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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

#71

Post by conanbatt »

morkalork wrote: post #15
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.

Go long argentina :)

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#72

Post by kylehotchkiss »

prottog wrote: post #23
nirushiv wrote: post #22

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…

> India - which is almost as large a time zone offset as you can have Not just that, it's a half-hour offset from pretty much the rest of the world! I wonder which genius thought of that one.

Kathmandu wanted to be even more odd and created a +5:45 offset

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#73

Post by not2b »

prottog wrote: post #28
not2b wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes perfect sense: the "natural" lines would give India two time zones; combining them into one half-hour time zone gives the whole country the same time. It did cause problems with the early Bell Labs Unix releases, which didn't contemplate that a time zone might not be a whole number of hours away from Greenwich.

Surely India as a large federal nation would be OK with two time zones! It makes about as much sense as China having one time zone for its sixty degrees of longitude.

The offset between local noon and time-zone noon is never that large, nowhere near what it's like in China, and it actually puts the center of the country closer to solar time. So it seems a reasonable thing to do, better than having the TZ line right in the middle where the railroads will keep crossing it.

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#74

Post by satvikpendem »

Supermancho wrote: post #69
Fervicus wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Anecdotally, from at least 2005 to 2015, every single India-based team had negative productivity output across the 5 SoCal companies I worked for, as an engineer. At 4 of the companies, the India teams were liquidated during my tenure. In 2 cases, one or two top performers were cherry picked out and brought to the US on work visas. These individuals each became US citizens, in time. They are awesome and they are stil…

So continues the brain drain, it's quite a legitimate problem, at least as I've seen it with my other Indian friends.

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#75

Post by vivegi »

prottog wrote: post #60
nradov wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is also why France has a high level of labor productivity. The least productive workers never get hired at all because no employer wants to take a chance on them. In highly regulated labor markets it's particularly tough for marginalized youths to get started and work their way out of the underclass.

> it's particularly tough for marginalized youths to get started and work their way out of the underclass. Yes, this is the point I always want to emphasize. Policies like this always favor those already inside (the existing workers being protected by tough-to-fire laws) at the expense of those looking inside from the outside (the newly-grads and members of marginalized groups trying to get started). I similarly disf…

> I similarly disfavor minimum wage laws

I am trying to understand this more. Why would a minimum wage law be unfriendly to a specific class of workers? Doesn't that just establish a right for the worker and an obligation for the employer to meet.

What about pay transparency rules for job postings (that are mandatory in some jurisdictions)? In principle, I feel they help the job seeker although corporations get away with specifying a wide range. At least, it establishes the start of the salary negotiation.

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#76

Post by rk06 »

prottog wrote: post #28
not2b wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes perfect sense: the "natural" lines would give India two time zones; combining them into one half-hour time zone gives the whole country the same time. It did cause problems with the early Bell Labs Unix releases, which didn't contemplate that a time zone might not be a whole number of hours away from Greenwich.

Surely India as a large federal nation would be OK with two time zones! It makes about as much sense as China having one time zone for its sixty degrees of longitude.

Nope, we simply adjust business hours according to daylight. just like we update school hours timing in summer and winter without DST.

The main advantage of having single timezone is that we can coordinate time related info(eg: train timings) unambiguously throughout the country.

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#77

Post by nradov »

vivegi wrote: post #75
prottog wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's particularly tough for marginalized youths to get started and work their way out of the underclass. Yes, this is the point I always want to emphasize. Policies like this always favor those already inside (the existing workers being protected by tough-to-fire laws) at the expense of those looking inside from the outside (the newly-grads and members of marginalized groups trying to get started). I similarly disf…

> I similarly disfavor minimum wage laws I am trying to understand this more. Why would a minimum wage law be unfriendly to a specific class of workers? Doesn't that just establish a right for the worker and an obligation for the employer to meet. What about pay transparency rules for job postings (that are mandatory in some jurisdictions)? In principle, I feel they help the job seeker although corporations get away…

Some workers aren't worth paying minimum wage. They stay unemployed because no employer will pay more than they're worth. If we set the minimum wage at $15 / hour then what do we do with people whose labor is only worth $14 / hour?

Transparency rules are fine and don't inhibit employment.

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#78

Post by jamesfinlayson »

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

I worked with some guys in Brazil - I'd say Sao Paolo because AWS have a region based there but I know none of them were from Sao Paolo (but they were all on the coast).

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#79

Post by howinteresting »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #34
howinteresting wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe in general this is true? But then Github's hires were not those, according to https://www.levels.fyi/companies/github/salaries/software-en...

The one reported E4, i.e. senior level, is at over 100k. But I agree that these salaries are a bit low.
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