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Comment by CSMastermind | Hacker News Reader

There are some obvious things missing from here.

I believe the prevailing wisdom is that tech hiring slowed because interest rates rose.

Because software scales so well, it benefits from speculative effort more than other business types. We see this in venture capital, where they only need 1 out of 100 bets to hit in order to make their money. Large tech companies do something similar internally. They may fund the development of 100 products or features, knowing they only need one of them to hit big in order to fund the company going forward.

When money was essentially free to borrow, it made all the sense in the world to make a large number of bets because the odds were on your side that at least one of them would pay off. Now, however, each bet comes with a real opportunity cost, so companies are making fewer speculative bets and thus need fewer people.

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The other thing he doesn't talk about is the rise of remote work and the downward pressure that it puts on wages. I know that many companies are forcing employees to return to the office, but I'd speculate that the number of remote workers has risen significantly. And that opens up the labor market pretty significantly.

I'll tell you that I'm getting overseas talent for roles where 10 years ago I would have hired entry level talent in the US. But since my company is fully remote and distributed, the downside to hiring in LatAm and Eastern Europe has been significantly reduced.

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>I'll tell you that I'm getting overseas talent for roles where 10 years ago I would have hired entry level talent in the US

the US is going to once again cripple one of their critical industries for short term gains, what happens when your senior engineers retire and there are no replacements prepared because it's more efficient to hire foreign senior engineers rather than onboarding and training a college grad? Even before AI improvements and Covid increasing remote work, the bar for hiring entry engineers was absurd and most startups only wanted seniors

I can't blame companies for doing this on the micro level because it makes sense, but macro level the US government needs to take action and treat hiring remote similarly to bringing in a visa worker or add a form of tariff like you would for manufactured products. Government's job is to reign in market forces that are net bad for the country due to unaccounted externalities

Or just let/require them to immigrate here, and get the best of both worlds.

Not many tech people wants to immigrate to USA. With 100k annual salary one can live as a king in LATAM or eastern Europe.

Overall from my point of view life in Europe is much better than in US.

There is objective data to either support or refute this claim. Look at immigration flows from LATAM the the US and compare it with the reverse. Then do the same with eastern Europe.

And then look at the millions of devs is LATAM who never went to USA or emigrated to the EU.

Exactly. Look at the net flows in and out of each location!

The best of both worlds is living in western europe on a US-level salary

Why western europe and not, say, eastern europe or latin america where cost of living is cheaper?

Because Western Europe is, generally, not as shitty as Eastern Europe or Latin America.

There is some tongue and cheek to that comment, but not much. You generally don't hear about waves of people wanting to emigrate from France or Austria to Poland or Latvia.

as opposed to all polish and latvian people lining up at Austrain and French border… :)

Given the Schengen area, I'm not sure those four countries make for a good example of anybody waiting at borders in either direction.

Not sure if your comment was meant to be sarcastic, but basically, yes, ever since the EU instituted freedom of labor movement, and Eastern countries joined the EU, there have been overall huge amounts of labor migration from Eastern to Western bloc countries.

> Because Western Europe is, generally, not as shitty as Eastern Europe or Latin America.

> There is some tongue and cheek to that comment, but not much. You generally don't hear about waves of people wanting to emigrate from France or Austria to Poland or Latvia.

Latvian here.

Life is reasonably affordable, most of the services you'd expect are available in the capital or most cities. Internet is pretty good (I pay 15 EUR for 200 Mbps up and down, could get up to 1000 Mbps for twice that, though cheaper with some providers), food is okay, rent isn't too bad in most places, went through university (both Bachelor's and Master's degrees) with no debt, healthcare is pretty good (especially with insurance), salaries kind of suck though across the board. Public transportation is pretty good, both between cities and within the limits of a city, I really don't need a car.

People can be a bit colder, not really that American small talk, but are nice when you get to know them. Except for some kind of harmful cultural stuff (alcoholism, machismo, LOTS of xenophobia but perhaps due to the country's past, some homophobia/transphobia/etc., people being selfish sometimes), also can't really read news site comments here, most are very toxic, like you wouldn't believe.

