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Comment by xtracto | Hacker News Reader

> There's an offshore team in Traansylvania busy making it a legacy codebase

As someone working for a US company in Mexico, I take offense at that :(.

I'm sure your team is different, but you must understand why people are generally so down on offshore development. Time zone issues and cultural issues tend to steal any and all gains you get by doing "salary arbitrage" between countries.

I've been burned on this a couple times; right now, if I was evaluating new employers and I heard the words "our offshore team," I'd be out the door.

I've been in similar situation and I don't take offense at all, as I saw both side of the coin.

I worked for an US based company through a Hungarian company. We were handled like normal employees. I was part of a US based team and reported for the team's manager. The only difference was that I had to go to my Hungarian manager for pay rises. The company got Mid/Senior employees for a Fresh Grad/Junior wage, which is still a great pay in my country. We delivered high quality software in a timely manner. Everybody was happy.

But the company got greedy. They decided they can get engineers even cheaper from other countries and they went for the bottom of the barrel ones from those countries. The new engineers didn't cared about quality, they wanted to merge everything ASAP as the payed for delivered story points by their employers. Madness.

The moral of the story is you always get what you pay for and the only ones who should take offense are the bean counters

I had a similar experience at a previous job, they hired tons of random developers and started paying per story point. Quit shorty after.

Also work remotely for companies in the states, nearshore.

In my case it was the opposite. The code done by the devs in the US was awful, the code did not compile, they didn't use git, one guy had the "working" copy of the project in his laptop...

We as the offshore team started to improve things a bit, we started using git, using CI pipelines to at least have the code always compiling, etc

After some months the CTO fired all the US devs and everybody is now offshore. We haven't had many prod issues and we deliver things faster than the last team

I guess my point is that it doesn't matter where the devs come from there are good and bad devs everywhere, if you hire good offshore devs they can be great

My company uses a lot of Eastern European developers and they are all fantastic--they jump right into the code and solve the problem, and they are in general a joy to work with.

If we want to generalise:

Eastern Europe is hit or miss. I had some good experiences and plenty of terrible ones (more so recently). I think that eastern Europe used to be good, but there are plenty of actors milking the scene and reputation of eastern Europe. I know 2 smart fellas making bank selling remote junior developers from Hungary and Poland to London clueless companies for slightly cheaper than senior London prices.

India, middle east, south asia has been an absolute nightmare every time we tried.

I think the future of outsourcing is going to be Russia: they can't speak English if their life depended on it but they're capable developers and paid ridiculously low. A few more years and people will start being a bit more fluent in English.

This is still assuming the USA and Europe will still have any relevance - maybe they should start learning Chinese.

Eastern Europe is not hit or miss: there are skilled people and the rest; companies hired the skilled people a long time ago, then started to hire people with no skills because "they had plans and targets to meet" and complain they are not so good? The IT market is vacuumed, people with basic skills are hired to fill roles of seniors, hiring managers have recruiting targets and quality is not one.

If we want to generalize, Russia is in Eastern Europe, as is Kazakhstan or Ukraine. (Yes, I'm aware some of these have also huge area in Asia.)

On the other hand it's more useful to classify countries like Hungary or Poland as Central Europe, because of timezone and because they have been EU members for more than 15 years.

There is just less difference between Warsaw and Berlin than between Warsaw and Moscow, so the old dichotomy First World vs non-First World is no longer that useful to understand what's going on.

Of course there is a distribution of talent in any industry and geography. However, in my experience, there are dev cultural attitudes (especially DIY-ness) that make Eastern Europe and Russia ideal for hacking.

Example: I had a relatively complex ticket with a new dev to my team located in Russia with sparse documentation. I scheduled a call to do a deep-dive how the system works and I got a rather laconic reply:

"Why need call? I will read the code."

> maybe they should start learning Chinese.

Despite all the cool Matrix aesthetic, I dread to think of a programming language in Chinese.

As my handle would imply I've spend most of my career in Japan. Paradoxically some of the best coders among Japanese are the worse English speakers--perhaps an inverse-correlation. It's not uncommon to see code comments in Japanese (or Chinese for that matter in China.)

I am waiting for a time when we get Angular or React in Jelly [1]

[1] https://github.com/DennisMitchell/jellylanguage/wiki/Tutoria...

The Chinese are consumate pragmatics. I think that it is more probable that we will be thinking of english as ONE OF the chinese languages 100 years from now than they forcing mandarim to us.

And I am not completely joking.

APL ^^ 3...

Don't. The hiring company always has a role in those kind of situation. Maybe they picked the lowest bider, maybe they don't have good hiring criteria or just don't review the work being done make sense.

We're in the process of hiring abroad and it's hard. The promise of better salaries does attract more candidates that need to be filtered but we think that if we care while interviewing, we'll get as good candidates that will be part of the team.

Be proud of the work you're doing and don't take OP's anecdote as an absolute. But the situation described does happen.

A good reason to go offsort is to increase the talent pool and maybe save some money A bad is to get the lowest bidder and usually get what you payed for.

As someone working for a US company in the actual Transylvania, I find you not entitled to be offended. Come here, live the life, check again if you are offended and share the experience.

They take offense because the OP implies that all offshore teams are shitty. "Transylvania" was used as catch-all term for "some other country".

As a non native English speaker, why is that offensive?

They didn’t say it’s offensive. They took an offence — as an individual. Insinuating that just because they’re based in a budget friendly country it doesn’t necessarily mean their output is of any less quality than that of their higher-paid counterparts (in the US presumably).

Which of course is totally not reflective of reality grounded in stats or anything. It’s just one in a thousand exception confirming the state of the tech world the OP has made a somewhat negative remark about.

This my interpretation anyway. Both persons are right in their own way.

So the OP said that there was "a team in Traansylvania making it a legacy codebase". The literal meaning is that there is a team of developers in a foreign country being paid less to do the same job. The other guy said it was offensive because he's implying something similar. He's also working in a foreign country for a US business. More of a joke about being offended. At least that's how I'm reading it.

Right ... I was trying to be funny / tongue-in-cheeky . Text is terrible for that and i leaned on HN guideline of "use the best interpretation " .

The fact is that there is great and terrible people in all countries. And a cheap company will be cheap no matter where.

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