LOL! They're going to send the jobs where the wages are cheaper, and that's exactly what they're doing.
IIRC, my employer stopped offering new H1-B sponsorships in most cases, after they opened an office in India (10+ years ago). They didn't open the office because they had a hard time hiring in the US. They opened it because they wanted to pay developers $10k/year instead of $100k a year.
For a bit of time I worked offshore for a company in the US. That was pure cost cutting, I was making probably around 5x-10x less than someone with similar skills in the US.
After a while I landed a job that required me to migrate to a different country. I actually make more here than the average salary for a local engineer.
I don't know many machinists that are hired from halfway across the globe, relocation costs included, to make more than the average machinist in the destination country.
Specialized skill is valued in the correct context, when there is demand for it.
Software developers view themselves as an entirely different class than skilled blue-collar laborers precisely because of their access to capital
It is explicitly because a single engineer can go out and get money from a capitalist and a single machine shop operator cannot go out and get money from a capitalist that makes the distinction
People wonder why software developers are anti-union it’s because they are fundamentally capitalist at heart
But they eat up the propaganda about how they totally could just happen to get that capital and run a one man software business and make a billion dollars.
Which is why they spent all that time and energy insisting they didn't have to unionize, because they were super important and could totally negotiate better than anyone else, especially a giant group of programmers, and now are panicking because dumb middle managers want to replace them with LLMs entirely.
Very predictable.
It wouldn't make any sense for them to call it offshoring.
Just alone "going where the talent is" itself is just plain out abusive and narcissistic behavior typical of the worst people, it's clearly not the parasitic ruling class or their parasitic abusiveness ... it's you, that you are not "talented", you are not "worthy" now that they have sucked and drained all they can get from you for decades and generations with all the other euphemistic language like "offshoring" instead of "wanting to profit at your expense but externalize the costs onto you too".
So you did this to yourself ... don't you know... because you are simply not talented enough and now you made the parasites have to go seek the talent elsewhere ... see what you did to the parasites who only just want to do right by you?
Humanity really needs to gain a far greater understanding of what narcissism is, how to identify it, how to resist and stand against it, how to counter it, and even how to utterly destroy and eradicate it and anyone who does it from society.
Many people simply don't even really understand what it is let alone how pernicious and subtle it is in its subversion; but it is utterly destructive, subversive, and parasitic for all of humanity. If we self-eradicate human life on this planet it will 100% be due to our inability to control narcissists like the people who say things like "going where the talent is". Just alone saying that kind of thing is utterly abusive and should be considered treason, because it is... betrayal.
If they were outside the US we would try to get them here. If not, we would find a spot for them outside. We would never hire a less qualified person simply because they could work in the US. We were always behind, to the point that having open “headcount” in an org was worth little, what you needed was priority to get a new hire.
At one point we were “parking” Australians in Dublin, having them work there for a year or two until they could get a visa for the US.
I've also been told for a company I will not name that had I been asian they would have called me, I just assume there's an overwhelming number of asian employees, not that there's anything wrong with that, but if they're discriminating against everyone else from being hired, that's not ethical or legal in the US.
But, I often see this presented as all or nearly all that is going on. There are lots of non-immigrant visa holders who get hired who are better qualified then 90+% of others, and are getting the same pay and conditions and their American teammates. These people are improving the employment prospects for Americans, not hurting them.
In the old days that approach would have obviously worked poorly (it was tried, and it went poorly).
IMO, as the company grew various issues inevitably reduced Eng effectiveness to the point where now outsourcing is no worse.
Now even if you could hire the best from around the world and get them all to MTV, it would not really matter.
I read these sentiments, and I honestly don’t understand the tone. This kind of behavior is exactly what you’d expect after taking just a few introductory undergraduate economics courses.
Free markets are predicated on the free movement of capital and labor, and American companies being able to go overseas for cheaper labor is exactly what they're going to do unless there are laws preventing that. When we have laws keeping jobs in one place they get called "regulation."
Generally speaking, I’m really shocked at how uneducated people are — programmers in particular — about how the labor market works, how the economy works, or how anything in the real world works, really.
There's a reason studying humanities is valuable - history, philosophy, economics, etc. It clues you in that when someone wants to exploit you, it's usually based on well-established precedent.
> I read these sentiments, and I honestly don’t understand the tone. This kind of behavior is exactly what you’d expect after taking just a few introductory undergraduate economics courses.
You'll notice I was responding to something I quoted. They claim they're taking action X because of Y, when they're actually taking action X because of Z. Changing Y will do nothing about X. Hence the tone.
Also, the eight most terrifying words in the English language "I just took few introductory undergraduate economics courses..."
> Also, the eight most terrifying words in the English language "I just took few introductory undergraduate economics courses..."
Fair enough, but I at least have a whole degree in it. :)
> Generally speaking, I’m really shocked at how uneducated people are — programmers in particular — about how the labor market works, how the economy works, or how anything in the real world works, really.
You provided zero evidence for any of these sins in the comment you replied to. I'm kind of shocked how economists get shocked out of thin air, it seems they make everything out of thin but highly compressed air.
