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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

This is the biggest unspoken story in tech.

The era of American developer exceptionalism is over.

Talent abroad has access to the same tools, education, and increasingly, network. American engineers will be replaced wholesale with overseas engineers that cost a fraction of American labor.

You can hire talented React engineers for $50k that will work harder than their American counterparts.

It's not just React. Overseas markets have DevOps, SREs, embedded, systems engineers, you name it.

For years Americans joked that overseas labor was subpar. It's not, or at least it isn't in today's world.

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If software engineering is not special and can be done by anyone, so can any other role in a business. So it follows that all American roles will be offshored eventually, including ownership of the company itself - or American businesses will be universally out competed.

Perhaps someday. But for now the USA has broader, deeper, and more sophisticated capital markets than every other country and economic bloc. This is one of the key reasons why most of the largest and fastest growing tech companies are still largely owned and located here.

> If software engineering is not special and can be done by anyone, so can any other role in a business.

Indeed, however other business roles have a significant physical presence or face to face component. Sales & marketing, legal, HR, and significant parts of operations and admin have physical presence requirements in most businesses. I would expect finance/accounting to be vulnerable to offshoring, though.

Accounting and bookkeeping already is

If all the workers are off shore, no need to keep HR state side.

If all the high earners are off shore, may as well sell to them with an off shore sales team.

Don't need local marketers if the market isn't local anymore.

> If all the workers are off shore

I forget that HN forgets that many companies don't sell software yet have SWE teams.

Any company not selling software for $$$ is hopefully not paying bay area salaries for their engineering team.

Mid west engineering teams are low six figure or even less. The cost savings from outsourcing a team of people earning 90k is meh compared to a team earning 300k.

You'd be surprised. I live in a state most SFers consider the middle of nowhere, and my friends and I make more in absolute terms than most SF companies offer (excepting the top tier). 90k is not much more than entry level IT pay here, even new grads make more.

Of course, you can't just work on CRUD apps or mobile apps, you have to build up domain knowledge of the business.

Surprising! Whenever recruiters have gotten confused and sent me non-costal job listings the salaries have always been very low (e.g. 140k for a principal level).

Yeah, we make quite a bit more than that even at IC level.

The best jobs are typically not send out for recruiters - people check their networks first, and only go to a recruiter if nobody in their network is available.

>finance/accounting to be vulnerable

Aren't there certifications and stuff? I'd think that from a regulatory and legal compliance perspective it'd be better to have Americans handling the books. Say someone turns out to be cooking the books, if that person is halfway across the world good luck prosecuting them (unless your company is wealthy enough to the point where you can mobilize law enforcement to do your bidding)

You only need one person stateside to review and sign off on the work and that person can be outsourced to an accounting firm.

> If software engineering is not special and can be done by anyone, so can any other role in a business.

What's the logic here other than "coders are the top tier of the labor market" arrogance?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...

I think other business roles have been offshored for a long time now, and software engineering is relatively late to that party

>"If software engineering is not special"

Correction - "The US / Canada software" engineering.

Otherwise people from many other countries are just as good while charging way less.

The ramifications of losing all or nearly all of the tech jobs in the US is that the last "good" place to find better paying work that had a fairly low barrier to entry is now gone. I think that has major consequences for the US economy. I'm 52 and I can't just go back to school and re-tool to become a doctor or a lawyer now. I spent so many years becoming excellent and what I do, including higher degrees and certifications (I never really believed in certs, mind you, I always thought it was a giant scam).

Everything I look into as far as 2nd career goes has a very high barrier to entry and then there's the ever-present ageism barrier to fight, too.

I'm fortunate in that I have enough money to maybe just be retired, but most of you aren't anywhere close to being that financially independent. It's going to be ugly.

I knew for years that the offshoring blitz would finally reach critical mass and I was correct. Now it is an economic conflagration.

> and re-tool to become a doctor or a lawyer now

It's worse than that. Who is going to pay the doctors and lawyers (and other folks providing services) if there are no more US jobs that product stuff for export.

And it's not even about services. Who is going to pay the home builders, electricians, plumbers, etc in a world where there is no money flowing into the US economy from the outside

This is a big issue for young people, too. Every white collar career path is very on-rails now - you're expected to get a degree in XYZ and then get a fresh grad job as a Level 1 XYZer and so on.

