As a recently laid of senior engineer, to the extent that my job was replaced, it was replaced with offshore junior devs who'd already been working with the company for over year with a pretty rough level of productivity by man-hour, though maybe taking 3x the time to get things done is worth it if they're cheap enough. Which is to say I see my layoff as as cost cutting backed by a premise that there is no value in retaining senior level talent, to try and keep operating in the black, not because AI was materially producing a lot of benefits. (Because to the extent it was, I was the one reaping them compared to the offshore folks and less experienced onshore ones.)
In my experience, if you're working on a green-field project, you're working long hours, making very little visible progress, you have to write a lot of code, make important decisions.
All the while management is breathing down your neck and asking 'why isn't it ready yet'.
Once the thing is shipped, then all the important people come out of the woodwork, who were surely there all along, 'supporting' you from behind the scenes, there are photo ops and important people shaking hands. If they feel particularly charitable, then you might get a seat at the table. There's talk of spinning up a team around the product, and people fall over each other to get to lead it.
But the thing is, most likely they don't need your expertise any more, not really, once everything works, you don't really have a negotiating position as a dev. They get some cheap juniors to fix the bugs and add the missing feature niggles - hiring 3 juniors might not even be cheaper, the point is management does not have to depend on you, they can play their human resource games.
'But only I can fix that complex race condition, that popped up half a year after development' - well if it was good enough with the bug for people not to notice it for half a year, it's going to be good enough for another half, until the new devs can fix it.
This applies to ambitious feature requests as well - if the code's good enough that the contract was signed, the business requirement was met, they can just kick the can down the road until they can fix it.
> In my experience, if you're working on a green-field project, you're working long hours, making very little visible progress, you have to write a lot of code, make important decisions.
Funny, this is the complete opposite of my experience. Greenfield projects I've been a part of have had a ton of highly visible progress with _frequent_ updates to stakeholders basically from day 1. Same goes for complex additional features.
I've seen both kinds. GF projects where the senior devs feel that they have to get something right from the beginning, spending a year just on that piece (a set of widgets, a data ingestion framework, a state machine that covers the entire underlying algorithm). And other GF projects which have frequent updates and are open to development with very few speed bumps.
Of course you can call out the former examples as incompetent or hubris, and they will probably occur less and less, but nevertheless they exist.
I was going to say the same. In my experience I can say without hesitation green field projects is how you advance your career, become visible and get promoted.
What is progress? Are you sure that was greenfield?
I think the OP meant projects that required long investments without immediate returns. For instance, a platform migration that requires many components to be finished before it can even be tested. Or, real greenfield, like a new product venture with a unproven customer thesis. The kind that requires months of work before you can go to market and validade... How do you report progress? Components built, percentage completed? Without something a user can drive or a seller sell, that's not progress... It's just speculation.
> 'But only I can fix that complex race condition, that popped up half a year after development' - well if it was good enough with the bug for people not to notice it for half a year, it's going to be good enough for another half, until the new devs can fix it.
From my time at AWS, and in light of the recent DynamoDB dns race condition bug, this is a line of thinking that is problematic.
There is so much complexity in the inner workings of any one of those services. Many of those services are now composed of many teams, each having turned over completely multiples of times.
Yes there are runbooks and knowledge passed down from each generation, to some extent. But when you hit some critical outage, edge case, etc., those people running the systems have such a different relationship to the system having simply maintained it vs. built it.
From a certain perspective, that line of thinking is only "problematic" if customers stop paying. In other words, the product only has to maintain a certain minimum quality threshold and doing any more is a waste of money. I don't necessarily agree with that myself but it is a common attitude.
>>But when you hit some critical outage, edge case, etc., those people running the systems have such a different relationship to the system having simply maintained it vs. built it.
Long stays in most companies are practically non-existent these days, apart from a few folks who are present for long, unfortunately these people are often called lifers, coasters etc.
Simply put, no one person can say they contributed most to the building of a system. Barring very few rare projects.
So you already need the runbook, documentation model to run things, for the reason people themselves work along those lines.
I am finding this to be the new "meta" for the software development lifecycle. Given this new reality, it's getting harder and harder to actually invest in ambitious, green-field projects. In this new meta, individual contributors and leadership don't trust each other, leading to a vicious feedback loop of making it harder and harder to jumpstart ambitious projects.
It's hard to commit to a green-field project that is predicated on a level of risk that leaders are hesitant to take on as they would also take on the "counterparty risk" of the expert individual contributors holding them over the barrel to finish the project. The expert individual contributors are likewise hesitant to devote themselves to the task knowing that once leadership considers the "hard bits" to be done, leadership's aversion to risk will try to swap out the expert-individual-contributor roles with much more replaceable roles and ultimately replace the expert individual contributors.
P.S. The parallels between this cycle of mistrust and the modern dating crisis (in the US) does not elude me.
> You have an amazing amount of confidence that the new devs are going to fix subtle race conditions…
> They’ll add a few sleep(5) calls to make them go away though..
I don't think torginus's point is that the new devs will find the proper fixes for the code, more that such a hack might be good enough in the eyes of both the company's management and the company's users.
As much as it pains me to recognize this (as a fan of clean, elegant code) not every bit of software needs to be clean and elegant to achieve its intended purpose (which is, at least in the corporate software world being discussed here, to make money).
If you meet the needs of your software's users, you can make a lot of money for a lot of years selling a piece of crap held together with chewing gum and elastic bands (and many companies have).
Such "sleep(5)" is actually a milestone in a project, a milestone that marks the beginning of deterioration and the end of architectural changes. I've seen multiple pull requests with "sleep" and similar shortcuts, and worse, I've rewound coding agent context and changes because of such model suggestions. I'm responsible for informing management about the consequences of such shortcuts and why we have to take the correct, often more time-consuming and more expensive, approach to avoid project derailment in the long term. I believe that management picks employees. If they don't trust my judgment, then it's okay for me, but I don't feel obliged to be responsible for the consequences.
I'm certainly not defending such code, just saying that its out there and in some very successful projects.
If the managers where you work understand the dangers of taking on such tech debt and are willing to put in the resources to avoid it, consider yourself lucky, because in my experience that's not at all universal, or even particularly common, though it does certainly exist at some places.
A old Twitter thread: “what’s one thing you wish you didn’t know about cloud providers? Answer: eventual consistency means it just sleeps and retries all the way down.”
IMHO, there's never been a better time to build your own product and learn to sell it. The effort that AI implementation requires is clearly exponential to complexity of the organization.
You can build faster now that you ever have: I am building faster than I have in 25 years of engineering. You have more capable support for all the unfamiliar processes of building a business imaginable.
And almost everyone larger than you is finding it harder to achieve similar productivity gains from implementing AI, if not outright struggling with it. This is a golden moment and won't last long.
I already get multiple cold emails a month selling me some sort of software product or service that I don't need and that wouldn't work for me.
If a bunch of additional people start going and building MVPs, what keeps that from becoming even more of a flood, like what you get if you post a job application on LinkedIn nowdays?
I think sales is likely to get harder, not easier, soon.
And to your earlier post, I think the big question is: can individuals get more done on their own now building new things because of less organizational issues compared to incumbents, or because of less product complexity and scope? Is the organization the problem, or is the complexity of stuff built to try to service a thousand different previous sales deals and customers?
