141–150 of 225 posts
I wonder are we going through a similar phase that happened mid-2000s when outsourcing became very much the preferred delivery model. Then user-centered design and agile pulled it back onshore.
It's hard to ignore the siren song as a business person of comparing your 300k a year engineers to a senior engineer that costs $80k in India (regardless of the potential hidden costs of cultural and time zone differences). This gap should probably narrow as more remote work becomes normal, and more people move out of the Valley and can actually live decently on 150k, rather than 300k.
I think the cost of an engineer is way less than 80K in India. Here in the Netherlands a senior SE would be $80K. I see no reason to go to India instead of western Europe then.
I've seen that consistently across companies in the past decade. Europe salaries have been stagnating while India and China can be growing 10% a year. The gap, assuming there was one 20 years ago, didn't last long.
My feeling is that best Indian software engineers are in the US (or even Europe) already. I have great Indian and Pakistani colleagues at my company, but we had very mixed results with outsourcing.
Like others have mentioned, the current political atmosphere is one that seems to have embraced xenophobia, thus making it harder for talent to emigrate. If you can't move the talent to the work, you can move the work to the talent. In that sense the internet is a great equalizer.
I worked at "mega bank" in London. They did this. For two years. And moved all the jobs back again. The time-zones didn't work and communication was poor. Ultimately it cost more money than, say, off-shoring to an East European country (which they did instead).
I don't think moving tech labor form US workers to Indian workers will have the desired effect that corporate decision makers are hoping for. For one, good tech workers are hard to find anywhere. A candidate needs a range of attributes to be effective at this type of work. That type of talent is hard enough to find in the western world, it will likely be just as hard to find in the east. Two, Indian tech labor isn't…
We are now outsourcing development to Mexico, not only is it cheaper, but they are in similar timezones so if there is a question they can ask directly not send an email that they won't get a response to until the next day.
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Because hiring an American requires you to treat them like a human being.
People earning 80k in India, China, and heck even Europe, for that matter, almost certainly have a much higher standard of living than people earning that much in the US. And you can find far more 80k level developers in individual cities in India than you would in a small mid level city in the US.
At some point where you live matters a lot. You can be rich, but if you can't get things shipped because the roads are bad, you can't get clean water, there are no local services around (haircut places, restaurants, tradespeople to fix your house), not to mention fun things to do, it looks worse.
I have this conversation with my friend Mike. I work and live in SF as a software engineer. He lives in Indiana and earns 8-10x what I do as a surgeon but I'm not sure he's actually better off. Especially considering there aren't great schools for him to send his kids to or interesting people to see in meetups.
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At least in Germany, $80k salary would mean costs of nearly $100k for the employer because of additional social security payments required. So it really isn't a fair comparison.
> $80k salary would mean costs of nearly $100k for the employer Closer to 150..
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> We should really divorce politics from this discussion. that's a common technical people pitfall. politics permeates society, and ignoring it is only to your own detriment exposing you form exploitation of those whom play the political game, of which you most assuredly participate in, whether you want an active role in it or not.
There's a difference between "let's try to figure out the best way to do something" and "let's sell the solution we've settled on". That's not an argument for avoiding politics, but there's nothing wrong with veering in the other direction either.