Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?
A mid-size US tech company I know well went fully remote after a lot of insistence from the workforce, prior to the pandemic they were fully in office.
Soon enough they started hiring remotely from EU, and now the vast majority of their technical folks are from there. The only US workers remaining are mostly GTM/sales. I personally heard the founder saying “why should we pay US comp when we can get extremely good talent in EU for less than half the cost”. EU workers, on average, also tend to not switch job as frequently, so that’s a further advantage for the company.
Once you adapt to remote-only, you can scoop some amazing talent in Poland/Ukraine/Serbia/etc for $50k a year.
I'm not talking about rural Chinese villages whose name you can't pronounce. Or the stereotypical Indian call centers. I'm talking about highly educated programmers who can communicate fluently in English, in cities like Beijing or Munich. If people in SV know how (relatively) little their counterparts make in these places, they'd be much more opposed to remote work.
And that was before LLM. Today practically the entire planet can write passable English.
It may or may not work but it can crater 70% of IT/software department by 2027 as per their plan.
On the other side, we have started to find that the value of outsourcing to very low cost regions has completely disappeared.
I expect that the wages in eastern Europe will quickly rise in a way they never did in former outsourcing hotspots (India for example), because they are able to do similarly complex and quality work to westerners, and are now enabled by awesome translation tools.
The low quality for cheaper is now better served by the Artificial Indian.
Amazing talent may end up cheaper in certain locales for a period of time, but if they are amazing they will become more expensive.
IMO, what's at risk are the entry/mid FAANG type jobs that pay a lot for what they are.
In my experience, pre-2015 or so, offshoring was limited in its utility. Communication was a bitch because videoconferencing from everyday laptops wasn't quite there yet, and a lot of the favored offshoring centers like India had horrible time zone overlap with the US. And perhaps most importantly, companies as a whole weren't used to fully supporting remote colleagues.
Now, though, if I interact with the majority of my colleagues over Zoom/Teams/Meet anyway, what difference does it matter where they're sitting? I've worked with absolutely phenomenal developers from Argentina, Poland and Ukraine, and there was basically no difference logistically between working with them and American colleagues. Even the folks in Eastern Europe shifted their day slightly later so that we would get about 4 hours of overlap time, which was plenty of time for communication and collaboration, and IMO made folks even more productive because it naturally enforced "collaboration hours" vs. "heads down hours".
I understand why people like remote, but I agree, US devs pushing for remote should understand they're going to be competing against folks making less than half their salaries.
The lower salary can be offset by the lower need for money when you don't need to buy your lunch, you don't need that expensive car to get to work and so on. The time you used for commuting could instead be spent working for another company part time.
Timezone overlap is also a big one.
I have had issues with Indian outsourcers like you say (lots of churn, time zone hell, a culture of pretending everything is fine until release day and then saying "sorry, nothing works", etc.), but it's a bigger world now, and there are still lots of folks making half of US dev salaries where none of these problems exist.
Given, outsourcing is probably going to be hit-or-miss regardless of who’s doing it.
Even a mid-size tech company I worked for had over a dozen small offices around the world to collect as many qualified developers as they could. They had some remote work too.
Still hired a lot of Americans. Thinking that remote work will be the end of American workers has been the driving force behind outsourcing pushes for decades, but it hasn’t worked that way.
The difference is that back then the project lead could explore outsourcing certain roles to India, EE and LatAm, while today the VP can explore outsourcing the project lead roles to those countries. These countries have built up their own native tech talent, many of whom already bring more to the table than the typical American - they work longer hours, for cheaper, and often bring a lot more experience. I've seen companies who only run sales teams with Americans, with the rest of the workforce being shipped out.
Notably, India already has nearly 2000 GCCs (Global Capability Centers, mega complexes of offices for foreign companies) set up, with that number only projected to increase as more mid-market firms expand. While many of them are just back offices, some of them, like Walmart's GCC, is the entire tech division - the CTO remains in the US, while the entire software team is in India. While earlier the Indian team would have had to adjust their timings to USA's, now quite a few US-based employees have had to adjust their timings to India's.
I've worked with remote workers from around the world. Let me preface by saying there are of course exceptions but:
What I've found is that most often Americans exhibit self-starting and creativity. What I mean by that is non-us workers are great if you give them a specific task, even a really hard task.
