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Uber CEO Wants to Shift More Engineering Jobs to India, Sparking Internal Debate
- atonse 6y agoIt's hard to ignore the siren song as a business person of comparing your 300k a year engineers to a senior engineer that costs $80k in India (regardless of the potential hidden costs of cultural and time zone differences). This gap should probably narrow as more remote work becomes normal, and more people move out of the Valley and can actually live decently on 150k, rather than 300k.
- secondcoming 6y agoYes, the salaries I've seen bandied about for SV developers are absurd. That a new grad in SV can out-earn a seasoned dev located elsewhere was never sustainable. People will point out that the rent is absurdly high too, and maybe it is, but I'd also wager that these employees are renting from colleagues higher up who approve these salaries because they know they'll get a large cut.
- babycake 6y agoMaybe the new grads with those legendary salaries are paid closer to their true value, while the seasoned devs are not?
- godzillabrennus 6y agoPaying $80k a year in India would get you top level talent. They’d pay less than that. Uber is preparing for a death spiral as their financial backing runs out and they need to shrink to the profitable markets.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago> Uber is preparing for a death spiral as their financial backing runs out and they need to shrink to the profitable markets. Many of their top markets have ruled their drivers are employees (or requiring similar compensation/benefits), except Brazil. I'm unsure if they can remain anywhere near their current size (versus the headcount of a traditional livery service) based on that regulatory environment, even with McKinsey style transformations to their business (ie offshoring). > "But one detail in particular caught my eye. About 24 percent of Uber’s bookings—all the money that customers pay through the app and in cash, including driver earnings—occur in just five cities: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and São Paulo." [1] London: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/19/uber-loses-appeal-over-driver-employment-rights https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/19/uber-lose... ("Uber loses appeal over driver employment rights") France: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-court/top-french-court-deals-blow-to-uber-by-giving-driver-employee-status-idUSKBN20R23F https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-court/top-french-cou... ("Top French court deals blow to Uber by giving driver 'employee' status") California: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/california-regulator-uber-lyft-drivers-employees-044824014.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/california-regulator-uber-lyf... ("Uber, Lyft drivers are employees according to California regulator") New Jersey: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/14/nyregion/uber-new-jersey-drivers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/14/nyregion/uber-new-jersey-... ("New Jersey has demanded that Uber pay $649 million for years of unpaid employment taxes for its drivers, arguing that the ride-hailing company has misclassified the workers as independent contractors and not as employees.") New York: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/02/nyregion/uber-drivers-pay-nyc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/02/nyregion/uber-drivers-pay... ("New York City regulators are moving toward significantly raising wages for drivers for Uber and other ride-hailing apps.") [1] https://slate.com/business/2019/04/uber-ipo-nyc-london-risks.html https://slate.com/business/2019/04/uber-ipo-nyc-london-risks...
- eldavido 6y agoUnintended side effect of this is to prevent competitive entry. No other TNC will be able to achieve enough density from day 1 to run at the wage floor without huge amounts of VC. That alone should make people suspicious of this legislation. In the long run, this is really, really good for Uber/Lyft.
- Jommi 6y agoYes, its basically a potential way for uber and lyft to lock themselves in as the only 2 players in the US market.
- chanakya 6y agoThe numbers $300K and $80K are roughly accurate. Yes, you can get engineers in India for $5K or even less, but you don't want them working on your product. Senior, architect-level talented engineers may well cost $80K. And yes, if you want to hire the same capability engineer in Silicon Valley, they will likely cost $300K.
- greesil 6y agoNitpicking a bit, it's not a death spiral if they don't die in the end.
- godzillabrennus 6y agoContemplated changing that wording before posting but decided that it’s a bit of a ship of Theseus thought exercise. If Uber radically shifts its focus to focus solely on smaller profitable markets and the people working there are swapped out then has the company ultimately failed/died and had to be reborn? It may not be a General Magic style death but it seemed reasonable to me that at least philosophically it is a death spiral nonetheless.
