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Not saying you're necessarily wrong, but there's been similar comments about India and China since the early 2000s. India alone has over 1.3bn people, and compe

Not saying you're necessarily wrong, but there's been similar comments about India and China since the early 2000s. India alone has over 1.3bn people, and compensation there is still a fraction of what it is in the US. If it was all just a numbers game, there should not have been a single working developer in the US right now.

vosper 7y ago
I don’t think India and China are the threat to US software jobs. It’s Latin America: same timezone(s); shorter/easier flights (because of the timezones as well as the distance) with easier visa requirements; far greater cultural familiarity and/or similarity (in both directions); lots of people who speak excellent English (in Latin America) and a fair few people who speak Spanish now in the US; less fear of IP theft; no trade war. Somewhat minus the timezone, a lot of these things apply to the Philippines, too.
- ohyes 7y ago
  You also have to imagine that India and China have increasing quality of life, more demand for their own software and (eventually) higher salaries.
- TheCoelacanth 7y ago
  Latin America is less of a threat simply because of population size. All of Latin America combined is half the size of just India or just China individually.
ben_w 7y ago
It definitely isn’t just numbers: language is also an issue, and, as I noted when someone asked about auto-translating programming languages, Chinese doesn’t seem to have the concept of lowercase/uppercase, so some things just wont work unless the developer really gets to know things that nobody will teach them because everyone else thinks it’s “common knowledge” and doesn’t realise it isn’t. As another example, there was a real-time city building/combat game a while back, made by an oriental developer and ported into English by a UK games company. You could set you flag to show your name — with a one character limit. That made sense if you’re thinking of “狐”, but English language players set their flags to “G” or “K”. Right now, I’m a UK-born developer living and working in Berlin, and my B1-equivalent in German isn’t enough to read German-language design documents without resorting to machine translation. It just about works (office and dev language is English), but German-English is easy compared to Chinese-English. Seamless remote work is also a prerequisite for levelling tech salaries even within single nations and time zones, but I don’t know enough psychology to argue how far or close that is.

vosper 7y ago

I don’t think India and China are the threat to US software jobs. It’s Latin America: same timezone(s); shorter/easier flights (because of the timezones as well as the distance) with easier visa requirements; far greater cultural familiarity and/or similarity (in both directions); lots of people who speak excellent English (in Latin America) and a fair few people who speak Spanish now in the US; less fear of IP theft; no trade war. Somewhat minus the timezone, a lot of these things apply to the Philippines, too.

ohyes 7y ago
You also have to imagine that India and China have increasing quality of life, more demand for their own software and (eventually) higher salaries.
TheCoelacanth 7y ago
Latin America is less of a threat simply because of population size. All of Latin America combined is half the size of just India or just China individually.

ben_w 7y ago

It definitely isn’t just numbers: language is also an issue, and, as I noted when someone asked about auto-translating programming languages, Chinese doesn’t seem to have the concept of lowercase/uppercase, so some things just wont work unless the developer really gets to know things that nobody will teach them because everyone else thinks it’s “common knowledge” and doesn’t realise it isn’t. As another example, there was a real-time city building/combat game a while back, made by an oriental developer and ported into English by a UK games company. You could set you flag to show your name — with a one character limit. That made sense if you’re thinking of “狐”, but English language players set their flags to “G” or “K”. Right now, I’m a UK-born developer living and working in Berlin, and my B1-equivalent in German isn’t enough to read German-language design documents without resorting to machine translation. It just about works (office and dev language is English), but German-English is easy compared to Chinese-English. Seamless remote work is also a prerequisite for levelling tech salaries even within single nations and time zones, but I don’t know enough psychology to argue how far or close that is.