The weather tends to be okay in the summer, but sucks pretty badly in the winter/autumn and sometimes spring. Cold, windy, lots of overcast clouds, overall a very depressing mood, sort of. Nature is pretty though, especially if you go on a boating trip down the rivers.

I reckon that other parts of Europe are probably better in many respects, but as with most places, there are positives and negatives.

If you'd gently direct your eyes to Ukraine, you'll realize why Eastern Europe isn't exactly prime location material for a lot of folks right now.

Meso/South America has a stability problem as well. Unless you pick Urugay, I guess, but being surrounded by large countries with both problems and guns is never a fun exercise.

The quality of life is Eastern Europe (and some countries) in North of Europe is great (and even greater than France and many places), but the risk of war spreading among these European countries is a real issue :/

Oh yeah, QoL is pretty decent. The economy for most of Eastern Europe is great as well. It's a geopolitical question more than anything else right now. (Not that Western Europe is much better there, but the time scale for potential conflict is currently a bit longer)

You get taxed ridiculously but can still afford private healthcare and air conditioning!

The tax really isnt all that different vs california. They just dont spend as much money on the military so go figure they can give their residents healthcare.

Damn bro, sounds like Europe has money to spare then. Guess the U.S should cut all spending in the area so Europeans can step up for themselves. I'd love to see the EU take the bill for policing their own back yard or trade routes.

Just do it already:

    the U.S. has about 750 military bases across 80 countries in the world and has deployed 173,000 troops in 159 different countries

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/10/infographic-us-mili...

there's no need to pretend the U.S. is doing it for the good of others.

I'd love to. The EU is free-riding on U.S's protection. At this point I don't care if Moscow is rolling tanks through Berlin. I would much rather be on good terms with Russia than prop up the rapidly declining EU while they act smug about their healthcare.

This is a regrettably shortsighted and myopic view of Russia and the EU.

All of the problems people commonly complain about with regard to America vs Europe generally disappear when you're rich enough.

The traffic doesn't.

> “treat hiring remote similarly to bringing in a visa worker or add a form of tariff like you would for manufactured products”

How would this work in practice? Visas and tariffs are enforced at the borders.

Where is the checkpoint for taxing foreign remote employees? Would Congress require Slack and GitHub to scan for evidence of work being performed by remote employees?

If you just make a law but have no enforcement mechanism, people will find workarounds because they only have to be justified internally.

>Where is the checkpoint for taxing foreign remote employees?

company payroll/tax reporting I'd assume. If payments are going to a worker in a foreign country, throw an additional tax on it to make it so there's no cost savings compared to hiring locally. That way the only reason to do it would be because you couldn't find the talent locally

That would be quite the tax. Developers in Europe and Asia make a LOT less than the US.

that's kind of the point, you want to eliminate companies just doing labor cost arbitrage rather than hiring globally because they actually need a unique talent they can't find in the US. If that's the case, they will happily pay the premium because that person still provides ROI even at US pay rates. That's supposed to be how H1B visas work as well

What's to stop Apple, for example, from setting up companies all over the world that employ their people and own their IP local to the employees? Then Apple US buys / licenses products for US distribution from those companies.

Massive companies have far more incentive to "engineer" their way around such laws than lawmakers have to find something without loopholes. Especially given how lobbying works in the US.

To "own" those companies Apple has to participate in trade agreements between both countries respective legal systems, and also know those agreements mean something.

If your foreign subsidiary is owned by citizens of the country it's in, then how exactly do "you" own it if your claim to ownership doesn't in fact depend on agreements between the respective governments?

The foreign employees are often employees of a foreign company, because it's more convenient that way. It's difficult to do business in a country if nobody around you understands the legal status of your company. That foreign company could be owned by the same holding company as the American company, or it could be technically independent. And if you impose tariffs on buying services from foreign companies, other countries will reciprocate, which will hit US tech companies hard.