- Avalaxy 6y agoI think the cost of an engineer is way less than 80K in India. Here in the Netherlands a senior SE would be $80K. I see no reason to go to India instead of western Europe then.
- kareemm 6y agoThe reason is that instead of 300k (or 80k) you're paying less than 80k.
- 0xcafecafe 6y agoI don't think it is "way less". 80K USD converts to 5,979K INR which is about the ballpark estimate some of the senior engineers I know make in India (one of them is working for the Western European company btw). One of the reasons to move to India would be the availability of talent even if it is at comparable cost. Companies like to scale and lack of talent is a risk they want to mitigate.
- rubber_duck 6y agoIn my experience working with outsourcing agencies - "talent available" in India is filling headcount numbers. Good developers ask for similar wages as EU based ones and are equally hard to find, probably even harder because the market is filled with scammers (eg. on several occasions I would interview a competent guy and then the work would clearly get delegated to someone inexperienced)
- 0xcafecafe 6y agoSure, scammers are abound and the bad to good ratio is pretty high but due to the population size, the number of good developers is high as well.
- egh5oon 6y ago> the bad to good ratio is pretty high but due to the population size This is not how ratios work.
- illuminati1911 6y agoWith 80k you could get a team of senior engineers in India. Or ”senior engineers”, but anyway.
- LeifCarrotson 6y agoWhy should those engineers be paid $150k if they're generating more than $300k of value? For that matter, why should an Indian engineer be paid $80k if they're generating $300k of value minus whatever hidden costs you want to assign (surely not $220k)?
- frandroid 6y agoThe value generated is an interesting number when the company is hemorrhaging money...
- ukoki 6y agoPeople are paid based on how much a similarly skilled worker is willing to work for, not based on how much value they generate for a company.
- jupp0r 6y agoThey are paid based on how much other companies are willing to pay the same worker.
- bronzeage 6y agoThey are paid between their value and what they are willing to work for. Where exactly in between depends on supply and demand. When demand is high, competition will drive the salary close to the value generated. When demand is low, cost cutting and unemployment will drive the salary towards the minimum price.
- karpierz 6y agoWhy should an engineer be paid that value they produce when they assume none of the risk? If the company goes bankrupt, will the engineer be willing to bail the company out? The engineer is paid less than the value they produce because they don't assume any of the risk. If the product they produce turns out to be worthless or break, they don't have to pay their salary back.
- egh5oon 6y ago
- taylorlapeyre 6y agoYou can live decently in the valley on a lot less than 300k. Speaking from experience, even 90k is perfectly comfortable. Based on the salaries of my friends in SF, $150k is a very reasonable salary that allows a fantastic lifestyle.
- eldavido 6y agoThis is kind of a contrarian viewpoint but one I happen to agree with. As a single person, you can live a great life on $100K. No, maybe you aren't going to $100/plate restaurants every night or living in a $5000/month luxury studio, but there are plenty of great apartments in Oakland (where I live) for $1500-2000/month. What's actually started to become jarring is the difference between SF proper and the rest of the region. SF rents seem to be almost 2x comparable places in the East Bay, plus the general price level is higher from Prop C and all the other insane junk the electorate wants. 2x the cost and the city is rapidly becoming a tent camp, I'm happy to live a little farther out and commute to work 1-2x/week when I'm not WFH.
- stuff4ben 6y agoProbably single with no family to support, living in a shoebox, with no car. Sure if you want to spend 60% of your salary on "housing" in SF, $150K is perfectly fine...
- Jommi 6y agoWhy do you need to live in SF?
- jupp0r 6y agoWith mortgage payments in the $5k range, I highly doubt your assessment. Maybe your definition of comfortable is different than mine, or you don’t have children.
- centimeter 6y agoRegardless of how “senior” they are, you get what you pay for.
