That said I don't hear the best about the company (long working hours, not the highest pay) and have declined a job offer there myself.
That said I don't hear the best about the company (long working hours, not the highest pay) and have declined a job offer there myself.
As someone who lives in a low cost country: rubbish. There's a reason we're a lower cost.
1. We have a lower standard of education
2. We have a higher cost of technology (relative to average income)
3. We have a lower need for the luxury market where most technology resides
You can also look at the proportion of field leaders. Are more from the developed nations or the developing ones?
The developed nations had a headstart on technology, do you think the developing ones have overcome that, despite most of us going backwards in terms of access to education and the wealth gap?
Don't take it personally, I'm not trying to tell you that you're a bad developer. What I'm saying is we have to work harder to uplift our country's fields and not fall into the trap of "well I'm the biggest fish in this tiny pond so therefore I'm an equally big fish in the ocean". It does not work that way.
Lower cost of living does not imply developing nation.
Czhech Republic or Poland or Taiwan are developed nations, all with the cost of living a fraction of Bay Area.
I see Ubiquiti dev center apparently moved to Latvia. You can argue it's a depressed region of the EU but it is not a developing country by any metric.
But I wouldn't think of the Baltics as such a place?
Instead, just hanging over the code and infra to new people, is risky in itself and can easily make security problems happen?
A lot of the engineering talent you find there is extremely limited in quantity, but it is untapped.
Overall I think it’s a step in the right direction as compared to other countries we’ve outsourced work to, but let’s not pretend Poland is an exemplary ray of developed industry and society.
Having worked (as a French) with dev teams over there, I can assure you they have a whole bunch of A+ devs and the market is very competitive.
You don't have problems with access to clean water in Poland. You ain't going to die from hunger in Czech Republic. There are no issues getting education in Latvia.
And mythical Anglo engineering talent, please. They are approximately the same anywhere you mentioned.
Sure, if you take 300M market like US and pool all the best talent to west-coast, there is a lot of engineers. But the market is saturated, and it's nigh-impossible to hire a team of the magnitude you can get in Eastern Europe. Canada? Oh please...
I'd like to also add that from my own perspective Ubiquiti gear and software is/was _exceptionally_ good. So converting to "just another network gear company" level of quality is going to have a much greater impact on my perception of the company compared to if this news of off-shoring came from say cisco.
In the US, good engineers don't have to tolerate abusive companies in exchange for good wages. Not all countries are so fortunate.
Almost forgot, but just last month my wife started complaining about the WiFi, turned out the latest firmware that was pushed to my UAP's is horrible. You have to turn off auto update and check reddit before upgrading firmware, what a joke!
> I hope it's not "the company is declining because the company moved talent to countries where developers are cheaper"
We probably agree the cost of developers varies considerably in different locations.
Companies operating in markets where local developers are expensive (I work near London for example) sometimes decide to outsource development to locations where it is much cheaper (e.g. India).
What I have seen (admittedly just anecdotally, not carefully studied and subject to bias) is a correlation between companies that don't value high quality software development and companies that are happy to dump a substantial part of their development efforts on cheap developers overseas.
Such companies don't care about their existing team - developers who are expensive but have built the software and understand it, and are to some extent understanding the end customer (often filling gaps left by product managers in smaller organisations). They just see their development team as a huge cost that needs to be reduced. Or they have trouble hiring locally.
When the daily rate of developers overseas is substantially lower, the company also doesn't care about those developers. They will want to outsource the least creative and satisfying work to them. They want to just fire and forget: "here's the spec, go and build it". Lower productivity is less of an issue if the "resources" are cheap. I'm over simplifying and I'm sure some companies try to work more in equal partnership but you get the picture.
Also, the move to outsourcing is often done suddenly; it's more like wielding an axe than an organic growth or shift in development model. Companies don't tend to invest in overseas developers as individuals.
In my view it's not great for either set of developers, or for the customers of that company. Perhaps when done right it can be more beneficial and I hope things will improve overall.
You cut my quote short of the important part which was "and employees complained less about constant crunch mode". It is easier to "trap" engineers in countries where average salaries are lower by offering them 20% over market rate and then threatening to fire them if they don't work constant crunch hours. We were promised very large bonuses that never arrived.
> That said I don't hear the best about the company (long working hours, not the highest pay)
It is a sad situation. The pay was very good and the working hours were reasonable when I started, but that changed for the worse. That is why all of my peers left the company.
My company started doing the same and erosion of knowledge is really bad.
You are saying the same as the parent. Expecting “short” hours is seen as “feeling entitled”... There are countries where people are not willing to work in those conditions.
Bottom-of-the-barrel developers bring even greater savings, and paying peanuts has always been a great way to get monkeys.