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>While mean wages metrics look great, the cost savings are an illusion because we spend twice as much time communicating and tacking back and forth to the final answer across timezones. compensation consultants dont care about that, they care about mean wage metrics

100% this. What you save in dollars is spent in time. Not just more documentation requirements, not just more meetings, not just changing your schedule to work early or late in crunch times, but way more time resolving obvious, easy issues.

> What you save in dollars is spent in time.

If you're on salary, that costs nothing to the business, so they don't care until it starts to impact them...

If you're on salary, that costs nothing to the business, so they don't care until it starts to impact them...

It depends on if you work for a good company or not.

Several times a year I have to make a decision about the direction and handling of projects based on how many hours it will take, divided into my salary.

Salaried workers aren't free labor. Wasting their time means they're not doing something more useful, and likely more profitable, for the company.

It absolutely does cost the business. Your salary is a generally fixed rate, and the time you spend also tends to be fixed.

It’s a zero sum game with diminishing returns.

The more time you spend on nonsense, the less time you spend doing useful things and the more time the company is paying for nonsense.

You're not wrong, but a well run company would have cost targets for a project, and the longer you are paying people (salary or not) to work on something, the more it costs and your staff aren't working on the next thing. So now it's $ plus opportunity cost.

It's not even H1Bs, all of Big Tech is shifting jobs in bulk to their offshore development centers. It may not necessarily be overt layoffs and increased hiring there, but simply through un-backfilled attrition in the US while maintaining headcount overseas. As a sibling comment mentions, this is simply because that is even cheaper than hiring a H1B, and probably has fewer strings attached.

The trick is that they increasingly outsource not just individual projects, but entire business or technical domains. This significantly reduces the communication and collaboration overhead, as each project does not need to be babysat. They typically have trusted, effective, high-agency leadership (often senior folks who have relocated back to their home country) that take broad strategic direction and execute on it locally.

Of course, there is still a lot of cross time-zone collaboration due to technical dependencies across geos, but that is limited due to a strong push to make all infrastructure "self-serve" (microservices yay!)

I think the shift started spiking shortly after the pandemic when companies realized fully remote work can work well, even across timezones. I am not sure what data the execs saw, but they all seemed to decide on this strategy at the same time.

Software Engineers need to get involved politically and demand regulations that systems that are critical for national security be developed by residents of the US on US soil by actual people with the right qualifications.

Qualifications are an interesting one, because they seem to be something that gets very little regard the development space.

Other areas like IT security or systems/network administration have tons of different qualifications/certifications that you can take, aligned to specific roles and career paths. Whether they're actually any good is another question - but at least there is some kind of structure there. And there are some attempts being made to further formalise it, with bodies like the UK Cyber Security Council establishing a professional register and chartership status.

But I don't think I've never met a developer who's talked about any programming-related certifications that they have. I'm sure that there must be some out there, but they don't seem to be widely used or respected.

And I suspect that any attempt to formalise the industry and require people to get certified to specific standards would result in a lot of pushback.

The ones I'm familiar with are mainly administered by corporate platforms like Salesforce, and appear to be mainly a revenue stream for them.

What are the right qualifications? Most military software development work already requires a security clearance and can only be performed on US soil.

Healthcare IT is dominated by India. No skin in the game, no thought for the end customers (patients).

That's not THAT different from a lot of US healthcare...

Can confirm.

At FAANG, it typically works like this.

What's really striking to me is the rate of attrition. Can anyone explain it?

Aren't these good jobs? Aren't there less opportunities for good jobs for them to be able to churn to?

Where are they going? Why do they churn at such high rates?

High paying jobs? yes. Good jobs? no. The organizations are typically dysfunctional and all of the things that the original comment here lead to really poor working environments and burnout.

Poor working environments? You mean the office is sometimes too noisy or too cold or the coffee runs out?

I would describe a poor office environment as an open one. Cubicles are much better, and offices a little better than that.

These are not just unproductive environments, they're unpleasant. Having to be "on" for 8 hours a day because you don't even get a vague idea of privacy is exhausting.

Have you ever worked in a factory or restaurant or construction job site? I understand that some office environments aren't great for knowledge work but complaints about poor working conditions are a bit overblown.

A bit overblown? I literally could not do my work in the working environment I was supposed to (open space) because of the constant noise from coworkers. That was at a time when ANC technology wasn't very good and I left for this and other reasons.

This. I quit a very high-paying job at a very well-known tech company because they shifted to an open office environment. It was not only exceedingly unpleasant, but it eliminated my ability to work.

I find that hard to believe. Some of the mechanical engineers that I know do much of their work out on factory floors that are constantly noisier than any office. And I guarantee that what they're doing is at least as complex and intellectually challenging as anything you've ever done.

I'm all for improved working conditions but some software developers are entirely too precious. What we do isn't special.

You sound exactly like a manager that would put everyone into a open space and then could not understand why the productivity goes down like a rock. Yeah, people told you and you chose to ignore them.

A lot of people substitute their own experiences and reality for that of the people they interact with.

“This coffee isn’t hot to me, so it can’t be hot to you.”

Yes, I've worked in a restaurant. It's a pretty good environment to be a restaurant worker. Probably not a good environment to be programming in.

