change that only happened around the beginning of the pandemic
I'm not sure what you're basing this on. Especially someone's that's had to work with peers across the globe for 4+ decades -- the tools have always been there.
> All the tools that existed for remote work had been there, largely in the same fashion and capability, for decades.
Trying to be charitable, but that is just complete nonsense. I managed an offshore team in 2007, and I managed offshore devs in 2022, and the experiences were world and away different. You're either totally full of shit or just managed teams on some other planet or something.
Detail what changed? Because I can't point to anything. And I've been doing this for 4+ decades. A lot of that remote.
So you're claiming things radically changed, and if such changes caused a huge shift in the workforce it should be pretty easy to give some examples, yeah?
Instead of going "you're full of shit", just answer the question at hand and the one that was given to you multiple times.
The fact that it's so easy to do and you just spent way more effort not doing it is a pretty clear indication you are following a narrative, and not facts.
This is just laughably ridiculous. OK, I'll bite though, even though I can't believe anyone is actually this willfully blind:
1. As the other commenter stated, gigabit Ethernet is now standard, and tons of people, throughout the world, have bandwidth to their home that can easily support high quality video conferencing. That just didn't exist 15+ years ago.
2. Group video chats on consumer grade devices simply didn't exist. Sure, in the mid 00s we had some group video conferencing, but they nearly always required dedicated facilities - people weren't having zoom meetings with 10 individuals from their laptops.
3. But perhaps most importantly, since the world is now used to doing everything remote, offshore teams are rarely "the odd man out". Right up until around the pandemic, most companies were culturally based around the office, and structures were set up to support in-office collaboration. Now, though, everyone is used to being remote anyway, like my favorite cartoon showing the difference between in-office, remote, and hybrid software devs - except there is no difference, because they're all on Zoom all the time anyway.
I just honestly can't believe that someone who managed remote teams in 2005 thinks it's the same as managing in 2025, and the plethora of advancements in networking and remote conferencing tech easily supports that.
Not OP but a couple major changes that didn't exist in most companies 20 years ago that reduced friction from an organizational perspective.
1. Gigabit internet - video call quality is significantly better than it was 10-15 years ago.
2. Zoom/Google Meets - the attention Zoom gave to UX just wasn't matched by any other precursor. Google Meets is a close second.
3. GSuite/O365 - sharing documents across organizations and being able to search for them successfully org wide has gotten much better now due to tools like Glean
4. Slack - most traditional companies didn't adopt Slack until the pandemic. Before that they were primarily leveraging email
There has been a whole decade of evolution in productivity and DevTooling throughout the 2010s, and the COVID WFH period forced most orgs (especially traditional orgs) to adopt a lot of that tooling.
On top of that, a large number of mid-level managers, engineers, PMs, and even VPs are in naturalization limbo, so it's become easy to find people to end up leading offices back in their home country while enforcing the same standards as back in the US. MS did this in Israel back in the 2010s, and most companies began doing something similar across Eastern Europe and India during the early years of COVID because most companies legitimately were worried it would become a Great Recession level event.
>Gigabit internet - video call quality is significantly better than it was 10-15 years ago.
You don't need gigabit internet for good video quality. We solved this with the MPEG-4, specifically H.264.
Most video streaming software still uses H.264 to this day, or some "mimic" of it. This was 15+ years ago btw.
You only need like, maybe 100 Mbps. Most definitely less for normal conferences.
> Zoom/Google Meets - the attention Zoom gave to UX just wasn't matched by any other precursor. Google Meets is a close second.
Opinion based, and you're welcome to have it. But not sure what qualifies as any sort of good evidence or reason for companies moving to other countries for their labor force.
>GSuite/O365 - sharing documents across organizations and being able to search for them successfully org wide has gotten much better now due to tools like Glean
Again, you're welcome to your opinions. Sharing documents in organizations across cities, states, and countries has been pretty mainstay for 30+ years.
And if you want my honest opinion, the tooling has gotten worse.
> Slack - most traditional companies didn't adopt Slack until the pandemic. Before that they were primarily leveraging email
At this point I'm just having trouble understanding why you think these things are fundamentally game changers.
>and DevTooling throughout the 2010s
Like what?
Again, if that's the best examples you could come up with they're not really enough and even worse (in the cases of GSuite/365) they are counter to your point about tooling improvement.