But if you give them a nebulous problem, or worse, a business outcome, they tend to perform much more poorly. And I rarely see non-americans say something like "I think our customers would like it if we added X to the product, can I work on that?".
I don't think it's because Americans are better at this -- I think it's cultural. America has a much higher risk tolerance than the rest of the world. Failing is considered a good thing in the USA. And the USA is much more entrepreneurial than the rest of the world.
These two things combined create a culture difference that makes a business difference.
Additionally, what I've found is that the exceptions tend to move here because their risk taking is much more acceptable here (or they are risk takers willing to move across the world, hard to say which way the causation goes).
...which is a lot like the LLMs! Maybe the skillset required to manage non-US workers is the same as for managing ChatGPT 6o, but the latter scales better.
I'm going to counterpoint somewhat. I think those attributes are evenly spread into all countries, but equally I think they are uncommon in all countries.
I don't live in the US. I have traveled there and elsewhere. I would agree that there are lots of cultural differences between places, even places as nominally similar as say the UK, Australia and the US.
Of course who you interact with in various places matters. If you go to India and visit a remote-programming-company you'll meet a specific kind of person, one well suited to providing the services they offer.
Dig a bit deeper elsewhere and you'll find some very bright, very creative, engineers in every culture. In some cases those folk are doing remote work for US companies. In a few cases they're building the software (creatively and all) that the US company is selling.
In countries that are isolated for one or other reason creativity thrives. Israel, South Africa, Russia, all have (or had) exceptional engineering abilities developed because international support was withheld.
Yes, it is hard to find good talent. It is hard to develop and nurture it. But it exists everywhere. And more and more I'm seeing folks outside the US take American jobs, precisely because American workers are so keen to explain how portable those jobs are.
I understand that the American psyche is built on exceptionalism. And that does exist in some areas. But unfortunately it also acts as a filter blinding you to both exceptionalism elsewhere and inferiority at home. By the time you realise someone else has the edge, it's too late. We've seen this in industry after industry. Programing is no different.
I understand also that shooting the messenger is easier than absorbing the message. Let the down-voting begin.
The data does not support your statement. From a startup report just four days ago:
The United States alone generates 46.6% of all startup activity worldwide, nearly half of the global total. Together with China (9.2%), the United Kingdom (5.6%), and India (5%), these four countries account for 66.4% of the absolute global startup activity.
I will give you that Israel in particular has a strong risk taking culture, as does Singapore and Estonia. And there are a lot of startups coming out of there.
But overall the US has way more risk taking.
And like I said at the very beginning, there are of course exceptions. Yes, every culture has some brilliant risk takers. But at least until recently, many of them came to the USA after they got successful.
America is unique in way it businessmen tend to think that creating a business is the only way to be creative.
And incidentally, post was about employee creativity.
This is art, mr white!
I think it's read as passive aggressive when people realise they've been holding a silly opinion don't want to admit it.
> thought terminating cliche
The irony.
> that might as well be saying "I know better than you".
Sometimes people do know better than you. I think I should reflect on that.
The former is a passive-aggressive way to say the latter. I aim to, and encourage others to say what they mean.
> The former is a passive-aggressive way to say the latter. I aim to, and encourage others to say what they mean.
I suppose you don't see the irony?
Re: the irony, I don't see it, but I'm happy to hear your explanation of it. For what it's worth, my own interpretation of my words isn't passive aggressive, it's (charitably) pretty direct, or even (less charitably) plain old aggressive-aggressive.
So yeah thanks, in the sense that I am not going to say this phrase now realizing it, Not sure how I even found it professional, man I am cringing.
But maybe the context OP used that was really maybe a good roast and I liked the use of this word in that context but yeah good point.
For what its worth, I also don't see the irony. And I also didn't see that it was passive agressive untill you told it and then I saw it..., So uh yeah.
Equally I don't think this is an argument for American exceptionalism (which is the point under discussion.)
I think if you add the US to the list this theory disappears. It's more the frontier/self reliant/entrepreneurial attitude that I think makes the difference.
Isn't that mostly a function of how incentives are aligned? I had a job with a lot of outsourcing to India. The Indians were given specific bits of code to write. They didn't even know how their code fit into the application.
