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It's what I don't get about the whole outsourcing, tech sector debate; if bay area tech employees are so expensive, why not hire people that are equally or at l

It's what I don't get about the whole outsourcing, tech sector debate; if bay area tech employees are so expensive, why not hire people that are equally or at least sufficiently as qualified in other parts of the USA, where you could get away with paying them less even though it would provide them with wildly higher quality of life than they would get anywhere in the Bay area from most perspectives. Essentially the question is why the heck outsource to places like India, where people don't speak proper English and the technical skills are lower in many ways, which is only compounded by communication issues, let alone why hire H1B visas from, e.g., India at Silicon Valley rates; when you could have hired net far better Americans in the long run. Western and American society suffers from a shortsightedness that will end up destroying not just the USA, but the advancement of all of the rest of humanity through that kind of mentality. You can only live on the inertia of others for so long before momentum ceases.

pc86 9y ago
It sounds like there would be a huge competitive advantage in starting your own company and doing just that. You can pay much less, get much better work, and rake in the profits as you shut down your idiot competitors one by one.
- dhd415 9y ago
  That's probably overstating the case a bit. If you're hiring remote workers from other parts of the USA, I'd say you can pay somewhat less, get roughly equivalent work, and reap the profits so long as you have the skills to manage a distributed team.
- seanp2k2 9y ago
  Because many of the workers who are "good" come to the Bay Area for the money, the lifestyle, the location, and the job selection. If you could, why would you not want to live in an excellent climate by many of the US tech companies and make 3-8+x what you'd get elsewhere? You also typically get to work on "cooler" stuff since the companies out here can afford to make bigger and riskier bets. There aren't too many AI/ML positions around the rest of the country, but it's hot right now here.
  - douche 9y ago
    > If you could, why would you not want to live in an excellent climate by many of the US tech companies and make 3-8+x what you'd get elsewhere? Because California, number one, and because everything costs 3-10X what it does elsewhere. I could easily double my salary if I moved to SV, but I'd have to live in a van in the parking lot like a hobo, instead of being able to afford a decent house and have a goodly amount of disposable income.
Domenic_S 9y ago
> why the heck outsource to places like India You vastly underestimate just how cheap outsourcing is
- voidlogic 9y ago
  Maybe he does... BUT I used to work for a consulting firm that would sometimes bid against far east outsourced providers when local firms had projects. This is anecdotal but over and over again, this was the scenario: 1. local firm collects bids 2. As courtesy firm tells us we were 2-5x more expensive than winner, winner is in far east. 3. 1,2,3 years latter firm returns to us asking if we can re-submit but on a more shorter timeline (maybe the project would have been 2-3 engineers for 6 mo) 4. We come back with a new bid that is 8-12x more, has a bigger team than we would have used orgiinally, less favorable risk analysis.. 5. They paid us to take them on! Often-times we had to throw away almost everything their Bangladesh contractors had been working on for years (fundamentally bad schema, no unit tests, bad bad code)...
  - fpoling 9y ago
    I have similar anecdotal evidence from Norway. A bank outsourced running IT systems to a company from India. A year later they hired a local company to fix/redesign things.
    - seanp2k2 9y ago
      Yep, many people who have been in the industry have heard this one before and/or inherited the project-from-hell that has been touched by half a dozen offshore dev firms and basically needs to be scrapped. There's a reason why we aren't all jobless while other countries take all our tech jobs; it's highly-skilled labor, which means that the quality of the end product is directly influenced by the skill of the workers. The time differences and language / cultural barriers (I forget the name for it, but IIRC there was something in Indian culture around ~"my part is done" which is part of why e.g. There's so much trash in the cities -- basically it's not your problem -- please correct me if I'm misunderstanding or misrepresenting this) certainly don't help set up these situations for success.
