Once you switch to full remote, why not hire from Central and South America at maybe 1/4 the price of a Californian.
We saw similar between 2005ish-2015ish. Lots of offshoring where you could get whatever you 'wanted' built, but it was exactly what you 'wanted' and not what actually made sense.
By this I am referring to contract houses that weren't quite 'code genies' but still would deliver products that were barely workable upon delivery. More than one shop I worked at over the last decade actually -suffered- from this.
Magically, most orgs who could figure out how to deliver even semi passable/realistic functional requirements could get the same done in house for a LOT less money.
That said, yes a lot of counties can provide very competent software development and houses.. but the communication time gap is often still present.
Another shop I worked at had EU devs that were competent, but that communication gap was still a big hurdle.
It’s just that you’re hiring a million Indian developers for every 1000 UK developers, so is it surprising that the average Indian developer doesn’t seem as good?
A'int gonna end up being authors or technical writers for sure but it doesn't get in the way of actually communicating.
Especially since American developers are unlikely to speak any other language, while their Asian counterparts can communicate extremely well in their primary language and do a more than decent job in communicating in English as well.
For a while. I worked with some excellent remote developers in other countries, but it always felt like a revolving door as the pivoted from one remote job to the next so they could get a $5K increase here and a $5K increase there. Eventually we had applicants demanding salaries equivalent to MCOL United States salaries, so we just went back to hiring local for a lot of the roles. Hiring and managing remote workers comes with a lot of financial and managerial overhead.
Once companies catch on, it's just to easy to go in and snipe entire teams from one company by giving them nominal raises.
Almost no American in the tech industry thinks that, given how many of our co-workers aren't (or at least weren't born as) American.
> But the reality is that most countries have them and they will do the same work for a fraction of the price.
At the high end of the tech labor market, it is actually a world market for talent, meaning the talent goes where they can make the most money, and bargains are hard to find because people are not so immobile (e.g. due to H1Bs).
> Everything is done over the internet these days so it doesn't matter that much where you are located.
This is true, but top talent is still going to demand top dollar, even if you let them live in a LCOL region, since they can just move to a HCOL region otherwise.
And yet nearly every American is vehemently against the H1B visa which is the only way for 99% of non American tech workers to work in the U.S. and not do the same work outside the US.
That is a very broad generalization, considering 27% of Americans are foreign born. Yes, the MAGA crowd is largely against H1Bs (and even here you'll find lots of exceptions), but they didn't win the last election.
> which is the only way for 99% of non American tech workers to work in the U.S. and not do the same work outside the US.
And yet, America has a lot of H1Bs and greencard holders, unlike China or India themselves (I say this having worked on a Z work visa in China for 9 years).
To my knowledge, the main barriers are managing the payroll: how do you deal with each countries' laws and obligations for each of your remote employees ?
The traditional way to do that at scale is to go through a local proxy company that abstracts the complexity and is the legal entity responsible for the workers in that country. Except you have to pay that middle-men, maintain an ongoing relationship, and if for instance a tenth of your engineers are managed by them, their bargaining power will be pretty high and the cost will rise.
If as a company you deal with each individual employee instead, you have to also directly manage all the legal aspects. Hiring freelance workers only can partially alleviate that, but this comes with its own can of worm, and the complexity stays the same in case of conflict (imagine getting sued by the worker in their own country)
In this day and age though, I wonder how much it actually works . For instance if one of your contractor does something completely illegal in your country and you get media backlash for it, you're in a tight position if that thing was perfectly legal on their side, and wasn't covered by the contract as you had your own country's law in mind.
I'm not sure you could push your country's law on them, nor that it would help your situation as your company is still fronting the backlash.
And even in that setup, we all remember Nike and many other apparel makers stuck with the "child worker in a factory" image basically forever. Or Apple being questionned about FoxConn's working conditions, or the environmental impact.
When it comes to PR, pushing the responsibility to the foreign contractor doesn't looks like a good working strategy IMHO.
Does "contractor" mean something different to you than it does to everyone else? This would be like me buying an iPhone and then Apple suing me for not paying proper sick leave entitlements.
I can understand where your misunderstanding comes from, thinking they’re all just businesses providing services to other businesses. But this interpretation is very naive, and the legal reality is massively more complicated than you’re making it sound. Governments really don’t like independent contractors, they’re subject to far more restrictions than ordinary businesses, and companies employing their services are usually exposed to risks that they don’t have when dealing with ordinary businesses.
The nature of the relationship, and the work you are doing determines whether your employer is a regular employer and what taxes they have to pay. In Canada, for example, certain taxes (GST) are applied to the contractor relationship based on whether the product the company sells is available within the country, and the distinction between contractor and employee is much less fuzzy than it is in the US (if you have to ask, the person is almost certainly an employee).
It gets complicated quick
Or more interestingly, I'd assume an independant consulting contract could be void in many legislations if it happens that their work should be reclassified as employment under some specific rules (e.g. you dictate their working hours etc.)
Basically, is the contract valid under the worker's country laws is a question you won't be able to ignore I guess ?
Depending on treaties, not having a formal business entity in a country doesn’t make you immune to their laws and taxes (not a lawyer, but it is totally possible to collect foreign debts in the US for example), if you’re publicly traded, breaking foreign laws intentionally is a BAD idea. On top of all that most companies strive to stay on the right side of the law regardless of the ability to get away with it.
Not an exact parallel, but see the saga of the Huawei exec who was arrested in Canada on behalf of the US for a business deal made by a Chinese company with Iran.
Are you probably going to get away with it? Yes, if you aren’t a very big fish. But what if you don’t.
Because interview process in bigtech has been subverted by people benefiting from it and who are already skilled in it. I bet absolute majority of people that I worked with and considered them very good couldn't solve knapsack problem on whiteboards in 15 minutes, don't know Z algorithm by heart and won't be able to correctly project Amazon leadership principles with (made up bullshit) examples from their previous jobs.
That being said, these companies don't really provide much as far as stable US jobs go so it would be better to encourage entrepreneurial activity for US programmers.
Another word of advice for programmers. Do what you can to own the IP of your work. Whether it's open source or your own proprietary IP. Work for hire where the company owns the IP if your work is a dead end job.