Their entire incentive structure was geared toward getting them to write those bits of code as quickly as possible, finish, and take another task. There just wasn't any room for "self-starting and creativity".
I have a feeling if the entire application had been moved to India things would have been different.
Interestingly the biggest exceptions were ones that had at some point lived and worked in the USA, and then had returned to their home country for some reason or another.
> I have a feeling if the entire application had been moved to India things would have been different.
I had direct experience with this. We had an office of full time employees in India tasked with a project, but I still had to hand hold them through most of the key decisions (which I didn't have to do with the US based teams nearly as much).
Employment is central to American's identity in a way that's almost considered perverse elsewhere.
Its also like, no I don't think a family is supposed to be where some guy on the top extracts all the money and then trickes it down and I get %'s of what I did. This doesn't sound like a family.
Someone create a blog post on this phenomenon as to me, this seems like americans having an parasocial bond with companies (I vaguely remember the stripe CEO had said my name once or something along that lines, a blog post and it felt parasocial man)
I mean, I just feel like americans complaining about indians devs are complaining about the wrong things, like maybe I don't get them but its not true as to what they are saying. I just don't get it man.
I have seen Indian govt jobs to be much more like american private jobs in the sense that employment becomes central to their identity and there is this sense of tightknit community for the most part and maybe that has to do with the fact that the govt isn't usually exploiting its own workers and the tight knit sense of community comes from helping really poor children in teaching, building roads that my uncle flexes on me that I built this road or this college and showing me the absolute chad he sometimes is.
You want a long list of simple tasks finished? Excellent workers. An endless ticket queue with simple problems? There's a few issues with them not escalating real problems, but ok.
You want an application developed and a lot of problems solved? Stay away.
And an incentives issue.
Some software engineers work and they do the job and if they finish the work early, the company just start having more expectations of them WHILE PAYING THE SAME. So you are effectively catered if you don't work or take more to do the same atleast in the consultancy or similar business in India.
I feel like a lot of Indians especially software devs don't have this allegiance to a company where we consider a company to be our "family", and I find it really fair. My cousins always tell me that a company extracts 10x more value from you than what they give you back. Not sure how much of that is true in US but some developers are literally exploited in India, they couldn't care less about an application developed if they are this stuck state of limbo where they won't get fired if they do shitty work but they won't really get higher up the ladder either and even if they do the good work, it would take years for the company to notice it and its better to just change companies for that raise.
An incentive issue at its finest which could and is fixed by many people, just because you used a consultancy that sucked or had people that sucked doesn't make us all shitty software devs man.
Its Not a cultural issue, It really offended me as by coating us all in this "culture", you said somethings which are clearly offending.
Maybe I can get the point that maybe software attracts a lot of shy people and so they are shy towards taking the first initiative but that's not a cultural issue.
The culture of our school depends, most schools don't incentivize extracurricular activities that much so we don't do it and that's why we don't usually take initiative, because boom everything matters what you wrote in 3 hours
The incentive system is flawed but maybe I have hope, I mean to be honest, Things aren't that better anywhere else in the world too. I just feel like either the devs I have met irl are absolutely really good from what I've seen or your guys experience hasn't been that good but it isn't that big of a difference and I feel like things are a little exaggerated when I come to such forums.
I'm not claiming they're well-paid, but I don't think this is the issue, or at least not the primary issue.
Maybe we just have different cultural expectations.
America is one of the most risk averse countries in the world, seriously. Americans are constantly scared - of loosing job, of physical injury, of everything and everywhere.
> Failing is considered a good thing in the USA
America punishes failure pretty hard. Some peoples failures are ignored, but most peoples failures are punished in pretty significant ways.
They agree with me.
I mean come on, how do you expect people to interpret this paragraph? I can only assume you are trolling, so I'm done here.
My experience is ANY delegation incurs a big loss in agency. I want to create a startup -> my employees are much less invested than I am. My remote (French) employees are even less invested. My Ukrainian employees are completely passive and I fired them. The more the distance, the less invested, the more passive.
It’s tempting to attribute this to your country’s qualities, but my experience is every country is a mixed bag.
I wonder how many devs have been sacked for going out of their way and making stuff nobody in business asked for, or perhaps that broke something along the way and ended up being a net negative: in the EU vs US and other parts of the world.
