On the other hand, the company I work for that IPO'd the year before COVID is now hiring a ton of remote...in Mexico City, the Philippines, and in Poland.
So I'd correct your phrasing: "The talent in the US have all the cards and bargaining power". So the "smart" thing companies are doing is find talent outside the US.
And also before anyone mentions lower quality devs (for which I have an eye roll and a "get over yourself"), I've worked with enough of these devs by now to tell you there's next to no difference in quality.
> hiring a ton of remote...in Mexico City, the Philippines, and in Poland
I think FAANG developers have protected themselves from that by normalizing leetcode-style interviews. Absolute majority of developers here in Eastern Europe are not prepared to implement some knapsack algorithm on whiteboard in 20 minutes (yes, even the good ones!).
Only a matter of time. If it can be gamed, it WILL be gamed. Do you really believe that non FAANG devs cannot crack leetcode if they really wanted to ?
> If it can be gamed, it WILL be gamed. Do you really believe that non FAANG devs cannot crack leetcode if they really wanted to ?
Well, of course it can! I presume this is how absolute majority of FAANG devs got there in the first place (judging from the popularity of leetcode, CtCI, etc.). It is just that people who have time, ability and motivation to "game" (e.g. learn) all of the required skills (leetcode-style questions, distributed systems design (even for positions that have nothing to do with distributed systems), behavioral (remember, here in Eastern Europe people don't always behave in typical American "happy-positive" ways, in fact you would be considered weird by your coworkers if you do that, but you will fail an interview to FAANG-type companies if you tell them straight up that your boss was an asshole or the code was complete crap) and don't forget about good written and spoken English) usually aim to move to western countries, because why would they chose to work for peanuts on remote (did you see Google salaries in Poland? I assume they will pay similarly for remote positions if you happen to live in that location).
Yep. The "remote or nothing" advocates are forgetting that it is levelling the playing field and now if I have to hire remote anyway, I would hire anywhere in the world. I have worked with many developers across US and the world and I can tell you that there are bad developers everywhere and great developers everywhere. Sure, in some places, noise is high but overall if you know how to hire developers, you can get a good one for a fraction of the cost and this is the reality.
Of course everything can be made to work but in my experience and from what I've heard from others there are some cultural differences, language barriers and time zone problems that makes this is bit less efficient and sometimes outright hard.
For a small or medium company it may also be a bit more work to handle foreign employment laws and tax laws.
> I've worked with enough of these devs by now to tell you there's next to no difference in quality.
There is. The best devs are equal as developers, but local developers have an intuitive understanding of the market and so will make good decisions for the future without needing to be told, while remote ones won't have that feel and so will write code that doesn't scale. Note that remote and local is relative to your target market. If you want to sell to Poland then developers in Poland have the advantage, if you want to tell to the world you need developers from all over the world to capture as many different cultures as you can.
I don't know about Poland, but I know in India there are a lot of bad developers who wouldn't even try to be a developer in the US. This is nothing about their best developers who are just as good as anyone else but you have to shift through more bad ones. (There are a lot of bad ones in the US as well, just not as many)
Sorry but that makes no sense to me. There are good developers and bad developers. Doesn't matter where they're from.
If you're talking about "understanding of the market" that has nothing to do with development. Might make a difference if you want the 1 man startup kind of person, but still, that has nothing to do with actual development. I sincerely don't understand how you can equate lack of knowledge of a local market with writing code that doesn't scale.
Hiring developers for their understanding of the market sounds to me like you're not in need of a developer. Even then, once a good developer gets into a specific market he'll learn it just like a local developer would.
For some anecdotal evidence, I've never set foot outside of my country (Brazil) and worked with very few US developers that are in the same ballpark as me. I've met people from the Philippines, Greece, Sweden and many other countries that are better. Country is a non-factor.
IMO being a good developer has nothing to do with the zip code you were born in. People become good developers if they're invested in it and work on it. Maybe you're a tad better if you were born with the right genes, but 99% of it is self-improvement.
Being a good developer is not only about coding skills. It is about right the right product. Sure someone can give you a feature list, but if you have an idea should you implement it - the right answer means you get a large bonus, but the wrong can result in losing your job.
I agree with you and never said that. But specifically hiring local developers for "knowing the market" doesn't match that criteria to me.
I've given plenty of ideas that were profitable, relevant to the product, market and vision of the company. Yet I never lived anywhere close to those markets.
Maybe you had contact with only low quality developers of other countries or we're not speaking about the same thing here...
The reason India gets a bad rep because it has a lot of people whose best chance out of poverty is to try and break into tech to make money. So the noise is higher and there is no doubt about it. But thats just because of the population and choices they have. You said US has bad ones but not that many. That is again because if you look at Per capita, there aren't that many devs in US especially people trying to get into tech. Well, that is kinda changing. Nowadays, all these bootcamps popping up are milking money in the US and I am interviewing plenty of people who are bootcampers and can't write a single line of code correctly. So there is that.
So I'd correct your phrasing: "The talent in the US have all the cards and bargaining power". So the "smart" thing companies are doing is find talent outside the US.
And also before anyone mentions lower quality devs (for which I have an eye roll and a "get over yourself"), I've worked with enough of these devs by now to tell you there's next to no difference in quality.