Wow, you are right that we are crippling a industry with short term goals, but is the other way around.

We should let them come work here. Each engineer carries a wealth of knowledge, enthusiasm and demand for other services that is very very valuable for the country.

We are all better off if we let every engineer that wants to come and work in the states.

Imposing tariffs on remote work would just incentivize outward migration of companies.

Don't make companies choose either the US or the world, instead make the US the obvious choice.

Have you worked closely with a remote work force from another country? I know a couple of dozen developers in Argentina who trivially rival any American counterpart and they wouldn't move here if we paid them to. Not everyone dreams of migrating to the USA.

I'm sure there's lots of people who wouldn't move to the States. But it's completely untrue to think that more people wouldn't move if given a path, or even if given an easier path.

I agree we seem intent on crippling ourselves, but the inverse move would likely be better, which is give tax credits for hiring US citizens on US soil that offset any savings they'd get by hiring out of the US.

If you run the numbers, you can adjust individual income tax upward marginally across brackets to account for shortfalls, and it will be far less complicated to implement and enforce.

This gives an incentive to keep the dollars domestic vs abroad.

You may even want to give some additional tax incentives for companies that close their foreign offices to re-open them in the US. This would be similar to a scheme that helped with bringing some manufacturing back from overseas

> what happens when your senior engineers retire and there are no replacements prepared because it's more efficient to hire foreign senior engineers rather than onboarding and training a college grad

This assumes that the overseas engineers aren’t senior or reliable? I (in the US) work with a lot of talented and dedicated overseas folks who keep me on my toes. Some of them are founding or staff level engineers of our SF-based startup.

Most lived experiences with off-shore talent are due to labor costs. There are great offshore engineers but many work for companies who aren't hiring at the top end of the local market: they're hiring off-shore to save. You get what you pay for. And that leads to impressions, even if incorrect ones.

"You get what you pay for" is fair, but its also worth pointing out that in some places "money goes further".

In my city, I can go out, eat at a steakhouse, 3 courses, with wine, 2 people, and the total bill is $30-$40 total, not each). Nice sit down restaurant, good food, linen napkins.

Consequently highly skilled, senior engineers can be paid < $100k and still live like a king. If the exact same person lived in the US, or worse in an expensive part of the US, you'd pay more, probably 5 times more.

Once you embrace remote work (WFH) you quickly discover this very real geographical swing in value-of-money.

Of course -most- remote workers are crap. Most local workers are crap too. The remote-hiring problem is as hard as the local-hiring problem, probably harder. But the cost-savings are immense, and the long-term PR is significant. (Yeah, we're laying off 10% of support, but their all foreigners - kinda skips over the point that they're -all- foreigners to begin with)

You get what you okay for, but that bag of silver you have turns into a bag of gold elsewhere.

> the US is going to once again cripple one of their critical industries for short term gains, what happens when your senior engineers retire and there are no replacements prepared because it's more efficient to hire foreign senior engineers rather than onboarding and training a college grad? Even before AI improvements and Covid increasing remote work, the bar for hiring entry engineers was absurd and most startups only wanted seniors

Presumably you hire more senior engineers from overseas? What, do you think American senior engineers are inherently better somehow?

And then they leave and form better companies, because they understand how things work, and then US politicians are sad because their critical industries are gone.

>And then they leave and form better companies

As opposed to US employees - who are well known among the most loyal employees in the world?

This is a bad-faith response.

They'll just open foreign subsidiaries to hire the devs, and the US company will pay it "license fees". If market forces are net bad for the country, country must improve its game and become more competitive.

> The other thing he doesn't talk about is the rise of remote work and the downward pressure that it puts on wages

This doesn't get nearly talked about as much and I feel the audience who is the loudest favoring remote work has more to benefit than just a reduced or eliminated commute. Rather, this puts people into job market's they never would have had a chance to be in. As companies leases run out on their offices they'll switch tune from demanding RTO to instead performing layoffs in higher salary & COL areas to drive down wages further. The "outsourcing scare" of the early 2000s was overblown. It will be for real this time.