marcuskaz 9y ago
Your conclusion of destroying all of humanity might go a bit far - but I agree with the general idea of hiring people where they are is more competitive and I would say better overall. Remote work allows for a better diversification of work forces across regions. For example, if somebody who lives in Detroit because that is where they were born and family is can have the same high tech job as people in the Bay Area it helps Detroit be more resilient and flexible to regional business fluctuations.
- seanp2k2 9y ago
  Too many companies IMO pay "based on location", which would mean that the person in Detroit gets about 20-30% of the Bay Area person doing the same work. If you make $100k a year in the Detroit Metro doing computer stuff that is still non-management, you're doing fantastic. For $1m out there you can get a literal mansion. In the Bay, you can get a totally unremarkable single-family home on a street with a bunch of people who can barely afford their property tax bills. Houses in such neighborhoods in Detroit are about $10k and you can literally buy property by the block in some areas.
JDiculous 9y ago
Because the executives and rich people who bankroll companies aren't yet sold on remote work, and those who are mostly prefer to just hire where labor is the cheapest (eg. India, Eastern Europe)
gnopgnip 9y ago
If they were equally qualified they would still demand a comparable salary. A full stack dev in Houston makes nearly as much as one in SF with the same qualifications.
- dopamean 9y ago
  I have a hard time believing this is true in general. I live and work in Austin. When I was interviewing for the job I have here I interviewed at a few companies in SF and received offers at two to do basically the same kind of work I do here. The offers in SF were substantially larger than what I accepted in Austin. After looking at my budget more closely I decided to stay put because after taxes, cost of living changes, etc I found that there wasn't much of a difference and that I'd rather not move. I understand that this is just a single anecdote but I work with quite a few people who have moved here from SF – and have friends who have made the opposite move – and they have all reported something similar.
- linkregister 9y ago
  A quick jaunt to Stack Overflow Jobs, Glassdoor, or h1bdata.info will show you that in the vast majority of cases, no. Different markets have wildly varying pay. If you meant "overall net income", then the Houston dev would likely come out ahead after taxes and rent/mortgage.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- douche 9y ago
  That's not really going off the beaten path enough to find bargains. If remote work was more reliable and easy to find, I'd be sorely tempted to move someplace out in the sticks, albeit where there is high-speed internet access, where land and living expenses are significantly cheaper than any urban area by considerable multiples. Plus, you get to be out in the sticks, not cheek by jowl with a million other people.
virtuabhi 9y ago
Almost every comment you have made with this account is either dead or flagged. I am surprised that your account is still active.
jrochkind1 9y ago
I think some companies think, as long we're willing to have remote workers in the first place, why not get the cheapest? Obviously you can also pay someone in India less and provide them with "wildly higher quality of life than they would get anywhere in the Bay area from most perspectives". My experience with Indian devs has been their English is as "proper" as anyone's, and their technical skill levels vary with about as much variation as in the U.S., where there are also plenty of not very good developers. The thing is, once a company has decided to prioritize saving money on developers, they are probably willing to take devs who are really not very good to get cost savings (whether they realize it or not), and there are a lot of companies in India which exist to help them do that. If they wanted to hire not very good developers at cheaper rates in the U.S., they could easily do that too. Perhaps the people making the decisions fool themselves into thinking the rock-bottom-rate devs they are hiring in India are magically highly skilled, and somehow it's easier to fool yourself this way when they are on the other side of the world.
beatpanda 9y ago
Groupthink and investor pressure