> Companies were already out-sourcing before great video conferencing software or an understanding of how to work with remote teams.
And those experiments failed in the 2000s.
But in the 2020s with an extended pandemic lockdown over 2-3 years, async work was proven to succeed.
I am one of those decisionmakers and the pandemic effect did convince the last stragglers that offshoring by directly managing a subsidiary in Poland, India, Czechia, Israel, etc with ex-American leadership is good enough.
I warned about this during COVID on HN and was downvoted constantly.
Pretending that the 2000s-era experience can inform decisions we make in the 2020s is completely flawed.
Being in denial of the "brave new world" is only going to do you harm as an IC.
But some of these comments are just like from another planet. Like a comment I responded to saying "All the tools that existed for remote work had been there, largely in the same fashion and capability, for decades", and then when I responded with disbelief about how anyone could think that remote working tools have been static for decades I was chastised for not giving specific examples.
The level of cluelessness on display here is just baffling to me. There used to be tangible benefits for being located in the same city. If I'm just Zooming with my colleagues anyway, it makes zero difference if they are in the same city or thousands of miles away, as long as there is good timezones overlap.
What you now get on your laptop, home internet, and Zoom was only available with $25k a room cisco gear 10 years ago. I don't think remote communication is anywhere near as good as in-person, but it's night and day different from 2015.
>static for decades I was chastised for not giving specific examples.
Any examples, really.
>The level of cluelessness on display here is just baffling to me.
I encourage you to give this thread an honest, deep think about why you feel this way. It's certainly not lack of insight from the other side. The word accountability is relevant here.
There are literally tons of examples lots of people, myself included, have given in this thread. At this point, arguing with you is like arguing with a dining room table. Have fun in your universe.
All the comments here on this thread feel almost exactly like the same things I heard about Chinese manufacturing or Korean cars back in the 2000s.
At an individual level, it's difficult to make any changes, but at the very least one can start thinking of how to live in this new world.
Just having enough EQ as an Engineer to give an actual business justification about your initiatives or teams (NARR attach rate, developer velocity, actual tangible examples of generating pipeline) along with actually trying to train and mentor new grads and consistently upskilling would in most cases be enough to protect your job, but people here want to stick their head in the sand.
Right, but, to be clear, that's not what happened in the case of the original post. They claim they were a senior dev who got replaced by several less effective junior devs.
For India they culturally value different skills and roles. They value pair programming and treat great ideas from juniors as a negative. Japan has a different work culture that doesn't fit the open model in the west.
The issue in the EU is local EU companies don't pay as well because they don't have to (little competition). And a culture of not paying high salaries but paying higher taxes.
He's likely talking about strategic not operative management. Not the Team Lead of a dev team, but VPs, department heads, C-levels etc, the kind of people who set quarterly goals and sign contracts.
They're an insular and distinct class unto themselves usually, and there's very little movement (or and very different candidate pool) between devs and them.
Only in America is this kind of anti-labor sentiment masquerading as "if you knew what was good for you now look what happened", as if businesses were so stupid as to be fooled by "if we don't make it apparent, they won't notice" and somehow this would shield programming from off-shoring. The actual reality is that post-WW2 exceptionalism in literacy ended; the developing world caught up. The entire premise of American labor exceptionalism was built on this faulty assumption. And rather than reconfigure your negotiation as labor, your first thought is how you can get back in the good graces of the 'big boss'.
> All that effort convincing management you're just as effective working remotely was also a collective sales pitch to outsource your role.
Here’s the thing though. People have been trying to outsource software development since the late 90s. Every time I’ve been around offshoring efforts wherever they were implemented, a few years later onshoring would happen again. It turns out time zones, thick Indian accents, and poor quality control have been and still are major obstacles to overcome.
I spent some time consulting over the last few years. So many companies are laying off their US engineering teams and replacing them with offshore teams. There used to be this notion that offshore meant lower quality but it doesn't seem like that as much these days. I've worked with some Ukrainian teams for example. They're 20% the price of Americans, produce the same quality, work harder, and speak great English. It seems like a no-brainer to go offshore.
There is an eternal cycle between uncomfortable and productive and comfortable and lazy.
15-20 years ago SWE work was brutal and paid OKish, but not great if you calculated the hourly.
Then the era of free VC money came, culminating in the pandemic boom, where people were crash coursing JavaScript to land a remote job doing 4 hours of work a week for $170k.