Lots of companies outside of tech need tech products. The best way to build the right things for customers is to get to know their customers and their business, from engineers to whoever. For one, that’s really hard to do through a laptop screen. Probably more important is it is much easier for person in country/culture X to familiarize themselves with a business and its customers in country/culture X over Y.

100% agree. But I suspect a lot of CEOs and their shareholders don't.

It's already happening. Tech companies are laying off U.S talent, but expanding in low cost places like Poland and Japan(surprisingly). I suspect part of this is naive Americans, but I think there's also a psyop from these low col areas to normalize remote work. This WFH craze is going to accelerate America's decline as we enter peak abstract society and workers just become an email and slack name, easily replaced by one of a million applicants from around the globe. We need to start having honest conversations about how to handle our decline gracefully so that the drops in the standard of living won't be too brutal.

I will second this. I work for an American company that now routinely outsources to Eastern Europe. Wages are 1/3, most speak English fluently, and the time zone differences aren't really that big of an issue.

It's much different than my experiences outsourcing to Asia around a decade ago. Many pushed for remote work, and the consequence might just be that they are out of a job.

Yes. Step 1 of remote is “are you really better than someone in Indiana with an $800 mortgage payment?” Step 2 is “And are you really better than the European Phd at half that cost?”

My Indiana mortgage payment is $500, thank you very much.

Haha I had one around there too. Indiana life is good life.

Unless you need an abortion.

Step 3 is “European PHD, if you’re really so good why are you half the cost?”

Step 4 is “European PHD is not as good as we thought, we need to start over."

And the answer being "the limited number of local companies paying high wages and the limited number of American companies willing to hire someone in Eastern Europe reducing my leverage."

because in Europe his local salary is at a tenth of the US offered. knowing that, you can say his actually the five times premium.

For a similar reason why a person pressing a button to pour coffee in Starbucks on Manhattan gets 10x more than a person pressing a button to pour coffee in Starbucks in São Paulo.

With so much wealth in America, do you really think life is going to be better for you when you're competing against everyone in the world? Sure, I bet the people in Indiana, or India are happy, but your SF salary is going to be demolished, and your local community is going to death spiral as to the wealth evaporates.

Not really. Employers that know what they’re buying will spend the money.

I recently was told to discuss things with a team in Serbia. Knowing not enough about the world, I expected it to be painful. I was blown away that they spoke English more properly and more clearly than a good portion of Americans even. And it felt more natural, not like the Britishesque English you tend to hear from India.

If it weren't for the time zone, I'd have really questioned my near term job prospects.

Your first point hits it exactly.

Let's say that it's year X and you have two choices: either you bet that the future will be bleak, and cut cost and hunker down, or you bet that the future will be bright and make big investments.

If X is 2022, the first bet will be right, while the second will lead to bloat and excess. But if X is 2014, the second bet will be right and the company will gain market share, while the first bet might make you go out of business.

So big tech companies weren't so irrational to make those big bets to begin with, and they simply overcorrected the other way around afterwards.

Now, as an employee in one of these I still think this is shortsighted and will damage them long term. But the stock market keeps rewarding these companies handsomely, so what do I know?

The thing I am most excited about is the diaspora of talent from the big tech companies. I'm hoping the talent vacuum slows down and we can infuse all those extra minds into more startups, more innovation, more value growth on mid-sized companies.

I'm thinking optimistically about this as well, however, it's also true that someone who does well in a large corporate environment and who only knows large corporate operating procedures could struggle to adapt to the needs of startup in a timely manner. A Google or Meta staff-level engineer is a pretty useless skillset I'd say for a company with only a few people. Plus, those folks likely also have the personal networks and charisma to bounce to another high paying position elsewhere that needs those skills and is willing to continue paying for them.