Might be loosely related to how much money the company has to burn and the nature of their work (e.g. probably not looked well upon in consulting where you have to convince clients to pay for whatever you've made), as well as how popular each type of work is in each part of the world.
That is, an external worker (and I'm a consultant, I know) gets paid per hour, if the company goes under for whatever reason they just move on to the next assignment, while an internal employee leans more on their job.
Anyway that's just a theory. I'm a "consultant" which is just a fancy word for a temp / hired hand, and I'm somewhere in the middle in that I will think along with the company and propose improvements, but at the same time have lower risk and much less attachment to the companies I work for.
I don't think it's cultural per se. As an extreme example, the CEOs of Google and Microsoft were both born and raised in India.
I've experienced both. Working with offshore employees and full time employees who happened to be in foreign countries. It was a similar experience with both, the exception being the ones that had previously lived and worked in the US.
> I don't think it's cultural per se. As an extreme example, the CEOs of Google and Microsoft were both born and raised in India.
Sundar Pichai moved to the US when he was in college. His entire working career and a bunch of his schooling was in the US.
Satya Nadella did the same.
As I said in my original reply, the ones who are more entrepreneurial or successful tend to move to the US (or at least used to).
The most crucial difference in this context is that Americans are employed directly by the company, while foreign workers are behind several layers of management belonging to several companies. While you can walk around and deliver elevator pitches to higher-ups, foreign workers must track their time spent on tasks down to the minute in Jira. Then, they must find a manager who would like to pitch a feature to a manager who would pitch a feature to a manager in the U.S.
Had I built the things anyway it wouldn’t be met with praise, but looked down upon for bypassing the manager (or I just wouldn’t get paid for those hours).
Many big corporations tend to be similar even when you’re employed directly.
You can’t truly be creative when you’re stuck 7 layers of mgmt deep. You also have to understand that for those who’ve only worked in such situations, “risking” their position at a foreign company just to appear smart doesn’t seem like a good idea, so they don’t do it.
But it can be due to terrible management hiring terribly.
The moment they can replace you for cheaper, they will, whether you insist on working remotely or not.
But alas, such a system is fundamentally impossible. Physics just won't allow it.
capitalism dictates that a capable remote person will not keep working for a single employer, as it will be a waste of time.
he/she will work for multiple employers (overemployed and such), maximizing earnings, thus it will constantly keep a gap between in-office and remote workers
In many larger companies also, nationstate threats and national security are a trending issue.
If you deal with a lot of PII, outsourcing your data processing pipelines to China isn't going to fly with Congress when you get subpoena'ed for a round with Hawley.
* lied about their capabilities/experience to get the job,
* failed to grok requirements through the language barrier,
* were unable to fix critical bugs in their own code base,
* committed buggy chatgpt output verbatim,
* and could not be held liable because their firm is effectively beyond the reach of the US legal system.
In a couple of projects I've seen a single US based developer replace an entire offshore team, deliver a superior result, and provide management with a much more responsive communication loop, in 1% of the billable hours. The difference in value is so stark that one client even fired the VP who'd lead the offshoring boondoggle.
Software talent is simply not as fungible as some MBAs would like to believe.
But at the same time, I doubt there is anything special about me or my US born coworkers. We aren't superior just because of the continent we live in. But offshore work is almost as a rule terrible quality done by people that are frustrating to work with. It doesn't make sense
And yes. There is nothing special about North America as far as quality of software developers in general. Mostly you get average buzzword indoctrinated not so great people with some amazing expectation salary wise.
Anyway highly competent and experienced folks will always thrive regardless of environment. Its the quiet rest that should be worried from multiple angles.
Language l, cultural, and time barriers still come into play regardless of how good they are, however.
General perception was the universities there produced qualified graduates who were not paper tigers (or didn't lie about creds).
Rates for them were pretty good, and we had better alignment with timezones and holidays.
Reasonably good alignment in terms of legal and HR issues -- easier to enforce than, like, Bangladesh
The NAFTA / USMCA / whatever its called now Visa made it easy for them to come across the border for a few years as well. Pay bump for a while plus a chance to work in HQ or the IT office directly, make fat stacks, and then rotate back to MX and buy a nice house. The Mexico City PMs were also instrumental for bridging the language gap when running projects in other LATAM countries.
