Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

In other words, if your job can be done from home or from Arkansas, it can be done from India.

I'd note that tech pundits and journalists have been saying for 20 years that many US jobs would move to India and other countries, but offshoring, while common, hasn't really made a dent in the US tech sector. It's interesting to think about why.

I set up an offshore team of four in India some years back. Two of the developers ended up being lackluster and let go, but two of them continued on as they were fairly decent. Even so the cultural difference was significant and it was difficult to manage them. I don't think it was their fault, they just had a very different views on what they considered was a completed task, how they went about asking for further requirements, etc. Whilst it was worth having them, there was a surprising and hidden overhead in cost for the cultural impact, as well as timezone issues.

Later in my career I worked with a team from Hong Kong as well, the cultural gap was less significant and they were able to work well with the management style given. We still had timezone issues (moreso since I'm from the UK which is further from HK than from India), but because they interpreted tickets in the same way and had similar views on what the definition of done was things were far more harmonious.

Communication is a huge factor in remote teams, and whilst there are lots of tools to aid it, communication styles across cultures can be very different which can cause a lot of friction.

I'm guessing that none of the workers you're referring to are IIT graduates. I agree that American developers face little competition from the middle/lower end of developers in India. But the top developers in India (eg, the IIT grads and Google-India devs), in terms of raw talent and job performance, would easily out-compete the average American developer, while still being happy with a lower salary. This is where the physical-proximity-perks that American developers currently enjoy, really make a big difference.

Yeah these definitely weren't top tier developers. Even so I was happy with the quality of the code on the two we retained, it was everything that goes around it that I struggled with. For example they wouldn't ask questions or admit that they're struggling with something. I saw a lot of this in the interviews as well, you would ask a question like "do you know what X is" and they would say yes, but then sit in silence. So you probe "well what is it?" and they would go "I'm not completely sure" or just try to make something up.

I definitely agree with you though. We interviewed one person that was exceptionally good: very experienced, good comms, ticked all the boxes. His salary expectation was around a junior dev salary in the UK, which unfortunately was too high for management who had set a budget per developer, rather than thinking it was worth hiring him and one other instead of four lukewarm devs.

My understanding though is that if you're restricting yourself to top developers in India you should expect to be paying 40-80k(and rising) assuming you directly hired them. And this doesn't include setting up all of the infrastructure to hire overseas, not to mention the increased risk of operating out of two legal jurisdictions, timezone differences, and culture gaps.

What was the cultural issue exactly?

They wouldn't ask questions or admit that they're struggling with something. I saw a lot of this in the interviews as well, you would ask a question like "do you know what X is" and they would say yes, but then sit in silence. So you probe "well what is it?" and they would go "I'm not completely sure" or just try to make something up. They would sometimes sit for days doing nothing because they didn't understand the ticket.

Another was their definition of done. They would finish a ticket and mark it as resolved as soon as the functionality is partially working. I think because QA is enormously cheap in India they were used to handing things off to QA as soon as possible to save their own time. We didn't have a QA department so that was quite problematic. I started having to include all the edge cases I could think of in the ticket.

I don't think it's necessarily wrong, it was just different, different levels of politeness and views on managing their time. But it was these differences that made things more difficult for everyone involved than I expected. They probably had a lot of issues with my management style as well, although they were too polite to say anything :)

I think offshoring hasn't hurt the American tech scene, for precisely the same reasons that "working in SV and living in Arkansas" is so rare. Physical proximity matters. Being able to talk and hang out with your co-workers, face-to-face, in real-time, matters. This is why top SW companies like Google, despite hiring developers around the world, still focus on having teams that are working together in the same physical office, as opposed to geographically disparate teams.

I've always wondered why tech salaries in Western Europe were so much lower than the US (exc. Silicon Valley effect).

Could it be the proximity to similiar-culture Eastern Europe where inexpensive developers are easily available?

Salaries in the US and Europe cannot easily be compared by the numbers alone. There are factors such as minimum PTO, health insurance, paid sick leave, pension payments, etc. that skew the bare numbers. You'll have to find an US job that has similar benefits as the european job to even be on a somewhat level ground.

