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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

53% that want remote positions need to realize that there’s someone in another country willing to do the remote job remotely for 1/6th of the wage.

My experience as of late is remote workers in India have advanced their language and professional skills greatly in the last 5-10 years.

Be careful what you wish for.

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Almost all software engineering jobs can be done remotely. If the only thing you have to offer is proximity, you’re probably not going to be in a good position.

Any foreign worker that's as good as a "native" worker will also successfully find a job paying within 10% of what the "native" worker would be paid.

Once you get into the lower cost workers, and that's why quality dips.

> have advanced their language and professional skills

They haven't made much progress in advancing their time zone difference, though.

If this where true then the labor would be gobbled up by the market regardless of how the labor in the U.S. feels. So the obvious question is, if you're so worried about it, why isn't it already happening?

It's happening very slowly but it's happening. In my Eastern European country tech wages shot up immensely after the Covid WFH boom thanks to American companies hiring here a lot.

In the US 80k+ is a bottom junior wage but here it's a king's ransom considering the lower taxes and lower CoL, so there's talented seniors willing to grind long hours and work on US timezones for that kind of cheese. I assume it's similar in Latin-AM and Asia.

So far it probably hasn't noticeably impacted US wages as there was an endless stream of free money pouring from the sky which enabled tech companies to keep hiring mostly US talent and grow much faster than off-shore talent onboarding could reliably be done, but now that the negative rate money printing bonanza is over, and the companies figured out how to better work fully remote and how to screen for quality off-shore talent, US companies without the massive war-chests that FAANGs have might focus more on talent from abroad to stay profitable.

Just my 0.02$

It already has happened. In the big tech companies I worked for, adding new headcount always seemed to come from outside the US. Even today, many of the senior leaders come from India. Not to mention the people with Visas.

Why do they need visas if they are remote workers?

My overlords banned hiring any Americans in 2020 and have whittled the Americans on team to less than the minimum to be successful. Like we have a email security team that has one guy and one consultant. And we keep getting more non-US personnel, "They are cross trained on everything", Yet they don't know how to do basic tasks that users can do and have been around for months at least. I gave them the training docs, but they never bothered to read them. If you're brought on a 'Senior', RTFM. Writing on the wall. This latest RTO push seems to be designed to get rid of as many Americans as possible.

Sounds like so many large enterprises in the US, I can't tell which company you're referring to. Unfortunately, workers aren't actually fungible, in tech and non-tech roles, and whether the worker is an American or not isn't actually important, but it acts as a bellwether for how seriously invested in the role company leadership is and how stringent the hiring process is. Nearly every major company and all the core infrastructure of American society is crumbling slowly as the oldest members of society extract any remaining value through financialization. Everyone under 40 is pretty fucked, and foreigners taking your job is the least of the problem, because even after that happens it continues to get worse because the basic services of society you rely on also crumble as they're taken over by uninterested and unaffected third-parties.

We're clearly a cost center that leadership doesn't care for, but can't make any money without it working, so...

Agree 100%. 20yrs ago I worked with multiple teams from India, and we always seemed to have language, skill, and expectation gaps ("the work is done" did not always mean it was done). Now, the India teams are very skilled, speak good/great English, and the expectation gaps are much closer.

As you said, "be careful what you wish for"...

A decade ago, I worked on a team that was half in India and half local to me (in the US). There was no problem with skills, language, etc. at all.

But the time difference was a constant and pretty large issue. If you wanted to have a live meeting, it meant that someone was going to have to be working at a problematic hour.

Agreed on the time issue. Even with Israeli engineering teams, their work week starts on Sunday and ends on Thursday. Thus, you are given a 4-day collaboration week.

Your view is far too tech centric. People old enough to be retirees are unlikely to work in tech/SW development but more stuff like law, medicine or traditional engineering where local credentials matter and act as gate keeping, so it's highly unlikely they'll face competition from abroad.

Mostly tech workers are at risk from remote work negatively impacting their wages.

They’re only too old due to age discrimination. I’ve worked with a number of excellent 50+ y/o workers in tech.

50+ aren't really retirees though, they're just older workers.

How many 65+ SW devs do you know with up to date marketable skills?

They’re all retired, they’ve done very well for themselves and still hack for fun (and have fun associated hobbies like Ham and electronics).

That was exactly my point. Retirees in tech aren't coming back out of retirement to work in flavor of the month framework and modern agile cargo cult.

