Every time I hang out my with most ambitious friends, I am reminded of how MSFT is 'low balling' company. That I could be making 2x if only I kept up with interviewing. On one hand, I can't avoid the objective truth of the statement. But, on the other hand, the hedonic treadmill is infinite.
I'm glad I am not in the bay area. I would've been paralyzed by the persistent reminders around me of my monetarily sub-optimal life choices. Get out out of my head: 'over-achieving friendo', I am already well into the 99th percentile of wage earners of my age in the world's richest country.
Over the last 5 years, I've seen a (COL non-adjusted) 100x (20x if I use a more practically true number) increase in salary. So far, My happiest moments have rarely required much money, let alone 100x as much as I had then.
So if you like what you are doing and can live comfortably you are at the top of your game. The rest is merely froth.
Some programming, some hardware, some chemistry, always lots of fun.
Right now I’m working on data control and privacy.
It doesn't take much to interview and double your comp. You don't have to interview at Google or Facebook to double your comp - many pre-IPO startups are paying up and their interview processes are often less rigorous.
If you're happy with your situation then more power to you. But something tells me deep down inside, you're not OK with it. I'm here to tell you that a couple weeks of prep and looking around can go a long way.
It actually diminishes very quickly for most people, which I suspect is why they aren’t that motivated.
Still true that being content with what you have can be a wise choice.
I think if anything, the decreased concerns about hiring remote AND the increase in overall demand has lead to very favorable conditions for engineers even abroad.
The second this changes, the bottom drops out of software.
I don't know if it will ever happen that big companies begin openly accepting overseas applicants but if/when it does, you can expect that it wont be for 100k. Suddenly when you consider the entire planet, there's no longer a shortage of developers, and the employer has all the power.
I'd say there is not a general unwillingness to hire overseas developers, on the contrary, if more people could speak english in south america US companies would be more than happy to hire even more here.
There is a shortage in english speaking developers globally, but not a shortage on companies' interest in hiring anywhere
There are still other substantial collaboration challenges, but if more places move to be truly remote-first, those places will necessarily have solutions for that anyway.
If I start another company I’d really like to hire a competent offshore team in south or Central America but I have a lot of trouble getting there from here. If I wanted to hire a team in Israel, Pakistan or India, I could do it immediately, because I have trusted friends who can hook me up with people that they themselves trust plus or minus some skeeviness that I know how to manage. For south-of-us I have no connections and basically no way to start.
You could dine out at nice restaurants every weekend and travel around by plane every time there is a holiday and stay at 5 star hotels
Taking into account the minimum salary here is 300 USD / month and with 50k per year you are already top 1%, 100k gives you an unimaginable level of wealth. You'd earn about the same salary as the president of the country and more than most CEOs from local companies
But that would be if you spend all your salary every month which is not so smart, what most of us (bilingual developers) do is continue living a standard middle class life and just invest heavily, I invest more than 50% of my salary, mostly in real state and US stocks
As an American who moved to Colombia, I can highly recommend it. That said, there’s a lot of downsides not mentioned here. First off, your foreign earned income and your US credit score mean nothing here. You will not be able to get a loan and if you want to buy property, you’ll be paying cash. I had to pay 8 months of rent into a bank deposited escrow just to rent a fairly cheap house for one year. That also involved (literally) about 6 trips each to a physical notary office and banks). Things that would be unheard of in the US are common place, like constant physical signatures and finger prints to authenticate documents and asking for your national id number in order to do anything and everything.
A small empty lot in the nicer parts outside Medellín will be at least $225,000. Not bad and beautiful land but again you’ll have to pay cash for everything. Taxes are very high and you can expect to pay 30% - 80% more for many foreign products (“nicer” cars in particular seem to be ridiculously high priced). Tech product selection is terrible, everything lags way behind or simply isn’t available. Amazon does ship a selection of lighter weight items here but you’ll pay a VAT tax of 20% plus an import tax of 10% on the total including shipping. It usually works out to be a 40% premium. Electric vehicles essentially do not exist unless you want a Twizy. I just had my radiator fan go out on my car and was quoted $900 for the part alone which is available in the States for $200. With shipping and taxes I can order from the US for about $550 but it will take about 2 weeks to get here.
There’s a lot of unnecessary friction in daily life, just trying to do “simple” things like an online purchase.
Still an amazing place, lots of great things but as someone trying to actually make a long term life here it can definitely be frustrating.
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Because it's been tried before and for the most part it was an abysmal failure. I was just starting out doing some basic web freelancing as a teenager in the 2000s and even I got roped in to clean up an outsourced project after being outbid a year earlier by an overseas firm during the first outsourcing wave. Lots of people on HN have horror stories of cleaning up from that era.
