Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by balfirevic » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 3:51 PM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #79

balfirevic wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Add other bits of cheaper living: lack of commute, cheaper food, etc. It's not just the rent. At this point, people arguing for moving to lower cost of living area should just show the math. > Also think how much is an extra hour every day (or however long you commute) worth to you in quality of life. Just live close to the office. You can literally pay thousands of dollars a month and still be better of financiall…

You can't really show the math beyond personal experience and even then it's all relative to your lifestyle. Living in the city near the office also depends on the area. I can get out off my town in ~5min at any time of the day. There's no traffic on my street. I've got a creek and walking paths nearby. I have time to cook at home and save on takeaways and potentially improve my health. I wouldn't exchange this for a…

I don't deny that some people prefer living in smaller cities. That's why I initially said "whether the lifestyle differences would be positive or negative is highly dependent on the individual".

What I object to is people saying that cheapness of such places will make up for massive salary reductions. It won't.

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

#82

Post by codegeek » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 3:53 PM UTC

katbyte wrote: post #8

foepys wrote: post #6

How does the SV crowd here see this? Considering that even entry web devs with only bootcamp experience often enough make >$100,000, outsourcing to India is a good idea, economically speaking. Could a successful outsourcing project by Uber threaten all SV tech jobs?

No. To get the same amount of quality in india you’ll be paying roughly the same - and then have cultural and timezone barriers.

Not true at all (I have team members in India). It is not even close to "roughly the same". For a decent engineer with 2-5 years of experience, you would pay anywhere from 8K-20K USD PER YEAR. That's average. Sometimes even lower than the 8K and sometimes higher than the 20K.

Indian engineers making more than 20k-25K USD Per Year are considered top talent in most companies across India. Are there engineers making more ? Yes absolutely. Are they a minority ? Yes, absolutely.

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

#83

Post by codegeek » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 3:56 PM UTC

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…

The issue with your arugment is that you are looking at it from a "cost" perspective only. Companies have a lot more problems to worry about. Local laws, regulations, is everyone cut out to be able to work remote ? etc etc. In the US, you also have to deal with shit load of laws state wise. For most companies that don't have the pockets of FAAANgs or well funded companies, it is just not viable to go "fully remote anywhere". It sounds exciting but logistically it is not that simple.

Also, you cannot just assume that just because the company decided to cut salaries by 40%, everyone will be excited to pack their bags and move to say "Kansas" or "Idaho" or wherever in the world. Not everyone wants to be a nomad. Lot of us like the stability of a home, a city where we live and have made friends/family and many other reasons. If that was the case, I am sure a lot more people would be moving out of NYC/LA/SF already. Not the case.

I say this as a small bootstrapped founder who has team members in 3 countries and we are only 15 or so. Remote teams are NOT easy. Not at all. I personally would love everyone to be able to work together in 1 office and call it a day. Yes, I am all up for flexibility to work remotely if needed from time to time. I just don't want to deal with the hassles I explained in my first paragraph.

Finally, lets say that we do look at it purely from a cost perspective. On an average, a "good enough" engineer in India will always be at least 10x cheaper than a good enough engineer ANYWHERE in America. It is just the facts of how the global world is. Don't compete on cost. You cannot beat that. Compete on other things.

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

#84

Post by codegeek » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 4:06 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #14

Wouldn't it only be fair for us to be handing more jobs to those with greater need in countries like India? Share the wealth, right?

I know you are being sarcastic but this is called "capitalism". Not doubt a country like India benefits tremendously from the jobs created by foreign companies BUT it is not a charity. Companies are doing it because they see enough value and profits for their shareholders. It has nothing to do with being fair or not. If you truly want outsourcing to stop, create better incentives for the companies to hire locally. Until then, welcome to a global world.

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

#85

Post by wobbly_bush » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 4:07 PM UTC

KingOfCoders wrote: post #32

The challenge with outsourcing is management overhead and turn around times. Biggest mistake I see my customers make is outsource and not control the quality of the engineers. Inhouse they have a sophisticated and long recruiting process. When outsourcing they take the first they get (and as a new customer, be assured, you do not get the best engineers but you need to fight to get them).

