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

GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 89 posts

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#11

Post by _xivi »

noodlesUK wrote: post #5

I'm not privy to anything special here, but I do get the impression that (intuitively) it's easier to target layoffs in areas with weaker employee protection laws. In most EU countries, it's pretty hard to make these kinds of redundancies without going through a slow and expensive process, as well as paying severance.

Wouldn't these protective laws help promote outsourcing tho? Less headache, not to mention wages

Similar to that in finance, where big corporations have the luxury to establish entities in tax heavens and avoid paying large sums while still operating just fine

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#12

Post by abhishekjha »

noodlesUK wrote: post #5

I'm not privy to anything special here, but I do get the impression that (intuitively) it's easier to target layoffs in areas with weaker employee protection laws. In most EU countries, it's pretty hard to make these kinds of redundancies without going through a slow and expensive process, as well as paying severance.

Spotify EU did a layoff not too long ago and so did Miro.

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#13

Post by howinteresting »

ethicalsmacker wrote: post #8
noodlesUK wrote: post #5

I'm not privy to anything special here, but I do get the impression that (intuitively) it's easier to target layoffs in areas with weaker employee protection laws. In most EU countries, it's pretty hard to make these kinds of redundancies without going through a slow and expensive process, as well as paying severance.

Or areas with weaker employees. I doubt they axed an entire team for monetary reasons alone. They could have axed 1/10th the employees in the bay area and probably covered the entire India roster (financial cost wise).

Senior-level engineers in India, of the caliber that GitHub would hire, easily clear USD 100k+/year. It's not as expensive as Bay Area talent but not cheap either.

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#14

Post by breckenedge »

yieldcrv wrote: post #9

What towns in South America have a concentration of software developers? Might target my real estate purchases there I’m finding that there's a lot more focus on timezone quality of life for US centric organizations, and that includes getting rid of their teams in Asia now and avoiding that Re-Discovering South America over and over again for similar help and cost

Towns? You mean Buenos Aires. Conveniently, real estate transactions are done in USD.

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#15

Post by morkalork »

yieldcrv wrote: post #9

What towns in South America have a concentration of software developers? Might target my real estate purchases there I’m finding that there's a lot more focus on timezone quality of life for US centric organizations, and that includes getting rid of their teams in Asia now and avoiding that Re-Discovering South America over and over again for similar help and cost

Having worked with developers in both India and Argentina, given the choice I would choose the guys from Buenos Aires every time. It's not just the time zone, the cultural gap is so much smaller.

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#17

Post by aiappreciator »

flappyeagle wrote: post #4

If you make your high-cost employees much more productive with AI, you may not need to reduce per-headcount cost so much anymore. The cultural and language benefits start to dominate the calculation. That said, India will only grow in importance, so I wouldn't be surprised if the team was reinstated in a few years

This, AI more directly competes with service outsourcing than anything else.

AI isn't reliable. But is your outsourced team any better?

Outsourcing is cheap, but AI is 100 times cheaper.

Communicating with AI, via prompt engineering, is easier than setting up cross-cultural + timezone communications.

India really depends on service outsourcing. So I'm curious regarding how it'll be impacted by AI. That being said, nothing stopping the Indians themselves using the AIs and reinventing their companies.

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#19

Post by yumraj »

pessimizer wrote: post #16
yumraj wrote: post #10

Perhaps the laidoff team can clone Gitea and start a competitor to GitHub. I would have seriously thought about it if I were there and part of that team.

Zoho certainly did well leveraging FOSS.

Such as?

I don't know much about how various Zoho products are implemented, but I thought most of their stuff is homegrown.

Post reply on HN