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Can confirm. I am brazilian. Did a few onsites this end of year. Guess the only one I passed with flying colors? Uber, Brazil office. TC for mid level around 80k dollars. Now that the real devalued even more, maybe 75-70?

Most of my brazilian friends living abroad also cleared said onsites, absolute majority rejected their offers(because they live elsewhere with a currency that has any sort of value).

As a matter of fact, Uber is struggling to fill their vacancies around Brazil. Everyone that can clear said interview are already in Europe/US. So you're only left off with the people that actually want to be closer to their families.

Small nitpick but using 'said' as a pronoun everywhere makes your writing hard to parse.

Hiring a lot in Poland and from what I know paying peanuts compared to US salaries, but still above the market rate in Europe, mainly because market rate for engineers in EU is nothing to write home about.

It sucks for you guys, but its just the new reality. Engineering is dead end career unless you are top 10%, move on to management, or money doesnt play a role, but at that point you might as well go duck farming or become a carpenter.

It turns out that work-remotely can be done by non-US based workers for a fraction of the cost of US workers.

So those lobbying for work-from-home, well, this is the natural endpoint of that.

They would’ve outsourced regardless of remote or not. It’s all about cost. Employers are hedging after they felt they lost control during the “Great Resignation” and the labor cost pressures they faced from it. Remote also makes it too easy for workers to find other opportunities, versus being restricted to opportunities within a commute distance. Unless it’s offshore remote of course.

This is not without peril due to structural demographics. You can only outsource so much.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/hard-to-find-a-job-... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42361817

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-18/us-faces-... | https://archive.today/Lyr5t

> They would’ve outsourced regardless of remote or not.

Absolutely

> It’s all about cost.

Yes and No...

What is happening now in "tech" has happened before in other industries. Since the internet various service industries have outsourced, outshored, nearshored over and over all together and in different order. I would put immigration or even move to the public cloud in that bag of schemes.

Unless those are very low level tasks the companies doing that don't really save money in the short and long term. This has been proven over and over in the last decades, but rarely admitted publicly.

What companies try to hide by doing that are dysfunctions in management and HR (usually the people who won't get offshored).

So yes it is about cost of mismanagement that need to be hidden with a very short term vision, usually to reassure shareholders.

There is another layer to this that is still very taboo. There is an inability for our societies today to make people work together in a reasonably healthy and stable manner. This is why you will often hear about "toxic workplaces" or "great resignation".

And casting those problems in economic terms to avoid talking about it lead us to bad and costly solutions.

An interesting take. Seen from the viewpoint of the worker I can see why blaming management has appeal.

Of course your argument leads to two conclusions;

A) given how badly these companies are managed, and how it will be cheaper in the long run to make use of local talent, the market must be ready for a new wave of companies that rise up. Certainly (it would seem) the local workers are available, and ready to work. Certainly there are enough ex-workers who well understand what bad management looks like, and won't make the same mistake.

B) since this outsourcing is expensive, in the long run, I expect incumbents to start failing soon. There's no need to make thus behavior illegal, the market will simply correct naturally to the most efficient path.

The natural approach of the American Entrepreneur is to see where things are going wrong, and step into the gap - forging the next success.

Where you see companies failing, I see opportunity.

This is not the viewpoint of the worker. Especially because it kind of put a political frame on it.

I have implemented those cost reduction programs over and over in many industries. I can assure you we always know it is gonna cost more than just doing things right. The problem is there is a lot of bad incentives, people saving their skins and and a whole industry making money out of those cost reduction programs. They are now permanent in many industries and became the standard way to manage those companies.

I would agree with your two conclusions, this is the logical way it "should" go.

Now reality is for most of the big players it probably won't go that way. For example I expect the hyperscalers to go the way telcos went. They have the power (financial, political & co) to freeze their position in the market and they are now a critical part of our infrastructure. But working for them or keeping their stock in the last 20 years was probably a very bad move.

Big multinational companies are creating entire development departments outside of the US. They aren’t hiring one or two contractors. Do you think the US has a monopoly on good developers?

But these are not remote positions

According to Amazon it can't... :-)

My company is hiring in ML, the position is remote, can you send me your resume?

Thanks, I’m actually pretty far in the interview process with a bunch of companies now but would be open to learning more.

My contact info is in my bio.

My good friend is a sr ml research eng looking for remote work also

OK, send them my way.

>Poland

Same here. At my last company, each missed milestone meant "fire an American, hire a Pole."

> was a CTO of a startup

Could it just be, the more senior/executive level you are - the harder it’ll always be to find another comparable job.

