GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

Post by xeromal » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 1:56 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #51

satvikpendem wrote: post #2

> 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.

People vastly underestimated the effect the timezone difference would have. Years ago I worked closely with a team in India, and I will never do a job that requires that again. The engineers were fine, but the timezone difference made things hellish for everyone - someone was either staying super late or getting up super early (time difference was 11.5 hours). I contrast that with a team I work with now from South Am…

Post by xeromal » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 1:59 AM UTC

ebiester wrote: post #30

throwayyy479087 wrote: post #27

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.

Post by Godel_unicode » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 2:52 AM UTC

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #21

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

> make your high-cost employees much more productive with AI Might happen soon, might not. AI has so far proven astounding for problems to which solutions are robust to small perturbations -- natural language, visual art -- but code is different.

Post by unmole » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 3:22 AM UTC

throwaway2037 wrote: post #39

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.

Are you implying that employee protection laws are weak in India? They are not. I have multiple, first hand experiences where it was very difficult to layoff underperforming staff. It is much easier to layoff in US and UK. (Continental Europe is a mixed bag.)

Post by Supermancho » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 3:48 AM UTC

Fervicus wrote: post #50

xiaodai wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.