pc86 9y ago

It sounds like there would be a huge competitive advantage in starting your own company and doing just that. You can pay much less, get much better work, and rake in the profits as you shut down your idiot competitors one by one.

dhd415 9y ago
That's probably overstating the case a bit. If you're hiring remote workers from other parts of the USA, I'd say you can pay somewhat less, get roughly equivalent work, and reap the profits so long as you have the skills to manage a distributed team.
seanp2k2 9y ago
Because many of the workers who are "good" come to the Bay Area for the money, the lifestyle, the location, and the job selection. If you could, why would you not want to live in an excellent climate by many of the US tech companies and make 3-8+x what you'd get elsewhere? You also typically get to work on "cooler" stuff since the companies out here can afford to make bigger and riskier bets. There aren't too many AI/ML positions around the rest of the country, but it's hot right now here.
- douche 9y ago
  > If you could, why would you not want to live in an excellent climate by many of the US tech companies and make 3-8+x what you'd get elsewhere? Because California, number one, and because everything costs 3-10X what it does elsewhere. I could easily double my salary if I moved to SV, but I'd have to live in a van in the parking lot like a hobo, instead of being able to afford a decent house and have a goodly amount of disposable income.

Domenic_S 9y ago

> why the heck outsource to places like India You vastly underestimate just how cheap outsourcing is

voidlogic 9y ago
Maybe he does... BUT I used to work for a consulting firm that would sometimes bid against far east outsourced providers when local firms had projects. This is anecdotal but over and over again, this was the scenario: 1. local firm collects bids 2. As courtesy firm tells us we were 2-5x more expensive than winner, winner is in far east. 3. 1,2,3 years latter firm returns to us asking if we can re-submit but on a more shorter timeline (maybe the project would have been 2-3 engineers for 6 mo) 4. We come back with a new bid that is 8-12x more, has a bigger team than we would have used orgiinally, less favorable risk analysis.. 5. They paid us to take them on! Often-times we had to throw away almost everything their Bangladesh contractors had been working on for years (fundamentally bad schema, no unit tests, bad bad code)...
- fpoling 9y ago
  I have similar anecdotal evidence from Norway. A bank outsourced running IT systems to a company from India. A year later they hired a local company to fix/redesign things.
  - seanp2k2 9y ago
    Yep, many people who have been in the industry have heard this one before and/or inherited the project-from-hell that has been touched by half a dozen offshore dev firms and basically needs to be scrapped. There's a reason why we aren't all jobless while other countries take all our tech jobs; it's highly-skilled labor, which means that the quality of the end product is directly influenced by the skill of the workers. The time differences and language / cultural barriers (I forget the name for it, but IIRC there was something in Indian culture around ~"my part is done" which is part of why e.g. There's so much trash in the cities -- basically it's not your problem -- please correct me if I'm misunderstanding or misrepresenting this) certainly don't help set up these situations for success.

marcuskaz 9y ago

Your conclusion of destroying all of humanity might go a bit far - but I agree with the general idea of hiring people where they are is more competitive and I would say better overall. Remote work allows for a better diversification of work forces across regions. For example, if somebody who lives in Detroit because that is where they were born and family is can have the same high tech job as people in the Bay Area it helps Detroit be more resilient and flexible to regional business fluctuations.

seanp2k2 9y ago
Too many companies IMO pay "based on location", which would mean that the person in Detroit gets about 20-30% of the Bay Area person doing the same work. If you make $100k a year in the Detroit Metro doing computer stuff that is still non-management, you're doing fantastic. For $1m out there you can get a literal mansion. In the Bay, you can get a totally unremarkable single-family home on a street with a bunch of people who can barely afford their property tax bills. Houses in such neighborhoods in Detroit are about $10k and you can literally buy property by the block in some areas.

JDiculous 9y ago

Because the executives and rich people who bankroll companies aren't yet sold on remote work, and those who are mostly prefer to just hire where labor is the cheapest (eg. India, Eastern Europe)

gnopgnip 9y ago

If they were equally qualified they would still demand a comparable salary. A full stack dev in Houston makes nearly as much as one in SF with the same qualifications.

dopamean 9y ago
I have a hard time believing this is true in general. I live and work in Austin. When I was interviewing for the job I have here I interviewed at a few companies in SF and received offers at two to do basically the same kind of work I do here. The offers in SF were substantially larger than what I accepted in Austin. After looking at my budget more closely I decided to stay put because after taxes, cost of living changes, etc I found that there wasn't much of a difference and that I'd rather not move. I understand that this is just a single anecdote but I work with quite a few people who have moved here from SF – and have friends who have made the opposite move – and they have all reported something similar.
linkregister 9y ago
A quick jaunt to Stack Overflow Jobs, Glassdoor, or h1bdata.info will show you that in the vast majority of cases, no. Different markets have wildly varying pay. If you meant "overall net income", then the Houston dev would likely come out ahead after taxes and rent/mortgage.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
douche 9y ago
That's not really going off the beaten path enough to find bargains. If remote work was more reliable and easy to find, I'd be sorely tempted to move someplace out in the sticks, albeit where there is high-speed internet access, where land and living expenses are significantly cheaper than any urban area by considerable multiples. Plus, you get to be out in the sticks, not cheek by jowl with a million other people.

virtuabhi 9y ago

Almost every comment you have made with this account is either dead or flagged. I am surprised that your account is still active.

jrochkind1 9y ago

I think some companies think, as long we're willing to have remote workers in the first place, why not get the cheapest? Obviously you can also pay someone in India less and provide them with "wildly higher quality of life than they would get anywhere in the Bay area from most perspectives". My experience with Indian devs has been their English is as "proper" as anyone's, and their technical skill levels vary with about as much variation as in the U.S., where there are also plenty of not very good developers. The thing is, once a company has decided to prioritize saving money on developers, they are probably willing to take devs who are really not very good to get cost savings (whether they realize it or not), and there are a lot of companies in India which exist to help them do that. If they wanted to hire not very good developers at cheaper rates in the U.S., they could easily do that too. Perhaps the people making the decisions fool themselves into thinking the rock-bottom-rate devs they are hiring in India are magically highly skilled, and somehow it's easier to fool yourself this way when they are on the other side of the world.

beatpanda 9y ago

Groupthink and investor pressure