Trump's ICE might be the end of that approach tho
But I also believe the managers hiring offshore employees are fully aware of this. If they aren't then they're not very good managers and/or have no idea what they're doing.
The offshore people mainly work on SAP and legacy systems though; it turns out it's very hard to find willing or competent people in Europe that actually want to work on / with SAP. However, foreign workers have less qualms about learning stuff like that, since the money is really good.
I have a feeling it's not working that well anymore because the people covering those juniors just earn more going to work straight for the client and they have less burden on them. Used to be harder so the agencies had leverage, nowadays even big companies will hire individual B2B contractor.
This was the sense I got from a friend's situation: he works for a consulting firm managing a large offshore team billed as "Oracle Experts" who are in reality completely incompetent. (Side note: How would a bunch of young third-world devs go about mastering a niche technology to the expert level?) The offshore team meets their contractual obligation by committing nonsense SLOC everyday that contains vague references to the requirements. But as the quarters roll by, it never actually meets requirements. So my friend learned the only way to deliver is for him to personally implement the solutions while juggling semi-daily meetings with the clients and the offshore team. The client is happy in the end, but it all takes a lot longer than it would he could drop the offshore team entirely.
In this situation, the value of the offshore team is they make the client believe that 1) their problems can only be solved by a large team and 2) they are paying less for this team than they would otherwise.
regular "line" SAP admins had to be found in Mexico and brought up on TN visas -- still well paid but generally pretty good, doubly so because we had a Mexico City office and could retain the staff even after they rotated back to MX.
but it's a bit like ikea: if you buy their cheapest stuff it will fall apart after a few months but their "expensive" lines are still far cheaper than the competition but the same quality.
you might think you're a solid mahogany table but at the end of the day you're probably the same table as being sold at ikea, just more expensive
Now, I am not a software developer but in high school, but I have my brother/cousins working in the software dev industry and here are my thoughts.
>language barrier: I genuinely don't know how incompetent developers you can hire, I mean sure if you hire extremely shitty developers but even that's rare.
Most people here are comfortable enough with english, in the sense that literally anyone can speak english & mostly get the point across. Yes, I have heard of some misarrangements but I don't think that its really much of an issue.
Now some outsourcing companies are mass recruiters who recruit tech from Cs colleges where noone recruited them (Tata consultancy services, infosys?) and the thing with them is that they don't even pay the mediocre expectations of a developer even in INDIA, they are basically exploiting junior developers and are compared with govt. insitutions in my country given how slow they are.
My brother works in a decent Consultancy services but he says that there are a lot of inefficiencies in the system.
He worked on a project and we estimated and he got 1% or less than 1% of the work that he MOSTLY did. and so my brother has way more incentive to freelance and get a "remote job" not consultancy.
I think that you confused yourself with remote job and consultancy part. Remote jobs hiring / freelancing indians is still cheaper than a consultancy imo who are parasites on the developers.
My brother works in a consultancy right now because the job market is shitty and he has gotten offers 4x his current salary from countries like switzerland and america. Yet, my family doesn't want him to do the 4x income work because he is already working a job and they don't want him to burn out
And they don't want him to leave the job because its "safe", you can't trust these startups etc. given the volatile nature and if they fail, then whoops the job market is really messed up right now, even in India and also arrange marriage is a huge thing and the girl's family usually checks the company that the boy works in and they usually get fishy if its remote job (and I mean, for good reason)
Also trust me some indians can definitely work in american timezones too but that is a little tough. But I mean, we are okay if you might call us once or twice late at night when its day in america and you have something really urgent. Atleast I am okay with that.
And you could pay 2x the salary the normal indian dev gets and I feel like even that would be less than an american dev. This can really filter some devs to get those with seniority or good projects.
Its a problem of incentives for consultancies (which is what you seem to hate) and maybe that's a bit fair given how much inefficiencies I see in that system. Just remote hire directly (I suppose)
Since that comes with all the disadvantages and risks you'd expect from splitting your team across two countries and operating in a market you don't understand, at that price point a US company should probably start thinking about spinning up a cheaper team in, I dunno, Dallas rather than offshoring.
this is a big one. last F500 I was at dropped Tata for several internal support teams due to belief that they were messing with proprietary code and/or had screwed things up so badly they warranted a lawsuit -- but had no legal levers to chase them for damages.
ditto for the one-off programmer who sexually harasses people while remote -- how does a remote worker sue, or get sued, and under what law?
or finance / tax -- who pays the payroll tax?