Though, I am hearing of a few who struggled to find a comparable job with comparable benefits ended up starting something while they update their skills. I guess the question is, do they have the network and reach to turn it into a business?! Having serious downtime to decompress is a major catalyst for any of us drained of our creativity. So, at the very least, once VC money starts flowing again, and that VC money is not just obsessed with chasing LLM + X idea, then we might see this new wave of startups.

As a software engineer over the past 10 years, this environment has been horrible. What happened is that it has been very difficult to find good projects to work on which were not bullshit; I.e. doomed from the start.

Finding that good 1% of companies has been like finding a needle in a haystack, especially as an outsider where you don't even know what the needle looks like.

Also, tech recruitment has been broken since the beginning. It has been based almost entirely on resume buzzwords (in the pre-selection phase) and one's ability to solve puzzles quickly within a constrained time frame (for the selection phase). Neither of these things are relevant to the job of software engineering; what's relevant is solving problems in an optimal way. HR who worked for big tech could have put focus on engineers' track record on past projects instead of ignoring it completely. Also, in latter years, DEI quotas further distorted the already COMPLETELY BROKEN recruitment process. Like rubbing salt into a gaping, infected wound.

I'm looking forward to high interest environment. I hope there is a huge crash and that most tech companies go bankrupt so that the industry can finally make room for people who know what they're doing.

Just look at what's happening in society and tell me that tech has been successful. Only innovation we got are LLMs, but wait to see how they're going to be applied to industry... If we keep going down the current path, it's not going to be good.

The tech industry over the past 10 years has felt like a show, completely detached from fundamentals. I was hoping that I would be given the chance to compete on a level playing field. It didn't happen since I started my career.

Every playing field in the tech sector has been rigged and distorted by private equity, national governments, foreign governments, intelligence agencies, big corporations, startup incubators, the media/social media, law firms... Absolute psyop from every side. Every well-connected corrupt midwit and dimwit benefited; everyone except skilled creators.

The idea that a crash would benefit talented people more than the bulshitters is not really all that likely in my opinion... More likely that the chosen few get put on life support through government contracts or entrenched work, and innovation scales back in total.

I almost expect a higher degree of bullshit to be honest; the cost of a startup will be higher, so the "honest" capitalistic speculation will be reduced, but there will still be plenty of money for DEI and CCP projects.

I can see how that might be true in terms of jobs but I suspect a crash might still open up opportunities on the business side as a bootstrapped entrepreneur.

The problem I've been having is that it's been difficult to find anyone to try my SaaS product because it appeared as though everyone was hooked to easy money in their big corporate jobs and nobody wanted to lift a finger to try anything even slightly risky. I couldn't even find non-tech marketing people to join my startup. I couldn't find other startups willing to do any partnership.

After tech layoffs, I noticed an improvement already; now people are responding to my messages, I'm seeing more small startups in my area and they're open to discussions about partnerships. Very big shift already. I think if big tech collapsed, people would just snap out of their trance and be forced to find more creative ways to earn money which involve some risk.

The problem we have now is that big corporations have made it possible for many people to earn good money while taking on very little risk. Such environment makes everyone extremely risk averse. They don't even want to take the risk of rubbing their employer the wrong way by doing something on the side.

Im guessing my experience is very different; I work more in robotics than pure software, and this is an industry where many of the problems are investment intensive...

I wouldn't call it a crash in this field, but there is definitely a trend away from ambitious attempts. Its not really a field where you can take your savings at make a go for a year or two, capital is required, and capital is more hesitant at the moment.

I am curious about your product, to me SaaS startups aiming to replace an existing always had the problem where the risk to your client was immense compared to the value you offer. For example even if your service is a hundredth the cost of the entrenched it might not be worth it, because its a saving on a small line item against what could be the entire turnover of a business.

I fully agree.

Low interest rates mean companies/capital-providers look to speculative places (like new software products) to hit their growth numbers.

Higher interest rates mean companies/capital-providers return to known/well-understood places to hit their growth numbers.