The pendulum is now swinging in the other direction.
Before the first dotcom era, software jobs paid like most other professional office jobs. Decent money but nothing really remarkable.
With the dotcom boom and VC money, that changed. I doubled my salary going to a startup in 1998. I was not a better developer all of a sudden, it was just that startups had piles of money and investors demanding that they spend it.
15-20 years ago software development was still very well paid compared to 30 years ago. And then the really insane FAANG money started flowing.
> I was not a better developer all of a sudden, it was just that startups had piles of money and investors demanding that they spend it.
That's not the whole story, though. The Internet inherently changed the value prop for software work, where a small number of engineers could support a huge number of users. That leverage makes software work inherently waaaay more profitable than it was pre-Internet, which is why companies could afford to throw gobs of money at top engineering talent.
I worked in software 15-20 years ago. The work was not "brutal". I worked hard, but mostly because I enjoyed the work. I lived in a major American city and my pay was essentially the highest pay you could get outside of professions requiring professional degrees like doctor or lawyer, or some high finance positions. And even then, I made more than some doctors in lower-tier specialties.
Remote work and outsourcing are two very different beasts, and companies have outsourced long before remote work. In fact, remote work is rarely an option in countries where outsourcing happens because the quality of high-speed internet isn’t uniform enough for folks to be able to just work from home.
Additionally, companies can’t just hire individuals in other countries. They have to set up business entities and that costs significant money to do. It’s why they mostly work with outsourcing companies, who often do have offices where these people come in and work.
Everything about this is the opposite from my experience.
No one is talking about outsourcing to body shops like the old times a decade ago. I went from employing offshored devs and IT talent competing with low-effort body shops, to now competing directly with the largest names in the industry for those workers.
It is not hard at all to employ people “directly” in most countries. Plenty of global payroll services that will handle this for you at a small scale, and you just stand up a local “office” with a cheap office manager and attorney on retainer if you outgrow that. The legal entities and structure might be opaque, but the end result is effectively direct employee as far as anyone working with them is concerned.
Offshoring does not mean what it used to. These people are treated and expectations are the same as anyone employed from Iowa or California. The largest difference and source of friction is timezone.
Reliable internet is more or less ubiquitous in the entire world now in any even moderately sized city. It’s not 2005 any more. This is utterly a non-issue. And this was before Starlink. A $200/mo paycheck bonus usually covers this anywhere I’ve done business.
I’ve worked with hundreds of folks around the world at this point. The HN take on outsourcing is so ridiculous to me, and explains the hubris you see here regarding remote work.
This is absolutely my experience as well - so many posts on HN are just in denial or clueless.
> The largest difference and source of friction is timezone.
Completely agree with this, and that's why I've seen much less desire to outsource software work to India or China (like I did in the 2001-2012 timeframe) than I have to Latin America or Eastern Europe (or heck, even Western Europe where dev salaries are still much lower) for US-based companies.
I've seen both: people handpicked in India that are all high quality employees, and big corps using companies like Infosys to wholesale replace huge numbers of onshore employees with the "cheapest and best" India can offer.
Traditional offshoring bodyshops are very much back in vogue too.
Admittedly privileged counterpoint: I want to work with the best co-workers in the world. Most candidates I’ve interviewed both in the US and in other countries aren’t anywhere near that level. If just anybody will do for a job, I’ll probably get bored and frustrated by it.
High pay has been a mixed blessing for the tech field. For every aspiring top mathematician or physicist who’s been tempted by the pay and relevant new problems, I often feel like we’ve gotten 10x as many people who would otherwise have been uninspired doctors and lawyers or top business majors.
Yeah, it is shockingly bad. I’m assuming you’re using “talent” euphemistically here.
For a recent job opening I was looking to fill, HR sent us all of the applications rather than doing their own filtering (they did first round calls with people engineering highlighted).
The level of resume spam is absolutely staggering. So many applicants to jobs that have no obvious connection to their stated skills & experience, with job application questions filled out by LLMs. I’m not saying they’re all bad people, but all of these people who don’t know what they’re looking for other than an income is really disheartening.
> For a recent job opening I was looking to fill, HR sent us all of the applications rather than doing their own filtering (they did first round calls with people engineering highlighted).