Why are you gatekeeping what constitutes poor working conditions?

There are people all over the technology sector that suffer from various issues that make the “modern” office an absolutely unproductive, overwhelming shitshow.

You might also be frustrated if you’re asked to meet unreasonable goals in an environment where you can’t get anything done, at a company that doesn’t give you any options or agency over your work space.

It’s not the workplace suffering olympics. We don’t need to figure out whose cornering the market on bad working conditions to acknowledge that that issue spans industries.

True. But it might be worth it for a lot of developers to take less money for a company with real offices or work from home option.

Backbiting, nepotism, self-dealing.

This is every professional job, my friends outside of tech have the same complaints.

The difference is that tech acts like it doesn’t have this issue. Other industries openly acknowledge they practice this and so expectations are set accordingly.

Isn't that a lot better than really poor working environments, burnout, AND low pay?

Are these the only options in the table? Perhaps it’s ok for people to want better.

> it is ridiculous to expect a computer science grand to "driving forklifts, construction, moving, factory work"

I agree, but at the same time this is what we told truck drivers when self driving cars was going to take over like a decade ago ("reskill, and at your own dime"). Kind of karma. Capitalism doesn't care unfortunately.

We should replace manual work with automation we shouldn't chop off the tree of industry knowing we will continue to need non entry level knowledge workers after current workers retire.

Also the we haven't actually replaced truck driver's at this point so nobody was actually told to reskill on their own dime yet and the "we" that specuated on this point is largely merely pragmatic.

> We should replace manual work with automation

Could you elaborate on the reasoning for manual work being different, and what it’s different from?

Well I don’t think it was kids still in school telling the truck drivers that so I’m not sure what karma has to do with it.

> people are are told to hire h1 only -- not explicitly -- but implicitly

I've funded and worked at a number of companies in the Enterprise SaaS space, and that's bull. I'm not saving any costs with a Visa sponsored employee.

At that point I may as well fully offshore to a GCC.

))) Yeah that's bull. I'm not saving any costs with a Visa sponsored employee.

It often isnt about saving money, it is about having fragile immigrant workers on a leash that you can control with the constant threat of layoff--->deportation

I’ve watched this abuse firsthand for most of my career, over 25 years

> It often isnt about saving money, it is about having fragile immigrant workers on a leash that you can control with the constant threat of layoff--->deportation

and also the carrot of actual sponsorship. two paths to motivation.

and some will get made into full-timers -- I've seen it -- but it just centralizes control

If it's control, you get the same in CEE and India with restrictive non-compete clauses that would make Illinois look like an open market, frivolous lawsuits, and no-objection certificates. Control doesn't impact my bottom line.

Reality is, H1B hiring is just as impacted as normal hiring in the US.

If you were right, we wouldnt have millions of h1s being hired in the US.

You cant have offshore workers away from family, alone in a foreign country, with an RTO mandate, and glued to a desk in SF, constantly worried about deportation. This is about control, power, and abuse.

We don't have millions of H1Bs being hired in the US. The exact number isn't tracked but I don't think any estimate puts it at more than a million.

> We don't have millions of H1Bs being hired in the US.

I think parent means over the long term. The dynamic they're describing has been in place a long time.

I just googled and in 2024 there >200k approvals for Indian nationals. That’s one year, one source country. And I believe that’s capped. Over time, it must be millions.

200k is the cumulative number

When shits tight H1B should be the first thing impacted. Whole point of the program is that there is a supposed lack of supply. Nevermind though because the whole thing has become a machine of bribes grift and kickbacks. No wonder you would jump to its defense as a beneficiary of the machine.

You don’t speak for the entire industry.

It's not offshoring as much as people think.

If you look at statistics for typical IT offshoring and near shoring markets like India, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria they have been in crisis since 2022. Only to show a slight rebound in Q1 of 2025.

On the other hand, here in Latin America, the offshore/nearshore jobs have been increasing in the last couple of years. Source: LinkedIn spam, and a couple of past jobs I've worked have been for nearshore companies.

Can you point me towards some stats for these please? Are you looking at consultancy type companies or subsidiaries that hire locally?

Here are some data points specific on IT. Back from 2023 until more recently, although as I said there is an uptick for 2025. For general statistics I like: https://tradingeconomics.com/

"India's outsourcing giants cut hiring; disheartening for economy, students" - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/indias-outsourcing-giant...

"India's IT services companies to report subdued growth during 4QFY25"

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/information-tech/i...

Poland:

"..The sector's share of Polish GDP and the value of exports per employee increased significantly despite the fact that at the same time the growth rate of employment slowed down. And while these changes were anticipated, this is a new situation. Until now, all three indicators have been correlated quite strongly.." - https://absl.pl/en/news/p/new-phase-growth-modern-business-s...

Romania:

"Romania’s tech sector faces headwinds as global IT slows" - https://news.outsourceaccelerator.com/romania-tech-sector-he...

Bulgaria:

"Bulgarian IT Sector Is Facing a Turbulent Period" - https://scoolmedia.com/en/bulgarian-it-sector-is-facing-a-tu...

This was above and beyond, thank you.

Whenever this topic turns to AI in media, I like to say that AI isn't going to destroy culture, the destructive force against culture (i.e. Big Hollywood) is going to use AI to do it.