Yes. Especially if you have kids. Here in Austria health insurance for kids is free (until they graduate), you get paid maternity leave, Kindergarten and schools are free, college tuition is less than 1000€ per year, and on top of that the state supports you with about 200€ per month for every child.

Pension payments??? What European business or country would pay pension to an American employee just for having worked there for a few years?

The Netherlands will pay a pension to anyone who lives there past the age of 16. You'll get more money for every year you live there. One year of living there will get you something like 18 euros a month when you retire, but it's definitely more than zero. It's giving back to someone who has lived there and (presumably) has contributed by paying taxes. Someone who as lived there all their life only gets something like 800 euro a month, so I think that it's expected that you will have other savings or an employer-provided pension in addition.

I've never lived in the Netherlands, but I hear that employers there will also contribute towards a pension for an employee. This pension will be managed by some sort of private company. I'm not sure if it's a defined contribution or defined benefits pension. The details on when you get your pension and how much you get probably depend on the company that is managing it. It may be that a couple years of working will get you a very small pension or it may be that there's a minimum qualifying period. In any case, you should be able to get some benefit from it, even if it's a one-time lump sum payment.

Getting a little off topic here, but if you're a US "person" subject to US taxes, then those pension payments can be taxable. http://rsmus.com/what-we-do/services/tax/international-tax-p...

If you google around, you can find stories of long-time ex-pats getting blindsided by the taxes associated with those pensions.

Define "much lower". Also Western Europe has several different countries.

In terms of "take home per month", expect between 2.5kE and 3.5kE for places like Ireland/Germany/Netherlands (YMMV) for a higher seniority

Now in Spain, Portugal, Italy it is going to be lower

Eh, I've worked with teams in Arkansas and India and I'm not overly concerned. There are more barriers to collaboration than physical location. Culture and language are huge friction points when they don't align, not to mention responsiveness issues due to temporal displacement.

You can just "deal with it" and your budget, codebase, and timeline will suffer. It adds a lot of overhead. Hiring a worker a timezone or two away that speaks the same language and shares a national, if not regional, culture with the rest of your team is an entirely different proposition than hiring one on the other side of the planet that speaks a different language. It CAN work, I've seen it. But I've seen it be a deal breaker much more often.

Working from the West coast regularly with people in India, Europe,and US east coast, I disagree.

You certainly have some benefits of having teams spread out around the world, as you could virtually have someone working at any hour of the day.

But communication is very hard with the foreign countries, because of 2 things: time difference, and some language barriers. Even with only the 3h time difference, communication with the east coast is sometimes problematic.

It really depends on how your team works, but let's say you insist on code reviews before submitting code, then you can easily loose days between a dev in India and a dev in the US.

> It really depends on how your team works, but let's say you insist on code reviews before submitting code, then you can easily loose days between a dev in India and a dev in the US.

Or for that matter, if your QA is in India and your devs in the US need more information to investigate, that can take days...

I worked at a company like that. I'd come into the office in the morning to see a ticket from a QA person in India, they didn't provide the information I needed to reproduce/investigate the bug, so I left a comment asking for it. Of course, they didn't get back to me until the middle of the night (my time), so I couldn't act on it until the next morning. And then, of course, I'd fix it, and they couldn't verify until the next night...

The response lag can be ameliorated to an extent by having lots of work going on in parallel so nobody is blocked on one critical reply from someone in another timezone.

I've done remote development as an employee, remote development as a consultant as sole developer on a project, and local development as an employee working with other remote developers. IMO a lot of the issues people have come from inexperience with asynchronous communication.

I would argue that growing up writing open source with international teams, using IRC and email lists, not only has made me appreciate remote work better, but also gave me a mindset to understand asynchronous distributed systems better, too. But it's not an insurmountable advantage; I believe any team, if it cares enough, can work effectively with remote developers, and get the morale and cost benefits of doing so.

Contracts written by a US company can be enforced far more easily in Arkansas than in India.

Going for the extreme cheap will also have some problems

South Americans (or even Mexico) will have a smaller time zone difference, less cultural differences.

Southern western Europe might be a good source of developers as well

Reply on news.ycombinator.com