Productivity has always been inversely exponentially correlated with manpower, I don't think this is related to AI, and I don't think AI speeds anything up in this scenario. If nothing else you're now constraining what could be one-man development speed to the speed of a chat-session, which is much, much slower.
If you know what you're doing (and most times even if you don't, yet) it's much faster to work actually solo, without bothering with any AI assistance except at most something like one-line auto-complete on command.
I can't agree with this more, and it's exactly both the position and the impetus of my personal action plan for the next several years to come.
Truly, AI levels the playing field, if you just have the inclination to look at it that way. It brings such potential to the right people. In my hands, a software developer who has been slinging code for food for 40+ years, I am a 'god' with a cheap monthly subscription to Claude Code. I can run several projects and keep track of every one of them and see progress like I've never had that chance to, in my entire lifetime. And yes, I still wield the stick, because I KNOW how to do this stuff. Claude really doesn't. Claude just gives me raw material, individual orchestral parts as it were, that I can put together with a conductor's baton.
My enterprise client? They get barebones slop. Enough to keep things alive but yet never be scalable and extendable. And they deserve that. They slaughtered our entire US based team and went overseas. They retain me to keep the wheels on while offshore wires up worthless, unpredictable AI agents to 'enhance' the product. I'm taking their money until I can break free sometime next year. They get the scraps now, and they will never know until karma brings them their bitter fruit.
My personal project. A really, really fun and fluid development momentum. Truly art and logic combined with Claude doing the grunt work for me. Absolutely a blast and it will have a user base, and the user base will really enjoy the results.
New partnerships. You can now make ANYONE you know, that much more viable, that much more tech savvy. As an individual, with your talents and our new little 'digital helpers', you, yourself can become the David to any Goliath you wish. You can help elevate ideas, small teams, and aspiring entrepreneurs and have a blast doing so.
Shed the notion that this moment has to be dark for you. It doesn't. It just takes seeing that maybe, just maybe, the boneheads that are trying to capitalize in these horrendous actions which include lying about AI, lying about the reasons they are laying off, etc. are bringing about their very demise in real time. Clueless as to what they are doing.
And those of us with the knowledge, ethics, high standards, discipline, and honor, are now armed with the very thing that can bring down those who created it to harm us.
Similar trend at my company - we're looking to hire in India to reduce costs. The rumor is that we could replace 25% of our existing IT workforce without outsourced roles.
If anyone is worried about their job, it won't be AI that takes it - it will be outsourcing. The US offshores 300k jobs per year with a high percentage of them being IT (60-80% depending on source). It's really not that different to the offshoring of manufacturing decades ago. Why pay people onshore when you can pay someone in India half of that? Any job that doesn't require a physical presence or has legal pressures to keep it onshore will be at risk. It will likely get worse over time, just like manufacturing. I don't know what the future will look like if we continue outsourcing everything. It used to be that we outsource primary and secondary sector activies so that we could expand tertiary industries. What are we replacing the outsourced jobs with now?
Offshoring/outsourcing is nice on paper, but as management doesn’t have to deal with time zones, in reality it is much more chaos than expected. And how do they want to deal with fuckups? Thru Slack or Discord? :)
We had British SaaS supplier and all the time I have talked with Bangalore-based people. They had to work in night I suppose…
Hard truths about outsourcing: you’re always dealing with a cultural, political, and legal gap.
Stuff that’s hella-illegal, that not even the remotest WFH citizen would ever try to pull, might look very tasty from another perspective. Economics that favour that cheap labour also means even marginal scams can seem wildly tempting on the other side.
Sad thing is that it works, and more than it works, it gives you an advantage over the people who actually do the right thing.
If you can work it out as you go and get away with it by definition you become the "first mover" over someone who only sells once they have the full capability. The incentive is there to do the wrong thing to win in the market as a whole.
I don’t see that as Indian culture as much as outsourcing. I’ve had tons of that from entirely domestic contractors, including people who’d bid on a project only to admit their team didn’t have the domain experience promised. I’m talking about things as basic as telling the client that they needed to buy an enormous SQL Server cluster because their “developers” didn’t know how to limit joins and were had deeply-nested loops processing duplicate results.
They do this because it often works: business people often lack the experience to tell whether excuses are correct, and large organizations have enough project churn that it’s entirely possible to wing it for the duration of a contract / pivot, get paid, and move on before someone knowledgeable notices that the old deliverables didn’t really work.
What they had in common was greed, and I think that’s where the association with India comes from, too, but as a selection bias affecting people who don’t otherwise have exposure to Indian workers: there’s a floor on what a productive developer is going to get paid – someone smart enough to do the job is also smart enough to realize when they’re being underpaid and all of the abuses I’ve seen were cases where some combination of the outsourcing outfit and senior management were basically saying “why cut our cost by just 30% when we can find someone who’ll show up to work for ¼ of our staff rate?” and then acting surprised when they can’t retain decent people (e.g. I once talked to a guy who had two clues to rub together as he was leaving and learned he was getting ⅓ of the hourly rate and bailed as quickly as possible to get closer to market rate). Less ethical American companies do that, too, but they still lose to the even cheaper body shops so they aren’t as successful, but in all cases I would say it’s not the entire nation’s culture but the subset of fake-it-til-you-make-it business types. Plenty of people in both countries detest that and don’t deserve to be lumped in with them.
Have you ever lived in India? (not just visited, but actually lived there)
I have, and while of course not 100% of any society is ever any specific way, Indian society is this way.
In the same way as german society is very ‘rules oriented’ (to put it mildly), even when individual germans can (and sometimes are!) the opposite.
Don’t mess with the Polizei and expect to come out unscathed, and don’t expect to get what you paid for (or what you’re asked to pay being a fair price) without fighting for it in India. Or for people to follow the rules if they can profit from not following the rules, even if it’s short term.
It’s just the way things work.
Occasionally, there are exceptions, but they typically prove the rule. (Ikea in India is awesome, for instance. And some individual local vendors are too. Autorickshaw drivers, cabbies, landlords, and vendors in busy markets tend to be the worst. Like 5x a fair price sometimes, or a fair price and 1/5 of what you should get. And in some situations, the Polizei are very kind. Like if you’re lost and a pleasant drunk. But do not argue with the Polizei, it will go very badly.).
Like in any society, these have reasons which are extremely obvious to most people in the society, and may not be obvious until you live there.
In India, for example, when everyone is trying to penny pinch/get rich quick because of a history of extractive behavior from authorities and economic/social instability to an extreme degree (including historically, famines, religious wars, purges, etc.) and so many factions/groups that ‘us vs them’ is just the norm - and once enough people start doing it, you’ll be screwed if you don’t do it yourself. It’s the prisoners dilemma writ large, but when there are already a ton of people floating around doing the ‘wrong’ thing. The rich can get away with not doing this (as much) sometimes, when they are dealing with foreigners, but it’s pervasive.
Or in Germany, when there is a history/culture of strong willed people doing what they want and making life harder for everyone else (in an environment where that can get people killed) but a reasonably consistent and obvious majority ‘us’ group, for instance. In weather that WILL kill the unprepared/weak without assistance a large portion of the year, and requires significant energy to be spent just to not freeze to death for everyone.
