Uber CEO Wants to Shift More Engineering Jobs to India, Sparking Internal Debate • Hacker News Board

Re: Uber CEO Wants to Shift More Engineering Jobs to India, Sparking Internal Debate

#171

Post by bradlys » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 3:38 PM UTC

blocked_again wrote: post #168

rootusrootus wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More remote work, and hire outside of SV then. There's a pretty big benefit to keeping the dev teams in time zones with a good amount of overlap. Probably the second biggest factor in our difficulty getting good results from our dev teams in Hyderabad is the 12 hour offset. The single biggest is that if you go to India looking to save money, you're going to be in for some pain. Good talent has a cost no matter where…

Wonder how long it takes for the company to move the entire/majority engineering team to India or Eastern Europe to avoid the time difference issues.

Time difference issues aren’t just between engineers. You have to deal with time difference issues between engineering and other areas of the business. (Like product)

There will be a very large lag time between ideation and solid implementation unless you have an extremely verbose product team.

Re: Uber CEO Wants to Shift More Engineering Jobs to India, Sparking Internal Debate

#172

Post by 0xcafecafe » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 3:44 PM UTC

rubber_duck wrote: post #63

0xcafecafe wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is "way less". 80K USD converts to 5,979K INR which is about the ballpark estimate some of the senior engineers I know make in India (one of them is working for the Western European company btw). One of the reasons to move to India would be the availability of talent even if it is at comparable cost. Companies like to scale and lack of talent is a risk they want to mitigate.

In my experience working with outsourcing agencies - "talent available" in India is filling headcount numbers. Good developers ask for similar wages as EU based ones and are equally hard to find, probably even harder because the market is filled with scammers (eg. on several occasions I would interview a competent guy and then the work would clearly get delegated to someone inexperienced)

Sure, scammers are abound and the bad to good ratio is pretty high but due to the population size, the number of good developers is high as well.

Re: Uber CEO Wants to Shift More Engineering Jobs to India, Sparking Internal Debate

#173

Post by 0max » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 3:44 PM UTC

blocked_again wrote: post #164

game_the0ry wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue there is no such thing as overpriced labor when its the market that sets the price. You will never get a Mercedes for the price of a Honda. So be skeptical when a politician or mega corp manager utters the words "labor shortage" - there is no such thing.

There is definitely a shortage of good quality Engineers in SF. That's the key reason why the engineering salary is so high. Also the weird housing laws. The same engineer who is making 30k in India makes 5 or 6 times the salary when moved to the SF office. Similarly the Engineer who makes 200k+ in SF gets 4 or 5 times less when moved back to India. Comparing Mercedes to Honda is not the right comparison. There are g…

Sounds like African automobile tariffs when you put it that way

Re: Uber CEO Wants to Shift More Engineering Jobs to India, Sparking Internal Debate

#174

Post by dethos » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 3:45 PM UTC

treis wrote: post #166

ForHackernews wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any reason (except for juicing their valuation) to consider Uber as a software company. Their product is not software: it's taxi cabs. A ride hailing app is more or less a commodity, see all the Uber clones out there: Lyft, Gett, Arro, Flywheel, Kapten...

>Uber as a software company. Their product is not software: it's taxi cabs. That's not accurate. They have software to match riders to drivers while optimally setting the price of the trip based on the current demand/supply. It has to work in many different cities while preventing fraud and/or gaming of the system. It's a legitimately hard engineering problem that requires sophisticated software solutions.

But do they sell that software/technology? As far as I can tell they sell taxi rides, software "just" helps/supports their core business.

Re: Uber CEO Wants to Shift More Engineering Jobs to India, Sparking Internal Debate

#175

Post by gruez » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 3:45 PM UTC

blocked_again wrote: post #164

game_the0ry wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue there is no such thing as overpriced labor when its the market that sets the price. You will never get a Mercedes for the price of a Honda. So be skeptical when a politician or mega corp manager utters the words "labor shortage" - there is no such thing.

There is definitely a shortage of good quality Engineers in SF. That's the key reason why the engineering salary is so high. Also the weird housing laws. The same engineer who is making 30k in India makes 5 or 6 times the salary when moved to the SF office. Similarly the Engineer who makes 200k+ in SF gets 4 or 5 times less when moved back to India. Comparing Mercedes to Honda is not the right comparison. There are g…

>There is definitely a shortage of good quality Engineers in SF. That's the key reason why the engineering salary is so high.

Do we say there's a caviar shortage because it's expensive? Or say there's a CEO shortage because CEO compensation is high?