I interpret the reasons in the article as well downstream from these kinds of investment decisions.

Have a slightly different view. In times of high interest rates, you are rewarded for profitability, not for growth. When interest rates are low, your company needs to grow or it will be outgrown by its competitors and becomes a takeover target. With high interest rates unprofitable companies (which is a side effect of a growth strategy) slowly bleed to death and become takeover targets by themselves.

Yes, thank you for distinguishing between profitability and growth.

Hiring overseas erodes America's talent pool. Ever wonder why no one knows how to make anything here? Our countries talent is being gutted by the entire world. Our desire is to become professional consumers what a joke

This feels like an emotional take. There are lots of people in the USA who are great craftspeople…but our economy has moved more towards computer technology specialization, because that is where a lot of the money. I’m sorry, but making widgets as a source of GDP is just a phase of most economies, it doesn’t make sense to pay someone here 1$/widget when you could do it overseas for 5c/widget.

I don’t disagree with you that the US seems to be spiraling on the consumption front, and a lot of this is due to an epidemic of advertising.

You can think whatever you like. Just look around. Observe what people around you know.

"it doesn’t make sense to pay someone here 1$/widget when you could do it overseas for 5c/widget"

Why doesn't it make sense? Because you want more money? What do you think will happen long term to our talent pool?

What I have personally seen, and I can only speak from my own perspective is that more and more people offshore and outsource their work. Someone gets good enough at something, and then they outsource it but not domestically they outsource it out of the country. And now those effects are compounding in a major way. Our culture doesn't value craft and we are continually devaluing it.

I’m perfectly happy taking a free walk in the woods, not being after more money. But apparently you don’t understand economics.

I wasted my time reading your reply. I should outsource my comment reading!

Anyone who has studied economics has to know our current state of knowledge on the subject is a complete farce.

> But since my company is fully remote and distributed, the downside to hiring in LatAm and Eastern Europe has been significantly reduced.

The WFH zealots keep downvoting any comments about this, but the offshoring of tech employment and massive layoffs were the predictable, and predicted, consequences of the massive push for WFH.

Either agglomeration effects exist and people work much better when they were physically collocated, or they don’t exist and companies incorrectly believed their employees worked much better when they were collocated (to the point that most companies were willing to relocate someone from Minnesota to SF and pay them an additional $100k than they would need to otherwise), the net effect is the same.

By insisting on WFH you’ve given companies absolutely no reason to continue paying 5-10x what they could pay the same person if they were living in a low CoL area.

The irony, of course, is that the WFH zealots understood this. Heck, many of them said this was an advantage of WFH as it would bring more jobs to mid tier cities in the U.S. etc.

Of course, being zealots, they wouldn’t take the argument to its logical conclusion, which was why would a company ever move a job from SF to Sioux Falls and shave off 20% when they could move into Buenos Aires and shave off 80-90% of the cost instead.

The icing on the cake, however, is that people outside the US are far more likely to be working from the office and wanting to work from the office. So not only are they cheaper for companies, they also benefit from the real benefits or the perceived benefits of the agglomeration that had companies paying their employees so much more than they needed to in the first place.

> When money was essentially free to borrow, it made all the sense in the world to make a large number of bets because the odds were on your side that at least one of them would pay off. Now, however, each bet comes with a real opportunity cost, so companies are making fewer speculative bets and thus need fewer people.

I disagree with this. Interest rates were very low for a long time. Tech hiring and salaries only boomed because of COVID. Companies needed to adapt or they would not be allowed to function; and these companies needed new software tools to handle it. COVID also encourages quite a few people to retire or move companies. Why work here if you can be in the hospital for another month? That same mentality also contributed to job hopping. Companies over hired just to deal with growing turnover. They said they over hired.

Interest rates do not help, but before generative AI, the best new startups would do is put an app for a traditional service or sell NFTs. It was not real innovation in those low interest times.

