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I think some companies think, as long we're willing to have remote workers in the first place, why not get the cheapest? Obviously you can also pay someone in India less and provide them with "wildly higher quality of life than they would get anywhere in the Bay area from most perspectives".

My experience with Indian devs has been their English is as "proper" as anyone's, and their technical skill levels vary with about as much variation as in the U.S., where there are also plenty of not very good developers.

The thing is, once a company has decided to prioritize saving money on developers, they are probably willing to take devs who are really not very good to get cost savings (whether they realize it or not), and there are a lot of companies in India which exist to help them do that. If they wanted to hire not very good developers at cheaper rates in the U.S., they could easily do that too. Perhaps the people making the decisions fool themselves into thinking the rock-bottom-rate devs they are hiring in India are magically highly skilled, and somehow it's easier to fool yourself this way when they are on the other side of the world.

It sounds like there would be a huge competitive advantage in starting your own company and doing just that. You can pay much less, get much better work, and rake in the profits as you shut down your idiot competitors one by one.

That's probably overstating the case a bit. If you're hiring remote workers from other parts of the USA, I'd say you can pay somewhat less, get roughly equivalent work, and reap the profits so long as you have the skills to manage a distributed team.

Because many of the workers who are "good" come to the Bay Area for the money, the lifestyle, the location, and the job selection. If you could, why would you not want to live in an excellent climate by many of the US tech companies and make 3-8+x what you'd get elsewhere? You also typically get to work on "cooler" stuff since the companies out here can afford to make bigger and riskier bets. There aren't too many AI/ML positions around the rest of the country, but it's hot right now here.

> If you could, why would you not want to live in an excellent climate by many of the US tech companies and make 3-8+x what you'd get elsewhere?

Because California, number one, and because everything costs 3-10X what it does elsewhere. I could easily double my salary if I moved to SV, but I'd have to live in a van in the parking lot like a hobo, instead of being able to afford a decent house and have a goodly amount of disposable income.

Your conclusion of destroying all of humanity might go a bit far - but I agree with the general idea of hiring people where they are is more competitive and I would say better overall.

Remote work allows for a better diversification of work forces across regions. For example, if somebody who lives in Detroit because that is where they were born and family is can have the same high tech job as people in the Bay Area it helps Detroit be more resilient and flexible to regional business fluctuations.

Too many companies IMO pay "based on location", which would mean that the person in Detroit gets about 20-30% of the Bay Area person doing the same work. If you make $100k a year in the Detroit Metro doing computer stuff that is still non-management, you're doing fantastic. For $1m out there you can get a literal mansion. In the Bay, you can get a totally unremarkable single-family home on a street with a bunch of people who can barely afford their property tax bills. Houses in such neighborhoods in Detroit are about $10k and you can literally buy property by the block in some areas.

Because the executives and rich people who bankroll companies aren't yet sold on remote work, and those who are mostly prefer to just hire where labor is the cheapest (eg. India, Eastern Europe)

> why the heck outsource to places like India

You vastly underestimate just how cheap outsourcing is

Maybe he does... BUT I used to work for a consulting firm that would sometimes bid against far east outsourced providers when local firms had projects.

This is anecdotal but over and over again, this was the scenario:

  1. local firm collects bids
  2. As courtesy firm tells us we were 2-5x more expensive than winner, winner is in far east.
  3. 1,2,3 years latter firm returns to us asking if we can re-submit but on a more shorter timeline (maybe the project would have been 2-3 engineers for 6 mo)
  4. We come back with a new bid that is 8-12x more, has a bigger team than we would have used orgiinally, less favorable risk analysis..
  5. They paid us to take them on! Often-times we had to throw away almost everything their Bangladesh contractors had been working on for years (fundamentally bad schema, no unit tests, bad bad code)...

I have similar anecdotal evidence from Norway. A bank outsourced running IT systems to a company from India. A year later they hired a local company to fix/redesign things.

Yep, many people who have been in the industry have heard this one before and/or inherited the project-from-hell that has been touched by half a dozen offshore dev firms and basically needs to be scrapped. There's a reason why we aren't all jobless while other countries take all our tech jobs; it's highly-skilled labor, which means that the quality of the end product is directly influenced by the skill of the workers. The time differences and language / cultural barriers (I forget the name for it, but IIRC there was something in Indian culture around ~"my part is done" which is part of why e.g. There's so much trash in the cities -- basically it's not your problem -- please correct me if I'm misunderstanding or misrepresenting this) certainly don't help set up these situations for success.