- gorpomon 6y agoThis is well-trodden ground as far as discussion around here goes. The common points pro and con always come up: is the quality the same (some say yes, some say no), is co-location or time-zone location important (same parenthetical), what $ amount is ethical to pay, whom is it more ethical to pay (are you a nationalist or a global citizen, etc), what's sustainable, many more etc's. I've decided that's it's a personal decision to a company. Many find benefits in having some teams in India or Asia, some don't so they don't. We should really divorce politics from this discussion. I'm ok with company A saying they like Indian devs and company B saying they enjoy the benefits of keeping it in their geographical area. I've seen outsourcing backfire. I've seen it succeed. I've seen team leads emerge in India and direct an entire product from 10,000 miles away. I've also seen dead weight that I had to go out of my way to get productivity from. You see it all and you'll get it all, so why the fuss?
- LoSboccacc 6y ago> We should really divorce politics from this discussion. that's a common technical people pitfall. politics permeates society, and ignoring it is only to your own detriment exposing you form exploitation of those whom play the political game, of which you most assuredly participate in, whether you want an active role in it or not.
- thebean11 6y agoThere's a difference between "let's try to figure out the best way to do something" and "let's sell the solution we've settled on". That's not an argument for avoiding politics, but there's nothing wrong with veering in the other direction either.
- LoSboccacc 6y agoonce you figure out the best way, you _still_ have to sell it to stakeholders which are each optimizing for different things, some of which you probably don't even known, and that's when the politics kicks in.
- 6y ago
- softwaredoug 6y agoThere is always one 'business KPI' being measured whether engineers like it or not - your pay. I know it's passe to poo poo KPIs and measuring value delivered to the business. If you're not in a position to justify the investment to stakeholders, relative to other options with lower costs, you're probably going to lose that argument.
- collyw 6y ago$80K will get you good engineers in Europe. Not saying they would be better or worse, but the cost of living is higher and the culture is closer.
- MichaelRazum 6y agoJust wondering why they don't want to outsource to europe. Here in Germany you will get good engineers for $80k. Or east europe is even cheaper + better cultural fit.
- EdwinLarkin 6y agoEmployees in countries like India are more disposable. In theory if you mean by eastern europe the part that is in EU even that one has some decent labor laws to prevent companies like Uber from firing at will. I think even Ukraine or Belarus do.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Alex3917 6y ago> This gap should probably narrow as more remote work becomes normal, and more people move out of the Valley and can actually live decently on 150k, rather than 300k. The gap is a function of Moore's Law. If Moore's Law slows down, the gap will narrow. If not, then not.
- ixvvqktiwl 6y agoI used to think this was a bad thing, but these days I'm not so sure. Assuming you can get the same (or similar) talent in India instead of the US, doesn't it make sense to do your development in a place where your money goes farther? The capitalist in me sees this as a win: more value for shareholders, and a big life improvement for Indians. Can someone explain to me why it's a bad thing? I understand it might be bad for current and future US-based Uber employees, but aside from that, what's the downside? The way I see it, this helps more people overall (and I don't really care about which national flag you identify with).
- jaywalk 6y agoWhy not just move the entire company to India, and pay everyone less?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gpm 6y agoBecause people will quit instead of moving, and those people have very valuable institutional knowledge.
- jaywalk 6y agoYou wouldn't move people, you'd hire Indians. (I was being sarcastic, by the way)
- somurzakov 6y agothats what Zoom does, large part of their engineering is in China
- ilaksh 6y agoYeah.. I also wonder about how some of those other Chinese companies do it.. they must somehow be able to find talent in China.. apparently.. I mean, it's amazing..I wonder if they pay them $300k I also wonder, I know there are a few big software companies in India.. how do they manage to build large operations without hiring $300k per year US engineers from the Bay Area? I wonder if there are actually some good engineers in India. Weird. I heard they were all bad. But I guess with 1.3 billion people they might have a couple of good programmers. Possibly. OR maybe the large Indian software/internet companies probably actually hire the best US engineers and just get by with them. That's probably actually it.
- villgax 6y agoHow is anyone surprised, Uber the taxi app is an international service whether its Vietnam or India is only maintenance/top-up work since the actual core product is up & running since the past decade.
- xwdv 6y agoWhy would you hire an $80k Indian when you could easily hire an $80k American from somewhere with lower costs of living than Silicon Valley.
