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Comment by benjaminwootton | Hacker News Reader

You have to wonder if remote work is starting to bite developers.

10 year ago I started a business that had hundreds of engineers in London and New York.

I am now starting a new one and this time I am hiring talent from all over the world now that it is more acceptable for us and our clients.

Surely this must be a factor in people in expensive western markets?

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> Surely this must be a factor in people in expensive western markets?

Yea, this was/is my main fear with remote work. It will "even out" the pay ranges across the globe...not perfectly (due to language, timezone, regulatory, and general cultural barriers), but the imbalance will be less severe as western salaries come down and int'l salaries rise from the new demand. I expect this to happen over the course of 5-10 years, not overnight, but seems like the early signs are already there now that Covid is 4 years old.

On the other hand, I read stories online where people claim that it's hard/impossible to get promoted as remote employees. I wonder if these constraints will loosen as well.

Depends on how many non-remote are left. Certainly the locals won't be promoted if they haven't been hired in the first place, because the position was filed by a remote.

I guess we'll see less developers getting promoted in total, with more of the higher rank positions filled from lines that aren't as remote as development.

There will be a lot of churn along the way, companies will all try various things and find strategies that work for them. I just think, on average, salaries for "western" software engineers will stay flat or trend down over the next decade.

Even within the US and maybe western Europe (though that works better from the east coast). If you want to live in San Francisco (or Aspen), good for you. But there's very little reason for me to pay you a premium to do so if I'm a remote company. (There's some. I might not be able to hire people in California otherwise. But my observation is that's actually the unstated process at a lot of companies these days.)

This is what I've been warning people about since I was at a company acquired by private equity. They straight up told us that if a job can be done from home, then it can be done from India. I got my layoff not too long after that.

Not your problem anymore but wonder if that turned out to be true. I have my doubts.

It's still a going business at least, and obviously India is chosen for cost above any other concern. That ethos showed up in a lot of decisions made by the private equity guys, so it's hard to say exactly which change caused the decline. Certainly in some sense the company is a shell of its former self, but maybe it's more profitable than ever, or maybe the PE guys are extracting lots of money from it? I assume they're making money somehow.

> They straight up told us that if a job can be done from home, then it can be done from India.

Company leadership could be done from home during covid, right?

I mean, when the big one came, they were pretty brutal to a few of the C levels too. They got a brief mention on the call at least.

I always assumed that the PE overlords take a dozen or so executives and lock them in a room with half a dozen knives and tell them to figure it out on their own, but it's possible I'm a bit overly cynical and have a vivid imagination.

They get lucrative agreements with big contracting houses to backfill those roles for cheaper than the onshore cost. PE overlords have us running on a fte/contractor ratio mandate. I can only assume it’s due to money and the ability to rapidly reduce headcount on demand.

The counterpoint, of course, was "we have special skills that you can't outsource; we're paid as much as we are because of the value we provide"

It was absolutely maddening to see mass-scale denial in real-time.

I think it is more to do with the massive rise in code academies and bootcamps over the past decade.

There are just a lot of barely skilled people in the industry with minimal passion. Hiring processes haven't caught up yet to filter for quality in this environment.

Last years I worked for a SJ-headquartered public company with spectacular compensation. While I was still there they stopped hiring in CA and the gossip was about TX. But on my team new roles were opened in Europe instead (surprisingly, not Eastern). The layoffs were concentrated in the Bay Area too. I heard that since then they started looking for even cheaper locations.

I have recently seen large American companies where managers/team leads are full-time employees while their teams are mostly contractors from LatAm. And even those managers are not on PST. They advertise "W2 contract-to-hire" roles here in the US though.

This happening was obvious (to me) the minute every engineer started clamoring for remote work.

Compensation packages and hiring processes were traditionally very regional. I remember having a very hard time finding work in a city I wanted to move to because I was not physically there.

Now they are not.

The push for remote work from our own was the second biggest "fuck you; I've got mine; should've been born earlier" moment I've ever seen in tech right behind OpenAI and Microsoft (whose engineers are paid extremely well) touting how well ChatGPT can replace engineers.

Companies have tried and failed to outsource their employees for more than 10 years.

It shouldn’t be different now. They reduce WFH to manage employees better (stupid but that’s what they think), but WFH is still accepted where I live (France, up to 3 days a week).

It's not just the price I think. Also dwindling acceptance of less than 100% skill match due to how remote makes the candidate pool much larger. Expect even more "openings" that aren't really open unless that one imaginary prince in shining armor shows up.

This is something I have been wondering about a lot. How can companies pay so much for engineers i Silicon Valley when you get the same level of engineers in Europe for 1/3 the price. And provable 1/6 of you look more to the east or asia.

Sure, there might be some kind of network knowledge going on in Silicon Valley, but now with work from home, that's pretty much fading away.

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