The funnel gets smaller the higher up you are.

NYC is a much more attractive location than Warsaw, not just because of the salary, so I fully expect the open roles in NYC to be filled very quickly.

I always wondered why American companies have offices in such unattractive locations. Last time I saw a company whose only European office was in Belgrade. Who are you going to convince to move to Belgrade to work for your company, lol? This is not like the US were all states speak English and have broadly shared cultures.

On a below-average US salary living in Belgrade your quality of life would be equal to a 7-digit salary living in the US. Not to mention that you would be in one of the safest cities in the World for women and children and generally would live better than Seinfeld on Park Ave :)

and of course everyone speaks english…

I'll say this: I once had to talk with a team in Belgrade. I was honestly not looking forward to it due to language barrier and such, but I didn't know anything about Serbia.

I was pleasantly surprised that that team spoke better English than most folks in the US. Every one of them.

If that's any indication of how most of the city speaks, I don't think any English speaker would have a bit of trouble communicating.

As I said in the other comment, I just don't think it would be a good experience when one is a foreigner. Maybe if you consider it as just an adventure. I personally think I would get bored and lonely very fast.

oh man, honestly this can’t be further from the truth, regardless of your age, marital status… belgrade in particular and europe in general would be anything but boring for US folk!

This comment brought to you by the Belgrade Board of Tourism!

As polish immigrant who moved to NYC as a kid and grew up here there's no place I love more than NYC but you're wrong about Warsaw. I've been to most major cities in the US and Europe and the standard of living in Warsaw is better than 95% of them.

I know that Warsaw is a great city, but I don't want to be a foreigner in Poland. I think there's a host of aspects that would impact the standard of living, when one is a foreigner in another country, that you aren't fully considering. NYC is great because it's a city of foreigners. Warsaw isn't.

That’s the point why they are opening offices in Warsaw, they don’t want you to relocate there, they want to hire local engineers willing to work for like quarter of the US salary, and there’s no shortage of people like that there.

I went to Belgrade a few years back over Christmas by myself and had quite a good time.

In particular, the Nikola Tesla Museum, free walking city tour, massages, and some cool bars.

Everything was really inexpensive compared to say Germany, and the women over there... they are stunning!

Of course it'd be different to live over there, but it really wouldn't be the worst place to end up if you were earning a decent salary.

Only obvious downside for me was smoking in restaurants (I can't remember but probably bars as well). Not sure if it's still the same now.

> Last time I saw a company whose only European office was in Belgrade

Obviously this is done to hire local workers. In general, and especially in Europe, most people are not interested in moving away from their home country if they can avoid it, even if it means a vastly reduced earning and career advancement potential. Serbia in particular has lots of engineers with a phenomenal quality to cost ratio.

forget the faang companies - but just your rank and file VC funded startup - series b and up. most software engineering jobs are either in poland, india.

so yeah ya'll folks are not hallucinating - jobs are gone.

e.g https://www.rippling.com/en-GB/careers/open-roles - engineering. majority of non-staff roles in india with staff roles in the US.

I could see outsourcing to Poland end up working out just as great as outsourcing to Ukraine did.

Not saying it will happen tomorrow, but would not surprise me to see Russia go in there after they get a big chunk of Ukraine and slowly gain control of it's government.

Putin would be asking for WW3 if he tried that and it would not end well for him.

A ton of big tech companies opened large offices in Poland in the past few years. It’s starting to look like a pretty major tech hub. If you look at Google or Box job boards most of their open roles in Europe are in Warsaw.

WW3 only happens if NATO isn't bluffing about article 5. Given the lackluster response to Ukraine it doesn't look good for article 5 and Poland, which is why they're buying so many weapons now.

How does NATO response to an invasion on a non-NATO country bears on article 5 exactly?

At this point we all would have much worse things to worry about. Poland is a part of NATO.

A) Trump is president and he has made it clear the US will be taking a backseat on NATO in Europe.

B) Even the polish government thinks this more than possible. They instituted mandatory weapons training for all teenage school kids recently.

I would say it has never been more probable than anytime since the last time Russia invaded Poland in WW2.

These companies outsourcing there have got some serious wishful thinking going on. They are right next door to a madman who uses nuclear material to poison his enemies anywhere in the world.

They brought back the weapons training program they had in communist times which is just weapons assembly and disassembly. They don't even shoot them which seems like it misses the point the firearms.

Poland is a NATO country. Russia won't attack Poland, they only attack weak countries. Even if they take over Ukraine, their next target would be Kazakhstan or Moldova or Georgia.