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I don't think it's fair to assume the quality of Indian workers is worse. They are paid less purely because of cost of living and locational differences. Uber i

I don't think it's fair to assume the quality of Indian workers is worse. They are paid less purely because of cost of living and locational differences. Uber is smart enough to know this and it's the exact reason they will end up paying less for similar quality. Also, in every company there are jobs that are trivial and jobs that require talent. I assume the more trivial jobs like bug fixing will be outsourced, while the rest of the engineers are kept for product design.

barry-cotter 6y ago
> They are paid less purely because of cost of living and locational differences. Cost of living is a red herring. No one’s going to pay me more if I live in Manhattan rather than the suburbs of Boise if they can avoid it. It’s all about the locational differences. If there’s a thick, liquid market for the product you’re selling, your labour, you’ll get a good price for it. If there isn’t employers have substantially more power to set wages. A lot of the reason engineers in SV get paid more is that they’re just better but the engineers in Boulder are pretty great too and fewer of them are getting those wages, even fewer in Boise. All about the competition for talent.
- ghaff 6y ago
  It's all interrelated though. If Silicon Valley CoL were more along the lines of the many Tier 2 areas where there is a lot of tech of various kinds, the big SV employers wouldn't have to pay as big a premium to get people to relocate. They'd still pay a premium to get the talent they want, but they wouldn't have to also basically cover the difference in housing costs needed. But it's complicated. For that matter, you could argue that the perks of Bay Area weather and great number of employment options should make the Bay Area attractive even if the salaries weren't great relative to CoL. But there's enough competition among large employers who generate enough value per employee that they can afford to offer top-shelf salaries so they do so to entice the people they want. To the last point, I don't expect dramatic short term changes. But to the degree that things tilt more in the direction of remote work and small distributed offices, I expect some equalization of salaries at least within the US.

barry-cotter 6y ago

> They are paid less purely because of cost of living and locational differences. Cost of living is a red herring. No one’s going to pay me more if I live in Manhattan rather than the suburbs of Boise if they can avoid it. It’s all about the locational differences. If there’s a thick, liquid market for the product you’re selling, your labour, you’ll get a good price for it. If there isn’t employers have substantially more power to set wages. A lot of the reason engineers in SV get paid more is that they’re just better but the engineers in Boulder are pretty great too and fewer of them are getting those wages, even fewer in Boise. All about the competition for talent.

ghaff 6y ago
It's all interrelated though. If Silicon Valley CoL were more along the lines of the many Tier 2 areas where there is a lot of tech of various kinds, the big SV employers wouldn't have to pay as big a premium to get people to relocate. They'd still pay a premium to get the talent they want, but they wouldn't have to also basically cover the difference in housing costs needed. But it's complicated. For that matter, you could argue that the perks of Bay Area weather and great number of employment options should make the Bay Area attractive even if the salaries weren't great relative to CoL. But there's enough competition among large employers who generate enough value per employee that they can afford to offer top-shelf salaries so they do so to entice the people they want. To the last point, I don't expect dramatic short term changes. But to the degree that things tilt more in the direction of remote work and small distributed offices, I expect some equalization of salaries at least within the US.