I’ve had two experiences with off-shoring. The first time my former CTO brought in a near shore firm and they worked independently on a large project. There was no knowledge transfer or collaboration with the on shore devs. They built what was asked, it was over engineered and much was built of little value. We still have the software they wrote but it is a liability. The second time, I’m now in the CTO position, instead of having the nearshore people silo’d we work integrated. Everyone is on the same team, code reviews, pull requests, all mutually understood. It’s so much better. It all starts from the top and if you don’t have vision you’re doomed to fail.
I do wonder at times if tariffs and offshoring protection are necessary at a certain point. Forcing a labor constraint on an economy (within reason) can spur efficiency. Accepting high structural unemployment in the name of the free market seems irrational.
I think we've taken free market to an extreme in a race to the bottom. Tariffs are probably a good thing, but maybe not in the way they have been currently implemented. Almost 15% of the country is on SNAP and we're spending hundreds of billions per month on debt interest. I'm not sure how we come back from this.
Frankly the race to the bottom does result in net good for humanity as a whole - but the transition period is not kind to the people who are losing their jobs.
Usually 5 - 10 years later the industry will cry because of lacking competence and being left behind by new companies from nations that can produce cheaper and themselves.
It turns out there is little value in management alone. It will be cut loose like the rest. Perhaps these companies can become patent trolls.
Also they have a very hard time to find new talent since word gets around. Sometimes it works for industries like textile, but not always, and it doesn't work for engineering.
It mostly works for low budget or high volume products. It is still a bad long term strategy. Still, outsourcing didn't just start yesterday.
My company has been intentionally causing attrition in the US by moving to effectively a 996 style schedule. As people quit, their positions are moved to the India office. It is not an officially communicated policy. I have just surmised this based on private conversations with the executives and what is actually happening.
I would say it is more sinister than just a cost-benefit analysis and plain racism in hiring. Cheap talent exists in far more places than India but somehow it almost always is India. Not only that but I have seen the strangest LinkedIn profiles where people graduate from no-name Indian universities and get a big-corp job here in the West like it is nothing.
It's not a racism thing, it's because India is in a fairly unique position: their population is so large, that (relatively speaking) the top 0.1% of Indians in any sector tend to outnumber the top 0.1% of (for example) Americans in that sector, plus if an Indian immigrates to America, a company can pay them less than an equivalent American employee (for various reasons).
So you basically can pay an Indian immigrant a junior dev salary, for significantly-better-than-junior-dev work. It's just stonks.
Not even close. We had two offshore contractors working with our team for about two years and they were consistently terrible. Despite this, some higher up pressed us to “hire” them so we conducted an interview. One of them said they had 8+ years of SQL query optimization experience and could not explain what a table scan was. The other claimed to have 5 years of C++ experience and thought a pointer was a url. I am not exaggerating.
Whereas our team’s college intern turned junior dev has consistently delivered increasingly valuable contributions and doesn’t lie to us.
One of the first startups I worked at in the early aughts, I started as a front-end dev. Indian dude a few cubes over. I'm not kidding, he had a "Learn .Net Nuke" Wrox book he was constantly pouring over.
He was gone on my second day. Apparently the company had hired an outside recruiter who interviewed someone and when they got the job, this dude showed up. Apparently this was a really common scam back then.
On the other hand, I've had extremely skilled senior Indian colleagues who were essentially paid like juniors.
As far as I understand, there's extreme variance between highest-tier and lowest-tier universities and it's not necessarily reflected in salaries when they're hired by Western companies.
They bait-and-switch like hell. Once the original workers are out of the picture they squeeze the contract like a lemon. The managers involved won't re-hire and more often than not will even hide the mess (for their own sake). The old IBM playbook on steroids.
The Indian diaspora is huge and you have second and third generation folks in executive office all over. As a political force, south Asians are increasingly powerful as well in many states.
There’s a lot of opportunities for personal networks, nepotism and plain old corruption to work. (Who is going to figure out that somebody dropped a few gold coins to your sibling as a kickback?) There’s a much smaller network of people with relationships to Eastern European or other companies.
> There’s a much smaller network of people with relationships to Eastern European or other companies.
Unlike eastern Europe, India is geopolitically in a pretty good spot right now, having decent relations with most developed countries, and not engaged in any major wars with its neighbors. The last company I worked for outsourced a lot of work to Russia. At a certain time in 2022 they suddenly had to shift a lot of that work to... India!
Absolutely. They are in the middle both physically and logically. Notice Trump’s big crackdown barely made a dent - mess with India, and Jamie Dimon and his peers are on the phone immediately… finance depends on the outsourcers onshore and offshore to function.
India’s long term positioning of neutrality and strategy with business, education and politics is bearing fruit.
When talking about outsourcing jobs from the U.S., you’re obviously gonna exclude the U.S. China is also not a factor. Neither are Western European countries or countries like Japan and S Korea because of relatively high salaries. Russia is out due to long standing geopolitical issues.
That basically leaves Brazil and Indonesia as the only alternatives to India in the top 10 and combined they don’t even have half the number of SW developers as India.
You need to then add Mexico, Vietnam, Turkey, Philippines and Poland to the above 3 to add up to the number of SW developers present in India.
Thats why the outsourcing industry is concentrated in India. You can setup 1 office in India and have access to as many SW developers (Indians are also very willing to migrate domestically, so an office in a single city is sufficient to cater to the entire domestic developer market) as you would if you setup 8 offices in & different countries across 4 continents.
> hiring towards this one country goes beyond that it is 'cheap'.
No it doesn't, not materially anyway. Stats can be misleading if you don't pay attention. A lot of the big corps started hiring H1-B in large numbers long ago but since H1-Bs can't easily switch jobs and tend to suck up to higher-ups, soon their mid-management was occupied by H1-Bs.
Anybody who has tried to find a job in such an environment knows the drill - Indian managers hire only Indians and prefer H1-Bs to keep them docile. Salary isn't a consideration there, but it all starts with "cheap" and is sustained by ethnic loyalty and fear of the outsider.
In smaller companies where hiring is more natural, H1-Bs are still payed less and their inability to switch jobs makes them cheaper still.
> I am talking about bias in hiring in general. I am responding that the bias in hiring towards this one country goes beyond that it is 'cheap'.
Same bias happened when manufacturing moved to China. However, no whining on HN since at the time, blue-collar American red-necks were getting their just deserts.
That's a commonly made argument, but it's innumerate. Low h1b salaries lower local salaries. The reason you hire h1b is because they're cheap, and then the only locals you hire are the ones that will work at the price of h1bs.
Local salaries might even be slightly lower, because you get to hold h1bs prisoner (an added benefit.)
The way the outsourced companies are structured, the folks who actually know things spend all their time selling new customers/placating existing customers. The moment someone shows promise/that they are actually skilled, they get moved out of the actual dev teams.
This is the same on a lot of larger staffing agencies that promise to have all the people you need and can either do entire projects for you, or get you developers, designers, QA, project managers etc on short notice.
They have a few very competent developers who are primarily in the secondary sales in my experience. First sales contact is between non-technical management and their front-line sales (usually very attractive women). In the second sales contact, technical staff from the potential client is involved and they bring along their real developers. But those are not the ones you'll get on the project. They'll give you interviews with the developers you can get, and they're coached for the interviews and sound fine. But then in reality they are people who can't touch type and develop purely by trial and error without forming a mental model.
If hiring locally wasn't such a mess, nobody would talk to them. At some point even a junior developer is better than not having a developer at all. I assume AI will change that and they'll get replaced first.
