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Comment by oxfordmale | Hacker News Reader

Outsourcing comes and goes in waves. Good talent in India and the Philippines tend to work for FAANG companies, often at very comparable salaries to the west.

The remainder of the talent tends to struggle with some of the outsourced work, but with AI they can now give a semblance of competence.

In the UK a major retailer, Mark and Spencer got hacked after outsourcing work to India. They couldn't fulfill orders online for months, and they are now reducing the amount of work they outsource to India.

We will see something similar happen to other companies in a year or two, but until then we just have to tighten our belts and hope we don't get layed off before then.

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its kind of hard to imagine that FAANG employees in india and philippines get paid as much as the west when London is a 30-50% cut from the Bay Area.

Just perusing on google for roles at google in hyderabad, I think its significantly lower than the US.

They do though. My company hires in India and has had a hard time retaining talent there because anyone with mediocre talent can get western salaries by switching to larger companies than our own.

We've lost a decent number of engineers to Google, Facebook, and Amazon in India.

My company wants to pay roughly $50k USD in India per dev and that's just not enough. They've tried to compete by making nicer facilities and better in office benefits (like a cafeteria) but it's just not enough.

FAANG may offer those devs more than your company will in India but I'd be very surprised if they offer them similar compensation to FAANG devs in the West and specifically the US.

It's extremely level dependent. New grad salaries in India are way below Western levels, but senior talent can command Silicon Valley level packages. People switch companies at the drop of a hat to climb another rung on the ladder, which also makes retention very difficult.

Talent eventually get paid their value. Doesn't matter where they live. If you have a brain, you rank up. Quickly.

The Just World Fallacy? In my Hacker News?

It's more likely than you think.

> Good talent in India and the Philippines tend to work for FAANG companies, often at very comparable salaries to the west.

I've never heard of typical senior engineers getting paid $400k/yr in those locations.

Outside the US, I've only heard of Zurich being the only comparable location.

Yea almost no one is making Bay Area level TCs in either location aside from those directly relocated from the Bay or working in HFT at Citadel, Jane Street, or DE Shaw, but you will be able to make Germany or UK level TC (US$50k-110k) with the right track record and experience. Ofc, an equally large cohort will be earning low salaries in the $5k-15k range, but those are largely employed at WITCH or EPAM type companies which employers are trying to cut out of the loop.

UK (let's say London) level TC is quite a bit higher than 110K US. For real talent you can easily double that. (TC, not cash)

Then you're making the same mistake that Americans are increasingly making as well.

If you aren't top tier talent (Google, Citadel, Bloomberg, or sexy FinTech startup equivalent) we can get by offering £50k-£90k TC for 10-12 YoE in London. This is reflected in the annual TC distribution on levels.fyi [0] - London TC distributions are severely right skewed.

For top talent we are fine matching US salaries 1:1, but most of those roles are basically for people who worked in the US but faced visa issues.

The thing is, most American companies aren't interested in hiring "real talent" at scale in the UK because the salary ends up becoming the same as the US but the pool of candidates is shallower - especially when I can hop over to CEE and open an office in Warsaw, Cluj, or Prague and get significantly higher quality talent at the £50k-£80k range.

[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/london-...

> Outsourcing comes and goes in waves. Good talent in India and the Philippines tend to work for FAANG companies, often at very comparable salaries to the west.

In those locations?

Based on sheer CS grad numbers why wouldn't companies just shift their r& operations there then?

The FAANG I work for is trying to do just that. But while new grads are indeed a dime a dozen, you can't staff an R&D with only new grads, and finding and retaining skilled seniors is so tough that it has resorted to offering US-based Indians packages with US level comp to entice them to move back for a few years to bootstrap teams.

> Based on sheer CS grad numbers why wouldn't companies just shift their r& operations there then?

There are lots of CS grads, yes. But most colleges out there are mostly degree mills, and this carries on to the workplace, where your average software engineer or engineering manager has very little understanding of what they’re actually doing (this[1] article was posted on HN, which will tell you the quality of engineering in India).

For anything slightly complicated, companies seem to be only interested in hiring from the best colleges and pay out of their nose in the process. A friend of a friend does some hardware work at a FAANG, and gets paid at almost that level.

[1] https://eaton-works.com/2025/10/28/tata-motors-hack/

Conversation about outsourcing aside, it isn’t fair to pick one example and generalize to say an entire country’s talent pool is poor.

The US has the best engineering talent pool in the world and you can find dozens of examples at major companies as bad (or worse) than the one you linked.

Yup! I've seen it at a big American cable company too - I was even a part of the initial team responsible for re-shoring, and now I'm seeing them offshoring everything back to (one of the worst) huge Indian outsourcing companies again.

One issue is that in many industries senior leadership just doesn't stick around for long enough. If your CEOs rotate out every 5-10 years then you're basically SOL; the next guy comes in, gets bamboozled by sweet talk of vastly reduced costs of offshoring and BOOM, round you go again!

> In the UK a major retailer, Mark and Spencer got hacked after outsourcing work to India.

Does sound more like correllation than causation. Was there evidence that the Indian devs made the mistakes that led to the hack or was it just the good old 'let's fall back on racism to avoid blame' by management? I still remember the articles where Boeing tried to peg the 737 MAX crashes on Indian engineers who worked for $10 an hour.

Its more about social engineering (this was the case for the m&s hack), if you outsource your work, you have less visibility over the people that work for you and it becomes more of a black box. This leads to worse employee awareness in general.

Jaguar/ Rang Rover is owned by Tata, and they created a massive $2B hole in the UK enconomy

> Good talent in India and the Philippines tend to work for FAANG companies, often at very comparable salaries to the west.

As other commenters have pointed out, this is simply bullshit. Good talent in India and the Philippines earn nowhere near US dev salaries. Unless by "very comparable" you mean 1/3 - 1/2.

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