Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by dominotw | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

dominotw

uber laidoff american staff and is hiring in India[1]. This is not an exception, just a sign of things to come.

If you do ordinary CRUD coding at work in USA, I would seriously start looking at how to pivot out of that job.

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-india-south-asia-stipen...

View on HN

I’ve been around long enough to see the cycle play out a time or two:

1. Hey, let’s hire cheap Indian workers!

2. WTF, we didn’t expect all these time zone and quality control issues!

3. Let’s onshore again!

Believe me they’ve been trying to do the Indian outsourcing thing for a looooooong time. It doesn’t work as well as imagined. The Indian developers who are as good as their western counterparts don’t stay in India.

Uber also had fired a bunch of people from India. (I'm from India). But I was in complete shock when they started hiring again just a month after firing so many people. I think using the pandemic as a scapegoat they got to clean up some highly paid resources and recruit new ones bargaining (given pandemic those who looked for job didn't have much to ask for). I guess there must be some government regulatory body looking into such type of firing and hiring process.

Isn't new talent more expensive than existing talent? If you've had employees that for years have been getting inadequate COL adjustments, they're cheaper to keep than getting market-rate talent.

This assumes that the market rate is constantly increasing. Given the amount of job losses that have occurred recently, there may be talent available at a cheaper price.

Developing countries are developing at a two digit percentage a year, same in the few top cities.

If a company has had somebody stagnant for years (many years), they're not going to be replaced for cheaper. The crash might cancel the last couple years of inflation at most.

Also, the employee is much more experienced now (could go from junior to senior over 5 years). Will the replacement be equally experienced or starting from scratch again? A fresh experienced hire is certainly more expensive than what the employee was originally earning.

I’m noticing that I am just becoming someone handed tickets who later hands them back for testing. Beyond that, I barely speak to anyone on the team anymore (in large part due to turnover). I speak to my boss maybe once a week, if that.

Government job, so they wouldn’t outsource me, but you could easily give someone else a login and that is all it would take to replace me.

Would be scrambling were I in the private sector in this type of job.

1. stop allowing foreign workers into the US

2. extremely portable work goes abroad

reversing 1 won't stop 2 though. I don't understand your logic.

Why would someone go through the hassle of hiring and bringing a H1B at higher salary in USA when they can hire the same person in India at much lower cost.

Some people from other countries are very good at what they do, and are hired because of that, not just because of 'cheap'. Cheap is an added bonus if you decide you need to open a dev center for the highly skilled people and can then also bring on some more mid-level talent.

> Why would someone go through the hassle of hiring and bringing a H1B at higher salary in USA when they can hire the same person in India at much lower cost.

Why do so many companies hire at a higher salary in the Bay Area when they can hire the same person anywhere else in the US at much lower cost?

presumably because they can come into the office in the bay area.

Because India is 9.5 time zones from New York. Americans who can remote work (not just developers) should be more worried about being outsourced to Canada, or to Central and South American countries.

Lol good luck going after somebody in India that has leaked some of your IP.

Based on how things are going(in the US) the equation is going like:

1. Reduce foreign workers in the US

2. Allow WFH from anywhere* thereby reducing total cost of workforce domestically

*remember things are never done to be awesome for the employee, just the companies bottom line, if both happen then that is fine too.

Hasn't this been tried before?

The difference these days is that US-based developers are going to be facing most of the same hurdles as the international teams. It's a blow to their competitiveness.

> US-based developers

no, not all parts of the country will be so hardcore about remote work into the future. For example, I see Utah (which leans heavy into enterprise SaaS and already booming in tech) to continue as normal except with masks or a little more space between desks.

If some businesses do better in person, then they will make it happen somehow.

not really. When were US workers completely remote ?

As a fairly new mobile (iOS native, Android native) developer (2 years professional experience) based in the US, should I be worried?

What I'm asking is: Do you think another type of developer (e.g. Systems programming) will not need to pivot?

yes anyone who is a 'ticket churning/ story completing machine'

Reply on news.ycombinator.com