GCCs are expanding in Canada, Ireland, Poland, Czechia, and Costa Rica as well.
Indians are more visible, but salary expections have gotten extremely out of whack in the US, and extended WFH during COVID proved to most boards that companies can continue to operate when entire teams are communicating async.
If a large portion of interns and NCGs in the US are essentially expecting $45-70/hr salaries, it just isn't sustainable especially when factoring the growing skills deficit because universities failed CS students to a certain degree over the past 10 years by watering down programs in a short term bid to compete against bootcamps.
If we are paying Bay Area salaries, we expect performance comensurate to that salary. Basically, all companies are now starting to adopt the Netflix model of hiring in the US.
London has a similar CoL as San Francisco yet tech salaries are around 33%-50% what are offered in the Bay. Same with Toronto.
On top of that, both the British and Canadian governments give some degree of tax subsidy and regulatory support, though not to the degree that India, Israel, Poland, Czechia, or Romania provide.
Why should I pay Jeff from NCSU a US$175K TC in RTP when I can get Jane who chose to return to Toronto after living in the US working for large companies throughout her 20s?
A lot of techies on HN really underestimate the amount of reverse brain drain that happened during and after COVID. The COVID layoffs in early-mid 2020 primarily targeted those on some kind of work visa, and a number of those laid off were given the option to take a pay cut but also open a node in their home country.
Edit: can't reply so replying here
> I hear this, but the fact is a 70% pay cut in the Bay Area would simply not be workable at all
This is why we began opening offices in RTP, Denver, Chicago, NYC, etc in the 2017-22 period because we could pay closer to London or Toronto salaries back then in those offices and we had state level support.
All of that went to the wayside after COVID because a large portion of our workforce reverse braindrained, and someone in RTP demanding WFH and a Bay Area salary in a metro where CoL is comparable to Fresno and where we had to spend significant amounts of capital in commercial real estate to unlock tax benefits is ridiculous.
We are fine paying high salaries and TC, but it needs to be justified by actually high tier talent. Think the Netflix model.
Yeah I'm surprised to hear London has a similar cost of living to San Fransisco. I wouldn't expect someone working in tech in SFO today to be able to stay there at 33-50% of their current salary.
All Western countries are devaluing their currency. No other way to reduce the debt. Cutting benefits is political suicide. Taking every dollar from billionaires would knock a 1 year of debt off. The solution is inflation
The response is inflation. It would only be a solution if it works, and of all the countries or empires that tried it in the past you'd be hard pressed to find one that succeeded at correcting their economy long term by debasing their own currency.
It may be a short term solution, on the right time scale I'd give it that.
The only way its a long term solution is if globalization is so fundamentally different from what other countries and empires have felt with that they can actually devalue at just the right rate to bring work back here.
Getting that rate right seems like a tiny needle to thread though, and that only works if this situation is different from when other currencies were devalued intentionally.
I think you might be confusing 'devaluation' with 'loss of spending power'. The dollar hasn't really lost value compared to other currencies. The thing that would do that would a loss of faith in the US to pay its debts, not the inability for the dollar to sustain a certain purchasing power.
I don't particularly care about whether one currency is devalued relative to another. Sure that can matter, international trade is important today, but I care about whether my currency is being devalued relative to the products I actually buy day to day.
The dollar is being devalued every time more money is injected into the system, either by government printing or banks printing more money via unsecured debt. When the total amount of currency in circulation goes up my money was devalued, prices will always go up when the money supply increases.
> The dollar is being devalued every time more money is injected into the system,
I was pointing out somewhat pedantically that 'devalued' has a specific meaning and 'to lose purchasing power' is not it.
> When the total amount of currency in circulation goes up my money was devalued, prices will always go up when the money supply increases.
If you got more of that money to cover increased costs then it wouldn't be a problem, so it really only matters if you don't get a bump in income that covers the decrease in purchasing power.
The problem is not money supply increasing -- it is that it is being misallocated. The money supply has to increase in order for economies to grow otherwise it would deflate, and that cause all sorts of worse problems.
Sounds like we just fundamentally disagree here, nothing wrong with that.
I view the increase in money supply a core issue that harms all of us. Yes, it wouldn't technically matter if all of us received the new money in a perfect allocation based on the amount of money we currently hold - if I have $100 and the supply increases by 2% I'm fine if I now have $102. It never works like that though, and never will.
Allocation is only one of the challenges to deal with when debasing the currency by increasing supply.
There is no perfect policy and everything has a trade-off. I guess the question really is 'what happens if we can't increase money supply?' and determining whether we'd we better off with those effects.
We have already eaten a ton of inflation, particularly in the first year or so when Biden was President. Trump printed trillions to forestall a collapse during covid. The wisdom of that move is lost on me. I would have preferred the collapse--we might be recovering by now instead of sitting on an even higher precipice awaiting the inevitable fall.
There is an interesting argument to be made that they have no choice once the problem passes a certain point.
The interplay between bond yields, the fed funds rate, and inflation can lead to weird situations. Right noe the Fed is having to lower rates because (a) job numbers are pretty bad and (b) the US debt is held in a surprising number of short term bonds and higher rates make the debt just rack up faster. They're also watching inflation continue to chug along higher than their 2% target though, a scenario they'd normally raise rates for.
I won't be surprised if we ultimately realize that, in the end, those in charge had way less control of the economy than they like to claim. I'm biased though, that's always been my view and it frustrates me that economics claims to be a field of science at all. It can be a very interesting and important historical analysis but it isn't predictive, and at the level of macroeconomics it can't realistically be isolated and tested.
When you outsource all your jobs that actually produce goods instead of services, you have nothing left to offer. At the same time, we're proving that short-term consumerism is completely destructive (designed to break is just another variant of the broken window fallacy).
Either you lower US standard of living to match the countries it is currently outsourcing to or you establish protectionism and isolationist policies with a focus on total efficiency rather than short-term gains.
FWIW, I get on the order of $40/hour as a senior with almost 10 years experience, and it allows me not to worry too much about spending (with a wife earning about a third of my salary and two kids). I think I could easily earn at least 50% more if I wanted to work for some rich but soul-crushing corp, but for obvious reasons I don't do that. I guess US cost of living is just insane. (I live in central Europe.)
> FWIW, I get on the order of $40/hour as a senior with almost 10 years experience, and it allows me not to worry too much about spending (with a wife earning about a third of my salary and two kids)
How much do you pay annually out of pocket for health insurance premiums and other healthcare expenses?
In the US that expense is very high, and is a major source of worry for working families.
> How much do you pay annually out of pocket for health insurance premiums and other healthcare expenses?
Very rough estimation: $9000. I'm not sure how much my wife pays - this is paid by the employer and she usually doesn't bother to check. (This is mainly insurance, we seldom use public healthcare.)
My wife is a full-time-mother and is currently uninsured because we'd be looking at doubling the cost of insurance, and paying close to 25k a year for insurance. It is a completely broken system at this point.
I'm similar salary band, I pay 9% of my annual salary for mandatory medical insurance, but it's usually hard to get an appointment in reasonable time so you are going to pay extra 50-100€ for a visit to the same doctor, but in private clinic. And also vaccination and dental is not covered by that 9% payment.
For most white collar jobs like tech here in the US, your out-of-pocket as percentage is income doesn't play a role in how we decide salary bands.
