Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

devonzuegel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 534 posts

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#311

Post by filoleg »

twox2 wrote: post #283
filoleg wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My anecdotal data is that I went really far in the process with a FAANG, got a verbal offer, and it was rescinded (never got the official offer). I always suspected it was due to lack of a degree. If your lack of degree was a dealbreaker, they wouldn't go with the interview process to completion. It makes zero sense to waste time and resources on a candidate that you already determined you aren't going to hire. My t…

I appreciated your comment. I want to believe what you are saying... but at the end of the day none of the people that I interviewed with were the final deciding factor in whether I was offered the role or not. This was decided by a hiring committee. I might be giving away which company this was at this point, I don't know if this is how it's done at other large companies. The thing is, I was asked to provide certain…

> I might be giving away which company this was at this point, I don't know if this is how it's done at other large companies.

Yes, you are, it sounds like Google, and I had the same experience with them, except I had a degree.

> I rocked my interviews (which was the feedback provided via the recruiter)

A lot of times, recruiters aren't at liberty to provide truthful and direct feedback. Also, you might have done well overall, but one of the interviewers tanked you. It all depends. You might have gotten a good signal (but not strong on all of them, just "good enough") from all your interviews except one, and on that one you got a strongly negative one. Hiring committee looks at this combination of signals and decides "no". This is really common.

Hiring a bad candidate and having to fire them later is extremely expensive, so the interview process prioritizes decreasing false positives rather than false negatives. Which means that unless they are absolutely certain you are a good fit, it is a pass. But I can pretty much guarantee you that if you got to onsites and then later got declined by the hiring committee, it wasn't your lack of degree that got you passed over.

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#312

Post by alfiedotwtf »

neom wrote: post #277
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the importance of physically residing in the US will decrease, and that there is an opportunity for other locales/governments to attract remote workers. COVID really did changed everything, and proved working from home not only works well, but more importantly to CFOs, made it significantly cheaper by literally outsourcing real estate costs to employees. The past few months have been interesting. I've been contacte…

I'm on the business side of the house, we keep waiting for rent to drop so we can find more space for growth, and it's not dropping because folks in real estate think there will be a rebound. As soon as I try to get into a negotiation, it's almost like they're MORE sticky on the price than they used to be, I guess because everyone is looking for a deal. I don't know what will happen but it makes no sense for me to pa…

Must be the area you're in. In Melbourne, office real estate is practically on life support and they'll happily discount

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#313

Post by heavyset_go »

postsantum wrote: post #298
standardUser wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

White males are one of the highest paid demographic groups in the US and always have been.

It seems white americans are far behind many asian ethnic groups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...

That's because US immigration policy selects for immigrants with significant wealth or specialized educations and experience. Our policy specifically selects for high earners and the already wealthy.

You can see this effect clearly from your own source, where Australian Americans and South African Americans both have higher median incomes than almost all Asian American households, as well as white Americans. Same thing goes for Pakistani, Iranian, Lebonese and Austrian Americans compared to other groups in the US.

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#314

Post by devoutsalsa »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #161

Except: - no country pay like the US. Worked for silicon valley companies remotely, and made twice the money I made in France, while being 3 times cheaper than local competition. - no country have the volume of hi-level coding gig job offers the US has. - few countries even have has many interesting projects. If you want to code in Haskell or Lisp in Europe, good luck. - the USA don't care about your diploma, only wh…

It’s not like the USA wants to pay more. If they can get away with paying less for the work, they will.

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#316

Post by filoleg »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #307
filoleg wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am working at one now (kind of, since MSFT doesn't really make it into the abbreviation), and one of the brightest senior engineers on my team had no degree whatsoever, just a high-school diploma (using past tense, because he left for another company a couple of years ago). I also have a bunch of friends who currently work Google (some from college, some former colleagues) and a few at FB, and all of them know at l…

It's getting harder. I have a friend who worked at MSFT out of high school >10 years ago, and was told several years in that he could never be promoted beyond his current level without a degree. Decided to take a couple years off to get a degree in something random (theology) and when he applied for his old job, now +BA, was told he needed a CS degree to be qualified for it.

