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GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

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Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#51

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #2

> It does go against the notion that lower cost of labor places are safer from cuts, though. Interesting, people were talking about remote work meaning that companies will now pay less due to a global talent pool, but it might just go to show that workers are not all fungible with other workers in different countries. It rings of the same fears as outsourcing a few decades ago.

People vastly underestimated the effect the timezone difference would have. Years ago I worked closely with a team in India, and I will never do a job that requires that again. The engineers were fine, but the timezone difference made things hellish for everyone - someone was either staying super late or getting up super early (time difference was 11.5 hours). I contrast that with a team I work with now from South America - they're also high quality developers, but, importantly, the time difference is only a couple hours so nobody has to sacrifice their personal lives.

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#52

Post by rr808 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #2

> It does go against the notion that lower cost of labor places are safer from cuts, though. Interesting, people were talking about remote work meaning that companies will now pay less due to a global talent pool, but it might just go to show that workers are not all fungible with other workers in different countries. It rings of the same fears as outsourcing a few decades ago.

India layoffs were ~100 people. MSFT USA layoffs were 10,000? Offshore trend remains intact.

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#53

Post by rr808 »

noodlesUK wrote: post #5

I'm not privy to anything special here, but I do get the impression that (intuitively) it's easier to target layoffs in areas with weaker employee protection laws. In most EU countries, it's pretty hard to make these kinds of redundancies without going through a slow and expensive process, as well as paying severance.

Sure that is one of the main reasons why USA always wins for startups and fast growing high tech.

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#54

Post by nradov »

prottog wrote: post #24
_xivi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't these protective laws help promote outsourcing tho? Less headache, not to mention wages Similar to that in finance, where big corporations have the luxury to establish entities in tax heavens and avoid paying large sums while still operating just fine

This is generally true. The same laws that make employees harder to be fired also means companies are more reluctant to hire them, since the cost of making a bad hire is that much higher. France is famous for having more than double the number of companies with exactly 49 employees than exactly 50 employees, and you can guess the reason why.

That is also why France has a high level of labor productivity. The least productive workers never get hired at all because no employer wants to take a chance on them. In highly regulated labor markets it's particularly tough for marginalized youths to get started and work their way out of the underclass.

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#55

Post by sacnoradhq »

moneywoes wrote: post #31
nirushiv wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. Especially in India - which is almost as large a time zone offset as you can have. Furthermore, India pays competitively enough that you’re not saving that much money for top talent as compared to e.g Eastern Europe. When I ran engineering teams, the language/dialect barrier between our US mothership and India was much much wider than South American and European devs, even though India is technically the l…

Is eastern Europe the real outsourcing threat?

Until ~2010, Belarus was until someone went all-in with Moscow.

Ukraine is (and still will be) an excellent outsourcing opportunity. Personally, I find it very easy to understand Slavic-speaking English as a secondary language speakers.

In general, there can be word use, humor, and cultural media reference difficulties, so it's important to always use very plain and direct language to avoid misunderstandings. To further comprehension and understanding, it's beneficial to say the same thing again in different words and ask for their understanding of details in yet other words.

PS: Early/mid 2022, I bought items on Etsy postmarked from Kyiv. Somehow, sellers forwarded parcels to Germany and Turkey and then to the US between shellings, missile attacks, and columns of Russian armor advancing.

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#56

Post by rapsacnz »

I think the first casualties of ChatGPT for developers are going to be offshore teams. These teams get given small, discrete programming tasks. They are also often teams with very high turnover. This means that tasks need to be heavily specified and managed. I think it's a small step from this to just getting a LLM to do the work. I also think that this could potentially be a huge disruptor for India as a whole and that there could well be some very big lawsuits coming brought by Indian companies who have lost millions (Billions?) to a machine trained on a largely open source codebase. This sort of thing makes me reconsider whether I should be putting any code up on github or answering anything on stackoverflow - why would I do this, if my code is harvested and used against me?

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#57

Post by Xixi »

prottog wrote: post #28
not2b wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes perfect sense: the "natural" lines would give India two time zones; combining them into one half-hour time zone gives the whole country the same time. It did cause problems with the early Bell Labs Unix releases, which didn't contemplate that a time zone might not be a whole number of hours away from Greenwich.

Surely India as a large federal nation would be OK with two time zones! It makes about as much sense as China having one time zone for its sixty degrees of longitude.

You don't have to adjust the clocks though, you can adjust business hours instead. Just look at Spain, which shares the same timezone as Poland: they simply wake up/go to bed later on the clock, but not with regard to the sun.

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#58

Post by jojobas »

Terretta wrote: post #37
jojobas wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to revert for you to kindly adjust to the same.

Do one thing. Timely discuss about doing the needful years back.

By the by, I take tension, please intimate me what re preponing of the meeting.

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#59

Post by sacnoradhq »

fwungy wrote: post #45
moneywoes wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is eastern Europe the real outsourcing threat?

There aren't as many East Europeans.

Unimportant. Educated tech workers are in much higher densities in many Eastern European countries than elsewhere.

Of all European countries, these are good bets for recruiting:

Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine

https://www.coursera.org/skills-reports/global

Re: GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

#60

Post by prottog »

nradov wrote: post #54
prottog wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is generally true. The same laws that make employees harder to be fired also means companies are more reluctant to hire them, since the cost of making a bad hire is that much higher. France is famous for having more than double the number of companies with exactly 49 employees than exactly 50 employees, and you can guess the reason why.

That is also why France has a high level of labor productivity. The least productive workers never get hired at all because no employer wants to take a chance on them. In highly regulated labor markets it's particularly tough for marginalized youths to get started and work their way out of the underclass.

> it's particularly tough for marginalized youths to get started and work their way out of the underclass.

Yes, this is the point I always want to emphasize. Policies like this always favor those already inside (the existing workers being protected by tough-to-fire laws) at the expense of those looking inside from the outside (the newly-grads and members of marginalized groups trying to get started). I similarly disfavor minimum wage laws.

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