Re: Uber CEO Wants to Shift More Engineering Jobs to India, Sparking Internal Debate

#176

Post by treis » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 3:52 PM UTC

dethos wrote: post #174

treis wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Uber as a software company. Their product is not software: it's taxi cabs. That's not accurate. They have software to match riders to drivers while optimally setting the price of the trip based on the current demand/supply. It has to work in many different cities while preventing fraud and/or gaming of the system. It's a legitimately hard engineering problem that requires sophisticated software solutions.

But do they sell that software/technology? As far as I can tell they sell taxi rides, software "just" helps/supports their core business.

Fundamentally, their product is an app that the riders and drivers pay them to use. I don't think the fact that they use it to do something in the real world changes that Uber is a software company.

Re: Uber CEO Wants to Shift More Engineering Jobs to India, Sparking Internal Debate

#177

Post by blocked_again » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 3:54 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #175

blocked_again wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is definitely a shortage of good quality Engineers in SF. That's the key reason why the engineering salary is so high. Also the weird housing laws. The same engineer who is making 30k in India makes 5 or 6 times the salary when moved to the SF office. Similarly the Engineer who makes 200k+ in SF gets 4 or 5 times less when moved back to India. Comparing Mercedes to Honda is not the right comparison. There are g…

>There is definitely a shortage of good quality Engineers in SF. That's the key reason why the engineering salary is so high. Do we say there's a caviar shortage because it's expensive? Or say there's a CEO shortage because CEO compensation is high?

Good CEOs in good companies makes much more than the average CEOs in average companies.

Every company in the USA wants a good CEO. But there are only very limited number of CEOs in the USA that has a good track record of running a successful company. So companies are willing to pay more and more for the top CEOs.

It's the same reason why drivers are paid very low. If there were only 100 drivers in SF who were capable of taking you from point A to point B with a reasonable amount of certainty they would be also be paid in millions.

Everything is supply and demand.

In case of SanFrancisco, the supply of good engineers that are available to be hired used to be limited compared to the demand.

Once you remove the restriction of being able to be physically present in SF, the supply increases much more than the demand. Which results in the reduction of salaries.

Re: Uber CEO Wants to Shift More Engineering Jobs to India, Sparking Internal Debate

#178

Post by MagnumOpus » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 3:54 PM UTC

treis wrote: post #166

ForHackernews wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any reason (except for juicing their valuation) to consider Uber as a software company. Their product is not software: it's taxi cabs. A ride hailing app is more or less a commodity, see all the Uber clones out there: Lyft, Gett, Arro, Flywheel, Kapten...

>Uber as a software company. Their product is not software: it's taxi cabs. That's not accurate. They have software to match riders to drivers while optimally setting the price of the trip based on the current demand/supply. It has to work in many different cities while preventing fraud and/or gaming of the system. It's a legitimately hard engineering problem that requires sophisticated software solutions.

It is not that hard, however. Every copycat mentioned above replicated it using a few dozen programmers, as did Yandex and Didi and Bolt.

The competitive advantage does not lie in the software quality for Uber, but in other things (customer install base, driver base, brand awareness).

Re: Uber CEO Wants to Shift More Engineering Jobs to India, Sparking Internal Debate

#179

Post by aldarisbm » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 3:54 PM UTC

dethos wrote: post #174

treis wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Uber as a software company. Their product is not software: it's taxi cabs. That's not accurate. They have software to match riders to drivers while optimally setting the price of the trip based on the current demand/supply. It has to work in many different cities while preventing fraud and/or gaming of the system. It's a legitimately hard engineering problem that requires sophisticated software solutions.

But do they sell that software/technology? As far as I can tell they sell taxi rides, software "just" helps/supports their core business.

I think that's a very short-sighted answer. Besides their actual core business, they are also building technology for self-driving cars. I would say, Yes, they are selling technology/software.

Re: Uber CEO Wants to Shift More Engineering Jobs to India, Sparking Internal Debate

#180

Post by TheAdamAndChe » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 3:58 PM UTC

manuelabeledo wrote: post #155

game_the0ry wrote: post #86

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…

> Finally, there might be a lot going on right now, but why haven't companies outsourced sooner when there was nothing stopping them (even visas were easier to come by before Trump)? I believe they have contemplated it, and changed their minds for good reason. 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…

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".

You(or others) may be getting mixed up between complaints of legal vs illegal immigration. Illegal immigration does tend to displace American workers for forms of manual labor like on farms, roofing, etc. Legal immigration like H1B tends to be gamed by large corporations to get cheaply paid workers for contacting companies. If talent was truly global, they wouldn't do this.