Was your friend in engineering? And what kind of level was your friend shooting for? Because yeah, if you are shooting for a director or a partner level position, you better have a degree. But for a regular senior engineer position? Not at all.

Also, i don't know when your friend tried to get re-hired and at which level. The whole "we don't care as much about degrees anymore" is a fairly recent thing, I would say 5 or so years. And of course, if your friend only worked at MSFT for a few years, then left to do school, and then tried to come back, they would be probably still shooting for a close-to-entry level position, not a senior. And entry-level without a degree or something else to compensate for it is going to be really tough. Normally it is compensated by either years of experience or something else (side projects, major open-source contribs, etc.), hence why I never saw someone without a degree at entry-level, but plenty who are senior engineers.

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#317

Post by scrumbledober »

the_only_law wrote: post #242
wesnerm2 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should not make any assumptions about work in the US. There's many American software companies that are able to fulfill your requirements. In many tech companies, you have "unlimited" vacation. You can probably take more vacation that you already get in Europe. This is true of my company, mParticle. I can work 9-to-5 as an employee. That is the culture of the company that I work for. People can choose to work rem…

> You can probably take more vacation that you already get in Europe. I’ve always heard that places like this tend to pressure you into not taking many days or taking a more “normal” amount. I just started a job with unlimited vacation, so I’ll have to see how it goes. I think best case is I can have more shorter stints through the year.

my company offers unlimited PTO, then also makes us take at least one day per month, then also has a $2000 travel stipend to encourage us to use PTO. on top of that it is a very 9-5 oriented culture. They do exist, and this is at a Series A startup.

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#318

Post by Bayart »

Gene5ive wrote: post #167
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #161

Except: - no country pay like the US. Worked for silicon valley companies remotely, and made twice the money I made in France, while being 3 times cheaper than local competition. - no country have the volume of hi-level coding gig job offers the US has. - few countries even have has many interesting projects. If you want to code in Haskell or Lisp in Europe, good luck. - the USA don't care about your diploma, only wh…

Yeah, I've heard about a classist element in Europe that might make the path I took unlikely. I dropped out of college, toiled in the service industry for 10 years, got sick of it, went to code school, got a tech job and 6 years later earn $130k. Still no degree. Is it true you can't do that there or is that just a stereotype?

I've walked a fairly similar path as you did (to an extent, I did get into code and systems as a teenager, but I've got little to no formal engineering education and drifted away from code for a decade) and getting decent opportunities is nearly impossible unless you're in Paris and pretty good at networking. Most of the work available is menial, with little prospects and pays the median salary (which is trash by EU standards, much less US).

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#319

Post by speby »

No no no no. Let's go down the list, shall we. Remember, COVID or not, remote work trend accelerating or not, things have not changed as much as they seem:

* People STILL want to migrate to the US and it will remain one of the top choices. People move her for economic/job opportunities, sure, but that's not all.

* Outsourcing (or hiring remote teams in remote offices), as well as setting up remote and international offices has been going on for .... I can't even remember. 100 years? This was already happening and will keep happening.

* Timezones are a physical problem and cannot be fixed. Sorry. Remote work or not, people don't want to work at 1 AM so they can talk to another team half-way around the world at 7 AM. This was true yesterday and it will remain true today.

* Culture issues will remain. True yesterday. True today.

* Language issues will remain. True yesterday. True today.

* US will continue to remain a country people WANT to live in and stay in once they are here. Remote work will certainly allow some people to move abroad and continue working because that's something they really want. But the data definitely doesn't suggest some sea change here. True yesterday. Remains largely true today.

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#320

Post by EugeneOZ »

jaegerpicker wrote: post #245
EugeneOZ wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the USA don't care about your diploma, only what you can do That's a total bullshit, unfortunately. Everything else is correct.

Now a days, it's very much true. I've worked for FAANG companies, a number of mid-major sized tech/internet companies, have had a engineering job for 20+ years, been a CTO and co-founded a VC backed company. All without any degree, in fact in the 20+ years in the field I've never once been out of work. Early in my career I was rejected a couple of times for lack of degree but I can't even remember the last time I was…

I have successfully went through a chain of technical interviews, but wasn't hired to Facebook because HR realized I have no degree. So our experience is really different.
Post reply on HN