For a family of four, the average health plan is around $10k out of pocket from the employee along with around $20k in employer costs [0]. Yet the median American SWE salary is $187k [1] versus $66k in Poland [2], $93k in Canada [3], and $111k in the UK [4]. Either way an American ends up earning significantly more after healthcare costs and insurance.
The issue is salary expectations at the lower performance band haven't kept up with what is expected at that salary band.
> In the US that expense is very high, and is a major source of worry for working families
When benchmarked against similar peer cities in Canada [5] or the UK [6], CoL is roughly at par yet salaries are significantly higher in the US, especially when comparing peer tech markets like SF [7] versus London [8].
This is the crux of the issue - demanding 100% WFH well past the end of COVID made it hard for us to justify domestic hiring when
1. Async was successfully proven to not impact business operation
2. A reverse brain drain of all nationalities in the US during COVID meant it was easier for employers to work with them to open a hub office or GCC abroad
3. A new grad is demanding salaries that simply don't make the economics of training and hiring new grads work. At $70k-$110k it does, but not beyond that.
4. Companies have now adopted the Netflix model - by cutting low performers, we can actually give higher pay bands to employees who actually have a business impact, as can be reflected in the rise in 75th percentile tech salaries.
I think you make some solid points, but there are major tradeoffs some of the data is not totally convincing. If US workers are so much more highly paid than foreign workers, then we can reasonably expect the best workers to migrate to the US whenever possible. It's pretty easy for Canadians to cross the border. So one reason to hire American developers is for quality. The other is simply that these companies exist in the US, which means collaboration needs to be done in US time zones, which makes overseas workers far less efficient, not to mention the major negative impacts on worker morale. So there can be reasons to hire out of country, but the tradeoffs are significant even when well executed.
> If US workers are so much more highly paid than foreign workers, then we can reasonably expect the best workers to migrate to the US whenever possible
Not really.
No one wants to leave their families, and the upper tier of salaries in alternative geos are high enough to capture the higher talent tier because their salary expectations are based on their domestic condition.
On top of that, the US immigration system is severely backlogged. It can take decades for Chinese and Indian nationals to become green card holders, and we as employees increasingly expect foreign nationals to pay the filing costs - not us.
> other is simply that these companies exist in the US, which means collaboration needs to be done in US time zones, which makes overseas workers far less efficient and having major negative impacts on worker morale
Not anymore. WFH proved async work models can ensure business continuity.
On top of that, the bulk of layoffs during COVID were workers on work visas who were given the option to return to their home countries and open an office there.
This is what Google did in Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Warsaw, Databricks in Bangalore, Amazon in Canada and India, and Nvidia in Bangalore.
Furthermore, we as employers don't really sponsor VPs, Engineering Managers/Directors, Product Managers, and Staff/Principal Engineers on O-1 visas. Most are stuck on some form of EB1/2 or L1/2, and those who apply to O1s who aren't founders or extremely critical to the business are being sponsored but filing out-of-pocket.
It just isn't attractive to immigrate to America long term anymore as a white collar employee in most cases now aside from unicorn roles which employees then use to boomerang back to executive roles or demand US salaries in their home country.
Ideally we need to build a domestic talent pipeline, but universities failed severely by watering down curricula in an attempt to compete with bootcamps, which burnt a lot of employers disincentivizing them from hiring early career, and state and local jurisdictions in the US just don't give us the support or pipeline needed to build a competitive early career hiring pipeline.
For example, in cybersecurity, I can hire someone in Israel who has done offensive security work for a couple years in a military, police, internal security capacity or someone in India who participated in one of the dozens of Police Force, Army, or Home Affairs cybersecurity internship programs. Similar programs like Cyberpatriots and the Cyber Incentive Program (approx $100M) were mismanaged as was found in a 2023-25 investigation by the DHS OIG [0][1] and an entire generation of students of cybersecurity scholarships quit in 2016 when the Trump 1 admin cut funding for cybersecurity scholarship programs.
> No one wants to leave their families, and the upper tier of salaries in alternative geos are high enough to capture the higher talent tier because their salary expectations are based on their domestic condition.
For 2x the salary young men have proven time and again they are willing to take the risk.
> On top of that, the US immigration system is severely backlogged. It can take decades for Chinese and Indian nationals to become green card holders, and we as employees increasingly expect foreign nationals to pay the filing costs - not us.
A challenge for sure. This and what you go on to describe could certainly shift some junior labor from H1B to remote contract. I would expect that shift to have a mostly net zero impact on other American exployment.
> > other is simply that these companies exist in the US, which means collaboration needs to be done in US time zones, which makes overseas workers far less efficient and having major negative impacts on worker morale
> Not anymore. WFH proved async work models can ensure business continuity.
Every non-US team I've worked with and everyone I know that works with offshore still have meetings. It would be incredibly dysfunctional to not have any collaborative time.
> Ideally we need to build a domestic talent pipeline, but universities failed severely by watering down curricula in an attempt to compete with bootcamps, which burnt a lot of employers disincentivizing them from hiring early career, and state and local jurisdictions in the US just don't give us the support or pipeline needed to build a competitive early career hiring pipeline.
Is that really what is happening? Because based on everything I can see, hiring standards are the highest they have ever been. As we get older, we have a bias towards underestimating the capabilities of younger generations, because we can see them making familiar mistakes in real-time.
> For 2x the salary young men have proven time and again they are willing to take the risk
First, sexist, and secondly in 2025 there's no guarantee that you would be able to live in the US long term on a work visa (but it's been this way since the mid-2010s), and if someone really feel the urge to immigrate to the West, then Australia, Canada, Netherlands, and Germany are all easier and (excluding Germany) Anglophone (yes, NL is de facto Anglophone now).
The US just isn't as attractive a location to immigrate to anymore for a large amount of people in white collar roles.
For the cream of the crop who primarily target American BigTech (GAYMAN) or HFTs like Citadel or Jane Street, in India the salary and ESPP grant can afford you household help, a nice condo, and make enough money that you can invest in building generational wealth or angel invest. It was a similar story for Chinese over the past 10-15 years as well.
For Europeans and Canadians, both are extremely turned off to America due to the Trump admin, and at portfolio companies we've seen a significant amount of requests from employees to shift away from the US as a result. Even Israelis increasingly don't target the US anymore because of perceptions and have begun choosing Germany, Czechia, or remaining in Israel.
> I would expect that shift to have a mostly net zero impact on American exployment
A lot of senior managers and leadership in tech companies are in the same boat with work visas as I mentioned before. All visas categories go through the same backlog for naturalization in the US - be you a manager, VC, factory worker, or SWE. Heck the creator of PyTorch is himself on one of these visas despite being employed at Meta.
> Every non-US team I've worked with and everyone I know that works with offshore still have meetings. It would be incredibly dysfunctional to not have any collaborative time
Absolutely, but everyone makes time for Zoom meetings and finds a way to make it work, or people like me will hire someone else who can get it done.
> Is that really what is happening
Yes in cybersecurity and a large portion of databases. I even explained why in other HN comments [0]
This is why most of our dealflow is now in Israel, Eastern Europe, and India. Look at recent exists like Wiz ans PingSafe.
Even recent cybersecurity companies that IPOed like Netskope and Rubrik have overwhelmingly hired in Israel or India and with leadership being Israeli or Indian either in origin or nationality.