If I can ask, what is it you think of work as? Most jobs are just that: a job, an economic transfer from employer to employee to perform specific tasks.
I hate to say it, but what do you think most Indians working for google, or facebook, or any of the other companies that open centers in India see their purpose there as?
As I mentioned, this is a privileged position, but I see work as an opportunity to do something I and others find meaningful and useful. I’m paid so that I can afford to focus my time on that work without worrying about money. I seek out employers and co-workers with whom my goals are aligned, and we go our separate ways if that ever ceases to be the case.
70% Advancing the state of the art in my areas of expertise
+
30% Enabling experts in other areas I care about to advance the state of the art by making all the problems related to my expertise just go away
Fair enough, but a huge amount of labor is much more aligned with the skilled but not SOTA work. People don't build payments systems, inventory management systems, or EHRs to advance the state of the art; they build them to provide a service for employment.
I think <5% of labor falls under what you are speaking about.
By no means universal. I was increasingly remote even before COVID because I did a lot of business and other travel--even if I was never officially fully remote until very late in the game. Never moved from the house I owned through a number of jobs with better and worse commutes. But, then, didn't live in California though did live in what is generally considered a tech center.
I didn't think about that but you may be right. I think what might be non-debatable is that setting up the ability to work remotely definitely makes it easier to outsource someone's job. Whether that's causal or makes sense with other factors would vary company by company. Remote jobs are easier to outsource, though.
One of my friends from school has long worked in robotics. He showed me a machine he programmed to cut glass or something at a Volvo factory. I asked him about outsourcing back then. He told me his job required being physical plant to assess, program, and monitor it. He was going to stick with that over the higher-paying alternatives that he believed would be outsourced or automated more easily. Today, outsourcing only threatens work opportunities for one of us.
The era of American developer exceptionalism is over.
Talent abroad has access to the same tools, education, and increasingly, network. American engineers will be replaced wholesale with overseas engineers that cost a fraction of American labor.
You can hire talented React engineers for $50k that will work harder than their American counterparts.
It's not just React. Overseas markets have DevOps, SREs, embedded, systems engineers, you name it.
For years Americans joked that overseas labor was subpar. It's not, or at least it isn't in today's world.
If software engineering is not special and can be done by anyone, so can any other role in a business. So it follows that all American roles will be offshored eventually, including ownership of the company itself - or American businesses will be universally out competed.
> If software engineering is not special and can be done by anyone, so can any other role in a business.
Indeed, however other business roles have a significant physical presence or face to face component. Sales & marketing, legal, HR, and significant parts of operations and admin have physical presence requirements in most businesses. I would expect finance/accounting to be vulnerable to offshoring, though.
Any company not selling software for $$$ is hopefully not paying bay area salaries for their engineering team.
Mid west engineering teams are low six figure or even less. The cost savings from outsourcing a team of people earning 90k is meh compared to a team earning 300k.
You'd be surprised. I live in a state most SFers consider the middle of nowhere, and my friends and I make more in absolute terms than most SF companies offer (excepting the top tier). 90k is not much more than entry level IT pay here, even new grads make more.
Of course, you can't just work on CRUD apps or mobile apps, you have to build up domain knowledge of the business.
Surprising! Whenever recruiters have gotten confused and sent me non-costal job listings the salaries have always been very low (e.g. 140k for a principal level).
Yeah, we make quite a bit more than that even at IC level.
The best jobs are typically not send out for recruiters - people check their networks first, and only go to a recruiter if nobody in their network is available.
Aren't there certifications and stuff? I'd think that from a regulatory and legal compliance perspective it'd be better to have Americans handling the books. Say someone turns out to be cooking the books, if that person is halfway across the world good luck prosecuting them (unless your company is wealthy enough to the point where you can mobilize law enforcement to do your bidding)
Perhaps someday. But for now the USA has broader, deeper, and more sophisticated capital markets than every other country and economic bloc. This is one of the key reasons why most of the largest and fastest growing tech companies are still largely owned and located here.
The ramifications of losing all or nearly all of the tech jobs in the US is that the last "good" place to find better paying work that had a fairly low barrier to entry is now gone. I think that has major consequences for the US economy. I'm 52 and I can't just go back to school and re-tool to become a doctor or a lawyer now. I spent so many years becoming excellent and what I do, including higher degrees and certifications (I never really believed in certs, mind you, I always thought it was a giant scam).
