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Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

blog.cerebralab.com

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Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#31

Post by pydry »

vbtemp wrote: post #28
Yanu-3452 wrote: post #4

This is an odd analysis, because as it highlights, salaries are strongly correlated with wealth of the country. So the question really becomes, not why are salaries different, but "why is programming difficult to offshore". If programming was easy to import and export then either salaries would even out or, more likely, would be relocated to cheaper countries like many kinds of manufacturing. But software is difficul…

> why is programming difficult to offshore" Lack of professionalism and absence of a professional engineering culture in many of the places you'd seek to outsource to save money. Doesn't mean that professionalism doesn't exist, it's just that the ones that have it are already busy with their own thing and not interested in being low-cost labor

Or they've emigrated in search of those higher salaries already.

I used to work in a relatively "low salary programming culture" and it wasn't just the salary that sucked in that location, the programmers did too. Smart people either emigrated or ventured into a profession that made $$$ (typically real estate, management or finance). Eventually I left too.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#32

Post by commandlinefan »

> 3. Most "good" programmers move to the high-income countries

> Again, fairly hard to find data on this

I'm surprised it's hard to find data, but yes, this consistently matches my observation over the past 30 years and four different geographic locations: very few American programmers are American at all. When I did my master's in CS 15 years ago, I was almost always the only person in the room born in the United States, and besides the (either Indian or Chinese-born) professor, the only US citizen as well.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#33

Post by commandlinefan »

xenocratus wrote: post #30

Is it just me, or does the link lead to a different article, "Imaginary Problems Are the Root of Bad Software" sometimes? I tried opening the link and it sometimes goes to the one titled like this post, sometimes to the other one - for the same URL. This seems like a very ironic problem when considering the content of the "alternate" article being presented... Example of an excerpt: "The problem is that you thought y…

I saw the same thing.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#34

Post by dgellow »

bagacrap wrote: post #26
gbasin wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turns out, the hard part of software is figuring out what to build. The rest is cheap in comparison, whether done in SF or Bangalore.

(Product) managers decide what to build. Engineers decide how to build it. You make it sound as if software engineering has no value. Clearly this isn't true as small local banks will have awful sites and apps despite the problem statement being pretty clear cut. The most successful tech companies also happen to be the ones that have attracted the top engineering talent. Generally, ime, an engineer you pay $150k is w…

> Product) managers decide what to build. Engineers decide how to build it.

That’s not how software is done though.

Product managers are in a constant negotiation with engineers to decide what to do. There is a lot of back and forth and exchanges to arrive to a set of stuff that can then be built.

That’s what the agile routine is about.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#35

Post by tommilukkarinen »

As an example, Finland has a population of 5.5M, US has a population of 328M. If you would outsource 10.000 coding jobs to Finland, it would equal outsourcing 10.000 coding jobs to Minnesota. So it does not make sense to compare country vs. country.

If you outsource talent pool from Finland, the cost is not so much different on paying salary in US.

I do think, that in future it is the norm to have a remote community in all companies to control cost and to access best talent. It will be an accepted fact that people are paid differently based by location.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#36

Post by commandlinefan »

throwaway4220 wrote: post #7

“ Doctors in the US and UK are very expensive, that's not because nobody has noticed there are equally skilled doctors in other countries that charge 1/5th the price (or even algorithms that can do most of it for pennies). It's because practicing medicine in those countries requires to go through a regulatory gauntlet that would make Kafka feel like an unimaginative fraud.” Ouch. Yeah some US/UK doctors are overpaid…

> go through a regulatory gauntlet

A lot of people like to point to regulations and licensing as a source of inefficiency, but in reality the lack of any sort of professional licensing around programming drives all sorts of alternate inefficiency: with no objective standard to measure applicants against, employers are stuck trying to make up their own, usually broken standards.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#37

Post by anovikov »

Absolutely not. Offshore labor is worth objectively less because of different people who are in the game there. Market is absurdly efficient, there is no arbitrage. Some kinds of work is better outsourced - repeatable maintenance work, some better done locally such as product development.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#38

Post by machbio »

To my knowledge - as an US immigrant, who has worked both in India and US - decisions everywhere are made by Managers (Non-Developer Ones) and Executives - they have weird power dynamics that they need to see their subordinates physically to ascertain their power or influence in the company...thats it - that is what is stopping every programmer being remote

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#39

Post by defnotashton2 »

This seems like it has a anti engineering bias written by a product manager who views himself as visionary and others as less. As if to say miscommunication is one sided. Nevermind the business over expecting and over selling, under paying, changing its mind radically, not respecting recommendations and just in general shitting on engineers.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#40

Post by chadash »

With all of the talk about companies going remote lately, I worry that the logical next step to this might be management saying "well, we are already hiring remote developers, why don't we just outsource to cheaper countries while we're at it?".

Sure, they tried and failed at this in the 90's and early 2000's but heck, people forget quickly.

One of the things that I like about working in an office is that the non-engineers see me there and get a better appreciation of what I do.

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