> Absolutely, but everyone makes time for Zoom meetings and finds a way to make it work, or people like me will hire someone else who can get it done.
So we are in agreement that work cannot be fully async.
There are clearly some forces at play that are changing how immigration works in the short-term. I think where we differ is mostly this: our anecdotal experiences are radically different (I would say competency is increasing not decreasing as a general trend) and I would never bet against the momentum of the US long-term, nor do I believe that quality tends to remain steady or increase with offshoring. Maybe things are different in your niche. I appreciate being given a view into a different perspective!
> For most white collar jobs like tech here in the US, your out-of-pocket as percentage is income doesn't play a role in how we decide salary bands.
Most people here in the US don't have white collar jobs nor compensation of a software engineer. They work in retail or other blue and pink collar professions.
A Canadian retail worker has much more affordable access to healthcare than their US counterpart.
> A new grad is demanding salaries that simply don't make the economics of training and hiring new grads work
This is just me, might not be representative, but as an indian CS graduate, I was willing to move to the US temporarily if it meant I could make FIRE money and return to India and basically chill out and work at interesting jobs without worrying about needing MNC/unicorn money to live well. I saw broadly two ways to do this - the startup scene, and the ridiculously high new grad salaries (which would enable FIRE in india after a few years) in the US back in early 2020s - when I was graduating. By the time I finished though, those salaries dried up like you are saying, and startup exits are easier in Blore these days and I can get funding from the usual bunch by just domiciling in Spore like flipkart did. Note that I did not expect the current AI bubble to last this long. Potentially could have cashed out on that. My impression is that if you know nvcc exists, you get money thrown at you in the US today... All in all, the idea fizzled out. Among my peers too, the people who went there for the usual M.S at a UC --> california job market pipeline are all people who are sure they want to settle in the US long-term, through the visa troubles and all. Others didn't go.
Point is, those high salaries were a big draw to a lot of people here including me. And in the absence of that companies now need to move here to get access to the same people. I think it is happening, unicorns/GCCs here are now paying quite well. I mean I had almost the median EU tech salary ($60K - 52LPA) for india cost of living at my _starting job_. So without the US starting salary being 150K-200K (a salary unattainable in india anywhere) like it was 5 years ago, it's a hard sell. Senior salaries are still high of course, but if you have to stay there 10+ years, you have a family there, kids there, loans there, and it is basically committing to settling in the US. Meaning that without the added security of the backup plan "return and you're either FIRE or super comfortable", its much more of a commitment to move. My circles have a selection bias of course, and for people who did not manage to get top 10% salaries here, the risk/reward is completely different.
My reply was primarily about American new grads - who overwhelmingly don't do grad school.
And your anecdote is exactly what I am trying to explain on HN.
We as employers are fine paying high salaries to mid-career talent, but it's hard to justify hiring a middle of the pack new grad from CSU East Bay for a $130k base salary new grad role when I can hire a mid-career US returned FAANG dev in BLR or HYD for $70k-90k TC.
We will still hire new grads in the US for a $130k-$180k base, but they will have to actually be worth it. The brutal reality is, if you didn't attend a target CS program for your Bachelors (Stanford, Cal, MIT, UIUC, CMU, UT Austin, GT, UMich, UW, Cornell, Harvard, Columbia), at this point you probably aren't landing a high paying CS job - just like how in India if you didn't get a good JEE score, you're essentially relegated to being stuck at WITCH because you didn't get into a good BTech program, and it's an employer's market
A lot of people on HN assume Indians (and other foreign nationals) only do b*tch work like legacy springboot crap (and ofc plenty of people do), but an equally large cohort is doing legitimately competitive and innovative work.
> The brutal reality is, if you didn't attend a target CS program for your Bachelors (Stanford, Cal, MIT, UIUC, CMU, UT Austin, GT, UMich, UW, Cornell, Harvard, Columbia), at this point you probably aren't landing a high paying CS job
But what about after masters? What are the expectations there? Now of course there is the research path which is publishing well in your masters, working at deepmind or nvidia etc,. But I am talking about people doing non-thesis MS and then entering the job market. Is the base salary for those people still high?
> But what about after masters? ... and then entering the job market. Is the base salary for those people still high?
Not really especially when you factor in international tuition and loan servicing.
While it does depend on the program they attended, their past work experience in India, and their ability to land internships, in general I'd say salaries tend to be at the 25th percentile and below of what is shown on levels.fyi nationally.
But in all honestly, newly graduated masters students would be in the same boat as domestic undergrads if not worse becuase there isn't an incentive to hire an international student domestically and then go through the jumla of filing their H1B while they are on OPT unless they are a unicorn but if you are a unicorn, why would you even do a course based masters?!?
In fact, most of the complaints on HN about "H1Bs undercutting American salaries" tend to be these kinds of students because of how desperate they are to pay off a 1.5 to 2 crore loan with double digit interest rates despite having almost no scope of getting hired here in the US.
> for people who did not manage to get top 10% salaries here, the risk/reward is completely different
Yep.
Personal anecdote wise, I had a cousin who was working at Tech Mahindra in Chandigarh so on the lower end of salaries and got the US MS fuwara and they ended up attending UF (which is expensive and not a target).
We warned him not to come, but he didn't listen.
After spending almost $150k/1.5 crore getting the degree, the only SWE roles he could get could only pay $70k-80k in the NYC/NJ area which meant their take home after tax was rent was a little under $30k a year and this was during the 2022-24 period so no one wants to sponsor and he had a massive loan/EMI to pay off that was in the $17k-22k range a year.
He basically burnt through an extreme amount of family net worth (which was significant as they owned a house in Chandigarh) just to service a loan and basically remain in the same spot as before.
Another cousin did something similar to go to Canada despite us warning them not to do so either and their career is functionally screwed because it's even harder to find a role in Canada, but at least they attended a "college" so the tuition hit wasn't as severe.
In both cases it did not make financial sense for either to leave India for North America - their families had enough money in India that they could have bought significant property in Chandigarh and NCR and build generational wealth despite not necessarily working in the best jobs, but a lot of capital was basically burnt in loan repayment.
Like, let's be honest - the only people coming to the US to do a masters have a significant amount of capital because no one is going to guarantee a 2 crore loan without significant collateral, but at that point there are just better asset classes to diversify into.
From a financial standpoint, if you are Indian, it honestly isn't worth it doing some random coursework based masters in the US because in most cases you just aren't going to be hired by good companies anyhow, because none of us are willing to spend the capital to sponsor for an H1B after OPT unless you somehow ended up at a GAYMAN.
Interesting. Well, hope my friends get into GAYMAN companies then... whats the Y in there anyway? And is microsoft still excluded from the acronym? lol.
Ok, not asking in the context of this thread but in general: why do you think so? With their stake in openai especially and github being a good place to sell AI code assistants (one of the clear revenue streams for LLMs thus far) they seem quite well placed. Is it all their big "enterprise" and government contracts that bring them a lot of money now losing value?
1. Operational work is difficult to justify extremely high TCs
2. Other aspects of the business such as Cybersecurity just lack domestic talent in the US. That's why much of the MS Security portfolio engineering team is in Israel or India or people who are brought in via an L1/2
3. Vast swathes of MS employees from line level ICs up to Engineering Directors were stuck in immigration limbo because of the GC backlog or because of older parents, so a large number began returning to India with a slight shave on TC.