- thekingofh 6y agoBecause hiring an American requires you to treat them like a human being.
- addicted44 6y agoPeople earning 80k in India, China, and heck even Europe, for that matter, almost certainly have a much higher standard of living than people earning that much in the US. And you can find far more 80k level developers in individual cities in India than you would in a small mid level city in the US.
- eldavido 6y agoYou say that, but I'm not so sure. At some point where you live matters a lot. You can be rich, but if you can't get things shipped because the roads are bad, you can't get clean water, there are no local services around (haircut places, restaurants, tradespeople to fix your house), not to mention fun things to do, it looks worse. I have this conversation with my friend Mike. I work and live in SF as a software engineer. He lives in Indiana and earns 8-10x what I do as a surgeon but I'm not sure he's actually better off. Especially considering there aren't great schools for him to send his kids to or interesting people to see in meetups.
- rorykoehler 6y agoI would wager an $80k Indian will be the far better engineer.
- HeroOfAges 6y agoI'd take that bet
- 6y ago
- thiago_fm 6y agoWell, there's definitely challenges in moving them to India. But given how technology is commoditised and honestly there are just amazing developers everywhere in the world, I don't see why they would stick paying $500k total comp for an engineer in silicon valley to change font size in a mobile app. For example, I moved from a third world country to a first one to work as a developer and people here aren't any better, just a bit more lazy, than my former country and worker laws are more strict(better for workers). They could just offshore the work, but instead they want to employ people here for a bigger cost, and I'm here because I get paid magnitudes more than on my home country.
- centimeter 6y agoThe people clearing over half a million are probably (hopefully) not working on implementing UI tweaks. The cost of hiring low quality labor to do your “soft” dev work (UI, web front end, etc.) is that you’ll probably end up with a badly done and frustrating-to-use interface with tons of bugs. See like 75% of websites.
- _jal 6y agoFirm with a business plan premised on devaluing and trying to eliminate labor continues to devalue labor, film at 11.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- luspr 6y agoMy feeling is that best Indian software engineers are in the US (or even Europe) already. I have great Indian and Pakistani colleagues at my company, but we had very mixed results with outsourcing.
- softwaredoug 6y agoI'm not so sure, with restrictions in immigration, and developing Indian tech scene, this might not be as true as it was 10 years ago.
- ixvvqktiwl 6y agoLike others have mentioned, the current political atmosphere is one that seems to have embraced xenophobia, thus making it harder for talent to emigrate. If you can't move the talent to the work, you can move the work to the talent. In that sense the internet is a great equalizer.
- eldavido 6y agoThis reminds me of a quote from my international econ class in college: "You can take our tomatoes, or our workers. It's up to you to pick which you want" - Mexico to US
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoI believe this is true also, but is changing quickly. Anecdotally I know of some pretty good engineers that are moving back home because the quality of life difference (having a cook, housekeeper, driver), and because salaries have gotten a lot better than say 5 or 10 years ago.
- dudul 6y agoI've also seen very mixed results with outsourcing, but I don't know if I would blame Indian (or Polish, or Ukrainian or whatever) engineers. I think often it's just how the "mothership" works with the outsourced entity. If the process is to ship a spreadsheet of specifications and expect to get back a great product in 3 weeks, it's not ideal.
- 6y ago
- designium 6y agoI think it's not a dichotomy if it's good or bad, when you think from which stakeholder perspective you are using, the answer is diametrically opposite: "Outsourcing devs to India" - this may be an oversimplification - Shareholders: Saving money, more money to Shareholders pocket hopefully - Management: Decreasing costs, better path to achieve xyz goals; therefore easier to meet bonus targets - Dev team: Increasing uncertainty about job security, quality of product losing control - PM, UI/UX, designers, related fields: Increasing uncertainty about job security, more overhead to develop products and features; potentially slower feature release - Other teams in the company: increasing more work to deal with teams in different parts of the world (but that's already happening with Uber with teams across the world) - India's devs: more high quality and better paying jobs - India's devs market: slight increase in competition of quality devs - Consumers and User: minimal disruption, they don't care I think the Outsourcing can be done because not all dev work is weighted equally across the board. Are you going to use a $300K dev to correct a spelling mistake in an app or use that dev to further the AI development of autonomous driving system? I cannot answer why this is not a good approach but it sounds reasonable. Now, there are a lot of other consequences of outsourcing the work if you proceed to second order thinking. Having Uber to vouch and invest in India will increase its prestige in software development market further; however, for the US side, that only adds more pain to the idea that big corporations are self interested only and undermines the US labor market.
