Everyone has this wrong. They are replacing US jobs with jobs in Poland. I experienced this first hand.
In Cybersecurity and DevTooling we've moved the entire Engineering and Product function to Israel, India, and Eastern Europe (Czechia, Poland, Romania).
We'll still fund founders in the US, but they still end up hiring in those countries instead because you can pay "Austin in 2010" salaries and get top tier talent.
20 years ago, P/L responsibility would remain in the US, but in the current iteration, even P/L stakeholders are now abroad.
VPs have been explicit, in writing, that we are shifting heads to lower cost geos.
Hiring has been largely halted in the US for the bulk of non-business-critical roles to shift PCNs overseas, and there have been multiple waves of US focused layoffs to motivate this further.
While offshoring has been a topic for the last 20+ years of my career, this time, since 2022 or so, feels different even vs. prior recessions, and I expect we'll see continuing erosion in the quality of engineering positions and careers.
Additionally, can obviously only speak for myself but I've tended to see more hiring in countries without the strong european worker protections (eastern Europe, Israel, india, asia)
I feel bad in a way, considering that I probably stole some other engineer's job simply because I am cheaper.
It's a moral problem I hadn't(or rather, didn't want to) consider before reading this comment thread.
I love the people I work with(both overseas and local), but comments like these make me wonder if I've made the wrong choice.
I don't begrudge a romanian SWE any more than a US one, we're all just trying to get by here, and the fact that global megacorps can do currency/economy arbitrage that they prevent workers from benefiting from while ensuring they have every advantage is by and large not your fault.
It should have been for us as engineers to organize, unionize, or legislate protections if we didn't want this to happen, and despite advocating this to my peers during the boom years, I was constantly rebuffed.
Obviously I put more on the massive companies with the power to dictate global laws and trade practices gleefully jumping at this, but between that and the responsibility I put on my peers/myself to fight against that, I certainly don't put blame on you.
The only difference is that you have zero control over the weather and very nearly zero control over corporate hiring decisions.
> I love the people I work with(both overseas and local), but comments like these make me wonder if I've made the wrong choice
It's out of your control as an IC. That said, do whatever you can to prepare for the worst.
Your a competent engineer, just like anyone else in any other country.
A lot of mid-level management on visas were laid off during 2020-21 during the depth of COVID, and this had to return.
Now, the SVP for a core Engineering Org or your PM Director owning an entire BU might be in Bangalore, Tel Aviv, or Cluj.
If ICs to mid/upper level leadership are in the foreign office, it doesn't make as much sense to keep hiring domestically for Product or Engineering roles.
You see, it’s of critical importance that Santa Clara valley retain the character of a quaint mid 1960s town of single level shops and tract houses. Where jimmy can ride his Big Wheel in the Cul De Sac.
Not true at all. We are in the same regime as the pre 2008 rate response. We are below the late 90s boom times.
So you’d need some other explanation other than bare rates.
But back then, the Engineering Manager or Product Manager would remain in the US.
Now even Engineering and Product leadership is being outsourced as well, which makes it easier to enforce standards.
But after the COVID layoffs happened, impacted H1B, EB1/2, and O1 visa holders returned to their home countries, and then got rehired by the same employers but for $60k-130k TC (depending on country).
A lot of mid-late career product and engineering leadership was laid of in 2020-21, and those guys have now founded the new generation of foreign offices.
The US is expensive, so offshore. Offshore projects are more expensive because they never work, so come back to the US.
I've lived it twice now. We’re in the middle of my third cycle.
In 2006 the Indians would randomly cut out, couldn't be on video (phone only) and had major language barriers, and they would join in their evening.
Now in 2024 you're on their schedule. Believe me, those people are not staying up late for your 3pm call. Wake up at 5am every day to keep your job, you have 3-4 hours to work with them.
The churn is real and any offshoring hotbed ends up with a lot of competing between big companies for talent which then drives the prices up and motivates people to jump companies more.
I've been employing eastern European IT folks since the early 00's as I've founded/worked for remote only companies since the late 90's. We were ahead of the game here, and anyone we hired was not treated like a sweatshop worker. They were hired and promoted like any hire we made in the US and were simply called an employee. The talent level was same or better than the US talent level for 1/10th of the cost, especially at the mid-tier/career level.
The largest issue was timezones, but if you needed to staff a 24x7 highly skilled ops team - this was one effective way to get a great head start doing so. Plus it was relatively easy getting folks to work odd hours if you were paying double local salaries.
Since the pandemic things have entirely shifted. It used to be large companies/enterprises would offshore to sweatshop style outsourcing companies. They had a hard time competing with us since the work and responsibility simply did not attract the best candidates. We could hire directly out of local university pipelines and be extremely picky in only taking the top 1% of candidates due to this. After the pandemic this totally changed to these large companies now competing on salary at levels we no longer found competitive. We simply no longer enjoy the strategic advantage of having an untapped low-cost highly skilled labor pool in these areas any longer. Large companies have more or less adopted our model.
It's now not uncommon to have entire teams headed up by a highly competent senior VP or C level local leader who reports directly to US upper level management. They are included in all business decisions as anyone in the US would be at their level, and performance is similar to any US team.
I have always (and even written a few times on HN about the subject) thought highly compensated US engineers were being exceedingly short-sighted in their demands for WFO since this was always going to be the outcome in the end. Once you can hire someone in the midwest US, it's not really a huge leap to realizing you can do the same 2500 miles away in a low cost country. There are still tons of labor arbitrage opportunities left in the world and the story that there is no local technical talent in these places is utterly false. It's always been a management problem.
Over time it will even out - and it has quite a bit. Salaries are now maybe 1/3 to 1/2 US salaries at the same talent level, so it still has a long way to go in my opinion. You are only seeing the start of many companies building up long-term strategic plans in these regions - these things take years to decades to be fully realized.
Most US WFH engineers will be competing on salary/skillsets in a world market within their lifetimes regardless of cost of living differences. The writing is on the wall, and I personally believe the die has been cast at this point.
Like, only now?! This had been the case my entire career to the point I got fed up of rat race to the delight of foreign superior, became cynical and unemployable. It's not ey-ay, nor outsourcing, it's the economay. We have a crisis, sir.
Small org, no low-performers, no layoffs. Same result as everywhere else.
This was totally predictable. If your job can be shipped to Kansas from SV because it is cheaper, it won't be too long before it is shipped to Canada which cheaper than Kansas and then to Colombia.
But HN is still embracing remote work. I hope those in the US/Western Europe wake up soon otherwise all the coding jobs will go the way of manufacturing jobs very soon - either done by robots or done by cheaper labor in Asia or Africa or LatAm.
Putin is covertly manipulating Poland with the same games as he did with Ukraine. And now it appears increasingly likely he has the right guy in the white house to take what he wants.
Great place for talent, pretty horrible for salaries and its going to get worse (from employer's perspective just to be clear, all the power to you guys there... I've lived 5 years in that city and if you are into European cities and city life in general and don't mind having mountains far this one is nice).