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Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

devonzuegel.com

511–520 of 534 posts

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

#511
post #501
post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lived in various places at various times, what specifically are you asking about?

I have never experienced what I would call “crime risk” in the US, much less anything that would require “seriously restricting my life”, so I’m curious if you are referring to a particular area, because I’m sure they exist.

I'm thinking of central/downtown New York and San Francisco (most good developer jobs seemed to be in the big cities). I had enough colleagues get mugged (and got pretty aggressively hassled myself) that it was worrying. What I was getting at with the "seriously restricting my life" was that it seemed like the only way to avoid the risk would have been to never go downtown.

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

#512
post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sure it's possible to get good code out of an offshore team, but we couldn't. That depends on the salary, how much were you offering?

EXTREMELY competitive salaries. The company owner believes in paying for talent.

EXTREMELY competitive salaries does not say anything. You have companies like Google and Microsoft in India paying very well and you have the IT consulting giants like Infosys, TCS etc who pay peanuts yet they still find employees but they have a bad reputation.

Was your company paying Google level salaries or the TCS level salaries?

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

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without stock appreciation, I don't see that in Dublin. Like, a friend recently got a FAANG offer for senior IC, which netted out at about 150k total compensation, which is far off from 200k. You'd be looking at Staff (or years of stock appreciation) to hit 200k TC, which is a lot lower than one would expect in the US.

Anyone can go look at compensation data for Google, Facebook, and Amazon on levels.fyi, filtering on "Ireland", and see that every single data point for senior engineers is 200k+.

Out of 310 rows, 42 are $200k+. Not that many.

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

#514
post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the realization people had through the pandemic is that a very large part of the western world is equally livable. Apart from economic opportunity, what else is there on US soil that makes it comparably preferable? And i think you re forgetting that the US has been outsourcing its manufacturing to china for decades, and china is , what 15 hours difference? Most of work is asynchronous I think the US has nothi…

Reading this post it occurred to me that if huge levels of remote work become the norm, there may be consequences for what 'rights' remote workers may obtain at the 'host' richer countries. I mean, somewhat like large companies effectively influenced the mechanisms for immigration, right? The same may happen wrt. access to financial services (e.g. Facebook employees around the world may eventually be indistinguishabl…

Ever since i read Snowcrash I've thought about this. What if major corps developed transnational power: get hired in India, get benefits that include expedited visa processing, global health insurance coverage, company schools or online curricula for children of employees. I mean this exists for senior execs, how would it look when extended to the FAANG rank and file?

Sort of a mobility-focused benefits package. Unlikely, incredibly unfeasible but interesting to ponder.

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

#515
post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They are not problem if you do hiring directly and select right people. Hiring directly in other countries is difficult for all but the biggest companies (who probably already have offices in those countries and have been hiring in those countries for years).

Not if you hire sole proprietor. You just have to pay such person an invoice like you would buy something from abroad. I work in Poland for company from the Netherlands and I know other people who have "single person company" that are working for companies in UK and US. I even did some work for company based in UAE. You just have to spend time looking where to find such people. Then of course you have to do trial per…

We have contractors in the US as well. But we also have labor laws that govern who can be considered a contractor, as do other countries. It’s more complex than this, but in general treating someone like an employee and paying them as a contractor isn’t legal. If this arrangement gets popular enough to disrupt the labor market, you can expect more enforcement actions.

Regardless of any actual enforcement, most US companies don’t want to deal with the potential issues of getting tangled up in foreign labor disputes, or getting tangled up in foreign courts over IP disputes.

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

#516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

shopify is literally hiring kids still in school at Carleton and Yorke to fill their teams through their devdegree program because they can't get enough graduated and qualified coders who want to stay in canada.

Oh no, they're giving comp sci students jobs!

That isn't bad in and of itself, merely that they're having so much trouble hiring they need to programs with multiple universities to get people to stay working for them. They have undergraduate students working on production - its not normal.

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

#517
post #113
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US seems to have a monopoly on the ability to pay top talent (at least in the west). At the high end of the talent pool, I don't think opening up is going to have a significant impact. We're mostly already internationally mobile or can demand competitive salaries, and a new supply of mid-tier talent will only create more capital-deploying opportunities. I'm a computer vision person with a good grasp on 3d geometr…

Other than the 3D skills, these are mostly run of the mill skills for a mathematics major. Why not train a decent math major in the 3D skills? Now the company is losing you and they have lost 6 months of time to train a new employee. Many companies are short-sighted and unwilling to accept candidates that don’t match exact specifications to their own detriment.

Training someone is a) time-consuming b) not a guarantee of success. Yes, perhaps the OP would take that approach, with hind sight being 20/20, but hardly the obvious conclusion to come to 6 months ago.

I have been patiently training someone for 4 months. He's not getting it. He's not ready to deliver. Whether that's a reflection of my training skills, or him, i dunno. Whatever, but I'm tired, and now have to go through the pain of letting him go and beginning the search anew. Wish i hadn't taken the risk.

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

#518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can go look at compensation data for Google, Facebook, and Amazon on levels.fyi, filtering on "Ireland", and see that every single data point for senior engineers is 200k+.

Out of 310 rows, 42 are $200k+. Not that many.

To be fair, I was looking at the numbers in Euros (which is the most relevant to me), while I suspect other people are looking in dollars.

It does appear that $200k is achievable in Dublin, Approximately $150k seems a lot more likely though.

Clearly, I need to give up on DS and become a software engineer. I suppose I could get a leetcode subscription and start back reading Knuth again ;)

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

#520
post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switzerland, London, Dublin, Amsterdam, Munich, Luxembourg FAANG.

At $200k+ for individual contributor? But it is probably effectively 0.0001% of the jobs across the EU zone.

That was my point if you read my comments again.

US companies in Europe pay that much, but there are only a handful of jobs (let's say 0.01% of jobs), and outside of US companies you can't even find that. Outside of US companies you need to be, as I called it "beyond-senior-level-individual-contributor", i.e. a god in your field to reach that. So you have to add 2 more zeroes after the dot, 0.0001%. They're both even rarer and also > hard to get.

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