Hacker News Reader

Comment by LysPJ | Hacker News Reader

Here's the Twitter thread (by Gergely Orosz) that TechCrunch got the news from: https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1640585325192912898

View on HN

India is not cheap if you want good engineers. Many folks I know (who are good, but not great) make more than what they’d make in UK or Canada. The US is the only other country that pays more. And the flux is just too much (though this likely is not the case in recent months).

https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/india has a median in India of $26k.

On the same website, UK and Canada medians are way higher, a little under $100k.

But the median quality you get it’s not the same. Basically because a good amount of the top engineers move out for better salaries. As the salaries get better in India, it’s easier to find good engineers, but then the salary difference is not that much.

I explicitly measured my words when I said “good” - india has a metric ton of engineers most employed in the WITCH consultant shops and none of them know any real programming. The median gets affected by it. A lot. Any decent engineer at the level GitHub would hire would get 40 lacs per annum INR the first year after graduation (very conservatively) which is $50k usd. Someone working at GitHub or any top tier startup or FAAnG after 4-6 years of experience would be making north of 100-150k usd.

> The median gets affected by it. A lot.

You're saying it explains a multiplier of 4 between medians, do you have any source for that?

If I look for e.g. Apple ICT3 in India vs the UK it's $58k vs $132k.

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/software-eng...

That's still a multiplier of 2. For ICT5 the multiplier is even higher.

Not really.

Amazon pays 160k$ to freshers in US. It pays 25L aka 30k$ in India. SDE2 band in India is 65k$ to 100k$. SDE3 Gets 150k$ to 200k$.

Add to that the lax regulations of labor laws in India and Amazon paying top of the market, they get a skilled and an experienced worker in India for the same price as a 21 yr old US college grad.

India is still extremely cheap compared to the west.

Just a reminder that their mars mission cost less than the movie gravity.

Government salaries are not comparable at all.

Government staff in india get ton of perks - cheap housing , very good pensions, healthcare for life and so on .

There is no easy way to cost this, that mission headline number is probably only the incremental mission specific expenses that got budgeted not the actual costs which are far higher if done via contractors (nasa) or private initiative (spaceX)

I don’t know what to say man, you can keep insisting no one pays well in india, all I know are people making 1Cr+ with 6 years of experience in early thirties. Amazon doesn’t pay well anywhere tbh.

For those wondering what WITCH is:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707

That website claims the median software engineer salary in Ukraine is $60,000 and $47,000 in Russia.

Both are way too high to believe.

They have a bias towards big tech (more big tech employees submit their TC), so you end up with higher numbers. The question is whether you get a similar bias in every country. You compare the same company in different locations to avoid this problem (easy to do with India, see my Apple example in another comment).

While true, 99% of the time offshoring to India is done to cut costs, not to seek out higher qualified candidates.

True, but there has been a big startup-led divide betwen the "offshorting IT engineer" and the "product engineer" salaries. The gap between the two can be 400-1000%.

i think a lot of firms believe they can keep quality (by hiring 'good quality') engineers in india and save money.

as anyone who has actually been at a place that tried this knows, it's probably not true. and for the time when it is true, you need very good information on the talent, and experience on how to set up your product/engineering teams.

and then it still won't be as cheap as you expect.

India is cheap. I don't think they do the same job what they'd do in UK or Canada. In my team, there are some folks who returned back to India to build a bigger team with much cheaper engineers. The top level seniors could make more but in average, they are very cheap.

Sounds like you hired cheap in India then. The work done by the top startups in India is much better than the product quality you see in most “western” apps. India lets you go cheap or go premium at this point and you get what you pay for.

Everyone else here is not agreeing with you, but having just come back from our India office and dealing a little bit with compensation adjustment, I totally agree with you.

Our Indian teams are making really good money these days, and if we don't pay them as such they bounce to another company.

Precisely. Anyone actually hiring in india would know the reality. everyone else keeps throwing levels.fyi forgetting basic rules about statistics (like cultural factors on bias in reporting salaries).

I remember reading some Bangalore-based users in r/DevOps being surprised that they were earning almost the same as devops engineers in Germany.

Salaries in the IT sector in Germany really are quite low compared to other countries. With several years of experience you still only earn around 70-80k per year. Entry level salaries can be as low as 45-50k. Almost on the level of full time office workers.

Nobody wants good engineers. They need cheap engineers who can work with a process.

Spoken like a true middle manager!

How do the economics of that work out? I realize Canada is pretty bad, but wouldn't Canadians be more desirable purely because they're in the same time zone and are less likely to have a communication barrier?

If your argument is that there are more good devs in India by virtue of there being more devs/people there in general... well, sure, but that means there are more devs in general, and the ones making salaries better than the top 25% of Canadians are probably the top 1% in India.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com