251–260 of 580 posts
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What makes someone in India (or the EU for that matter) an inherently worse developer than someone in the US? (Unless that’s not what you’re implying?)
Nothing. Don't think I said that, I certainly don't think it.
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Yeah. One of the most ridiculous things in my entire life of 40 years was seeing 90% of my fellow SW industry workers using the 2 or so years during/after COVID where we had more power than we’ve ever had to advocate hard for making ourselves much more easy to replace by insisting on remote work, and insisting on reducing our productivity (even if not actually, at least in the eyes of the employers) so we couldn’t ju…
There’s quite a lot of arrogance about foreigners just not being good enough. Turns out smart people are everywhere.
There is also a big difference in mindset between an employee hoping to advance their career at a company, trying to become a SME, pushing initiatives, incentivized by stock grants, actually caring about customers, etc, and a vendor employee - even a good one - to who this is just a temporary gig, and has no vested interest in the quality of the codebase or building value for the company.
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Just a note on point 1: As someone who is Indian and frequently visits the sub continent (writing this from a suburb in Delhi) I can categorically tell you that no one actively wants to live in the cheapest Indian cities (just left my family’s home city which falls into this bracket). I’m not sure if you’ve travelled much around the sub continent but I’d say you’re quite badly romanticising it. Yes we have our own cu…
While what you write is correct, the parent speaks about the most expensive tier of Indian cities, which are quite a bit nicer.
As others have said, even the richest cities have a swathe of issues which simply do not exist in the west (reasons for which are another discussion).
*looks at air pollution chart which is literally at 359 right this second (01:38)*
wait until the GPUs and data centers start getting written off for being obsolete in a couple years when we still have nothin but fancy auto complete.
Probably could be repurposed for something else though?
As a recently laid of senior engineer, to the extent that my job was replaced, it was replaced with offshore junior devs who'd already been working with the company for over year with a pretty rough level of productivity by man-hour, though maybe taking 3x the time to get things done is worth it if they're cheap enough. Which is to say I see my layoff as as cost cutting backed by a premise that there is no value in r…
Hacker News doesn't like to hear it, but remote work is a big part of this. All that effort convincing management you're just as effective working remotely was also a collective sales pitch to outsource your role.
One of my friends from school has long worked in robotics. He showed me a machine he programmed to cut glass or something at a Volvo factory. I asked him about outsourcing back then. He told me his job required being physical plant to assess, program, and monitor it. He was going to stick with that over the higher-paying alternatives that he believed would be outsourced or automated more easily. Today, outsourcing only threatens work opportunities for one of us.
As a recently laid of senior engineer, to the extent that my job was replaced, it was replaced with offshore junior devs who'd already been working with the company for over year with a pretty rough level of productivity by man-hour, though maybe taking 3x the time to get things done is worth it if they're cheap enough. Which is to say I see my layoff as as cost cutting backed by a premise that there is no value in r…
Hacker News doesn't like to hear it, but remote work is a big part of this. All that effort convincing management you're just as effective working remotely was also a collective sales pitch to outsource your role.
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FWIW, I get on the order of $40/hour as a senior with almost 10 years experience, and it allows me not to worry too much about spending (with a wife earning about a third of my salary and two kids). I think I could easily earn at least 50% more if I wanted to work for some rich but soul-crushing corp, but for obvious reasons I don't do that. I guess US cost of living is just insane. (I live in central Europe.)
> FWIW, I get on the order of $40/hour as a senior with almost 10 years experience, and it allows me not to worry too much about spending (with a wife earning about a third of my salary and two kids) How much do you pay annually out of pocket for health insurance premiums and other healthcare expenses? In the US that expense is very high, and is a major source of worry for working families.
For a family of four, the average health plan is around $10k out of pocket from the employee along with around $20k in employer costs [0]. Yet the median American SWE salary is $187k [1] versus $66k in Poland [2], $93k in Canada [3], and $111k in the UK [4]. Either way an American ends up earning significantly more after healthcare costs and insurance.
The issue is salary expectations at the lower performance band haven't kept up with what is expected at that salary band.
> In the US that expense is very high, and is a major source of worry for working families
When benchmarked against similar peer cities in Canada [5] or the UK [6], CoL is roughly at par yet salaries are significantly higher in the US, especially when comparing peer tech markets like SF [7] versus London [8].
This is the crux of the issue - demanding 100% WFH well past the end of COVID made it hard for us to justify domestic hiring when
1. Async was successfully proven to not impact business operation
2. A reverse brain drain of all nationalities in the US during COVID meant it was easier for employers to work with them to open a hub office or GCC abroad
3. A new grad is demanding salaries that simply don't make the economics of training and hiring new grads work. At $70k-$110k it does, but not beyond that.
4. Companies have now adopted the Netflix model - by cutting low performers, we can actually give higher pay bands to employees who actually have a business impact, as can be reflected in the rise in 75th percentile tech salaries.
[0] - https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/how-muc...
[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/united-...
[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/canada
[3] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/canada
[4] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/united-...
[5] - https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_resu...
[6] - https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_resu...
[7] - https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
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GCC - Global Capacity Center, basically instead of outsourcing to WITCH or EPAM, a company creates an entire office abroad that owns profit-loss, product roadmap, has executives present, and is a direct part of the company. NCG - New College Grad You ain't dense btw, it's a good question. Keep asking questions!
So GCC is basically a subsidiary in another country?
The big issue with outsourcing to WITCH or EPAM was you were essentially paying $30k-50k per head but getting the lowest tier of talent becuase those companies would pay around $5k-15k salaries to maximize their margins.
As such, companies decided to just open offices in India, Poland, Czechia, etc to poach talent in those countries because people are only productive if well remunerated, and remove the middle man out of it.
Ofc, the traditional Indian outsourcing companies like TCS [0] and HCL [1] have also begun pivoting away from Software outsourcing towards becoming end-to-end chip design companies, Infosys pivoting to becoming an end-to-end MedTech company [2], and Wipro becoming an aviation and defense manufacturer [3][4] because of a mix of Indian government subsidizes and Taiwanese, Japanese, and American FDI.
[0] - https://www.tataelectronics.com/semiconductor-foundry
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-approves-hcl-foxco...
[2] - https://www.infosys.com/services/engineering-services/insigh...
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There’s quite a lot of arrogance about foreigners just not being good enough. Turns out smart people are everywhere.
Sure, but many companies outsourcing aren't looking for the best, they are looking for the cheapest, and surprise-surprise the cheapest are not the best. Some of them are goddamn awful - close to zero value, but upper management typically never hears about that and just thinks they are saving money because they are cheap. There is also a big difference in mindset between an employee hoping to advance their career at…