This is false the rockstar salaries in software started in the early 2010s with the rise of the worldwide software (SAAS) company many CS jobs started paying more than doctor or EE jobs even though the barriers to entry were lower. This directly coincided with the savings bubble from the first boomers - age 65 - finishing their peak savings years 2010 - 2022. This ZIRP savings bubble isn't coming back!

I've got news for you folks. This gravy train is not coming back ...

I’d also say that there is less speculation since guaranteed investments carry higher payouts tied to interest rates and therefore the risk vs reward calculation swings the other way. If you invest 1 dollar into each of 100 ideas expecting one or two to hit and return double your investment but interest is at 5% it just doesn’t make sense to gamble your investment.

This ^

>I'll tell you that I'm getting overseas talent for roles where 10 years ago I would have hired entry level talent in the US. But since my company is fully remote and distributed, the downside to hiring in LatAm and Eastern Europe has been significantly reduced.

I really don't get the argument that remote work means that it's easier to outsource jobs or hire overseas talent. The fact that you can get overseas talent for a fraction of the cost of hiring domestic talent sounds to me like a vastly more compelling reason to hire overseas or outsource, and yet companies nonetheless hired a lot of US talent despite this fact. Microsoft and Google had the experience and know-how necessary to make a globally distributed workforce work, and yet the headcount at their overseas offices were paltry compared to the number of staff employed at home. Why is that?

How does a change in work culture tip the scales in any meaningful way? Especially compared to that?

Yeah, sure, you hear stories about companies hiring more overseas talent now that remote work has been normalized, but I have a hard time believing that things would be completely different and they'd be a largely US-based shop if it weren't for remote work being a widely accepted thing.

If you aren't convinced by now that this argument is bullshit, take a look at those companies who were fully-remote and distributed waaaaay before it got popular, especially those who have maps of where all their employees are located. One thing you'll note is that, despite being fully remote, most of their workforce is domestic, and a relatively small portion of their workforce lives in countries that have gained notoriety as outsourcing destinations.

Automattic, is a great example of what I'm talking about: https://automattic.com/about/

Just to clarify, I'm not dismissing overseas talent, I'm dismissing the idea of overseas talent being used a bogeyman that might suppress wages and take our jobs. If it were that easy, it would have happened already.

> How does a change in work culture tip the scales in any meaningful way? Especially compared to that?

Two ways:

First, when everyone is remote, it puts everyone on an equal footing. When you have mixed onsite and remote resourcing it's much easier for a divide to creep in.

Second, the technology to support true remote work really accelerated during the pandemic and feels practical in a way that it hadn't before.

Large companies in any industry are generally not trendsetters but laggards because they have so much invested in the systems they already have in place. Moving all of Google or Microsoft remote is a daunting task. Starting a new company fully remote and then growing to Google or Microsoft's scale is much more practical and I think something we'll see over the next 10 to 15 years.

>Large companies in any industry are generally not trendsetters but laggards because they have so much invested in the systems they already have in place. Moving all of Google or Microsoft remote is a daunting task. Starting a new company fully remote and then growing to Google or Microsoft's scale is much more practical and I think something we'll see over the next 10 to 15 years.

Yeah, but Google and Microsoft both already have offices in India. They have logistics and infrastructure that have been in place not just for years, but for 2 decades. Nonetheless, latest figures I could pull for Microsoft's total headcount in India was 18,000. Impressive, until you consider that they employ 238,000 employees.

I'm not saying it's curious that they haven't gone fully remote by now. What I'm saying is that it's curious that their talent pool isn't more evenly distributed across the globe despite the fact that they've had a 20 year head start.

Sure, large companies aren't trendsetters, but by this point outsourcing is pretty conservative. Just within tech alone it was something that was talked about in the very early 2000s.

Regarding the two points you bring up, agree in that it makes hiring globally distributed talent easier. It's no longer inconvenient to make special accommodations for an employee in LatAm when you're making the same accommodations as everyone else.

