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> consider whether the company gains value from workers sharing a time zone, language, cultural context, etc Hire people from Argentina ;)
I love Argentinian devs, but they have the most holidays of any country I've hired from.
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I’ve found it’s easier to outsource maintenance and harder to outsource creation of software. Cultural issues coupled with time zone changes are difficult to overcome.
You can work in the same time zone : - Mexico, South America are same time zones as US - as the other poster mentioned 75% US dev salary puts you in 1% in Eastern Europe, you will have no problem finding people with flexible work schedule adjusted to your TZ Cultural issues are a thing in terms of understanding the US market - but that's up to your PMs/POs to handle. Cultural differences in terms of work habits, etc.…
Assuming the US salary is $150k, 75% of that is $112.5k. It probably is in top 1% in EE in general, but definitely not among developers. If you're senior, you can find a remote position paying that much in one of Western European countries.
If you don't provide value for your salary and only have knowledge/skills that other people have you might get outsourced.
If you don't behave in a polite and reasonable manner and show a little humility to people who aren't system experts, you might also be in trouble.
It depends. If you can be replaced at a cheaper cost, why wouldn't a company do it considering they can. The question is: What does it cost to replace someone and is it worth it ? Here is how I look at it: There are 4 types of employees in a company. 1. "Should be partner" Players: You not only do a great job, add tremendous value but you think about the business and team and go out of your way to help improve things…
I worked for a company that embraced remote, distributed work long before COVID. WFH doesn’t automatically lead to outsourcing, but it does move it a lot closer. Once the company dynamic has shifted to all communications and interactions being online, it’s very easy to add someone from a different country as long as the time zones aren’t too far apart and the logistics of employing and paying them aren’t too onerous…
Thank God someone said it. I have an odd quality – among my uncountable bad qualities – that I can’t lie to myself, and Lord almighty the number is shocking of otherwise-smart engineers who are capable of virulently believing something that’s plainly wrong, when the alternative is uncountenanceable for their psyche.
And yeah, the proposition “the incredibly high salaries engineers are paid (relative to the time, effort, intelligence, and miscellaneous skill demanded to pick up the metier) are a historical bubble – albeit a long one – and will not continue for our lifetimes” is without a doubt one such belief. People have different ways of rationalising their refusal to accept it, mostly either (a) that it’s gone on for decades already / you naysayers have been saying this for decades already[0] /c or (b) some miscellaneous argument for why our job is uniquely insusceptible of possibly being done by an Indian despite the evidence thereof (my favourite is the “but who will train the [robots/Indians/c]?”, as if self-hosting Indians will take centuries to be invented), but either way everyone has a reason. That old cliché that ‘it\’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it’ has never made so much sense to me as when I first asked this question.
[0] This is a weirdly tropical fallacy used to reject all manner of things. “Millennials are lazy/disrespectful/entitled/&c.” “Oh yeah? Well, people have been saying that kids are lazy/disrespectful/entitled for centuries!”
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I think that example may be more a matter of being separated by a common language (and/or poor written communication skills) than a time zone difference.
Not at all. You can’t document everything precisely when you do new and complex stuff. Sometimes it’s way more efficient to talk to people directly.
When you say "talk to people directly", do you just mean by voice (so you have the extra channels of verbal stress, pauses, and intonation), or do you mean by video or in person (where you get to add gestures too)?
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> As a manager I was told I can hire more people outside the US and was recommended to only hire in the US if I find someone who we really don't want to pass on. In other words, top talent would be OK, everyone else would have problems. This is exactly what it turned into for us. We were encourage to hire most people outside of the US but to leave space for exceptional US candidates. It’s a hard incentive to ignore w…
Yup. Let's birth that baby by throwing more mothers at it.