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GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

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Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#41

> It does go against the notion that lower cost of labor places are safer from cuts, though. Interesting, people were talking about remote work meaning that companies will now pay less due to a global talent pool, but it might just go to show that workers are not all fungible with other workers in different countries. It rings of the same fears as outsourcing a few decades ago.

Quality talent has a cost regardless of geography.

indian developers are extraordinarily talented. it's just more convenient to give up on them in one go. good luck to github for hiring in india again in the future. very short-sighted

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. Especially in India - which is almost as large a time zone offset as you can have. Furthermore, India pays competitively enough that you’re not saving that much money for top talent as compared to e.g Eastern Europe. When I ran engineering teams, the language/dialect barrier between our US mothership and India was much much wider than South American and European devs, even though India is technically the l…

The hardest time I’ve had communicating at work has been with native English speakers from India. They have such a strong accent and such different idioms. Same to some extent with Singlish. The problem is they really are speaking perfectly legal English, with grammar better than mine, but it’s a different dialect. Not true of ESL Indians.

american have accents too to the rest of the world, but very less

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. Especially in India - which is almost as large a time zone offset as you can have. Furthermore, India pays competitively enough that you’re not saving that much money for top talent as compared to e.g Eastern Europe. When I ran engineering teams, the language/dialect barrier between our US mothership and India was much much wider than South American and European devs, even though India is technically the l…

The hardest time I’ve had communicating at work has been with native English speakers from India. They have such a strong accent and such different idioms. Same to some extent with Singlish. The problem is they really are speaking perfectly legal English, with grammar better than mine, but it’s a different dialect. Not true of ESL Indians.

Honestly, they only issue I run into is that they tend to speak English extremely fast.

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the issues is these top talent often get offers in the us so they leave. so the churn is horrible

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. Especially in India - which is almost as large a time zone offset as you can have. Furthermore, India pays competitively enough that you’re not saving that much money for top talent as compared to e.g Eastern Europe. When I ran engineering teams, the language/dialect barrier between our US mothership and India was much much wider than South American and European devs, even though India is technically the l…

Is eastern Europe the real outsourcing threat?

There aren't as many East Europeans.

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#46

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

india has a thriving tech start up scene so they are much better off serving local entrepreneurs

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardest time I’ve had communicating at work has been with native English speakers from India. They have such a strong accent and such different idioms. Same to some extent with Singlish. The problem is they really are speaking perfectly legal English, with grammar better than mine, but it’s a different dialect. Not true of ESL Indians.

I’ve spent long enough in the industry that I am relatively comfortable with many of the accents, I would love a class to exist that teaches non-Indians the dialect.

I think after about a year in tech consulting I developed a pretty robust ability to understand accents that most Americans have trouble with. Chinese, Russian, Indian, Nigerian, you name it. I guess if someone wants to practice they could listen to Kitboga or something.

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#48
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardest time I’ve had communicating at work has been with native English speakers from India. They have such a strong accent and such different idioms. Same to some extent with Singlish. The problem is they really are speaking perfectly legal English, with grammar better than mine, but it’s a different dialect. Not true of ESL Indians.

american have accents too to the rest of the world, but very less

Absolutely, that's what I'm trying to say - that they have accents, and we have accents, and they're different. I sure as shit don't speak the Queen's English, which is etymologically closer to what they speak

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardest time I’ve had communicating at work has been with native English speakers from India. They have such a strong accent and such different idioms. Same to some extent with Singlish. The problem is they really are speaking perfectly legal English, with grammar better than mine, but it’s a different dialect. Not true of ESL Indians.

I’ve spent long enough in the industry that I am relatively comfortable with many of the accents, I would love a class to exist that teaches non-Indians the dialect.

Right, everyone else needs to adjust to the Indian dialect of English.

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#50
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quality talent has a cost regardless of geography.

indian developers are extraordinarily talented. it's just more convenient to give up on them in one go. good luck to github for hiring in india again in the future. very short-sighted

That's a broad generalization. I have worked with a few great and plenty of terrible Indian devs.
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