Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by echopom | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

echopom

I'm a tech worker based in France.

This topic gets brought up on HN every year I think.

The answer is always the same :

- Yes , US Engineers Salary are way exaggerated compared to the rest of the world

- No US Company will never "outsource" to europe to save 50% per full time worker

This has been predicted already a millions times and has never happened. The cultural difference is so important it doesn't work.

Long time ago there was a trend to outsource to india. It didn't end well from what I remember.

View on HN

> No US Company will never "outsource" to europe to save 50% per full time worker

To a point this has already happened, there are tonnes of American tech companies hiring in London. The cultural difference between the US and the rest of the Anglosphere is fairly minimal, which makes us plus Canada obvious choices for "nearsourcing". And if the planned UK-US free trade agreement goes through, this is just gonna accelerate.

They do though. They've been doing it for years. I mean UK's no longer in Europe so your point may technically be true but I've had plenty of recruiters contact me from big US tech co's who operate via EU/UK (sometimes shell) entities.

EDIT: to further qualify, those orgs base salaries have typically been in the range £120k-£150k if a quick scan through my notes is in any way representative. And obviously the FAANGs pay extremely well when you factor in stock but those figures are quite hard to come by.

>I mean UK's no longer in Europe

When did we switch on the thrusters?

> have typically been in the range £120k-£150k

Is there for an actual roles in the org, or for fixed term contracting gigs?

Can confirm that 120-150 is mid-range base for a senior dev or devops roles in London; not just for fintechs in the City but from post A-round startups in Shoreditch and established companies around town. I have seen some outside IR35 contracting roles start to exceed £1000 per day in the job description (so you know a canny operator can be getting more for that contract.). 8-12 months ago everyone was holding their breath and not hiring while they waited to make sure they survived the Covid lockdowns, but now that things seem to have recovered it has become a sellers market as everyone tries to catch up on a backlog from not hiring over the previous six months.

Still in Europe, just not in the EU.

>Long time ago there was a trend to outsource to india. It didn't end well from what I remember.

This is a narrative that often gets repeated on HN and reddit but IT outsourcing to India has been increasing in the past 20 years. IT outsourcing now makes up 8% of the Indian GDP, 50% of Indian exports, and is on the receiving end of half of the Foreign Direct Investment into India.

Within India people from other fields are rushing to coding bootcamps because salaries in IT outsourcing are so much higher than any other field.

I'll add to the narrative. IT outsourcing has been an unmitigated disaster for Engineering departments I've been part of. Losing control over your own hardware and network, putting it into the hands of a cut-rate operation managed by a non-Engineer, it seems obvious. Necessary changes are too late to matter or never happen. Resources get locked in a closet to "keep Engineers from messing with them" which means to reboot the crashed server it takes a call to somebody in a different timezone who creates a 'ticket' that gets prioritized later and eventually happens next Tuesday.

I waited a month for a RAM upgrade so I could scan GB log files from lab hardware and solve an issue. Long after the need was past our (formerly self-directed) local IT guy came with the new RAM. I mentioned I'd long since had to work around it, and he just grunted. He'd heard it all. And been looking for work since the change.

This experience repeated again and again and again, and you see how the 'legend' builds.

> - No US Company will never "outsource" to europe to save 50% per full time worker

Even European countries outsource to Europe for at least a 50% save on FTE.

Edit: and if you count countries like Ukraine as European, it's even more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com