> There's a reason studying humanities is valuable - history, philosophy, economics, etc.
There's a reason why people avoid these - in their present form, they provide zero practical value and even worse, teaching them amounts mainly to shamanistic incantations designed to confuse and hide the truth -e.g. BS about "talent" when the issue is "cheap labor".
I was pointing out that capital seeking lower wages is a standard economic outcome and my surprise was directed at how often folks in the tech industry seem caught off guard by basic profit-maximizing behavior. That's just what companies do and they are expected to do so.
Regarding the value of studying economics: it provides the exact framework needed to see past corporate PR. When companies claim they are offshoring for "talent," basic economics gives you the analytical tools to quickly recognize that the real motivation is reducing labor costs.
Israeli [0] tech salaries are comparable to Atlanta [1] and Dallas [2], yet we get better talent across the board - less bootcamp grads and more people with a background in OS and algos.
[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/israel
[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/atlanta...
[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
However one thing as a founder, I have started to adopt the Israeli playbook - have dev team etc in Israel and sell in the US i.e green card startup
you can live in a cheaper location, while benefiting from a larger market that might not be your home market
Sucks for people born in Israel btw.
I’m going to wager at least one reason for this is Israel is big in industries that demand that sort of knowledge where in the US, most money was made by CRUD monkeys putting together high level line of business applications.
Maybe there's a confusion that an "US" company should somehow be loyal to the US. This isn't the case, big publicly traded corporations work for the shareholders. They don't own anything to the US graduate who's looking for a job.
If they have less flexibility to hire in the US, they will hire elsewhere if they can. They still have an incentive to hire in the US as it's easier to collaborate when everybody is close by, but apparently it's not enough to favor (less skilled and/or more expensive) US citizens.
What is ironic is that this model has been forced to the world by the US, and nobody cared when it affected the manual workers. Now that it affects the educated elite, it's suddenly unacceptable.
That's not true. A US company should be loyal to the US: the fact that they are not is political dysfunction.
China, for all its faults, gets that, and it makes sure its companies are loyal to China. They're also in the process of burying the US economically and technologically. The US is falling behind in industry after industry, and its not creating new, sustainable technological edges at a sufficient rate. That's partially because the shareholder-mercenary American companies repeatedly make deals with the much more strategic China, that weaken themselves and America in the medium to long term.
> What is ironic is that this model has been forced to the world by the US, and nobody cared when it affected the manual workers. Now that it affects the educated elite, it's suddenly unacceptable.
It was always unacceptable. It's just that too-many idiot software engineers confused themselves for capitalist barons, because they had a 401k and a higher-than-average salary.
Allowing US companies to find talent abroad means those companies can deliver better products and makes competition more viable (ie lowers prices for consumers). If we only care about “jobs” and the size of paychecks, then protectionism is the way to go. But if we actually want to provide broad based prosperity (especially for our own citizenry), then you should not protect a small subset of high paid workers.
Why should American voters pay more for everything so that SWEs can be paid exorbitantly?
I shouldn’t need to explain to you why protectionism is bad. There’s 200 years of economic research on this and it shows that protectionism always backfires.
Besides, in trying to formulate an explaination for how offshoring is actually in America's interests, aren't you tacitly acknowledging that it is only right and reasonable to expect American voters to vote for what they perceive to be American interests?
The America First doctrine, in practice, has meant using power to do things that nominally appear in our interest, but don’t account for the second and third order effects. ie bully allied nations into accepting high tariffs without reciprocating, which doesn’t account for our own industries being hurt by higher input prices, a new reluctance to enter the US market, less competition, etc.
Protecting US workers from competition nominally helps those select workers, but it also makes them uncompetitive, steers businesses from setting up shop here at all, makes things more expensive for US consumers, and reduces innovation and upskilling.
The extreme cases are well known. But let's just give the statistic: the average global wage is $24000 in PPP, according to the UN. In other words, such a global system will be on average a 75% pay cut for US workers.
By the way, that's a PPP paycut, in other words a paycut without anything getting 1 cent cheaper. Not your housing. Not your food. Not your playstation. Not your cost of living. We'll be back to deciding which day in the month we'll have a little bit of meat.
The scary thing if you've ever been there is that India actually cares more than most countries for it's people.
And the truly terrifying thing is that income is distributed along a power law. In other words, it'd be a 50% pay cut for Donald Trump and a 90% pay cut for you and me.
However, in my opinion, if these companies want to continue to enjoy preferable tax treatment and the deregulated environment the US provides them, then they should be expected to hire people in the US to drive the US economy.
If they're not going to do that, then we (meaning the Government both state and federal) should stop incentivizing them. Why would we give government contracts to a company that's offshoring jobs? Why would we give them tax breaks? Why would we leave their markets largely unregulated?
The US Government should incentivize and support companies that are providing value residents of the US. As these companies move to offshoring (and other similar policies), they become economically extractive and the government should no longer support and enable such behavior.
And at that point they simply... shift the bulk of their operations somewhere that still gives incentives, and maybe just leave a lightly-staffed satellite office in the US.
Of course, in reality, they never actually leave because the vast majority of their profits is from the American economy.