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Comment by debaserab2 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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