Ask HN: Do you think remote work will hurt Americans? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you think remote work will hurt Americans?

16 pointstinyhouse18 comments

I've been noticing a trend lately of US companies hiring outside of the US to save money. I'm not talking about outsourcing, I'm talking about hiring capable full time engineers in places like Canada, Central America and Europe. (The first two have no time zone issues; Europe is manageable for East coast companies). Some companies still hire in the US, but prefer low cost of living regions.

Isn't that worrisome for US based people? I'm wondering what will be the impact on US salaries, esp in tech.

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Not even a little tiny bit.

This question is as old as outsourcing itself; I've been hearing scare stories about how all the programming jobs going to cheaper developers in India or Eastern Europe or wherever else for literally decades.

Language/cultural/communication barriers are a real barrier. Working around significant timezone difference is a real drain. In the long run it's more expensive and has lower quality results (not, I emphasize, because non-US developers are less skilled; simply because clear, synchronous communication is so important to good software development.)

I think it's different than outsourcing that was trendy years ago. I also recall those days and the gloomy predictions.

Canada doesn't have the problems you listed. Central America has the language barrier but good devs are likely to have good English. The reason I'm thinking it's different is that now I don't see that companies are looking for cheap labor. They are looking for talented engineers and willing to pay them well, but still far below what they would pay for a similar talent in the US, esp in expensive regions. Top talent will always be OK, no matter where they are. Everyone else might have a problem.

You're right, it does look like Canadian salaries are a bit lower than in most of the US -- though not that much lower. (Nationwide averages are wildly skewed by Silicon Valley, but for example entry-level engineering jobs in Chicago pay less than in Montreal.) (Yes, I remembered to convert the currency ;)

I can speak directly to "Central America has the language barrier but good devs are likely to have good English" -- my org recently acquired a small company in Brazil, and we've been trying to integrate the engineering teams. They're great guys, very skilled, and they have conversational English -- certainly better than my Portuguese! But it's still a huge, huge communication barrier that drains a whole lot of time and requires a whole lot of extra effort on both sides.

(Was there a one-time cost savings from acquiring a Brazilian company instead of a comparable US one? Probably. I wasn't privy to that deal. And are their salaries lower than those of their co-workers in the US? Yes, a bit. But I can say for certain that the delays and miscommunications caused by the language barrier are expensive -- and we're shorter on time than we are on money.

> They are looking for talented engineers and willing to pay them well, but still far below what they would pay for a similar talent in the US

If you substitute "Silicon Valley" instead of "the US" in that sentence, I'd wholeheartedly agree with you. "Outsourcing" to Ohio or Albany or, well, most of the US is a real cost savings compared to SV or a couple of other high-dollar metro areas, without most of the problems you get from going international.

Currently, it is harder to hire outside the US due to legality issues such as taxes, the gov. designed it so for US workers to remain "competitive".

It is apparent that if these regulations were irrelevant, the market will become more fair and corporations won't be able to secretly discriminate by location.

What regulations? From what I've seen all a company needs is to create an entity in the country they want to hire people. Since it's all remote they don't need an office or anything.

Hiring contractors abroad is certainly on the easy side, it’s actually even easier than you point out, because you can just hire an Accenture contractor or something and then you don’t even need to bother with having a presence in that country.

Registering for a country costs money and legal resources, a hurdle most companies are not willing to incur.

My hypothesis is that people are naturally lazy, so they find the easiest path. If recruiters know they have to go through extra loopholes and paperwork (if they don't have a system set up already), your likelihood of being hired decreases significantly. They won't admit this (illegal discrimination), but it is human nature.

There's companies that specialise in this sort of thing: https://www.letsdeel.com/

Not for the next couple of years at least since there is tons of free money in the market from VCs and then we have the FAANG type giants. There is lot of demand for good talent and for the right talent, companies are paying all kinds of money.

This will become a problem if demand goes down and Employers have more choices. Right now, not so much. It is a candidate's market for a while and will be.

> This will become a problem if demand goes down and Employers have more choices.

Or if interest rates rise and the economy slows down to fight inflation and the money dries up until things stabilize (or freaking war spreading in Europe). Would you rather be laid off due to economic downsizing or go back the the cubicle. I think I know the company’s opinion here.

I think this is temporary. For a few reasons.

So much of the US economic system is tied to commercial real estate. Small business loans to sandwich shops, parking garages, office building and the people and companies that support them, build them, plan them, etc. It’s an industry that is not going to die.

I think the “kids” today will swing the pendulum back to working in the office after having spent significant periods of their adolescence on lockdown. People who think remote is forever will resent the next generation for these reasons. Resentment leads to replacement, the tech stacks aren’t as technical as they used to be. The cloud can make beginners rockstars.

When data can be produced to show quarterly earnings from non remote companies (Msft, Amazon, Apple, Tesla, presumably Twitter and more Morgan Stanley, Charles Schwab, Exxon Mobile) are “better” than remote, the CEO will demand everyone back to the office. I think the ones that will remain remote are more call centers, insurance, billing and customer support. I don’t think that those jobs are very compelling to folks with CS degrees and backgrounds.

It’s crazy to think employees have the power here by going remote. Once you’re locked into living out of state and your company goes back to the office, those remote salaries in the US will rival remote salaries elsewhere in the world, and remote developers will work multiple remote jobs, poorly further depressing earnings or revenue.

We’re just well on one side of the pendulum. The middle is not hybrid, but telework (like one day a week), and the extreme opposite is no jobs due to recession and employees fighting for a space in a cubicle.

As an example, I bought a house in the Bay Area in 2009. The market was so depressed that they gave me an $8000 tax credit and a low interest rate for doing it. When I talk about that now people think I am a crazy person. Things change because we make the stuff up as we go along.

It might lead to more salary polarization. The average salary for the average developer will likely go down. For companies that only hire the cream of the crop, salaries will likely keep increasing as competition increases (a European company can more easily compete with top US companies and hire top US developers, for example)

Remote work isn't really changing the international hiring situation. Companies were previously hiring internationally, even before "remote" was a thing. That being said, it still takes work and logistics to setup subsidiaries in other companies. Companies like remote.com are making that portion easier - that does change the calculus a little bit.

It's not new, and despite this trend the unemployment rate in the U.S. is low at 3.6%. Americans are consumers as well as workers, and companies that can access lower-cost labor can charge lower prices. Higher cost-of-living regions in the U.S. should address their costs by making housing easier to build, for example.

Yes but it will take years, maybe decades. High cost of living makes everyone less competitive. I'm not seeing anyone strategically making life less hard on a hard cash sense so it is undeniable. Although if you rush to "outsource" everyone for the cheap talent abroad it would be a shitshow.

Not in any meaningful way.

I think this would be true if "the sort of work that can be outsourced like this" were extremely essential, but I don't think it is (i.e. it's more "speculative and perhaps redundant") B.S. jobs and all.

Of course it’s hurting Americans. These companies are saying that lower wages are more important than Americans, period. Your instincts are dead on.

More like it will hurt people tied to the most expensive areas SV/ New York rather than cheaper areas around the US

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