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Comment by antishatter | Hacker News Reader

When I was at Intel, they had outsourced graphics driver development to Panang. Within a year they had created a large number of US jobs for folks who had to rebuild the work from Panang and validate/test/fix any new working coming back from Panang.

There is a difference between a cheap foreign engineer without formal training and a trained domestic engineer. Anyone who thinks every type of labor can be outsourced to cheaper labor markets has no understanding of the phrase "You get what you pay for".

Sure, the call center guy telling you to reboot can be outsourced trivially, move up the stack and you may be making a large fiscal mistake. This is discounting the much higher fraud rate attached with outsourced labor as well.

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> There is a difference between a cheap foreign engineer without formal training and a trained domestic engineer.

IMO there's no difference between a trained domestic engineer and a trained foreign engineer. Foreign vs domestic isn't a meaningful difference.

However. Existing tech hubs got their cachet for having the best and the brightest, which in turn draws in the best and the brightest. Companies have to pay more for talent on average in hubs because the talent has self-selected for a high concentration of great folks.

That doesn't mean there isn't an assortment of great folks elsewhere who just didn't feel like moving, but IMO, more than likely, the majority of the great folks are already in tech hubs. I think the risk is overstated.

He didn't say there wasn't talented people elsewhere. The title says anyone can take your job, and he drew a line between looking globally to save money and getting what you pay for. You seem to be bringing up counter points to something that wasn't said.

Of course there's a difference. A domestic engineer needs great software development skills and decent communication skills. A foreign engineer needs great software skills, great English skills and an extra measure of communications skills to bridge the cultural gap without ever meeting face-to-face. Clearly one of these workers is more highly skilled than the other and would be harder to recruit.

> IMO there's no difference between a trained domestic engineer and a trained foreign engineer. Foreign vs domestic isn't a meaningful difference.

This isn't supported by the research. American university graduates have much better knowledge of computer science than their Indian, Chinese and Russian counterparts.[1]

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/116/14/6732

I guess it depends on what you mean by a "trained domestic" engineer. The implication of your paper is "domestically-trained" i.e. the caliber of US universities is higher. "Trained, domestic" implies US person, trained wherever, and "trained, foreign" implies non-US person trained wherever.

For instance, is someone who moves to the US from Malaysia, goes to UIUC, then moves back to Malaysia a "trained foreign", "trained domestic", or "foreign, trained" engineer in your view?

Nuanced, but important, and might be why people are talking past eachother.

Fun fact, you can get good foreign engineers as good as any SF engineer but they also tend to be as costly as their US counterpart maybe slightly less do to lower living costs.

That's exactly my experience, the foreign talent on par with domestic talent costs about the same or close enough that outsourcing becomes much less attractive.

Exactly, in general you get what you pay for.

I would not say "SF engineer" = "good engineer".

There are excellent engineers in SF, but that's not the standard. It's the result of strict selection processes.

This is nothing but racism. Foreign engineers are no inherently worse than "domestic" born and raised. For proof, just visit any Silicon Valley company office. You will see nothing but foreign born engineers.

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