London and Toronto have a similar CoL as the Bay Area and $45/hr is a mid-career tech salaries in both Greater London and GTA.
Edit: can't reply but every single white collar job provides an employer healthcare plan that is equally as competitive as the public healthcare plans in Canada and the UK.
And especially if you were being paid $50/hr as a new grad in 2014.
Edit 2:
> And I was in Michigan.
All the more reason I would have pushed back severely. It's easier to find talent at scale in London or GTA - metros there have a population larger than the entire state of MI, and with a breadth of options beyond UMich Ann-Arbor.
$45/hr is low for GTA. I was making about that in Toronto in 2017 with two years experience, one year vocational degree, and a bachelor's in a completely unrelated field.
The vast majority of jobs in America give healthcare. The quality is vastly superior to London and Toronto, although we pay far more (and our medical professionals are upper middle class rather than middle / lower class). However this is a huge hidden portion of salary that most are not aware of, about $25k for a family of 4, which increases labor costs greatly.
On sheer metrics of access and quality, America kicks the shit out of Europe and Canada
> I was making $50/hour fresh out of college back in 2014. And I worked remotely.
Same for me, except out of high school, and a decade earlier.
That's the sordid tale of the industry. Outside of a handful of FAANG high flyers, pay, in real dollars, has been very steadily decreasing over many decades. But it took high inflation for us to notice.
Now we're in a difficult spot because we feel we need to make more to make up for the considerably higher cost of living, but there is no market willing to pay more — and never was.
The market can bear to pay high salaries for the right talent.
If you can show me you have tangible development skills and can think about the product or feature you develop as a business (eg. Can you justify to me in financial terms the net benefit doing a refactor does versus keeping the status quo) you will be fine.
We aren't going to pay you $300k-$400k TC just to be a code monkey. We expect you to be able to help inform actual business decisions and not be a PITA when thinking about the core metrics that matter for a business - NARR, FCF, and COGS.
So, being a developer who is specialized in a business domain (eg. Being a fullstack developer but with a decade of experience working on Cloud Security products) makes it easier for hiring managers to decide whether or not to hire you. And as a former PM, those kinds of Engineers are the best to work with becuase they understand the pitfalls that exist in a subdomain and have opinions and the ability to justify them.
Those who can upskill or show the ability to upskill are also worth their weight in TC.
And finally, you will have to be located in Tier 1 tech hubs now (Bay Area, Seattle, Austin, NYC). The 5-7 year blip of satellite offices in RTP or Denver or Portland or being 100% WFH in a cabin in Montana is over. The roles at these kinds of offices are the ones that get offshored first.
> And finally, you will have to be located in Tier 1 tech hubs now
Exactly. Adjusted for cost of living, $300,000 in SF or NYC is about $170,000 where I lived back then, so ~$80/hr. Which is, after adjusted for inflation to that time... You guessed it: $50.94/hr!
And you're pointing at high quality talent with considerable experience, not some kid out of high school. Said kid out of high school like I was back then isn't going to find that much in today's market. As you point out, the market has tanked big time — and has been tanking for decades.
As before, we're only just now starting to notice how far behind we’ve fallen because of things recently becoming exceptionally more expensive.
> Adjusted for cost of living, $300,000 in SF or NYC is about $170,000 where I lived back then, so ~$80/hr
I've lived in SF over the same time period as well, and my CoL hasn't changed aside from rent - I've kept the same consistent savings rate - but even rent was largely manageable for me because of job opportunities and a mix of local and state rent control.
That said, I do think being Asian or Latiné means having different buying preferences (eg. the bulk of my shopping is at ethnic grocery stores and my "white people food" is primarily sourced from Costco or TJ).
Ofc, looking visibly ethnic also gives me the ethnic discount at most places I shop at.
> Said kid out of high school like I was back then isn't going to find that much in today's market. As you point out, the market has tanked big time — and has been tanking for decades
Oof, that is actually a good point. Sadly, you are right about that. I don't think hiring managers in the US would take a risk on hiring a HSer even if they have the right skills and domain experience.
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That said, I am starting to come around to your argument.
Jeez--I was making $50/hr in 2004 in one of my first jobs after I finished my PhD and opted out of academia. That pay didn't go that far back then!
This is what upsets me about my career--that logistic pay curve. You initially grow fast and then it tops out and never gets better, but your costs keep rising, particularly as you have a family. I'm paying for one kid's college tuition right now, she has 1.5 years left, and will then enter a dubious job market. My son is 15, so if he goes to college, I won't be paying tuition for him until Fall 2028.
The problem is, I'm no longer a developer. I'm currently a nothing working on figuring out "something." I have a lot of skills and talents, but seemingly not many that will pay. I'm looking at any 2yr. training program that can get me certified to do something useful. It's so freaking bizarre to be sitting here with a degree in CS/Math, an MS in Computer Engineering from a very reputable university, and a doctorate in Information Management, also from a very reputable university, and looking at basically doing blue collar work! My nation has utterly failed me in every possible manner.
I should add that we are looking to move out of our fairly high-cost of living state for a possibly lower cost of living state, but there are complications to that plan, too. My wife doesn't really want to move our son out of the high school he is in. I'm saying that other imperatives need to be addressed before they become full-blown crises. I'm being taxed to death, and costs like insurance are rising fast.
If I were you I'd be tempted to rewrite my PhD as a multi-year "special project". Reason is that hiring a PhD is controversial unless you're a university or a research division of a corporation. In contrast, the CS/Math & MS will always be solid & saleable.
> My nation has utterly failed me in every possible manner.
We've failed ourselves too, though. If I was some random person with endless money burning a hole in my pocket, what would I even do with a CS/Math/Computer engineer/Information manager? It is in no way clear how life is improved by working with such a person. Other industries put a lot of effort into marketing what function they serve. Said random person knows exactly when and why they'd want to hire a plumber, electrician, structural engineer, lawyer, accountant, physician, etc. But us...? We've rested on our laurels thinking Google, Microsoft, and Meta will forever want us, putting no effort into expanding our market.
GCC - Global Capacity Center, basically instead of outsourcing to WITCH or EPAM, a company creates an entire office abroad that owns profit-loss, product roadmap, has executives present, and is a direct part of the company.
NCG - New College Grad
You ain't dense btw, it's a good question. Keep asking questions!
The big issue with outsourcing to WITCH or EPAM was you were essentially paying $30k-50k per head but getting the lowest tier of talent becuase those companies would pay around $5k-15k salaries to maximize their margins.
As such, companies decided to just open offices in India, Poland, Czechia, etc to poach talent in those countries because people are only productive if well remunerated, and remove the middle man out of it.
Ofc, the traditional Indian outsourcing companies like TCS [0] and HCL [1] have also begun pivoting away from Software outsourcing towards becoming end-to-end chip design companies, Infosys pivoting to becoming an end-to-end MedTech company [2], and Wipro becoming an aviation and defense manufacturer [3][4] because of a mix of Indian government subsidizes and Taiwanese, Japanese, and American FDI.
You can consider it a branch. It has all sorts of advantages like tax avoidance (you pay them the expenses - salaries and office cost - and zero profits to pay taxes on), you can fire them all if you want, especially if it is fairly small and replaceable. And you can sell the dream of promotion space in a large company, but they will almost never get that. And you cut the middleman and keep the money.
