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Comment by samtp | Hacker News Reader

Yup, this is much more likely to lead to more offshoring than companies hiring more American workers. Which also means that communities in the US with a large amount of workers on visas will also suffer.

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Offshoring it hardly new. Take Microsoft for example. They offshored heavily over 20 years ago. Allow more immigration or the jobs will be offshored is an idle threat. Companies have done tons of offshoring and reshored many things after it didn't work out. More or less immigration isn't going to move the need on offshoring much either way.

The post-Covid offshoring is looking quite a bit different though.

How so?

For starters, compensation is almost entirely location-based now. Situations where a person lives in cheap city / country but paid close to US rates were never common, but in last 5 years or so they disappeared almost entirely. Moreover, every company seems to know about local rates, they all source this data from the same sources, so if you're job hunting they all give you the same offer. And, since there are so much competition for positions companies are very reluctant to bid on candidates, and most offers do not allow negotiations. Even if paying you slightly above market would still save the company quite a lot of money they don't do it. So, situations where you receive the same offer from multiple companies, and all of them are "take it or leave it", became pretty common.

I haven't been on a job market for a long time, but this is what I hear from people around me.

Of course it's not new. And of course it never really stopped. But there is a new incentive for execs to give it a much bigger push given all the recent remote work tooling and when they now think a programmer is just monitoring AI output. So why not pay the monitor SE Asian wages rather than US wages.

The trend is away from remote work though. So much more stuff is hybrid then it was a few years ago. SE Asian wages means a 12 hour time zone difference and that carries a real cost on efficiency (I personally experienced this at two companies). Future poorly thought offshoring attempts will go just as badly as they have in the past. If anything AI makes it worse, since each individual dev is responsible for a bigger slice of the output they need to be in the loop on business / customer needs and significant timezone differences make that harder.

What about Central America?

Plenty of offshoring to both Central America and South America has occurred in recent years. It was a somewhat untapped offshoring location, but that no longer seems to be the case.

Real example: my company is US based, top and middle management is in US, some middle management and lower in Europe, managing workers in India and Manila. Same scheme with Costa Rica, but managed directly from US.

If managed correctly though it means you can have effectively a 24 hour work day. US workers/management goes to sleep as the Asian workers are starting up

A key difference is that at least one isn’t competing for limited housing with offshoring. That is the number 1 driver of the affordability crisis atm.

I’m a fan of the YIMBY types but we aren’t building enough annd, until we are, it’s a problem to put more people where we already have little housing!

There is a lot more to an economy than just housing prices. All the local business now have less customers to sell their good and services to.

Offshoring to India is an idle threat due to radically different work cultures and expectations.

Offshoring to, say Poland or Portugal on the other hand...

Offshoring (form the US) to Europe, especially eastern Europe is not new either. The newish offshoring location was Central America and South America, but those have been tapped as well.

For example see https://theenterpriseworld.com/offshore-development-centers/ where they are listing well established locations for (US) offshoring.

Then let them already. Relocate all the work to India. I’m tired of US companies threatening everyone with job losses. Just fucking do it already.

They already are.

I'm old enough to remember when people gnashed their teeth about the U.S. taking talent from abroad being 'brain drain' that hurt those countries. Which is it? We want to take the rest of the world's best and brightest and screw those other countries in the process, or we feel bad about that and don't want to do that? EDIT: Cynically, it could be both!

Well it depends if you live in the US or you live in a country that is hemorrhaging your best workers to the US. No idea why you are trying to lump both groups together as if they should both have a single opinion.

People in the U.S. used to complain that we drain the rest of the world's brains. That has stopped. I was referring to that.

If you put yourself in the shoes of people in other nations, then... a) individuals might really like the option of emigrating to the U.S., but b) their nation might be better off with them staying at home. Interests conflict. The question is whether we should have selfish policies (such as putting a company's bottom-line ahead of a nation's, or one nation's development ahead of another) or not, and, of course, which is is which because one could argue that the only ones being selfish are the Americans who object to all these visas (I don't think they would be the _only_ ones being selfish, and arguably the 'nation' exists in part to protect its citizens, but yes, this is a case of selfishness).

> People in the U.S. used to complain that we drain the rest of the world's brains.

Ok? Are we all supposed to maintain a consistent view with this group of people? I don't understand your point.

I want to know: does the HN commentariat think that brain drain is a problem or not. Elsewhere in this thread we have people urging that we do drain the rest of the world's brains to "win the talent war" [0].

Now, I can totally see that maybe draining our adversaries' brains can be a good thing, unless it's a way of bringing in a fifth column, in which case... no. And it's definitely not good for countries we're on good terms with -- there that "win the talent war" comment shocks the conscience as a thoughtless, unnuanced, jingoist-but-dumb, and immoral/destructive as to our allies comment.

Consistency was not the issue. The question was: what has changed that so few seem to care about brain drain as a negative externality?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50009507

Ok, let’s say it leads to 60% offshoring and 40% hiring more Americans.

That 40% is a win for Americans. It means more new grads will be hired instead of losing out to “experts” from TATA to copy and paste from ChatGPT. Our vibe coders will be home grown, corn fed.

The argument works no matter what you think the breakdown is, 70/30, 80/20 etc.

It's not so simple because it's also a drop in demand for american goods and services. Fewer taxes paid, less consumption, etc.

No, that is the incorrect take. Offshoring isn't easy or cheap. Especially when Trump is basically trying to get companies to hire American workers by any means.

It is risky to invest in offshoring when the outcome isn't guaranteed to save you money.

> It is risky to invest in offshoring when the outcome isn't guaranteed to save you money.

Now apply that same line of thought to AI.

"Suffer"? It might help bring home prices back down to reality.

For the first time in my life I'm seeing high-income earners as a big drag on society.

There is a lot more to an economy than just housing prices. All the local business now have less customers to sell their good and services to.

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