Everything I look into as far as 2nd career goes has a very high barrier to entry and then there's the ever-present ageism barrier to fight, too.
I'm fortunate in that I have enough money to maybe just be retired, but most of you aren't anywhere close to being that financially independent. It's going to be ugly.
I knew for years that the offshoring blitz would finally reach critical mass and I was correct. Now it is an economic conflagration.
This is a big issue for young people, too. Every white collar career path is very on-rails now - you're expected to get a degree in XYZ and then get a fresh grad job as a Level 1 XYZer and so on.
So the stakes are drastically higher for 18 year olds picking their college majors. It's effectively a life commitment for a specific career path, and there's a lot of anxiety among students because they don't know if the career path they're betting the farm on will still be be viable by the time they graduate. There's also a sense that if you can't manage to find work in the field you majored in within a year or two of graduating, you've fallen off the track and are condemned to DoorDashing forever.
I'm always amazed at how many older people I know (especially 60+) spent their twenties directionless and then started a decent paying career in their 30s, often by simply learning how to do something and getting a job doing it. I'm not sure what policy platform would make that possible again, but accomplishing it would alleviate a ton of the anxiety that young people have today.
It's worse than that. Who is going to pay the doctors and lawyers (and other folks providing services) if there are no more US jobs that product stuff for export.
And it's not even about services. Who is going to pay the home builders, electricians, plumbers, etc in a world where there is no money flowing into the US economy from the outside
Exactly my thoughts. A free market tends towards specialization which makes the market more efficient and therefore more competitive. As specialization increases it becomes more critical that one chooses and specializes their career early on. But this is unfair to young people who often have no idea what to do. Hence luck plays an increasing role, which is again the opposite of fairness.
That's really interesting. I did not know that India used commas for numbers like that, 3 digits and then 2 digits, and then apparently 2 digits again?
I am a European, so may be wrong, but it is my understanding that Indians have intuition around lakhs (100k) instead of thousands/millions. Apparently 100 lakhs is a crore (10M), but I haven’t seen that used so don’t know how prevalent it is - lakh is very commonly used though.
Because most of the smartest people in the world moved to the U.S. because of the education system, great access to capital, and the fact that they and other smart people could easily move to, live and work with each other in the U.S.
The U.S. also has the largest useful single market in the world (the EU is broken up across many languages/cultures, China is isolated so you can’t really expand out).
The U.S. is actively working to destroy several of those planks right now.
Even the capital plank, which superficially looks strong, is being hurt by the government picking winners and choosers. If the current govt bets don’t turn out to be the right ones we’re looking at an ugly, probably tax payer funded (OpenAI has already hinted at this) collapse.
> Jobs that have a high 0-1 component will still be in the US but jobs that are more 1-n may be offshored.
It used to be (since at least mid last century) and 0-1 and 1-n jobs were focused here. The world becoming smaller allowed a lot of 1-n jobs to move abroad. But we kept 0-1 jobs here.
That used to be the situation when the country brought people from around the world to be educated and then start business here. And historical precedent allowed us to continue thise advantages by having a reputation for it and continuing to support it. Our country for some reason now has decided it no longer wants to take the actions that fill the pipeline for 0-1 innovation.
And the world just like it took over 1-n is going to take over 0-1.
Why you would choose catalyze that change as an American, I have no idea.
I think there are people that generally believe that there is magic dust that says it can only happen on US soil instead of there being structural actions taken to enable it.
We will all very quickly learn that 0-1 can be anywhere that 1-n is.
It is less so about skills of workers. And more so about having lot of investors who are willing to throw money at everything and then even more after the fact. Or to just outright having enough money to buy out the better ideas.
That's not even close to remotely true. If that is the case, why is the UAE throwing their money at US startups and not their own? They have more than enough "capital".
Maybe, but I was looking for a job recently and most "remote" jobs from US companies were still US-only. Some allowed for hiring people in US timezones or close (basically the Americas). Very few were open to anyone in the world. I get the impression it's mostly the admin hassle that makes most companies avoid it.
So I have worked with great offshore folks, but the companies who really go for it seem to very much go with engineers who can barely code their way out of a paper bag just because they're cheap.
Nah, none of this is precisely true. Even if the folks abroad are just as skilled (true), they aren’t as effective because of primarily time zone differences and also language barriers (which is exacerbated by the time zone differences).
