Funny enough, as a guy hiring in house developers deliberately and regularly, I got the impression that salaries in previously "cheap" countries are normalising to what folks earn in US/Europe - which could make offshoring less viable over time.

Employees from the same country OTOH have some tactical advantages: Same culture/language and time zone (I noticed a lot of folks care), less legal/accounting hassle, easier/cheaper to meet occasionally for workshops and stuff.

Something is disrupting the software industry and might cause a drop in salaries, and some people on HN are acting like the sky is falling. This is how taxi drivers felt when Uber and Lyft came for their wages. Or how booksellers felt when Amazon ate their industry. Or how so many other people felt when we cheer for the startups that disrupt lots of other industries. HN is all about this sort of industry-shifting change.

This is not a bad thing. It's just a change that you are potentially on the wrong side of. Work out how to capitalize on it. Figure out an angle, start a company, and profit from it.

I used the shift to remote work to move company and net myself a better, fully remote role and a ~50% raise. And that's the lazy, low risk way to take advantage of it. There is a whole world of opportunity here.

Outsourcing already happened without salaries equalising. To the extent that it can be done, it has been done. For instance, I have a constant stream of people on LinkedIn wanting to sell me projects in eastern Europe and India.

I think the thing to think about is how negotiating positions change. On the face of it you'd think it's bad for Western devs because there's more competition. But it's also bad for hiring managers because there's more of them competing too. I recently had a remote offer gazumped by another one, which would not have happened in the days of "all finance jobs are in a London office".

For people in the low income countries, they have the double edged sword of low cost of living. OTOH they can live like princes on a western salary. OTOH they have to give up some of that because anyone bargaining with them knows they will share a large chunk of the excess in the form of a lower salary. You can cry "same work same pay" all you like, they will agree a lower salary themselves.

There's also a eye of the needle effect. If someone had been a FAANG or similarly hard to get role, people are going to want to pay them more, just because. Similarly if someone hasn't worked in the west and gotten paid in the west, people will negotiate lower pay for them. This is really awesome if you were a FAANG guy whose family is Indian, you'd get a top % of the world income in a middle income country. But for most of the unanointed, it's good but not great.

Yes. There's no room for current American dev salaries in a world where remote-first jobs are a norm.

Sure there are timezone differences, but EST is doable for Europe. 08:00 EST = 13:00 UTC, so working 8h in EST means 13:00-15:00 -> 21:00-23:00 in European timezones. Some people may even prefer it. Europe has a larger population of devs that's underutilized because it's dispersed among multiple countries. India is too shifted for America but doable for Europe, so the natural next step is to move work completely into a much larger European-Indian worker pool that can remotely work together.

I don't expect it to happen very fast, first part this decade, second next decade. First part is going to fully equalize dev wages between Europe and America. Second part between Europe and India.

Alternatively I may underestimate the willingness of Indian devs to live a nocturnal lifestyle for a high enough pay. In which case the global equalization of dev wages with India is going to happen during this decade.

People have been saying this for decades but it hasn’t come true. Remote work can’t make up for the significant challenges caused by differences in time zone and culture.

I've been interviewing lately and what I'm seeing is that companies are indeed hiring more internationally but salaries are also significantly up. What's different is that productivity is also up so people are building billion dollar companies with 10-20 engineers. So there's less room for people that aren't top contributors but compensation for those top contributors is still very good.

Is it still called outsourcing if the work stays in the same country or state? Some people on HN probably hope this transfers jobs from high COL trendy cities to low COL remote workers 100 miles away.

Doesn’t seem to have made any downward impact on my yet, at least. If anything, my bargaining power has gone up, given the upped frequency of recruiting emails for fully remote positions.

Outsourcing has been happening in cycles since forever. If companies can outsource they were already doing it.

For most of the world this is in-sourcing