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Comment by deanmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

You’ll get downvoted but in my experience, which may not be representative of the entire population, this is true.

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.

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I think most programmers in the US simply don't realize how much they earn compared to the rest of the world.

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.

Yeah, for $100k or slightly less you can hire very good devs with 5+ yr experience in CN or DE. Often speaks English at full professional proficiency without the help of LLMs too. I know because I currently work for a fully remote startup with people from both countries. For that kind of money you can do what in the U.S., hire below average juniors? Even the most clueless junior likely makes more in SV.

Flip that around. Junior devs in the US earning $100k is the anomaly. The fact this is the case indicates the pipeline for competent developer talent is bottlenecked. Right now is still an amazing time to be in Tech. The fact the industry is so hungry for talent it’s paying such rates and is expanding abroad in search of new supply is a sign of it’s health.

Agree. It is harsh truth. Even the good old outsourcing seems in resurgence. Lately I see at work large delegations of IT bodyshops claiming 60% saving with AI + a dev/support center in India.

It may or may not work but it can crater 70% of IT/software department by 2027 as per their plan.

It's interesting, ai seems to be enabling the middle in a positive way.

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.

There's a lot of nuance in these types of stories. First, the US is far from uniform in salaries. Salaries in large metro areas are different from smaller areas and are different from CA/SV. Europe also isn't uniform, and in Western Europe if a company doesn't move to all contractors they will pay significantly more into a countries equivalent to social security. Personally, I would be uncomfortable having my entire development staff be contractors as their interests are not exactly aligned with mine.

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.

The fixed exchange rates between EU countries massively drags down the international cost of a German software engineer, and US companies have yet to wisen up to that fact.

My previous employer stopped hiring in the EU (except for the UK, where they were based, and South Africa, where the CTO was from) because the labor laws there made it too difficult for them to fire people, which was a particularly troublesome for them as they had almost quarterly layoffs. They switched back to hiring in the UK and US where there are fewer worker protections.

Does the UK really not have labor laws as strong as most countries in the EU? It's not like you can't fire people in EU, you just have to have an actual legitimate reason to do so, exactly because doing quarterly layoffs is absurd and shouldn't be tolerated by anyone.

The UK seemed generally slightly less strict than, say, Germany, France, or Poland. It sorta felt like it was splitting the difference between the US and the EU.

Maybe he should not hire people and then fire them after 3 months? Could it be that your previous employer is a terrible employer?

Oh it absolutely was a terrible employer.

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