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Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India

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Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India

#61

Post by exhaze »

As someone who worked at Uber from 2014-2018, I'd like to weigh in with some observations based on my experience.

1). While Uber has been very Bay Area-heavy, it has had a distributed engineering team for many of its core operations for a very long time. For example, many of its core infrastructure was built in Europe. Cross-timezone collaboration hasn't been the smoothest, but of all the large "FANGish" tech companies, Uber actually has the most experience with non-HQ teams building business-critical systems. Even companies seen as very progressive in terms of eng culture, like Stripe, seem to keep the core business close to HQ (this is my subjective observation, and I'd love to proven wrong here, because I think Stripe, as a whole, is awesome).

2). India is a country with many people and many engineers. If there's one strong believe I can state in this post, it's that there are many incredibly talented engineers who are living in India and are choosing to stay there. Uber has experience in building engineering teams outside of HQ. It's not a sure thing, but I think they can do it.

Happy to answer any other questions or comments.

(I guess as a disclaimer, I have zero financial stake in Uber, but I have some friends who still work at Uber, so that may or may not influence my opinion)

Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India

#62

Post by nkingsy »

itake wrote: post #54
felixarba wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not as good as it sounds just because it works for you. People don't love moving, and they usually move for better work opportunities, not to accomodate a pay cut at their current job. Moving to a lower cost of living area also means moving to an area with less opportunities, and not to mention moving away from your social circles and the life you have established somewhere. The only way I can see this workin…

To add to this when I worked remotely for two years I was always worried that if I move to a low cost of living city and I lost my job I will be screwed. No one would hire me at the rate I was paid with the SF company.

This has happened to me. Ended up working for a very scary company because they were the only local option that came close to matching my bay area salary. Moved back to the Bay Area less than a year later.

Lesson learned, I won’t be moving again without a relocation package

Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India

#63

Post by dvdhnt »

masonhensley wrote: post #46
mabbo wrote: post #36

A better option: shift it's engineering to everywhere else in America , and go full-remote, but pay less. Imagine if Uber told it's developers: we're cutting salaries by 40%- but you are now full-remote, and we want you to live somewhere less expensive than SV. Spread out across America! A lot of folks would quit. But some would see the incredible opportunity. In that situation, I'd move somewhere like Chattanooga TN…

I drove through Chattanooga earlier this week during a cross country move. Gorgeous, underrated part of the country. Close to Nashville, Huntsville (huge aerospace & engineering base has fiber) & Atlanta. Pretty sure they also have municipal fiber.

Yes. We have EPB, a municipal fiber provider.

Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India

#64

Post by justinclift »

nkingsy wrote: post #62
itake wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this when I worked remotely for two years I was always worried that if I move to a low cost of living city and I lost my job I will be screwed. No one would hire me at the rate I was paid with the SF company.

This has happened to me. Ended up working for a very scary company because they were the only local option that came close to matching my bay area salary. Moved back to the Bay Area less than a year later. Lesson learned, I won’t be moving again without a relocation package

> very scary company

What did they do?

Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India

#65

Post by vsskanth »

chocks wrote: post #42
mabbo wrote: post #36

A better option: shift it's engineering to everywhere else in America , and go full-remote, but pay less. Imagine if Uber told it's developers: we're cutting salaries by 40%- but you are now full-remote, and we want you to live somewhere less expensive than SV. Spread out across America! A lot of folks would quit. But some would see the incredible opportunity. In that situation, I'd move somewhere like Chattanooga TN…

I’m genuinely curious why companies don’t do this? It seems like a great deal, many cities in US are great with decent cost of living. I used to live in Kansas before & home ownership is cheaper and time zones are usually better. Maybe the total cost of hire is still higher? idk

Just looking at annual pay, lets say you pay devs a reasonable 75K USD in Chattanooga. Thats 56 Lakh INR annual pay in India. You can get a top engineer for that kind of pay.

This doesn't even account for the difficulty in hiring an engineer of the same caliber in Chattanooga and all the associated overhead like health insurance, etc.. which are much lower in India.

If you already have experience building a high quality engineering team in India (thus know how to overcome cultural barriers), its pretty much a no-brainer.

Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India

#66

Post by lumost »

nkingsy wrote: post #62
itake wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this when I worked remotely for two years I was always worried that if I move to a low cost of living city and I lost my job I will be screwed. No one would hire me at the rate I was paid with the SF company.

This has happened to me. Ended up working for a very scary company because they were the only local option that came close to matching my bay area salary. Moved back to the Bay Area less than a year later. Lesson learned, I won’t be moving again without a relocation package

This has always been my big concern with leaving a major tech city ( even to go to the suburbs ). your opportunities shrink.

I'd be curious if this will change as more companies offer full-time remote.

Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India

#67

Post by bathtub365 »

mabbo wrote: post #36

A better option: shift it's engineering to everywhere else in America , and go full-remote, but pay less. Imagine if Uber told it's developers: we're cutting salaries by 40%- but you are now full-remote, and we want you to live somewhere less expensive than SV. Spread out across America! A lot of folks would quit. But some would see the incredible opportunity. In that situation, I'd move somewhere like Chattanooga TN…

Asking people to take a pay cut that means they need to uproot their families to make ends meet is completely unreasonable. I think they’d suddenly find themselves spending much less on engineering staff but probably not for the reason you think.

Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India

#68

Post by viraptor »

balfirevic wrote: post #47
mabbo wrote: post #36

A better option: shift it's engineering to everywhere else in America , and go full-remote, but pay less. Imagine if Uber told it's developers: we're cutting salaries by 40%- but you are now full-remote, and we want you to live somewhere less expensive than SV. Spread out across America! A lot of folks would quit. But some would see the incredible opportunity. In that situation, I'd move somewhere like Chattanooga TN…

> In that situation, I'd move somewhere like Chattanooga TN- average rent at around $1000/month, vs SF's $3000-5000. Food is cheaper too. That rent difference turns out to be $24000-$48000 a year. If salaries are cut by 40%, it would only make economic sense to move if you earned less than $60000-$120000 a year (not accounting for cheaper food). Whether the lifestyle differences would be positive or negative is highl…

Add other bits of cheaper living: lack of commute, cheaper food, etc. It's not just the rent.

Also think how much is an extra hour every day (or however long you commute) worth to you in quality of life.

Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India

#69

Post by anonms-coward »

I think we might see more instances of this happening, not less. The thing is SF salaries are very high compared to just anywhere else in the world. There are many reasons for that (high rent, high concentration of talent), but I doubt these justify paying 300k when Uber can pay 80k to an engineer in India. To people saying the difference in salary is not large, it absolutely is large, and they can check https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Uber/Google for some data points. Not to mention this is just salary, cost of employment will include more things like real estate costs, health insurance, all of which will make this even bigger.

Also, India has good enough engineering talent that product quality shouldn't be an issue given good technical leadership. If companies can hire people straight out of bootcamps for entry level jobs, they can sure get better value by hiring someone having a very good CSE education at much lower cost. Even the vast majority of work at FAANGs doesn't require a Dave Cutler or Jeff Dean. For example, majority of engineers at Google are not working on Search, Colossus,BigTable,Spanner,Borg or the most important technologies. Most engineers just need to know how to use BigTable/Spanner, and that is much easier than designing them.

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