151–160 of 225 posts
Uber is done. The only way they survive is if they come up with autonomous driving and the only way to do that is dumping money into hiring the best engineers. Waymo will have taxi service in a couple years and that will be the nail in the coffin for Uber.
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Just wondering why they don't want to outsource to europe. Here in Germany you will get good engineers for $80k. Or east europe is even cheaper + better cultural fit.
Employees in countries like India are more disposable. In theory if you mean by eastern europe the part that is in EU even that one has some decent labor laws to prevent companies like Uber from firing at will. I think even Ukraine or Belarus do.
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For a single without kids, 50%, meaning 40k in your pocket, is a good rule of thumb, yes.
So an 80k salary in Germany involves the employee paying 50% and the company paying another 20k on top of that?
Set the "Steuerklasse" to 1 for singles, 3 for married employees.
What does "India" have to do with it? Where I work we have Indians, Taiwanese, Americans, Australians, Austrians, Canadians. It's really no factor, I don't get it?
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…
Outsourcing to India is not trivial. It's a bit like outsourcing to China, where you _must_ have a deep understanding of the market and the players, so you don't get, well, duped. I have already gone through three different ventures where outsourcing to India didn't go too well, and it was commonly because the layer of management you end up dealing with, will say yes to whatever you ask them to do, regardless of time constraints or engineering talent.
Now, you made an interesting point regarding the current visa situation. See, I am myself a visa holder who came here from Europe, to work for a startup. The whole process was painfully hard. Even renewing the visa is a complex matter. Costs have gone up, and so have hurdles to get even the supposedly "easiest" kind of visa, which I believe must be a J1. My employer sure spent a lot of money on my L1.
It seems that some US engineers believe that their jobs are being "taken" from them by "unqualified", or "substandard", or "underpaid" immigrant engineers, and that getting a work permit in the US is something almost "trivial".
In reality, companies like Uber, Google, Microsoft, etc., will be shifting more jobs abroad, not because it is cheaper, as I think we must agree that the inherent complications of foreign teams may outweigh the potential savings, but because talent is _global_. And if they cannot have the required talent in home, they will surely look elsewhere.
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This is well-trodden ground as far as discussion around here goes. The common points pro and con always come up: is the quality the same (some say yes, some say no), is co-location or time-zone location important (same parenthetical), what $ amount is ethical to pay, whom is it more ethical to pay (are you a nationalist or a global citizen, etc), what's sustainable, many more etc's. I've decided that's it's a persona…
> You see it all and you'll get it all, so why the fuss? Because people are afraid that they won't be able to command 350K a year salaries anymore. The fear is that the "good old days" of SV salaries are over is being materialized. Imo its overdue, but I also am perfectly happy making an average salary in a HCOL area, with aspirations to move to a low or middle COL area.
I live in a low cost of living area and get the good and bad of my choices.
This is kind of about whether Uber views itself as a FAANG type software company (software as core competency, strong recruiting brand for tech-hub engineers) or a more operational business (software as a cost center). Most companies end up having to choose one. If you're the latter, you absolutely don't try competing with FAANG for the same talent. (I do think Amazon is a rare example of a company that both develope…
A ride hailing app is more or less a commodity, see all the Uber clones out there: Lyft, Gett, Arro, Flywheel, Kapten...
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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.
> politics permeates society No, it's a pitfall people fall into when they read politics into any topic.
that quite literally requires reaching compromises in place of whatever optimal mathematical solution may exists.
[1] including people that might want a certain solution to be implemented _and_ fail. they do exist, especially in older groups where the power structure is fragmented and the dynamic dysfunctional.
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I don't think the kind of engineers that command 300k in valley are to be had in Amsterdam for 80k. In India that's possible.
Indians who are on that level are not going to be in India, but they are already in SV or Europe.
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).
East European country => Poland, Ukraine or which country?
The whole outsourcing to India was a disaster. Made additionally worse by Java developers trying to write C++ (pre-11 too), so memory leaks everywhere. Fun times :(