A lot of that stems from a lack of job security. Stuff like suddenly being locked out of your work email/slack or being escorted out of company premises is largely unheard of in the rest of the world.
As a point of comparison: I'm a contractor based in a popular outsourcing destination. My contract is extended well over a month before it expires and I would need to do something particularly harmful to be let go just like that, as our client values continuity of services and will hold the agency accountable should that suffer.
Over here if a job listing mentions "US client" it typically means considerably more work for considerably more pay. Some go for that, others opt for more relaxed roles. I can't imagine having US jobs as the only option.
The majority of people in the company are still in the US, and even for the East coast, the timezones are just annoying to work around sometimes. Either I need to do late days, or they have to do uber early mornings/SUPER late days, don't even get me started on West coast where the hours basically never match. And I'm in the closest timezone I can be for the US.
And there's also a cultural aspect to it. I simply work differently to how the US bosses expect, because my employer has to respect worker's rights if they want to hire people in the EU unless they hire them as contractors (they still have many protections in that case though). I clock off at exactly 17:00, I never answer messages outside working hours, I don't do overtime or anything resembling it etc. And yes, they don't pay me the same as I would in the US, but it's really not that much lower, plus life is just cheaper, even here in the Netherlands. I get paid less relatively, but from what I can tell other that the people getting paid obscene amounts, my quality of life is higher than most of my US counterparts
I've noticed my US colleagues are much more willing to waste away their lives for their employer as well, even if there's no real expectation for them to do so, and the business obviously prefers those kind of employees over the ones like me.
So there's still plenty of reasons to keep hiring US-based devs, from cultural to logistical. Maybe you guys should work on getting some actual worker protections first, though...
Lived in the NL for 4 years, it was many things - cheap wasn't one of them. With the enormous taxes , high rents and mediocre salaries I don't think you can make the case it's somehow cheaper than the U.S unless you specifically mean Manhattan and Silicon Valley.
Around the 50-60k Euro mark is a VERY decent and comfortable living in the Netherlands and you'll be hard pressed to find companies not paying that much for medior roles, yet alone senior ones. Plus you have the bigger companies like Adyen, Booking, ASML etc. plus remote US companies that pay ~100-125k for Medior+ talent (I know this as I literally today, a mere 4 hours ago got an offer letter from one of the mentioned companies as a SWE II). The taxes only really start hurting in the 70k-90k region, but since it's progressively taxed it's still not the end of the world. Also if you work for one of the aforementioned big boys then you're probably going to be in the party bracket (literally what it's called :p) where the sting is lessened, stupidly enough.
Remember, average salary in NL is around 40k-45k EUR. If anyone above a medior level manages to work at a tech-adjacent company as is getting paid less than that, it's time to move jobs because the market has shifted up massively as of late in terms of wages, at least anecdotally from what I can see.
And most importantly, money isn't everything which is so often missed in these discussions talking about EU vs US comp. Most importantly of all is that I never have to worry about healthcare costs should anything happen to me or my loved ones that don't have the privilege of being sponsored by a megacorp, and very importantly I have job security and a permanent contract that makes it damned hard to get rid of me.
Now things aren't perfect here obviously, train costs are astronomical, the tax brackets are absurd (the aforementioned party bracket being an absolute farce), the healthcare system while great can be very annoying to navigate alone, and indeed rent in the private sector and housing costs in general is completely detached from reality... But compared to anywhere in the US I've ever lived, especially if we zoom out a bit and look at it from a lens of someone not in tech and not making FAANG-level money? I'll take Utrecht 100 times out of 10, thank you very much.
They always ask “if a job can be done remote why not just hire a foreigner in a cheap place?” and never ask “if the foreigner was so good as the American engineer why wouldn’t they be getting paid the same as the American?”
It’s like they think companies are dumb and there is some undiscovered engineering arbitrage opportunity waiting to be tapped that will end the high 6 figure salaries of American software engineers forever.
And yet, since the 90s, software engineer salaries only go up. Millions of Indians flood the foreign markets, but American tech salaries only go up. Covid hits and everyone goes remote, but the salaries only go up. They always go up. American tech holds a supremacy over the world that you will likely not see the end of in your lifetime. There is so much money, so much risk taking, so much drive to dominate, other countries are generations behind.
