91–100 of 118 posts
Gotta love the knock-on effect of these systems. - Don't want to pay labor enough to live (for whatever reason) - Outsource, offshore, automate, etc - Margins and revenue go up - Two to Three Years go by - Refusal to pay local living wages results in decline of product sales at local prices, feeding the cycle of further cuts rather than pay labor - Cities decline as secondary and tertiary businesses dry up due to lac…
The talent being desperate and willing to work for low wages.
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This was the old Google, new Google lays off teams and moves them to India. New grad hiring is all but paused, hiring just enough to Seniors to backfill attrition and trying to slot them in at n-1 or n-2 levels.
Old Google was run by engineers. New Google is run by finance.
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Homie you’ve been around here long enough to know that that is exactly the case Software developers view themselves as an entirely different class than skilled blue-collar laborers precisely because of their access to capital It is explicitly because a single engineer can go out and get money from a capitalist and a single machine shop operator cannot go out and get money from a capitalist that makes the distinction…
The vast vast vast majority of programmers do not have access to capital. But they eat up the propaganda about how they totally could just happen to get that capital and run a one man software business and make a billion dollars. Which is why they spent all that time and energy insisting they didn't have to unionize, because they were super important and could totally negotiate better than anyone else, especially a g…
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It is talent though. You can't write a performant Linux runtime agent such as what Wiz did without knowing eBPF, which requires also understanding Linux internals, which requires an OS background. Why should I spend $150k training someone who has no experience from scratch for 1 year? A lot of table stakes curricula has been made optional.
There are plenty of non-juniors who meet all of your expectations, you just want to pay them less than market rate for their expertise.
> If tech talent can’t come to the U.S., American companies will go where the talent is. LOL! They're going to send the jobs where the wages are cheaper, and that's exactly what they're doing. IIRC, my employer stopped offering new H1-B sponsorships in most cases, after they opened an office in India (10+ years ago). They didn't open the office because they had a hard time hiring in the US. They opened it because the…
> They're going to send the jobs where the wages are cheaper, and that's exactly what they're doing. I read these sentiments, and I honestly don’t understand the tone. This kind of behavior is exactly what you’d expect after taking just a few introductory undergraduate economics courses. Free markets are predicated on the free movement of capital and labor, and American companies being able to go overseas for cheaper…
> I read these sentiments, and I honestly don’t understand the tone. This kind of behavior is exactly what you’d expect after taking just a few introductory undergraduate economics courses.
You'll notice I was responding to something I quoted. They claim they're taking action X because of Y, when they're actually taking action X because of Z. Changing Y will do nothing about X. Hence the tone.
Also, the eight most terrifying words in the English language "I just took few introductory undergraduate economics courses..."
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Why should American voters be expected to vote in India's interests? Cheaper shit isn't good enough, not least because that derives from the premise that companies pass savings on to consumers.
Companies don’t pass savings to consumers, competition does. Why should American voters pay more for everything so that SWEs can be paid exorbitantly? I shouldn’t need to explain to you why protectionism is bad. There’s 200 years of economic research on this and it shows that protectionism always backfires.
Besides, in trying to formulate an explaination for how offshoring is actually in America's interests, aren't you tacitly acknowledging that it is only right and reasonable to expect American voters to vote for what they perceive to be American interests?
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Yes I say you are right, but that only proves these companies only want to hire very cheap labor. There is talent in the US, all it takes is training. Decades ago companies would train new hires out of college, but that trend ended in the 90s. Wall Street started forcing these companies to chase fast market growth and high stock prices. In many cases profit has no meaning for these startups, the only metric is stock…
> Decades ago companies would train new hires out out college, but that trend ended in the 90s. Decades ago engineering salaries were a fraction of what they are today, developing countries did not have computing and educational infrastructure, and we had worse solutions to the logistics challenges from off-shoring. It is increasingly difficult to justify the US salaries and I'm not sure that the talent pipeline in t…
That may be so at the FAANGs and the companies trying to become FAANG-like, but I'm not sure that's the case for people working at more ordinary places.
3 decades ago I worked at a place making retail software for Windows and Mac. I had ~15 years experience. The net tells me that today median total compensation for that kind of job at that experience level would be around $150k/year.
I made $63k that year. My recollection is that this was a pretty normal amount at the time.
If we adjust using CPI that would be $132k now, which suggests my salary then was about 12% lower than an equivalent salary today. However, if we adjust using the indexing factors [1], which are usually consider better than using CPI for comparing wages across time, my $63k then is equivalent to $169k now.
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There are plenty of non-juniors who meet all of your expectations, you just want to pay them less than market rate for their expertise.
Market rate is a function of supply and demand. Unless the market is regulated.
This stands in direct contrast to the stated arguments they use to justify such moves, like "there isn't sufficient talent inside the US". There is sufficient talent inside the US, it just comes with a price tag they don't like.
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I've been told by completely different friends, at unrelated companies spanning countries and different US states that if I was only Indian they're sure HR would have called me back. I applied at each of these companies over the years. There's no shortage of talent in the US, there's an uptick in hiring discrimination.
End of the day, given roughly equivalent talent availability, cheaper is where companies go. Maybe some will call it "cost discrimination" or something just as strange, but the many will know it as "sound business strategy".
I've also been told for a company I will not name that had I been asian they would have called me, I just assume there's an overwhelming number of asian employees, not that there's anything wrong with that, but if they're discriminating against everyone else from being hired, that's not ethical or legal in the US.