GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired
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Interesting, people were talking about remote work meaning that companies will now pay less due to a global talent pool, but it might just go to show that workers are not all fungible with other workers in different countries. It rings of the same fears as outsourcing a few decades ago.
Not just that, it's a half-hour offset from pretty much the rest of the world! I wonder which genius thought of that one.
It did cause problems with the early Bell Labs Unix releases, which didn't contemplate that a time zone might not be a whole number of hours away from Greenwich.
> they simply wake up/go to bed later on the clock, but not with regard to the sun.
This defeats the purpose of having time zones at all. People generally prefer the sun near overhead at noon; otherwise we would all just set our clocks to UTC no matter where we are. It would certainly make programmers' lives easier ;-)
The main advantage of having single timezone is that we can coordinate time related info(eg: train timings) unambiguously throughout the country.
The problem is they really are speaking perfectly legal English, with grammar better than mine, but it’s a different dialect. Not true of ESL Indians.
Prepone
Do the needful
Kindly
You are now well-versed.
I'm joking though. That would be a fun class to take!
Native English speakers make up 0.02% of India's population. I've worked in tech for a decade and have met exactly zero native English speakers in India. I honestly have no idea what you're talking about.
Of all European countries, these are good bets for recruiting:
Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine
Ukraine is (and still will be) an excellent outsourcing opportunity. Personally, I find it very easy to understand Slavic-speaking English as a secondary language speakers.
In general, there can be word use, humor, and cultural media reference difficulties, so it's important to always use very plain and direct language to avoid misunderstandings. To further comprehension and understanding, it's beneficial to say the same thing again in different words and ask for their understanding of details in yet other words.
PS: Early/mid 2022, I bought items on Etsy postmarked from Kyiv. Somehow, sellers forwarded parcels to Germany and Turkey and then to the US between shellings, missile attacks, and columns of Russian armor advancing.
According to levels they're probably making 15-20% the equivalent salary of github employees with similar YoE in the U.S. But you're right, eastern europeans probably have similar wages.
I doubt they axed an entire team for monetary reasons alone. They could have axed 1/10th the employees in the bay area and probably covered the entire India roster (financial cost wise).
We just haven’t done a great job of building awareness for all of our different locations, but you can find them on our location directory here: https://levels.fyi/locations
Similar to that in finance, where big corporations have the luxury to establish entities in tax heavens and avoid paying large sums while still operating just fine
Yes, this is the point I always want to emphasize. Policies like this always favor those already inside (the existing workers being protected by tough-to-fire laws) at the expense of those looking inside from the outside (the newly-grads and members of marginalized groups trying to get started). I similarly disfavor minimum wage laws.
I am trying to understand this more. Why would a minimum wage law be unfriendly to a specific class of workers? Doesn't that just establish a right for the worker and an obligation for the employer to meet.
What about pay transparency rules for job postings (that are mandatory in some jurisdictions)? In principle, I feel they help the job seeker although corporations get away with specifying a wide range. At least, it establishes the start of the salary negotiation.
Transparency rules are fine and don't inhibit employment.
> Some workers aren't worth paying minimum wage
I don't necessarily agree with the statement above. If a worker is not qualified for the job, don't hire them. Just as we would not hire someone who is say at 2x the compensation budget for a role.
I do agree with the issue of what we do as a society with people who don't meet that threshold minimum wage and are unemployed. That number is never going to be zero, but it is not 30-40% either (US context). So, it probably requires targeted policy solutions like unemployment benefits, universal basic income, social safety net etc.,
Your solution seems to be doing away with the minimum wage to provide them employability at some wage level. That is interesting. I feel that has the unintended consequence of suppressing wages for the larger percentage of employable new workforce (recent grads etc.,)
The more interesting follow-on point, however, is that people have to start somewhere, and effects compound over time. Someone fresh out of high school or college is, generally speaking, useless at any given job on day one. Most job training happens on the job, even for people with college degrees. A new employee is a double cost to the employer until they reach proficiency; they have to be paid wages, and they take time away from somebody else who has to train them.
And through that path someone learns not only the job-specific skill, but also the general skill of being a productive member of the workforce: discipline, time management, grit, people skills. Over time this learning compounds, and they move up in income.
The way that a minimum wage that is too high is unfriendly to the already-underserved is precisely because they miss out on that critical experience. Sure, it might seem exploitative at first glance if a local burger joint hires a kid right out of high school and pays them $5 an hour, and doubly so if the kid is from a disadvantaged class. But the fact is that they will learn from this experience (and crucially, more than just about flipping burgers) and level up and move on. The rich kid gets to skip this step and go right into a job that pays $30 an hour, because they have the unpaid internships and the social connections and everything else that makes them more prepared; that is, they have already leveled up to a degree.
Proponents of a higher minimum wage imply a picture where the people getting paid minimum or near-minimum wages are stuck there for life, perhaps for generations. Actual data shows otherwise; only a third of people born to parents in the bottom quintile of incomes remain in that same bottom quintile in their own adulthood. And on the other side, only a third of people born in the top quintile remain there. Under some analyses, the only group that stagnated were the beneficiaries of greatly increased government benefits borne of the Great Society programs in the 60s. Those people were disincentivized from working and therefore never up-skilled.
A higher minimum wage has a similar effect: it will necessarily mean fewer young people join the workforce earlier on in their lives, and again, because their experiences compound, will mean that over their lifetimes they will be worse off.
I have no strong feelings about salary transparency laws, but am generally in favor.
That said, India will only grow in importance, so I wouldn't be surprised if the team was reinstated in a few years
AI isn't reliable. But is your outsourced team any better?
Outsourcing is cheap, but AI is 100 times cheaper.
Communicating with AI, via prompt engineering, is easier than setting up cross-cultural + timezone communications.
India really depends on service outsourcing. So I'm curious regarding how it'll be impacted by AI. That being said, nothing stopping the Indians themselves using the AIs and reinventing their companies.
Might happen soon, might not. AI has so far proven astounding for problems to which solutions are robust to small perturbations -- natural language, visual art -- but code is different.
We agree on that. Breaking the problem into bite sized pieces is the really hard problem. I can't explain my codebase to the AI. I have to figure out what to change myself. If I can offload syntactical stuff to an AI, great, that'll save me 10% of my time. Nothing to sneeze at, but nothing that will make my job disappear either.
I would have seriously thought about it if I were there and part of that team.
I don't know much about how various Zoho products are implemented, but I thought most of their stuff is homegrown.
What's their excuse for layoffs?
When a company is doing well, if it lays off, I think we're looking at a fundamental problem.
I’m finding that there's a lot more focus on timezone quality of life for US centric organizations, and that includes getting rid of their teams in Asia now and avoiding that
Re-Discovering South America over and over again for similar help and cost