- IntelMiner 6y agoI'd be wary about the Consumers and Users "not caring". Depending on the size of the company, there's definitely a lot of negative sentiment to seeing "jobs" sent overseas, regardless of where the positions actually are When things do go wrong, there's a bit of an attitude of "of course it broke, they sent all the jobs overseas!"
- naruvimama 6y agoIndia is also a huge market, also one with huge growth potential. People living in advanced economies growing at 2% do not seem to realise that the growth that they need for their survival actually come from developing countries growing at 6-7% actually adding assets, or store of value.
- Ozzie_osman 6y agoThis is kind of about whether Uber views itself as a FAANG type software company (software as core competency, strong recruiting brand for tech-hub engineers) or a more operational business (software as a cost center). Most companies end up having to choose one. If you're the latter, you absolutely don't try competing with FAANG for the same talent. (I do think Amazon is a rare example of a company that both developed software as a core competency but also real world operations) That said, I'm always happy to see companies diversifying their geographic footprint. Smart, conscientious people exist everywhere, not just in Western tech-hubs. And I hope in the future the choice isn't viewed as "to be one of the best software companies in the world you have to be in Silicon Valley, but if you want low costs, go to India, etc"
- ForHackernews 6y agoI don't see any reason (except for juicing their valuation) to consider Uber as a software company. Their product is not software: it's taxi cabs. A ride hailing app is more or less a commodity, see all the Uber clones out there: Lyft, Gett, Arro, Flywheel, Kapten...
- treis 6y ago>Uber as a software company. Their product is not software: it's taxi cabs. That's not accurate. They have software to match riders to drivers while optimally setting the price of the trip based on the current demand/supply. It has to work in many different cities while preventing fraud and/or gaming of the system. It's a legitimately hard engineering problem that requires sophisticated software solutions.
- softwaredoug 6y agoI feel like this happens because engineering teams get too big and unfocused. This size creates communication overhead (ala mythical man month) and little fiefdoms. The easiest solution is to outsource the jobs. The harder solution would be to streamline the business and the focus.
- game_the0ry 6y agoI don't think moving tech labor form US workers to Indian workers will have the desired effect that corporate decision makers are hoping for. For one, good tech workers are hard to find anywhere. A candidate needs a range of attributes to be effective at this type of work. That type of talent is hard enough to find in the western world, it will likely be just as hard to find in the east. Two, Indian tech labor isn't that cheap, a conclusion I draw from my own anecdotal experience. My first job was working for what you may call a "body shop" that was US based with US only employees. The owner started the business after doing sales for an off-shore, India-based "body shop," and he did it bc cost of labor was approaching the cost of labor of US workers, and the US workers would tend to produce higher quality (less defective) work (his words, not mine). No idea what the details were, but he has a thriving business. Finally, there might be a lot going on right now, but why haven't companies outsourced sooner when there was nothing stopping them (even visas were easier to come by before Trump)? I believe they have contemplated it, and changed their minds for good reason.
- softwaredoug 6y agoMaybe Indian tech labor isn't that cheap. But Silicon Valley tech labor is very expensive (perhaps overpriced!). Maybe the latter is the key factor...
- game_the0ry 6y agoI would argue there is no such thing as overpriced labor when its the market that sets the price. You will never get a Mercedes for the price of a Honda. So be skeptical when a politician or mega corp manager utters the words "labor shortage" - there is no such thing.
- softwaredoug 6y agoSure, though it takes a bit of time for the actors to become conscious they'll get the same value at a lower price.