> sorts of advantages like tax avoidance (you pay them the expenses - salaries and office cost - and zero profits to pay taxes on)
Nope.
Subsidiaries need to pay domestic taxes which in a lot of cases are significantly higher than those in the US. That said, countries like Czechia, Poland, and India help by covering the cost of each employee per head depending on amount spent.
> you can fire them all if you want
Nope.
In my past experience, we need to follow domestic labor laws and they do not budge on hiring or firing in Czechia, Poland, Israel, or India. Ofc, the financial hit of hiring the wrong person is much lower there than in the US, and unlike the US those jurisdictions provide a single window or tribunal dedicated to disputes foreign investors may face.
Same with the UK and the film industry.
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Basically, American jurisdictions became significantly non-responsive to services businesses after COVID and the 2020 election because white collar industries just didn't matter politically speaking (they represented a fraction of hiring and jobs in most competitive seats).
The same kinds of hand-holding support I mentioned above used to be provided by jurisdictions like NC, the Bay Area, NY, TX, etc, but local politicians don't care anymore and local and state governments are severely backlogged and attritted significant amount of personnel who understood business promotion.
The expansion of Indian offices is a result of the reverse brain drain that accelerated during the early COVID layoffs along with the EB1/2 backlogs - a number of Staff and above Engineers, EMs and above, and Sr PMs and above who were on work visas were either cut or given the option to relocate to India and start a hub office.
A similar trend happened in other countries, but India being so large means they get overshadowed.
[3] Never even heard of Cato Networks, and no figures. So irrelevant.
[4] onsemi manufacturing $2bn, not relevant as this is manufacturing numbers (Apple India is expanding multiple times that)
[5] No numbers, 2,934 employees. Mentions increment 20% of local market and an acquisition. Not relevant.
[6] Amazon plans 8,500 employees in the two [Canadian] cities. Meanwhile "Amazon to invest $233M to strengthen India operations network" https://www.aboutamazon.in/news/operations/amazon-to-invest-... (OTOH: they are laying off 800-1000 in India, out of over 15,000 desk employees just in Hyderabad)
[7] Uber to invest $200 mln in Turkey. Peanuts compared to the billions in my links.
From your submissions it seems like you are Indian or something.
The long term part is overstated in my experience. People move around a lot at these offshoring firms as better opportunities arise. In my experience by the time you find someone competent they’re already interviewing for a better role. Constant churn trying to find the next one.
A friend, senior engineer, was laid off sometime ago. He was replaced with an offshore junior dev. The strange thing was that he was located offshore as well. What actually happened was that his company had to pay 50-60% of US salaries and RSUs etc to hire and retain talent at these offshore centers. They decided that was too costly and hiring an outsourcing outfit to pay 10% of US salaries instead.
With AI even dumb people feel smart - thanks to the overconfident answers, I am expecting this to be race to the bottom. Even the highly skilled offshore employee is not safe. Middle managers crunching numbers and looking at the bottom line might be convinced that if AI + less experienced but cheaper "human in the loop" can produce "similar" result at 10-20% of the original cost then that is worth it. I am personally dealing with such middle managers nowadays day in and day out. They seem blown away by Copilot demos and keep pushing "savings" and don't seem to understand AI hallucinations at all.
This is my conclusion as well, get the cost center down to good enough after threats from competition is relatively secured.
I think this is going to be a new golden age kf innovation. Lot of senior engineers capable of pencil whipping microservice infrastructure paired with industry experience means startup mill goes brrrr
>> though maybe taking 3x the time to get things done is worth it if they're cheap enough.
Started doing automation about 6 years ago. We had several offshore teams. The one caveat was that the company was vying for several government contracts. One of the requirements was the ability to pass a low level security clearance and on yeah, you cannot, under any circumstances off shore any of the work.
Therefore, they needed an onshore team to handle the government work.
Well, when things got slow, our team was essentially the clean up team. We had several hockey players on our team so we nicknamed our team "Zamboni". A large chunk of what we were doing was fixing the off shore teams coding and things would break so regularly two of devs became full-time off shore support.
The company was literally paying our off-shore team to build an automation. Then when it constantly break, they would pull us in to fix it.
Absolutely maddening they couldn't understand they were paying triple or quadruple for work we could do once properly instead of two or three times before we got it.
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.
I was told that the main reason the “Who is hiring?” thread (and other job boards for startups) has much fewer remote positions that are global (the vast majority is Remote US now) is because of a legislation that reduces a fiscal incentive when hiring software engineers and the reduction is much more aggressive when the engineers are from outside the US.
Doesn’t it affect big tech companies? Only startups?
I would guess the opposite, with big companies being much more savvy and influenced by fiscal incentives.
Exactly this, articles of that tone are starting to surface. AI is often the pretext, because it makes sense to replace labour with technology. The dissonance is why those who make layoff decisions refuse to accept reality, that AI does not replace staff.
One thing also contradicting the "AI can do it" argument, is that a business's playbook is to rather expand the work force in order to multiply the effect of technology. Yet they lay off in waves.
There is no dissonance, just a disguise: Several big tech companies in the US cut their workforce, in the US, while expanding it in countries where talent is cheaper.
Paradoxally, junior folks have it even worse. It has become very difficult to land a job without experience, again, in the US. It all makes sense, if you replace US based senior staff with Junior staff on different time zone, and having a different culture, you are left with nobody to mentor and supervise junior so staff.
I still can't explain how ending up with more Junior staff, offshore, less senior staff and little to no Junior staff locally will pay off in the long term.
I guess I will figure that out, but for now that's one piece of the puzzle I can only call an "economic downturn" outlook.
The regressive housing policies on the west coast are going to completely destroy our international competitiveness.
Salaries for tech are 2x what they should be just due to housing costs.
Seattle used to be where bay area companies relocated teams to because the cost of living here and salary expectations where 2/3rds the bay area, but that ship long since sailed.
Asinine short sighted city councils will be the death of all our jobs and also the death of the only remaining industry that America is competitive in on a large scale.
Don’t you have this backwards? People want to live in the bay because it has high salaries education etc, so the housing market is competitive. Everyone wants to live there
Yes. There is a supply problem hindered by politics. But even if all the construction in the world happens, would you be able to buy a 3 bedroom house in SF for 400k? Not a chance. Everyone wants it.
A 3 bedroom townhome in Seattle (actually Redmond WA, more expensive!) when I graduated was 350k, and that was already an inflated housing bubble price. My starting salary was 85k at Microsoft.
If 20k people move to a city each year and the city only approves 10k new buildings, the city is sabotaging its own growth.
Saying "we don't want growth!" doesn't work. Prices shoot up, wages increase, cost of living goes up, the price of everything goes up, eventually it becomes unsustainable and the entire economy crashes.
If 20k people want to move to a city, built 25k housing units. Keep it simple.
Expedite permits, hire more inspectors, simplify building codes, do whatever is needed to ensure people have a place to live.
I am also pro growth but it doesn’t change that many people want to live there. You say only 20k people move there, but isn’t the pricing keeping out many more who would otherwise like to live there?
Or it's just plain, boring cost cutting because finance is looking down the barrel of a grim YoY outlook. Companies are hurting, and GenAI can't get people to spend more money with them.
one of the main drivers is companies like Deel that make it very easy to hire remote workers anywhere and I think AWS will soon launch a similar service