One thing I've struggled to understand, even after years of working with a great team of relatively low-cost engineers in India, is this:

If engineers in India are, say, 5x cheaper fully-loaded than in the US; and some of them are awesome engineers; why are there not startups in the West competing to pay the rock-stars a Western salary but have them stay in India?

With all the close ties between the Indian IT sector and Silicon Valley I would expect it to be common practice especially among startups to try recruiting the best away from, say, InfoSys by simply paying them what you'd end up paying an inferior engineer locally.

As far as I can tell this is not done very often. Anybody know why? Or am I just not aware of it?

The three big challenges I see are how to identify the rock stars, management culture, and time zone. It's possible to overcome all of those, but you'd need significant expertise hiring and managing Indian teams.

The hardest part would be to build a team of true startup hustlers, because the outsourcing industry has not been built around those types of people. Traditionally you have to have very strong top-down management and clear requirements since the mentality on the other end is to do what your told, avoid giving bad news, and maximize billable hours. This is something that large companies with established products can do a lot easier than startups.

In general the reduced execution risk is not worth the cost savings because you don't yet have a business, you are trying to build one. The safer bet for a startup very tight team working hand in glove where every employee is obsessed with the high-level product.

I suspect there are cultural issues that break down communications.

I've seen people who've got really cool sites to show that they've worked on in their spare time, or worked on with local collaborators.

Somehow, and it's hard to pinpoint how, when they try to work with someone in the West, it breaks down. Understandings that are natural to you sitting in one part of the world may have been completely missed by your remote guy in the East. Doesn't always happen, but it's enough to warrant a risk premium.

> If engineers in India are, say, 5x cheaper fully-loaded than in the US; and some of them are awesome engineers; why are there not startups in the West competing to pay the rock-stars a Western salary but have them stay in India?

If you're paying them a Western salary, why not relocate them to be local? In my personal experience this is what I see happen when we do ID an engineer who isn't local but good

"If engineers in India are, say, 5x cheaper fully-loaded than in the US; and some of them are awesome engineers; why are there not startups in the West competing to pay the rock-stars a Western salary but have them stay in India?"

Doesn't that remove any kind of gain from outsourcing? What would be the point? You now have the downside of SV salaries and the downside of managing remote teams across the globe.

"With all the close ties between the Indian IT sector and Silicon Valley I would expect it to be common practice especially among startups to try recruiting the best away from, say, InfoSys by simply paying them what you'd end up paying an inferior engineer locally."

Usually those worth their salt aren't working for Infosys in the first place.

They just don't have the technical ability their western counterparts do, obviously some do but finding them is a crapshoot. Also if you pay people too much they won't stay with you and that will be a much bigger issue when you can pay someone more than they would otherwise be getting (even if it's costing you less)

There's also control, if you outsource your whole project then why do your workers even need you? They could just do it themselves and cut you out completely.

I don't think startups would have enough funding or the time to take advantage of it. MVPs would be done by the founders because of the time constraints (setting up a whole outsourcing setup would take a bunch of time). Also, if you fully outsourced all the startups tasks then your group that your outsourcing to doesn't need you. If a startup was well funded and has larger projects I could see that though.

There's no grand mysterious reason. Businessmen want cheaper. They are like "Indians are already used to low payments, let's offer them 15% more so they are ecstatic". In my observations, there's nothing else to it.

If they were equally qualified they would still demand a comparable salary. A full stack dev in Houston makes nearly as much as one in SF with the same qualifications.

I have a hard time believing this is true in general. I live and work in Austin. When I was interviewing for the job I have here I interviewed at a few companies in SF and received offers at two to do basically the same kind of work I do here. The offers in SF were substantially larger than what I accepted in Austin. After looking at my budget more closely I decided to stay put because after taxes, cost of living changes, etc I found that there wasn't much of a difference and that I'd rather not move.

I understand that this is just a single anecdote but I work with quite a few people who have moved here from SF – and have friends who have made the opposite move – and they have all reported something similar.

A quick jaunt to Stack Overflow Jobs, Glassdoor, or h1bdata.info will show you that in the vast majority of cases, no. Different markets have wildly varying pay.

If you meant "overall net income", then the Houston dev would likely come out ahead after taxes and rent/mortgage.

That's not really going off the beaten path enough to find bargains. If remote work was more reliable and easy to find, I'd be sorely tempted to move someplace out in the sticks, albeit where there is high-speed internet access, where land and living expenses are significantly cheaper than any urban area by considerable multiples.

Plus, you get to be out in the sticks, not cheek by jowl with a million other people.

Almost every comment you have made with this account is either dead or flagged. I am surprised that your account is still active.

Groupthink and investor pressure