- 6y ago
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y agoI will add something that has recently popped up as a result of the pandemic and apparently was not seen even during 2008 crash. Apparently, companies are considering cutting pay. From that perspective, it is not a surprise that a subset of tech companies will attempt to save money on employee cost. I don't even want to get started since I know management will get bonuses for right-sizing the business.
- eldavido 6y agoEverybody's talking about the cost side of this and not the benefit: customer intimacy. India is a huge market for many tech companies, and having more on-the-ground presence means they'll innovate in ways more appropriate to the Indian market.
- Jommi 6y agoAnd compete with the homegrown Ola? Severly doubt it.
- perseusprime11 6y ago20 cents on the dollar is what they have on their minds. But when you add in the right layer of management, factor in productivity gaps due to time zone differences and lack of business context, etc. You are actually paying 80 cents on a dollar. Tech executives know this but they are unable to persuade their business counterparts.
- DrBazza 6y agoI worked at "mega bank" in London. They did this. For two years. And moved all the jobs back again. The time-zones didn't work and communication was poor. Ultimately it cost more money than, say, off-shoring to an East European country (which they did instead).
- langitbiru 6y agoEast European country => Poland, Ukraine or which country?
- DrBazza 6y agoHungary. The whole outsourcing to India was a disaster. Made additionally worse by Java developers trying to write C++ (pre-11 too), so memory leaks everywhere. Fun times :(
- jacksonpollock 6y agoI still like Lyft
- tvote2020 6y agowhere all the lockdown supporting covid believing fauci fanatics now? that's what I thought - there are consequences to your actions folks
- simonkafan 6y agoI recently visited Uber's engineering blog (https://eng.uber.com/ https://eng.uber.com/) and I can't help but it seems they have engineers goofing around with new technology completely useless for their core business ("Look, we now also use meta learning like all the hip kids!") A company that is swamped with ad revenue money may can afford this but for the rest (especially when they are VC backed) there will come the time when they have to ask themselves if they really need 4000 engineers to maintain the service that brings in the money (= a few apps and a cloud based backend)
- itsmefaz 6y agoThough Uber requires great engineering backbone, the future doesn't seem to be bright on the engineering front. This seems like the best decision Dara could take at the time being and if Uber is able to recover from this mess all well and good. A good point taken below is the shift from product-oriented to operations-oriented company. I guess this transition is long-overdue and expected to make sustainable profits.
- paulgb 6y agoThe story doesn't mention it, but I wonder if this has been accelerated by the increasing hostility the administration has towards H-1B visas. To the extent that companies can no longer access the labor pool of the other ~96% of the world's population, it makes sense that they would set up production where they have access to that labor.
- adrr 6y agoUber is done. The only way they survive is if they come up with autonomous driving and the only way to do that is dumping money into hiring the best engineers. Waymo will have taxi service in a couple years and that will be the nail in the coffin for Uber.
- rimliu 6y agoNobody will have self-driving taxi service in a couple of years, maybe not even in 20.
- adrr 6y agoWaymo is running driverless taxis in Arizona and has approval from California to go full driverless(L4). They inked a deal for 20,000 cars and a leased a factory in Detroit to install the sensor equipment. Why would they spend that amount of capital if it wasn’t a few years away? https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/27/17165992/waymo-jaguar-i-pace-self-driving-ny-auto-show-2018 https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/27/17165992/waymo-jaguar-i-p...
- rimliu 6y agoHype.
- ilikerashers 6y agoJohn Lewis (large UK retailer) just announced the same yesterday: https://www.johnlewispartnership.co.uk/media/press/y2020/jlp-announces-partnership-with-wipro.html https://www.johnlewispartnership.co.uk/media/press/y2020/jlp... I wonder are we going through a similar phase that happened mid-2000s when outsourcing became very much the preferred delivery model. Then user-centered design and agile pulled it back onshore.
- s3r3nity 6y agohow/why did this fall off the first page after barely an hour?
- bitL 6y agoIt's one of a few plays Uber still has before going bankrupt. It typically a sign of a final phase of any SV company. All current Uber engineers should try to move on while they still can.
