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Comment by billy99k | Hacker News Reader

They have already started outsourcing to Canada at 60% of the cost.

One of my clients outsources all large projects to a company in Ukraine (The HQ is there, but the developers are in other parts of Europe). The time zone isn't too bad, their English/communication is nearly perfect, and it's at a fraction of the cost here in the US.

A large year-long project that I was the tech lead on that involved moving our legacy systems to a brand-new system (this includes all of the coding, etc) cost the company around $90,000. There were 10 devs on staff.

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So you want us to believe that the same managers who could not manage remote US employees and started crying for return to office will suddenly be able to run a tight ship with overseas freelancers?

Boy, they are in for a treat.

I think you underestimate just how good overseas talent is now…

The problem isn't how good overseas talent is (I worked with Avanade developers from Poland and they are excellent, need zero ramp up time) but rather is our own management good enough to work with them if management can't even work with remote people in the same time zone.

Remember, Europe culture is very different. There are laws there and you can't "manage by crisis" when your team has multiple people in Europe. Basically, this forces management to actually do its job instead of relying on Venkat (who is on an H1B visa and can't fight back) to be unofficially on call 24/7.

> A large year-long project that I was the tech lead on that involved moving our legacy systems to a brand-new system (this includes all of the coding, etc) cost the company around $90,000. There were 10 devs on staff.

Sounds like complete BS. Even just taking in salaries, that's $9K/year/dev - even living in Ukraine you would make more than that. If you've moved out of the country and are in Poland for example, that's not a livable wage.

They were probably not full time on that project. Since it's a contracting company, contractors can be assigned to many projects.

I Oversee the project and can see all invoices from the contracting company. Even so, This is the cost of one developer in the US, which would never be able to complete this project in a year.

9k a year in Ukraine is entirely possible for dev work. Especially if you are outside the main city. Devs in Ukraine often juggle multiple projects. It’s not uncommon to work 2-3 projects at a time.

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