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Comment by vosper | Hacker News Reader

Programmers in first world countries (and triply so the Bay Area) should plan for lower pay because there are increasing numbers of foreign (and some domestic-but-rural!) workers out there who’re skilled and will take less pay than you and be happy about it and will be able maintain a high quality of life in their area. I don’t mean the outsourcing/body shops (though some good ones exist) so much as individuals in Argentina or Mexico or the Philippines. They’re out there, they’re good engineers, they fluent in English, and as more companies become remote friendly these people are going to start taking some jobs. The market is slowly, but surely, going global.

And if you think you’re safe in Ukraine or Bulgaria give it 20 years until a bunch of Africans in nearly the same timezone come in and undercut you, too.

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That song and dance has been preached for at least 20 years and I'm still waiting for it to happen. After working several jobs managing outsourced talent, the problem for me was never quality of engineer, it's proximity to the business requirements.

If you're a programmer in a different country with a completely different culture you may simply not understand the reasoning behind why or how you are solving a customer's problem.

No amount of documenting and specing ahead of time can correct this to the same degree as having a programmer that truly understands the business problems they are solving.

As a developer in Eastern Europe I am in this game for almost 20 years and I feel like things are changing fast.

Ten or even five years ago it was very rare to find companies that will pay well for remote talent and it created weird culture when your core senior engineer is paid less than out of school junior dev just because they are living in place with lower costs. At the end companies got what they paid for.

Nowadays I see new wave of companies that understand this better and treat remote workers as first class citizens: not just by amount of money they pay but also bringing these developers to the table and letting them to have stakes in the project not just handling assignments.

I don't know much about culture in India or Philippines, but after working years with developers in both SV and places like Germany, UK and Romania I don't see much difference.

> I don't know much about culture in India or Philippines, but after working years with developers in both SV and places like Germany, UK and Romania I don't see much difference.

I'm working on a daily basis with colleagues in Eastern Europe as well as with India and Phillipines. There are vast differences in culture that is affecting workplace performance. Philippines are fairly americanized and function almost like Europeans, but they are also paid as much per hour so why suffer the distance and timezone disadvantages when you can stay in Europe.

Indians are still cheap per hour but have a vast national labour market which means they rarely stay in a job for more than a few months, perhaps a year. It means many won't stay for the duration of a large project, and changing team members frequently is a burden on any project. Countries also have very different leadership expectations and culturally-savvy leadership is in short supply.

I was told this twenty years ago when it was time to choose a college major. I believed the doomsayers then, and that derailed my programming career for a good decade.

Maybe this will eventually come to pass, but there are no signs that it's on the near horizon. Most U.S. companies are still uncomfortable with domestic remote engineers, let alone international remote engineers. It won't happen overnight.

Not saying you're necessarily wrong, but there's been similar comments about India and China since the early 2000s. India alone has over 1.3bn people, and compensation there is still a fraction of what it is in the US. If it was all just a numbers game, there should not have been a single working developer in the US right now.

I don’t think India and China are the threat to US software jobs. It’s Latin America: same timezone(s); shorter/easier flights (because of the timezones as well as the distance) with easier visa requirements; far greater cultural familiarity and/or similarity (in both directions); lots of people who speak excellent English (in Latin America) and a fair few people who speak Spanish now in the US; less fear of IP theft; no trade war.

Somewhat minus the timezone, a lot of these things apply to the Philippines, too.

You also have to imagine that India and China have increasing quality of life, more demand for their own software and (eventually) higher salaries.

Latin America is less of a threat simply because of population size. All of Latin America combined is half the size of just India or just China individually.

It definitely isn’t just numbers: language is also an issue, and, as I noted when someone asked about auto-translating programming languages, Chinese doesn’t seem to have the concept of lowercase/uppercase, so some things just wont work unless the developer really gets to know things that nobody will teach them because everyone else thinks it’s “common knowledge” and doesn’t realise it isn’t.

As another example, there was a real-time city building/combat game a while back, made by an oriental developer and ported into English by a UK games company. You could set you flag to show your name — with a one character limit. That made sense if you’re thinking of “狐”, but English language players set their flags to “G” or “K”.

Right now, I’m a UK-born developer living and working in Berlin, and my B1-equivalent in German isn’t enough to read German-language design documents without resorting to machine translation. It just about works (office and dev language is English), but German-English is easy compared to Chinese-English.

Seamless remote work is also a prerequisite for levelling tech salaries even within single nations and time zones, but I don’t know enough psychology to argue how far or close that is.

Generally the hard part about programming is communication, both with machines and with all sorts of stakeholders. That's why "naming" is one of the hardest problems in programming.

I expect good communicators fluent in the same language working mostly the same hours every day to be in the same talent pool. I don't expect every employer is willing or able to take advantage of the entire talent pool. Many (apparently most!) are willing to pay a premium to have their team physically sitting in desks on site.

Based on what I'm seeing living in Vietnam for the last 4 years, the tech salaries here are increasing YoY as developers realize they can make as much as those 'bay area' people. They increasingly have the same level of talents, or better, so why not? Not only that, but the cost of living is increasing in the larger cities like HCMC, so the argument that it is cheaper living is starting to lose weight.

I saw that a few years back when I was working with a company that had outsourced a lot of its operations to India because India was so cheap. Problem was, India had gotten more and more expensive every year to the point where it didn’t make economic sense any more... so they were looking into offshoring their operations to Africa.

I think you have it backwards. Most good programmers in non-first world countries should plan for much higher pay as remote friendly companies grow. The problem isn't that demand will diminish due to the larger pool, the problem is that the demand for good programmers outstrips the entire world supply by a lot.

US alone has 300+ mils so if it was so easy we’d have lots of local competition already but we don’t.

At my workplace, people work from home when their kid is ill or whatnot, but management has been pushing back against us having more work from home days, and there has been much Sturm und Drang over this.

If management is so concerned over us working remotely a few more days a month, I can't imagine more of a push toward remote workers, particularly in other timezones, with people that have limited English skills.

You don't want to put your software development in corrupt countries. I mean, do you really want to hire a team of people who are used to paying bribes to get ahead?

You’re tarring an awful lot of people with the same brush there, and also neglecting that people may be used to paying bribes aren’t necessarily people who want to pay bribes, and they may act differently when bribes aren’t something you essentially have to do.

It doesn't matter that not everyone is a problem, as long as we can't properly tell one from the other the problematic ones has to be a part of the equation when you deal with corrupt countries. This will usually eat everything you'd save in salaries, which is why efforts to move development to third world countries usually fail to reduce costs.

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