Removing geography from the hiring equation is going to fuck American tech workers. Once you’ve gone digital, there’s no (on paper) difference between a programmer in the Philippines or in Iowa except the one in Iowa is much more expensive.
Among the big consequences: you lose R&D tax credits. The language and skill barrier is also pretty big; most companies that outsource end up spending so much money on QC that they barely save anything at all.
It's theoretically possible to find good programmers in the Philippines as opposed to locally. But seeing as how finding local programmers is still not a solved issue, expanding the job pool to include the entire world isn't going to make that task any easier.
Aren't those negligible compared to the salary gap?
Probably true, however by then they will already have made the decision and it will be priced in to the company’s stock. The System is replete with the consequences of bad short-term decisions that have become more or less locked in.
$200k vs $<20k. It’s an extremely large gap to be filled. Surely the people who spend their days looking at numbers on spreadsheets will see this gap and try to take as much advantage of it as they possibly can, and surely the market will reward the massive cuts in operating costs.
There will always be companies who need to learn on their own how $20K developers are different from $200K developers and what investing in either means 10 years down the road.
By the way, good developers with good English and good communication skills can easily earn MUCH more than $20K even today by working remotely. Already today in most countries there are almost no barriers to earning multiples of their national averages other than one's own skills and attitude. And yet dev salaries in America are as high as ever.
The industry seems to be growing faster than the labour force even despite globalization, and I don't think that trend will reverse anytime soon. We're still shoving software into more places, industries, and processes, and making it all more complicated.
They've made it pretty clear that they won't be looking for local programers. They're looking domestically. Presumably, the same processes used to hire remote domestic programmers will be equally applicable for most remote non-domestic workers too.
Knowing that the market is getting even more global it only encourages me to ask for more money, not less.
[0] measured in years of xp.
Up here in Lithuania, in IT, it's not uncommon to live (relatively) bumfucknowhere, work remotely and drive in once or twice a week.
I meant that "location adjustment" just increases the gap to the already existing gap made of "attractive place(big city) - bigger companies - bigger salaries" factor.
>Up here in Lithuania, in IT, it's not uncommon to live (relatively) bumfucknowhere, work remotely and drive in once or twice a week.
I'm not exactly aware of how common it is here
During my time there a typical project would have 30-40% of the personell living either in a small town or in the middle of nowhere.
And how long is the commute into the city?
I think this is how it's going to be in America soon.
Commute varies a lot depending on specific location. Want to live in a village in a national park? You're looking into at least a good hour off-peak to two hours including city traffic. Random small town? May be an hour, may be two. If you want to stick close to your parents and they happen to live deep in backcountry... You may be looking into 3-4h one way depending on which city the company is located in.
1-2hrs is reasonable for a shoot into the city.
I think this will become very popular.
https://blogs.worldbank.org/education/who-trains-best-comput...
> The United States trains the best computer graduates ― by far: We find that CS seniors in the United States substantially outperform seniors in China, India, and Russia. The average computer science student in the United States ranks higher than about 80 percent of students tested in China, India, and Russia. Seniors in elite institutions in the United States similarly outperform seniors in elite institutions in China, India, and Russia by approximately 0.85 Standard Deviations (SDs). Importantly, the skills advantage of the United States is not because it has a large proportion of high-scoring international students.
I've seen kids straight out of highschool who can write solid stuff and know git back to front compared to some lad with an Ivy league bachelor's who is basically clueless, needing his hand held for months and yet demanding 8x the wage.
I treat everyone who only has a degree and no real world skills with a lot of suspicion. There's plenty of ridiculously good hires out there.
“Hey everyone, let me introduce you to the wholesale replacement technology staff we obviously hired just to pay them way unfairly less and fire all your friends who did a good job. It may be night time every time you see them on the video call but don’t worry. As you capitalize on a near indentured servant relationship with them so we can pay them less than their worth purely because of geopolitical arbitrage, they’ve generously agreed to never read their kids bedtime stories or sleep at the same time their spouses do, as they live out a stereotype hellscape of Western arrogance where they are happy to be worker ants endlessly reciting Bill Gates’ “flipping burgers is opportunity” speech in their heads.”
In other words the question is, “Given that contracting and outsourcing are deemed to be worse options by rational actors, what reasons make this true?”
If your tasks are so well defined that a single feature request ticket can be fulfilled and satisfied on the first try, that’s cool but you’re likely not actually doing anything challenging and you’ve probably already outsourced to India.
Maybe my clients and I got lucky because little hands-on management was required and specs were quite lax? But at least in some cases it works just fine.
https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w...
Applying the current exchange rate and American standards regarding time off I'm currently making, as a front-end dev with 8 years under his belt, $60k+ before taxes in Poland, and I'm far from the highest earner among my peers.
Sure it's considerably less than the median US wage in this field, but still it's not like we're orders of magnitude away from you guys.
And note that Poland is a very popular destination for outsourcing.
If they are equally productive, then surely they deserve equal pay.