Cannot fully agree with this. I've just been fired from remote job. My remote contact position after 4 years was replaced with internal full-time position. I could convert to employee if I was willing to relocate to Bratislava and take a huge pay cut. I'm in Eastern Europe already, but cannot agree to €40k salary offer.
It's not like they don't have money, it was an insurance company with $1bn in quarterly profit. Market is extremely unfavorable for IT talents currently.
There are plenty of studies showing that remote work increases productivity that have been published before or after COVID, and similar case studies showing the dangers of off shoring. In a perfect world, a business that correctly understands these studies would be rewarded.
I think it's both more simple and more complex than AI or out-sourcing, though these are symptoms. Leadership everywhere is just kind of moving further away from reality, and don't care about progress, results, or fundamentals as they focus more on optics and spin, and controlling narratives or choices. Circular financing, ad fraud, trendy scam products or whole sectors.. does anyone want to do anything real when it's easier to make huge profits being fake? Enshittification is another sign of the times, but that's just about products and platforms, we need a better term. That leadership really wants a scammy rotten economy/product/company which ignores quality isn't that surprising, but the extent to which investors and even workers are often onboard too is surprising. Vandalism economy? Expertise simply isn't valued for the same reason that enlightenment values and rationalism generally are on the decline, in SWE sure, but also just in general.
One of the most myopic self-owns by a certain segment of industry I can think of in my lifetime.
I guess folks really did think that location had nothing to do with Silicon Valley paying 4x or more the worldwide average. That there was simply no talent anywhere in the world who could even compete at their level. No project managers anywhere who could do the job for less than $200k/yr.
One the dam broke and it was clear that remote work could be productive it simply opened up a rather insular industry to extreme worldwide competition. Far more smart and talented folks out there in the world than many anticipated.
It wasn't a "self own" unless you're taking the perspective of Covid. Remote work was forced onto sceptical employers due to shutdowns.
The industry suffers from fads and cargo-culting. Stealth diffuse offshoring is currently in, it's going to take a while for the downsides to percolate: I suspect will mostly boil down to jurisdiction impedance mismatches. What does it mean for employers if it is 1000x harder to extradite an employee to Delaware (or whatever jurisdiction is agreed to in their employment contract) if they clone their product from code? Without e-Verify, what are the chances that your remote employee is a North Korean unit, or working for your competitor? Boom times ahead for corporate intelligence - as well as the traditional kind. How many security teams and policies are geared to face Iran as an adversary? An unstated e-Verify benefit is free FBI COINTEL
There was and is a collective push to show remote work is just as effective as in-office. To the point of absurdity, where there were never any benefits to office work.
It was absolutely a self-own. People not understanding why they were being paid the salaries they were and how replaceable they might be.
It was more or less an entire workforce demanding that their job positions be opened up to global competition thinking there would be no negative long term outcomes from it. They effectively helped offshore their own jobs.
This is just starting - inertia is a thing, and it takes years to stand up competent local engineering teams in various countries. The past few years has simply been laying down the base infrastructure for what is starting to visibly happen today.
sure but people on the other side of the world are harder to communicate with for practical reasons like time zones and also for cultural reasons that matter big time in many markets
For certain types of projects it's possible to accelerate delivery by using a "follow the sun" model where at the end of the workday each team hands off tasks to another team farther west. This will obviously decrease productivity per team member due to additional communication overhead and increase the risk of errors, but the trade-offs can be acceptable if the project has to hit a fixed external deadline. Doing this successfully requires a high level of project management discipline that most organizations lack.
> sure but people on the other side of the world are harder to communicate with for practical reasons like time zones and also for cultural reasons that matter big time in many markets
That's a pain management are willing to inflict upon /you/
Yeah this is the reason most offshoring projects ultimately fail to deliver the promised savings. The overseas staff can never be as effective as folks in the same time zone.
Offshoring is valuable not to save money but to increase the development and operational bandwidth of the organization. This truth may not be known to the decision makers, but it is clear to the workers over time. It does increase the cost of coordination and the difficulty of establishing a common technical vision, but these are mitigatable by for example sending entire software project to one region, with the colocated workers having a higher degree of autonomy to make decisions. One way of partitioning work that fits with the power dynamics is to have all the new shiny things done in North America and mature profitable software is owned by a remote region. Half smiley but this effect is real.
