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Comment by azangru | Hacker News Reader

> Also, suggesting that someone from outside the US is more likely to give you unsatisfactory performance is simply racist.

The article's position is more nuanced than that.

It starts with the premise that good (whatever that means) programmers are expensive.

It proceeds to observation that companies would outsource to cut costs. It also makes another observation that Indian and post-Soviet programmers are cheap.

This observation conflicts with their premise: "good" programmers are expensive; therefore cheap programmers are likely not "good".

Whether this has any bearing on reality can perhaps be tested probabilistically, by examining whether there exists a negative correlation between the amount of money asked for a project and the "unsatisfactory performance" — if one can define what that means). If such a correlation exists, it will make this statement not a statement of personal attitude ("racism"), but a statement of likelihood.

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All other things being equal with 2 programmers who have perfect knowledge of their market worth, the better one will cost more. But this premise is proved false trivially.

1. People don't have a good sense of their market worth. It's possible to convince/coerce someone to work for less than they're worth ("think of the exposure!", "we'll be big in 5 years") while other people have an inflated sense of their own worth.

2. All other things _aren't_ equal. Indian programmers cost less because of Purchasing Power Parity and relative wealth. For a person who's monthly expenses are $400-500, getting a salary of $3k a month is a sweet deal. Plus A salary of $3k per month would put you comfortably in the top 0.5% of Indian society, able to afford most luxuries.

I haven't yet read this 2004 article, but, FWIW, there was significant US software industry worker fear of programming jobs being outsourced overseas, starting at least just before dotcoms. The dotcom funding boom and disruption seems like it might've been a relief of that. A noteworthy 1992 book on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_and_Fall_of_the_Americ...

It's not particularly important if the OP was being racist (I don't think they meant to be), the racism is the stigma that outsourcing to India results in unsatisfactory performance.

That is a racist sentiment, leading to a racist system which is self-reinforcing. It means fantastic devs have to deal with low pay or leave their families and homeland to get paid their worth, it means mediocre devs who were lucky enough to be born in Palo Alto have a much easier ride.

There was a time when people wouldn't give women important jobs because the mainstream view was that they would perform unsatisfactory performance. Now I think we can all say that's sexist nonsense. I think this idea is in a similar vein.

A lot of racist statements can be hidden in an obscure arrangement of facts, observations and generalization. In this case, the statement that cheap programmers are less likely to deliver good results isn't inherently problematic. What is problematic is the following sentence:

> Now, competitors in India, the former Soviet bloc, and elsewhere can just as easily use the same tools and techniques at lower cost.

The author implicitly generalizes that all Indian and post-Soviet programmers are cheap and all cheap programmers are Indian/post-Soviet.

> The author implicitly generalizes that all Indian and post-Soviet programmers are cheap and all cheap programmers are Indian/post-Soviet.

Respectfully, the generalization that includes the word ALL happens in the mind of the reader. The authors CANNOT have meant that all cheap programmers are Indian/post-Soviet. Indeed, in the previous paragraph the author talks about "barely-out-of-high-school whiz kids", whom he also doesn't hold in high esteem; and those kids are likely imagined as American.

The claim that the original text makes is probabilistic. It may even turn out to be true (as in, it is not unimaginable that it's more likely than not to get bad programmers on the project when outsourcing to cheap companies in e.g. India or post-Soviet countries).

I'm still not convinced that that sentence wasn't meant to imply this generalization. (Whether the author has deliberately written the sentence like that or subconsciously, I can't say.)

Besides that, bringing in nationalities was completely useless. The author had already established that low cost contractors yield bad results, so why tie that to nationalities needlessly? It adds nothing to the text except for a slightly racist undertone and a bash on engineers of these nationalities.

They are cheaper because of different development level of countries. I doubt this can be classified as racist.

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