Ask HN: If you are fully/partially remote, would you hire devs in India?

Just personal anecdote. The original comment is spot on because the money saved on salary is spend on time spend on communicating ideas at much granular and micro level details to get work done and everyone is looking for an opportunity for moving out of the country first.

So if a company do not offer an option for overseas job sooner or later the person will try to move to an outfit which promises them for some overseas job.

I had better success with teams from Ukraine, Poland and Europe in general compared to Indian teams and costed about the same for finished project. For detail and innovative work the EU team performed n general much better than Indian team. In Asia my Vietnamese staff got a team from Vietnam and quality was also very good, especially with Ruby on rails, C# and are more stable than the team in India. The only thing favouring India is its large population, but still quality matters over quantity and when it comes to quality USA, EU perform better as the culture of quality is ingrained. In India people have to do Jugaad from the very beginning so most find shortcuts to do things especially in code they copy/paste by googling and work based on continuous trial/error without figuring out fundamentals on how it worked (there are brilliant people from India in my team just few though and hard to find). For mobile development especially iOS and swift teams from China did better, but still for long term the quality of EU and US teams in code is better.

Absolutely not. I work hard and pay high taxes without much complaint to try and help enrich both myself and the society I am a part of.

Helping companies offshore work destroys local jobs, depresses salaries and helps the rich get all the richer at a time where they've already taken a disproportionate amount of the gains from the increases in productivity since the 70s and in that time, as the panama papers et al. have shown, have done all they can to hide those profits from the societies that generated them.

I'm also pretty staunchly anti-globalism so it would make a hypocrite of me if I did.

As a hiring manager, a large part of my filtering of candidate resumes / applications is focused on being able to validate their credentials e.g. who they've worked for, where they were educated and how they did there, any repos / sideprojects etc. and make my opinion based on the composite.

If I can't easily validate those credentials then I move on. India has a reputation for spinning up "colleges" to pump out "engineers"[0], to the point where they now recognize the issue caused and are trying to put further efforts on hold [1], and so assessing the educational credentials of a candidate who has not explicitly attended IIT becomes a minefield.

Validating non-local experience is a similar minefield. Instead of recognizing previous employers and having some idea of the work they do and the quality of it, one has to start googling the companies, diving into websites / glassdoor / etc. to find out what calibre they are. Another point against hiring globally for me.

Overall, I would be no more hesitant about hiring Indians in India than I would anyone else in a foreign country with a resume that is difficult to validate, but it's not something I will ever support as I believe in creating local jobs and supporting the local society and economy wherever possible.

[0] https://restofworld.org/2020/india-engineering-degree/

[1] https://www.theweek.in/news/sci-tech/2020/02/14/AICTE-No-new...

I think we're going to see some divergence in the remote-work frenzy. I believe that when your product is still in an open-ended stage, and/or when your engineers are closer to the product side of things, there's still benefit to be had from in-person collaboration. Whiteboarding, ad hoc discussion, etc. Of course the older and bigger a company/product is, the less important this factor becomes, and the more suited they are to having everyone just do their work remotely and check it in. But I would wager that many smaller companies/startups will continue having physical offices even as this trend permeates.

Congrats on this bold justification you’ve created to justify your role in the exploitation process, but you’re not fooling anyone. There is no moral or material logic for this nonsense.

I am in Seattle, and have worked on teams with engineers located across the US, across Europe and in Mexico. I have found talented engineers everywhere.

As mentioned below, there are political reasons you might not want to this. And, there are some logistical hurdles in terms of local regulations which, in my experience, can be overcome and plenty of companies have shown that is the case.

So, to answer your question specifically, the reason to compete for talent in Silicon Valley/locally is exactly what you mentioned: the challenges due to different time zones.

Engineering is inherently a collaborative discipline despite the fact that much of the work is done in a solitary fashion.

Each degree of separation makes collaboration harder. The first degree is when you are not sitting next to your collaborators. And it goes on from there: perhaps when the are on another floor, or even another building, in another city, country, timezone, etc.

The most distance you add to the equation, the harder collaboration becomes.