- bamboozled 6y agoWhy does it matter where they're from? If they're good, hire them before someone else does. What does "India" have to do with it? Where I work we have Indians, Taiwanese, Americans, Australians, Austrians, Canadians. It's really no factor, I don't get it?
- bronzeage 6y agoOnly problem is that the whole software / tech company facade is what held the whole bubble going. You can't keep insane valuations when you're just a taxi company hiring cheap engineers to develop an app. There has been a growing bubble of using software and apps and pretending to "disrupt" traditional real world markets that has been there for years. I suspect a big part of that bubble was dunning-kroger effect of software engineer's arrogance, investors extravagance, and willingness to burn cash fueled by prior experience with actual software companies which spilled over to optimism about being able to do the same in traditional markets. AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, Grubhub, other food delivery apps, WeWork, Tesla. They are all examples of what happens when you judge a traditional business from the rose tinted glasses of software companies, almost ignoring the efficient market hypothesis about these traditional businesses long before these "disruptors" came along, while exaggerating the value the software part really provides.
- askjdlkasdjsd 6y agoI want to know how many of the total 3600 engineers are just maintaining the main uber app and how many are off in other ventures (self driving etc.)
- faika_account 6y agoI am an Indian new grad currently working in Bangalore. Almost all my classmates have a 15-20 lakh(20-25k dollars) job. And that's a lot of money for most of us straight out of university. I don't see why companies shouldn't move a part of their operations to India since they can save a hell lot of money by hiring here. The sentiment that India is just good for outsourcing trivial jobs is changing quite dramatically I would say. There are 3 factors which can be a problem: language barrier,reduced talent pool and cultural differences. Regarding language, most of my peers have decent English skills given we have spent like all of school life learning the language(more years are spent learning English than the native language). Most of us also spent a lot of time watching American/British shows in English given the lackluster scene of Indian TV. Yes we can't converse like natives, but I bet Indians can speak English better than most other nations whose second/third language is English. As far as talent pool is considered, yes we aren't anywhere close to Silicon Valley but I think the gap will reduce in the coming years given the proliferation of the internet. And the explosion of cheap Internet has been a relatively recent event, thanks to "Jio" - a Telecom conglomerate. There is no reason someone who understands English and is persistent enough can't learn basic principles of software engineering from the Internet. Hell just leetcoding is enough to get a job in America(from what I have seen on r/cscareerquestions) Also given India has 4-5 times more students than America, there is a larger pool to sieve from. India already has a more rigorous mathematics education programme(thanks to the russians) and Indians are increasingly getting good at competitive coding competitions. I feel the quality of developers in India is only going to get better with time and software giants can surely set up more and more offices here. Lastly, cultural differences obviously exist and will continue to exist. But I don't think they are much of an impediment to the work culture. Like most my friends are religiously apathetic and believe in democratic, liberal values unlike say the Chinese. Indians have been working in America for decades and they have done quite well I would say. Cultural differences are reducing with time thanks to multiculturalism and the internet. India might very well be on the verge of a software boom, thanks to newfound awareness in the youth thanks to cheap Internet and an overall better education than previously. Hell china could do all of this without much help from the west. Now they have their own Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba. India has a lot of handholding from the west and Indian expats, surely we can develop quality software in the coming future as well.
- hkai 6y agoAs a programmer and not a finance guy, I can't understand the cost savings. I'm earning roughly 4k USD per month and our developers in India earn 1k USD per month. The output of the entire 12-people team there including managers etc is the same as output of 1-2 people with a 4k USD salary here, but with a much lower quality and maintainability. And that's not counting the hours spent negotiating fixes or giving detailed instructions.
- naruvimama 6y agoPeople seem to forget that India itself is a huge market, and doing well in India could help innovate for the rest of the world. This not an American bank outsourcing legacy systems for maintenance, so the usual experience is irrelevant. Let us remember that uber has engineering teams in countries, where they are not allowed to run a car pooling businesses.
- sqldba 6y agoBwahaha. Yeah let’s see how that works out. Looking forward to a dead company in 3... 2... 1...