> modern agile cargo cult.

Hear hear.

I know a fair number of 65+ SW devs that are still working and their skills are as up-to-date as anyone else's.

There are two such engineers on my team right now.

(For the record, I am not a sprightly 20something, but I also am not nearing retirement yet.)

That’s great! What kind of work does your team do?

It primarily develops deep learning vision systems.

I work with two developers in that age ballpark who are experts in the field we work in (cloud).

And what does “up to date” mean? Have you seen the kind of tech that insurance companies, etc. use?

To most companies, go is still a verb and rust is still something that happens to metal

> a number of excellent 50+ y/o workers

As an almost-50-year-old, it might be worth reminding you young whippersnappers that folks in their 50's today started college in the 80's, which was about the peak of the computer revolution. You should expect 50+ y/o tech folks to be hyper-competent, rather than being surprised - they learned back when a bit of assembler programming was expected.

And more importantly they had to read manuals and think through solutions instead of copying the first answer from Stack Overflow (source: me, I'm 51 and have been programming since I was 7).

>You should expect 50+ y/o tech folks to be hyper-competent, rather than being surprise

Yeah, tell that to recruiters. The fact you had to learn things the hard way, including assembler and low level hardware, means very little to modern companies who are looking exclusively for experience in modern languages and frameworks meaning you can easily find yourself unemployed if you're lacking the experience that is in demand right now (AWS, Kubernetes, Kafka, Django, etc) despite you being an ace in C & assembler. Ask me how I know.

> in demand right now (AWS, Kubernetes, Kafka, Django, etc)

Not that I would ever do such a thing, but... it's really hard for a prospective employer to determine whether or not you actually used "X" professionally at your last job or whether you learned it on your own while you were looking for a job.

They can figure it out during your probation period when they'll give you tasks and expect output of someone with experience and you'll suck at them because you have no hands on experience on large projects in production as you learned everything on your own off tutorials so you'll either be slow from constantly reading stuff and debugging the codebase to find your way around or you'll be bugging the seniors too much causing them to question your actual experience.

Granted that depends on the company and team and their expectations on your output, but it definitely didn't work out for me. It might work out in large companies/projects where you'll only be a small cog in a large machine.

It’s up to us as engineers to maintain relevant skills (I say this as I’m pushing 40 and still spending 5-10 hours a week reading outside of work and picking jobs based on opportunities for new tech stacks).

> People old enough to be retirees are unlikely to work in tech/SW development

What? There are tons of software engineers at or beyond retirement age. The industry isn't /that/ young.

Remote workers in India isn't the only inexpensive workforce that has improved language skills recently...

Indeed. Computers as well. And the workers in India could leverage them to further close the skill gap.

Its a good thing to wish for: This way, the US labor can also become free to disperse to regions with more sane cost of living and work for similar wages.

Similar wages, because the overseas senior talent wont work for anyone's corp for dimes, in contrast to what some seem to think. They have their own career trajectories, their expectations. If you don't pay them more than what the local corps pay, you wont get them because those local corps come with a lot of perks and the social status. The latter can be quite more important in many regions of the world in respect to the expectations of your family, relatives and friends so the pay difference must be worth losing it.

Yeah, people who think jobs being shipped to other countries is bad should realise that in the long run this increases their own mobility. The quality of life gap between the US and these countries decreases, because higher per-capita income makes everything better. This leads to fewer visa restrictions between those countries. Believe me, India's geographical diversity and cultural openness makes it an amazing place to live provided it fixes its pressing issues and increases its HDI.

Tangentially, this shows why moving jobs to countries with similar values of democracy/pluralism/diversity (e.g. India) is better than authoritarian states, as the latter does not really improve the mobility of your citizens.

I think this ignores the fact that there's not enough wealth to go around for everyone on earth to live at a US level QoL.

QoL != wealth. For example, many Americans live in Europe and more would gladly do so despite significantly lower per-capita income.

Despite continuous cries of "capitalism bad" these days it continues to uplift people all around the world by offering skilled people a fairer chance to compete, while also promoting long lasting world peace. We need more of it, not less.

It uplifts people across the globe while hurting your fellow citizens. We need less of it, not more.

Yeah, this sounds great. Everyone in the world getting access to the tech industry without having to be gatekept by living in a few tech-hubs in the US.

I think at some point we have to turn off the "but any advancement at all will be bad for me because post capitalist hellscape" voice as that's true of everything.

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