Hacker News Reader

Comment by locusofself | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but at some point in the past, "Amazon India" was not a thing. Nor was "Microsoft India" and so forth. Surely you can understand what it feels like to be an American tech worker in a super high cost of living area, looking at reduction in headcount and continual offshoring of jobs as time goes by. I live in Seattle area, work at one of these big companies, I work with people in India almost every day and have been to India three times on business. When parts of my department's work was allocated to a new team in India, of course I was nervous about that.

View on HN

I get the fear, but look at it from the investor's perspective. The US market is tapped out, Amazon is already everywhere it can be.

Amazon isn't expanding in India out of love for the country or a desire to see it grow. They are doing it because Wall Street demands infinite growth every single year. Amazon India went from zero to a market leader in a decade not because of charity, but because that is where the new money is.

To keep the valuation climbing (which sustains everyone's RSUs), they have to capture these emerging markets. If they don't, the stock stagnates, and the compensation model for US tech workers falls apart.

They can capture the market without moving the workforce there. Meta/Instagram/WA have dominated Indian market for a decade now.

It seems like this is pure labor arbitrage. Growth is gone so the only way to increase profits is by cutting costs, with labor force being the top line item.

You are describing a colonial model, extract all the wealth while investing nothing in the local economy. That era is over.

If anything, Meta is the anomaly, not the role model. They should be required to invest more given their dominance, rather than being praised for extracting maximum value with minimum local footprint. Regulators will likely close that gap eventually.

"Exchanging goods and services for money to a locale" is not a colonial model.

I, a strawberry farmer in Florida, should have no obligation to create an office of locals in every geographic location I sell strawberries in.

No but you give up a large margin to shippers, importers, distributors and retailers in those geographic locations.

Which is an entirely different dynamic than what the person I responded to was calling for

If a foreign entity came into Florida and bought up 35% of the entire retail infrastructure, you bet the US government would regulate it and demand local value capture.

Case in point - US actively forced TSMC and Samsung to build $65B+ of factories in Arizona and Texas to secure domestic interests.

And Chinese/Korean workers being fired while American workers are being hired by their companies would absolutely be correct to see their jobs being offshored

> If anything, Meta is the anomaly, not the role model.

Meta try very very hard to avoid having any data within Indian borders, because of their privacy laws.

This necessitates not hiring product or data people there.

Source: worked there for five years many moons ago.

> They can capture the market without moving the workforce there. Meta/Instagram/WA have dominated Indian market for a decade now.

The former is a logistics company. They need an on-the-ground workforce in places they operate. The latter are social media products, no local workforce of significance needed.

That said, we are in a world where Amazon is able to do labor arbitrage of software-adjacent jobs by moving them to India. That's been happening for more than 2 decades. Nothing short of new laws levying penalties, or a massive consumer boycott will stop that or slow it down.

>I get the fear, but look at it from the investor's perspective. The US market is tapped out, Amazon is already everywhere it can be.

Heaven forbid we forget about the investors, and don't forget about the executive compensation!

I mean, seriously, is there no such thing as balance? I'm not saying investors should be arbitrarily shorted, but on the same token it doesn't mean workers need to always take the brunt of the change, which is how it goes down 90% of the time.

If layoffs were seen as executive leadership failures first and foremost it would be a small step toward the right direction of accountability.

>To keep the valuation climbing (which sustains everyone's RSUs), they have to capture these emerging markets.

Fallacy that the stock must continue to rise to the detriment of the workforce that supposedly would benefit. Never minding that RSUs shouldn't be seen as a primary form of compensation to begin with, there is a myriad of things companies can do to maintain the valuation of employee RSUs, like bigger grants.

Secondly, you're assuming to capture these emerging markets, a layoff is a must. In reality, it likely is not. If you have a surplus of resources, deploying them effectively would be a net win, as you re-allocate these folks to higher priority projects and workstreams. The incentive structure that C-Suites have built up since the 1980s however don't align with that, because executive compensation is entirely based around juicing the numbers on a spreadsheet, as opposed to being rewarded for building sustainable businesses.

>If they don't, the stock stagnates, and the compensation model for US tech workers falls apart.

It doesn't, compensation is more broad than RSUs, and could be adjusted in kind. This is a solved problem.

I'm pretty sure that most American software engineers would take a stable job with a salary without RSUs over RSUs but you can get laid off tomorrow.

and why do i care for the investor's perspective? they already made enough money to last them 100 lifetimes

True. This is Globalism at work. If these companies were not selling goods and services globally then they wouldn't have to deal with setting up offices, staff, pressure from local politicians to hire locals around the world.

Companies hiring more in cheap labor countries is quite obvious for long time. In case of Amazon I feel most of the stuff that was cutting edge 2 decades back is now low value work where cost is the only edge.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com