So the stakes are drastically higher for 18 year olds picking their college majors. It's effectively a life commitment for a specific career path, and there's a lot of anxiety among students because they don't know if the career path they're betting the farm on will still be be viable by the time they graduate. There's also a sense that if you can't manage to find work in the field you majored in within a year or two of graduating, you've fallen off the track and are condemned to DoorDashing forever.

I'm always amazed at how many older people I know (especially 60+) spent their twenties directionless and then started a decent paying career in their 30s, often by simply learning how to do something and getting a job doing it. I'm not sure what policy platform would make that possible again, but accomplishing it would alleviate a ton of the anxiety that young people have today.

Exactly my thoughts. A free market tends towards specialization which makes the market more efficient and therefore more competitive. As specialization increases it becomes more critical that one chooses and specializes their career early on. But this is unfair to young people who often have no idea what to do. Hence luck plays an increasing role, which is again the opposite of fairness.

Absolutely! $50k is ₹45,00,000 which is at the 95th percentile of tech salary in India across all levels of seniority.

So yeah it’s not surprising that jobs are going offshore.

That's really interesting. I did not know that India used commas for numbers like that, 3 digits and then 2 digits, and then apparently 2 digits again?

3,00,00,000 instead of 30,000,000

It’s the lakh and crore system [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system].

Older than western civilization probably, but does take some getting used too.

Look for Lakh, crore and the whole indian numbering system. It is interesting. Source: I use to live in India.

It was extremely difficult to get used to when I was visiting India for a few months years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system

I am a European, so may be wrong, but it is my understanding that Indians have intuition around lakhs (100k) instead of thousands/millions. Apparently 100 lakhs is a crore (10M), but I haven’t seen that used so don’t know how prevalent it is - lakh is very commonly used though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system

You are correct on all counts.

Any data backing this? If this were the case, why isn’t most innovation done outside the US?

Jobs that have a high 0-1 component will still be in the US but jobs that are more 1-n may be offshored.

> If this were the case, why isn’t most innovation done outside the US?

Capital

That's not even close to remotely true. If that is the case, why is the UAE throwing their money at US startups and not their own? They have more than enough "capital".

It is less so about skills of workers. And more so about having lot of investors who are willing to throw money at everything and then even more after the fact. Or to just outright having enough money to buy out the better ideas.

Because most of the smartest people in the world moved to the U.S. because of the education system, great access to capital, and the fact that they and other smart people could easily move to, live and work with each other in the U.S.

The U.S. also has the largest useful single market in the world (the EU is broken up across many languages/cultures, China is isolated so you can’t really expand out).

The U.S. is actively working to destroy several of those planks right now.

Even the capital plank, which superficially looks strong, is being hurt by the government picking winners and choosers. If the current govt bets don’t turn out to be the right ones we’re looking at an ugly, probably tax payer funded (OpenAI has already hinted at this) collapse.

> If this were the case, why isn’t most innovation done outside the US?

Are you measuring by where the work is done, or where the people signing their names on it live? Two different things.

> Jobs that have a high 0-1 component will still be in the US but jobs that are more 1-n may be offshored.

It used to be (since at least mid last century) and 0-1 and 1-n jobs were focused here. The world becoming smaller allowed a lot of 1-n jobs to move abroad. But we kept 0-1 jobs here.

That used to be the situation when the country brought people from around the world to be educated and then start business here. And historical precedent allowed us to continue thise advantages by having a reputation for it and continuing to support it. Our country for some reason now has decided it no longer wants to take the actions that fill the pipeline for 0-1 innovation.

And the world just like it took over 1-n is going to take over 0-1.

Why you would choose catalyze that change as an American, I have no idea.

I think there are people that generally believe that there is magic dust that says it can only happen on US soil instead of there being structural actions taken to enable it.

We will all very quickly learn that 0-1 can be anywhere that 1-n is.

Maybe, but I was looking for a job recently and most "remote" jobs from US companies were still US-only. Some allowed for hiring people in US timezones or close (basically the Americas). Very few were open to anyone in the world. I get the impression it's mostly the admin hassle that makes most companies avoid it.

So I have worked with great offshore folks, but the companies who really go for it seem to very much go with engineers who can barely code their way out of a paper bag just because they're cheap.

Nah, none of this is precisely true. Even if the folks abroad are just as skilled (true), they aren’t as effective because of primarily time zone differences and also language barriers (which is exacerbated by the time zone differences).

The gap has never been technical. It’s culture.

React Engineer

Not really, rather industry incentives switched from competing on quality (by whatever metric one might use), to competing on cost.

And developer costs had gotten so crazy, this was the perfect storm.

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