Nonetheless, you still have companies that were fully-distributed and fully-remote well before it became trendy. They made the same special accommodations for everyone. The technology available at the time was already good enough to allow them to hire talent from anywhere across the globe. Even so in many cases it's the exception rather than the rule that their employees live in a low CoL country rather than a high one. Most of the employees tend to work either in the US or Europe. Take any prominent company that's been remote since the early 2010s, look at their about page, you generally see this trend.

> Second, the technology to support true remote work really accelerated during the pandemic and feels practical in a way that it hadn't before.

I've been working remote for the better part of 14 years and I completely disagree.

Slack existed before the pandemic, Jira existed before the pandemic, video calls existed before Zoom.

What tech are you referring to?

Which countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America do you find most of your talent?

Not parent, but I’ve hired and worked with a lot of great folks from Argentina, Romania, and Ukraine.

Other countries from which I’ve hired fewer, but generally solid, folks are Spain, Poland, Columbia, and Costa Rica.

Usually as contractors. Full-time employment laws in other countries are very, very different from the US.

Other than cheaper rates/salaries, doesn hiring overseas helps with taxes in some way (vs hiring domestically)

Hiring folks on contract was less expensive due to the lack of US domestic taxes (e.g. social security).

With Section 174 changes, though, that's not the case anymore, and I've spent a lot of time understanding that (because of the 15 year amortization). I won't get on my soapbox about Section 174 stuff and derail this thread. Check it out, though!

edit: missing content/context

Gotcha. Is that making you lean towards hiring domestically now instead of overseas, or is the cheaper rates still worth it at the end of the day?

I haven't read up too much about 174. Are you suggesting contractor pay can't be written off anymore as well, and thus is less attractive, even at a lower dollar/hour cost, than hiring domestically?

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/ is a good read on Section 174, for those who might be curious.

Colombia*

Right now I have team members from Ukraine, Croatia, Montenegro, and Romania in Eastern Europe as well as Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico in LatAm.

Some countries have more stable talent pools than others - Ukrainian engineers tend to be notably high quality while Mexico can be very hit or miss.

It may sound novel and egalitarian to you but the next time there is a layoff you're going to be the most expensive employee at your company...

We hired some great talent from Argentina. Great tech and English skills, and the similar time zone was key.

The downward pressure depends on where you're sitting. Here in Kentucky, being able to pull in a FAANG salary that's based on the cost of labor in Seattle is a huge upswing in salary.

> the rise of remote work and the downward pressure that it puts on wages

I've seen the reverse.

The same position pays easily 20% more than 4 years ago. (Though a lot of that is general inflation.)

I work in the US, but not a large city.

Yes, it might increase for those outside the city, but for those inside, it's overall downward pressure.

The last 4 years were 4, 8, 5, and 1% inflation, respectively.

And a lot of inflation is wages.

So when you talk about upward/downward pressure on wages, you can't discount inflation, because inflation is wages and the product of that upward/downward pressure.

You can talk about real wages.

It wasn't? The majority of that inflation, certainly in the EU, was energy and profit taking in uncompetitive markets, the result of decades of failed anti-trust?

This stuff is researched these days, we don't need to repeat 1930s tropes.

I mean everyone talks about 0% percent interest rates.

Effectively, why didn't businesses just borrow a boat load of cash - any sane person could posit that it wouldn't last forever, after all - and build up hoards of cash independent of revenue for the future, as to deploy it when everything craters, there by making things like hiring and acquisitions cheap?

That seems like it would have been a good use of money, what everyone effectively is saying (talking head media wise) is that businesses were able to get money at "little to no cost". It seems likely then, that borrowing enormous amounts of cash, investing it in relatively safe growth securities, and waiting for your competitors to eventually crater because they are living high on borrowed time would have been a viable strategy for some businesses.

Some definitely did. I distinctly recall my previous employer saying they were doing exactly that 5-6 years ago during an earnings call (keeping a large loan balance because interest rates were low, and they could use the money in the future).

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