But hey keep doing what you’re doing. Maybe you’ll save a couple bucks while your competitors gobble up the market with far better engineering talent. Not “equivalent” talent: better talent..
You should also ask whether you're paying American so much because they are so good, or are you paying them so much because rents in SF are so high?
> Covid hits and everyone goes remote, but the salaries only go up. They always go up.
Once again, did it go up because COVID infections somehow made american workers even better or because lockdowns caused mini tech boom while money printing tanked the dollar's value?
But I've yet to meet an accountant who puts in their 40 hours a week and somehow manages to grow their backlog rather than shrink it.
Whereas bad programmers who will do that exist in spades.
Clearly the two professions are not identical.
That said, I've had two mind bogglingly bad accountants on my payroll in the past who made $100K+ mistakes if we hadn't caught them and fired the fuck out of those dumbasses. One was American and one was Filipino.
Time zone differences, language barriers and cultural differences proved insurmountable.
Hybrid remote seems to work quite well, on the other hand.
Once you have world-class experts all over the developing world, my job might disappear. But you need experience to get there, which they aren't getting, because they aren't here. It's privilege 101: if you have it, you get more of it; if you don't have it, you don't get any of it. We're very privileged to be high-value domestic workers.
And by the way, remote work has been a thing here for decades, yet the calculation hasn't changed. Our remote jobs are still safe.
Seems like the capabilities of current systems map onto "the kind of labor that gets offshored" quite well. Some of the jobs that would get offloaded to India now get offloaded to Anthropic's datacenters instead.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-05-30/tough-...
So, that doesn't seem like a likely culprit unless you have some convincing evidence.
I expect that other areas like accounting that use outsourcing are going to see similar effects in a few years.
Language barriers, culture, and knowledge are some of the biggest challenges to overcome for offshoring. AI potentially solves many of those challenges
Isn't it exactly the opposite?
Language barriers: LLMs are language models and all of the major ones are built in English, speaking that language fluently is surely a prerequisite to interacting with them efficiently?
Knowledge: famously LLMs "know" nothing and are making things up all of the time and sometimes approximate "knowledge"
Knowledge: True to an extent, but my assumption here is that it would be used to fill in gaps or correct misunderstandings. Not wholesale doing my job. At least that’s often how I use it
That said, I have one ESL on my team who uses LLMs a lot like that and it's fine so who knows.
Google Translate is relatively awful. I have an intern now who barely speaks my native language but very bad English so weve been using it all the time, and its always spot on, even for phrases that dont translate directly
I bet I can do a good job communicating with you without speaking a common language.
It was absolutely flawless, to the level of accentuations and little quirks that no tool before even came close.
Parent is plain wrong and doesnt have a clue... thats what happens when folks skip on learn foreign languages, the most important thing for life you can learn at school. Actively using multiple languages literally increases brain plasticity, much better than running ie sudoku or similar brain teasers endlessly
The H1B pipeline has not decreased at all whereas millions of American workers have been laid off.
Happening simultaneously sadly.
* - Someone should maintain a walkback list to track these. I believe recent additions are Amodei of Anthropic and the CEOs of AWS and Salesforce. (Benioff of Salesforce, in February: "We're not going to hire any new engineers this year." Their careers page shows a pivot from that position.)
IT help was outsourced to India years ago. I expect them to be replaced with AI the minute their government stops handing the firm big contracts because I’ve never spoken to anyone from that group who was actually better than a chat bot.
I wonder how much this actually matters? I understand that for an auditor, having a quality reputation matters. But if all audits from all firms are bad, how much would the world economy suffer?
Likewise for the legal profession, if all judges made twice the number of mistakes, how much would the world suffer?
At the end of the day it is a question of convenience/standards, if GAAP didn't exist maybe firms could use a modified accrual standard that is wholly compliant with tax reporting and that's it.
Is this hyperbole? It seems like the real question being asked here is "would the world be worse off without deterministic checks and balances", which I think most people would agree is true, no?
From that perspective, lowering the quality of something that is already non-rigourous might not have any perceivable effect. It’s only a problem if public perception lowers, but that’s a marketing issue that the big-4 already have a handle on.
The all-in on AI shows a lack of imagination around innovation.