> The challenge with outsourcing

This article is not talking about outsourcing but offshoring. Uber still has total control on the people, the project and rewarding the right behavior. It will just happen in India instead of the US.

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

#86

Post by ghaff » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 4:08 PM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #34

Arfiraaa wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's fair to assume the quality of Indian workers is worse. They are paid less purely because of cost of living and locational differences. Uber is smart enough to know this and it's the exact reason they will end up paying less for similar quality. Also, in every company there are jobs that are trivial and jobs that require talent. I assume the more trivial jobs like bug fixing will be outsourced, whil…

> They are paid less purely because of cost of living and locational differences. Cost of living is a red herring. No one’s going to pay me more if I live in Manhattan rather than the suburbs of Boise if they can avoid it. It’s all about the locational differences. If there’s a thick, liquid market for the product you’re selling, your labour, you’ll get a good price for it. If there isn’t employers have substantially…

It's all interrelated though. If Silicon Valley CoL were more along the lines of the many Tier 2 areas where there is a lot of tech of various kinds, the big SV employers wouldn't have to pay as big a premium to get people to relocate. They'd still pay a premium to get the talent they want, but they wouldn't have to also basically cover the difference in housing costs needed.

But it's complicated. For that matter, you could argue that the perks of Bay Area weather and great number of employment options should make the Bay Area attractive even if the salaries weren't great relative to CoL. But there's enough competition among large employers who generate enough value per employee that they can afford to offer top-shelf salaries so they do so to entice the people they want.

To the last point, I don't expect dramatic short term changes. But to the degree that things tilt more in the direction of remote work and small distributed offices, I expect some equalization of salaries at least within the US.

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

#87

Post by wobbly_bush » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 4:15 PM UTC

_tw9j wrote: post #58

varshithr wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am from Hyderabad and one of my friend works at Uber Engineering here. From what I understand, the quality of engineers matches to that of his US counterparts, if not better. He got his degree from IIT, a tier 1 college in India. I agree that India has not been the best in terms of tech innovation but the situation is changing. The start up ecosystem is booming here and investments are following too.

Relative to what? India has 1.34 billion people. If other countries put a million self selected students to compete with each other in a dog fight, I am sure the resulting 50k might have good chance of being similar. Startup ecosystem is booming on foreign investment especially from china. Local investment is still dire.

How does this reply contribute to the discussion?

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

#88

Post by tijuco2 » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 4:15 PM UTC

I was a Uber driver for two years and year after year they keep saying they are struggling. I really don't get it. On a ride where passenger pays 20 bucks, they usually keep something like 8 dollars. How can it not be profitable? The computational and human resource necessary to make a ride happen can't be that high. Maybe they should fire their CTO and CFO.

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

#89

Post by wobbly_bush » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 4:17 PM UTC

breitling wrote: post #2

Shift innovation to India? Have they seen India's track record on tech innovation? The education system there does not produce very innovative people or engineers. However they are great at following exact instructions so I'm sure that part of engineering team will do well

This comment is pretty ill informed on the tech scene in India. Most large companies already have engineering offices in India dealing with varying complexity of projects. You are probably only thinking of outsourcing companies.

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

#90

Post by TheCoelacanth » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 4:29 PM UTC

quicklime wrote: post #28

BurningFrog wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good for India if it works out, I guess. But it feels - to my uninformed biased mind - like more of Uber flailing around while slowly failing. > Could a successful outsourcing project by Uber threaten all SV tech jobs? No. It could be part of some downward pressure at worst. Outsourcing to India has gone on for 2-3 decades. It's not some new disruptive thing.

> Outsourcing to India has gone on for 2-3 decades. It's not some new disruptive thing. I guess what's different here is that Uber is a proper tech company and knows how to identify good engineers to hire. The same cannot be said of non-tech companies that have outsourced to consultancies like Infosys and Wipro.

So are Google, Microsoft, Amazon and many other companies that have large offices in India.

This isn't a new thing. This is just a common strategy that many companies take once they are large enough to be able to handle the extra overhead of working across a 12 hour time difference.