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Comment by andrewmutz | Hacker News Reader

Increased outsourcing will almost surely be a consequence of the significant shift to remote work.

If it is normal for companies to be hiring people at good salaries to work on zoom remotely from, say, Montana, why not just go the next step and hire in Latin America?

There are plenty of brilliant software engineers in Latin America (I have met and worked with many), and even if the company is not motivated strictly by cost savings, they can just get better engineers at any given price point. They speak English well enough and work on zoom from a reasonable time zone, like any usa-based candidates

USA-based software engineers have been the initial beneficiaries of the COVID push to remote work (and this will continue), but the long term benefits will go to the brilliant people in other countries who no longer are hampered by geography.

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Not even long term. This upcoming recession will flip everything over.

There are 3 ways I can look at it.

1) Agglomeration effects are real. And physical proximity matters. And having all these really smart people in the same physical space led to results that were greater than not having them in the same space.

This is the belief tech companies held. And that’s why they were willing to pay people in the Bay Area 5-10x what they would pay people not in the Bay Area. And that’s why they pushed for a return to office.

If this is true, then US workers have shot themselves in the foot by pushing for WFH because they’ve voluntarily eliminated their advantage over cheaper workers offshore.

2) Physical proximity doesn’t matter. Agglomeration effects don’t exist. Companies were duped into believing that there was something special about American water.

If that’s the case, the the beneficiaries of this misconception, US workers, have voluntarily chosen to clarify that it’s not true. That the companies paying them extra were kind of foolish to do so.

3) For whatever reason, the smartest people only lived in the Bay Area for reasons that had nothing to do with geographical advantages of physical proximity to people (lets say it was the high salaries that drew them to it, but this has a huge chicken and egg problem). So the people earning those high salaries deserved those high salaries purely on their merit.

But this isn’t any better. With the push for WFH, all it means is that they will be pushed out to cheaper places to live. Everyone seems to think that this cheaper place will be out in a suburb in Arizona, but in reality, Brazil is gonna be even cheaper and in the same time zone (and in many ways better). Portugal is really nice. Lots of Indians might decide to keep their US salaries and live back in India where they can have a better lifestyle and have their children spend time with their grandparents.

And all these people may be willing to take a marginal salary cut to do so, because they will still be much better off.

Those marginal salary cuts will add up.

Personally, I believe #1 is the answer. But either way, it’s gonna be a lot worse for a lot of us.

You assume proximity was the only benefit.

Fluent English, shared cultural norms, and work culture vary wildly between countries.

The farther I’ve gone in my career, the more I’ve realized that “clean code” and “maintainable software” comes down to well written prose, in code.

Why do names authors pay US ghost writers when they could outsource to Brazil? The difference between “very proficient” in English and “fluent” is night and day.

I'm not so sure about the relationship between native English and maintainable software, or in general being a great software developer.

Israelis aren't particularly fluent in English, more than others. Yet Israel is considered a great source of talent.

In a way, writing software is translating human speech into machine speech. Any good software developer is fluent in the "machine" part, but trying to "translate" from a language (and culture) you don't master is a recipe for disaster.

I agree, people who are only fluent in one language (and who don't study anthropology) tend to ignore the huge cultural factor in these things.

Indian people already have a hard time getting hired in your own country, you think your boomer boss is going to go out of his way to get them? I strongly doubt this.

Outsourcing has been tried for a long time, if it was a permanent solution it would have become the norm. Not to say that there is never a time for it, but software is, ironically, where I think it's the least likely to work out, precisely for the reasons you cited.

Outsourcing software development works great when you can specify exactly what you want ahead of time...

... software engineering history has been a lurching but ever more complete realization that the customer never knows exactly what they need ahead of time.

BINGO!!!

The work has to be well-defined and expectations clearly set, but we all know that it's rarely the case that the work is well-defined and that expectations are clearly set. What you end up with is an expensive disaster - and you can't correct from it either: you'll be black-listed in your community and people will be very leery of ever working for you again.

These lessons have been learned and re-learned for the past 30 years now - going back as far as Yourdon's Decline and Fall of the American Programmer - which was published in 1992.

There's a 4th butterfly effect: All those places you described are becoming more and more inhabitable due to global warming, political instability and lower quality of living. Almost all of them want sponsorship to move to the US or Canada and bring their families with them.

so in the long run what really differentiates outsourced labor vs local is really down to culture and the type of working environment that is created. This really cannot be underestimated. If hiring Indians or Brazilian engineers was the be all end all, there wouldn't be any jobs here in North America.

I don't know what the end game is but for sure WFH really makes these cultural differences pronounced. They can't read between the lines. They don't get the jokes. They make grammatically mistakes and stuff gets lost in chats.

Personally experienced this working with French speakers. Their level of English is god awful and majority of the time were spent trying to figure out what the hell they were saying. It worked for a while but eventually it burnt out a lot of the English speaking staff.

I'm a CTO and looking to outsource to India, Middle East, Ukraine, Latin America. Is there a one stop shop for this? Or are you just manually hitting up people on upwork or freelance.com?

I also think that the barrier to entry is so low that anybody that can read English documentation, have intermediate-senior level experience, can get the job done. It's just that in some cultures, there is clearly some effort to make themselves indispensable by increasing technical debt and not caring about security with the end goal of they being the only devs who can keep the lights on at your company.

Curious as to what part of Latin America has the talent, in my experience of hiring Brazilian developers, they've been just awful, much more so than Indian devs but they've also been known to play "games". I don't know who to trust right now.

You need a local partner you trust. Your partner is going to get a cut, and a big one, but otherwise you won't get good people.

I'd disagree here. "Your partner is going to get a cut" is the exact issue. I feel like if you're the CTO, you're going to want to own the relationship between you and talent. You can find very good people on UpWork at $40/HR across all technical disciplines.

I've done all of my hiring via UpWork and will continue to hire via UpWork. After about 2.5 years at this, I prefer talent in Ukraine and Vietnam. Post a project description with good details and pay and you'll have all the talent you can handle. I don't think being in the same timezone matters at all. I have no idea why you'd hire American technical talent when you can get the same talent at 5 - 10x less the cost.

can you share more details? how are you getting 5x~10x discounts and for which tech stack and roles? im still surprised at how expensive ukraine devs are compared to vietnam or india.

I'm a technical architect by trade. I write clean, concise and discrete product requirement document artifacts. If you can do this and you're able to convey clear parameters of what needs to be done, you can easily score senior developer talent @ $30/HR.

My back-end developer writes Serverless IaC with Python Lambdas for $40/HR. Our app developer writes Swift for $25/HR.

We manufacture a proprietary IoT sensor. I pay $30/HR for an embedded developer to write C in TI CCS. I pay a fixed rate for board layout / schematic / BOM edits.

A hard truth is coding skills are commodity if you know how to modularize and write spec. You don't need perfect English to write beautiful Python / Swift / C. I don't need you in the same timezone because you're pushing to a git repo and we review it when we wake up.

For permanent talent, they're more than happy with $40/HR. They like working with people who know what they're doing, they like that I write a PRD and leave them alone until deadline, and they believe in what we're doing.

Fascinating. I was always under the impression that Upwork was filled with low skilled workers.

How do you get your BOM to production? I've always wanted to create my own circuit boards but have no idea where to start or how the process works.

Absolutely incredible the information I'm walking away here. I'm definitely going to look into outsourcing on Upwork now, especially I'm hearing you are actually having consistent success.

You've had many issues that violate trust, and you're still looking to outsource?

> why not just go the next step and hire in Latin America?

For IP law? It’s much easier to protect IP against employees of the same justice system.

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