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Comment by orzig | Hacker News Reader

I love anecdotes and I have some of my own, but does anyone have real data-backed arguments for why Americans still get hired for 10x a comparable developer in India? Are we, (I’m an American developer) really 10x as productive?

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> One experiment by psychologists at the University of California, Irvine, invited pairs of strangers to play a rigged Monopoly game where a coin flip designated one player rich and one poor. The rich players received twice as much money as their opponent to begin with; as they played the game, they got to roll two dice instead of one and move around the board twice as fast as their opponent; when they passed “Go,” they collected $200 to their opponent’s $100.

> In various ways — through body language and boasting about their wealth, by smacking their pieces loudly against the playing board and making light of their opponents’ misfortune — the rich players began to act as though they deserved the good fortune that was largely a result of their lucky roll of the dice.

> At the end of the game, when researchers asked the rich players why they had won the game, not one person attributed it to luck.

https://www.marketplace.org/2021/01/19/why-rich-people-tend-...

I'm really suspicious of that study, even if I mostly think it's emblematic of the real-world effect it's supposedly studying. Was the difference in rules/situation communicated to the players? What exactly were they asked at the end of the game? I just find it hard to believe people would be that crass in what they know is an artificial environment where they know there are stark and obvious advantages. This feels like the Stanford Prison Experiment where the results are "too true to check".

I actually completely agree - I'd be curious to see replications. Though after a couple decades of life, I don't find it hard to believe people would be that crass.

Well if I played a game of rigged monopoly, I would say and act exactly the same way, doesn’t mean I am oblivious, it just means I am making fun of the researchers

Or you just assume that's part of the structure of it. Doing a study and pointing out something that obvious feels weird. "I know you asked me to play this clearly terrible game, but it's a terrible game" feels like odd feedback. Or I'd assume it was some trick and the "poor" player had weighted dice or something.

It just seems odd in a game that's fairly profoundly a luck-based game even without messing up the rules, like Monopoly, that 100% of players would have that low self-awareness.

And you posted this why? Are you from a certain part of the world and mad? :)

I'm from a certain part of the world and I seem to lack the necessary psychology to justify why my pay is a couple times that of people who I work alongside (virtually) who are equally as competent as me.

Who do you need to justify it to? I'm sure your work would accept you offering to get paid multiple times less if you were prefer that. Or otherwise, do what you can to advocate for giving raises to the equally competent people on your team who are making less.

I suspect it's a basic primate tribal dynamic built into my firmware - us monkeys need to stick together and pull our weight so the tribe can survive. Of course it bumps up against some other greedy functions that are also built in.

There are several aspects to it, besides productivity. A company is more than a resource pool. It has workflows, cultural aspects. The engineers have commitments. People are chosen for cultural fit, and mentored into higher positions. Teams build internal relationships.

Indian developers are as capable as any other developer. But the whole reason why they were hired in the first place, to lower costs, mean that they will always be second rate citizens in the environment. Not because they are bad at their job - but because they are a way to cut costs. There will be no budget for innovative projects, heavy training, bonuses will be limited. They won’t have access to what’s going on, they won’t be able to have greater impact.

A good engineer may be born anywhere. A lot of us here learned tech by reading .TXT files on 486 computers. The problem with outsourcing is outsourcing itself.

Thing is that a developer in America is either an immigrant who has passed 10 stages of talent filtering to show up here, or an American who had to compete with these immigrants to enter the same schools.

The talent pool is much more competent in the US because of filtering and tough competition at a high level.

Also, is there any data confirming that equally well educated Indian developers are 10x cheaper than American ones? How does it compare to European ones?

I'd love a serious answer, but I am aware that software quality is almost impossible to measure, and quantifying the skills level of developers might be even harder.

I can't comment about India but in Eastern Europe software engineers have a comparable purchasing power than in the US - it's just that it's achieved at ~50% of the wages because of cost of living differences.

It's not like I don't believe that. But I am interested in any data taking salaries and qualification/experience into account. Local costs of living are certainly important for the employees, but not so much for the employer (assuming that they impact the salaries level to some degree).

Even though the latter is probably still an approximation to the actual skills level of a developer.

That’s a great point, thanks. One collection-of-anecdotes from my company is 3x in the same role (10x was from the article), which might actually equate to a similar standard of living (with huge fuzziness given the different amenities of the two countries - I’ll never have a personal driver)

The same reasons we don't outsource all of our management and executive positions.

It's flawed logic to think that pay is (exclusively) based on productivity.

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