We've been here several times before - like literally just this past year of everyone saying "oh but now you have to compete with remote workers everywhere!" Salaries keep rising because software is an arms race. The companies making the most profit will continue to invest in getting the best people and outside of the odd global crisis, the industry will continue to grow as everyone else tries to keep up both in technology and in hiring. All those firms I cleaned up after as a kid are still around today and bigger than ever, yet on this side of the ocean we keep making more and more money.
I think we've got at least a century before software hits the diminishing returns that the industrial revolution did. My local lumberyard is still using DOS machines probably made before I was born.
I'm sorta wondering what country would be next. It has to have a large enough labor pool to fill the positions, and still be cheap enough to at least look good on paper..
- junior: 45K - 55K - medior: 60K - 75K - senior: 75K - 90K
Although getting more than 85K as an individual contributor is not easy.
I would argue that outsourcing failed primarily due to companies trying to farm out the coding to uninterested entities whose incentives did not align well. Not necessarily because the foreign workers doing the coding were bad.
Back to the guy in Argentina -- I imagine that he/she is actually in a reasonably good position as the amount of remote work increases. Indians not so much, because they are 12.5 hours ahead (of Pacific time). Argentina is only 4 hours ahead, which makes for a lot more overlap.
So I think the field has leveled a little bit in that sense, because if you have a remote developer in another state, they are not very different than one in another country who happens to be in a similar time zone. The other big barrier IMO is communication, so someone in Argentina who is not merely fluent in English but speaks it very clearly could be in a really strong position.
You can do bigger differences and many of us do on occasion. But on a multiple times a week basis, both 5am calls and 11pm calls get old.
My intuition is that a max of 3 or 4 time zones is the sweet spot, but it's cool to hear that you've had success up to 6.
It failed because the intent was to cut costs and they got what they paid for. The successful ones were genuinely trying to expand their engineering talent pool and quickly figured out that the cost savings were a marginal benefit that made up for some of the extra overhead of international accounting and management. Quality engineers are one visa lottery away from Western salaries so the local median salary is often completely disconnected from what a FAANG might pay for a decent engineer, which is a rude awakening for anyone trying to cut costs without destroying the quality of their output. On top of that, the people most likely to make it a smooth transition are also the people most in demand (arms race!) and competition for them helps evaporate any savings for the business.
The guy in Argentina is in a great position to get hired to work remotely for an American company, but I don't seem him as competition regardless of how good he is. It's an arms race so my employer's competitor can't replace their team with Argentinians because that down time will give my employer time to crush them (which we learned in the 2000s). They can hire an extra team of Argentinians on top of their existing head count but if they do that my employer will be pressured to hire a team of Brazilians. Before you know it, both companies are hiring even more local teams to help manage the flow of work between their existing local teams and the outsourced ones.
There's more work and money to pay for it than there are people to do it. Until that changes, we're not the ones competing, the employers are.
This has worked far better than the 'Tata' chapter which exported to very cheap Asia where staff tech skills and the support model were too often haphazard and frequently underperformed. Hiring remote staff in new-growth US cities with lower CoL (e.g. Charlotte NC or Austin TX) has delivered capable staff and nearly synchronous operating hours to the main office. However in the past 2-3 years, IT labor costs have risen greatly in 'secondary' US cities, reducing those savings substantially.
In my experience, remote staff in eastern Europe have skills equal to US folks, but the 5 hour mismatch in daytime hours and their inability to visit US sites where non-IT R&D work is done and data is acquired does hamstring this model.
I wouldn't be surprised if a 4th era of outsourcing arises soon: remote work in small towns across the US and in western Europe. European IT wages often seem to be 50% or more below US large cities. That differential is likely to diminish as remote work increasingly is established as a new norm.
Markets clear. If outsourcing were so great, it would have completely taken over by now. It has been tested for decades now and it hasn't.
Outsourcing fits really well for organizations that have a lot of explicit, documented, well-understood domain knowledge, for which the org is the key inventor. But that's not most organizations. Most organizations are operating by the seat of their pants, competing in markets where a large number of other orgs know their business. That they turn a profit at all is more a testament to the perseverance of a few, key employees than it is the exceptionalism of the organization itself.
Every axis of communication is a potential friction point, be it collocation, industry, experience levels, language, time zone, culture, personality types, etc. The more you can remove those friction points, the more successful your project can be. But outsourcing throws several of those out the window, never to be touched again. So you're left optimizing on the few that are left, where most companies only ever optimized on those axes that have already been removed.
Ultimately outsourcing has issues with accountability.
you are a team of people located all over the world. To Your being off-shored to India as soon as can figure out how.
Worked both, and the culture difference and happiness difference is drastic.
Even a hint of offshoring will induced panic for many employees/ candidates. Definitely makes hiring and retention hard.
Yes that's right; business hates saving money and loves hiring super expensive US talent.
If you are looking to fill a position coming with a decent pay, I'm all ears :)