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Not to mention that the notion that there's a huge global pool of talented devs is largely a myth. It's true that labor is cheaper in India or Russia, but resea

Not to mention that the notion that there's a huge global pool of talented devs is largely a myth. It's true that labor is cheaper in India or Russia, but research confirms that the average engineer is far less competent than their American counterparts.[1] Software wages in the US are high, because it's very hard to replicate the quality of an American workforce. By and large global differences in wages reflect global differences in workforce quality. It's not like this is the first time companies have realized that global labor is cheaper. They've been trying to capitalize on cheap engineers in developing countries since the 1980s. It's always the same issue. Lower price on paper, but delivery and quality issues that scale far beyond the up front cost savings. [1]https://www.pnas.org/content/116/14/6732 https://www.pnas.org/content/116/14/6732

hyperman1 5y ago
A company outsourced some work to India. They wanted to add a few forms to their application for managing roughly the tuple (name,surname,medicine taken). A few weeks later, the first release came in. It contained everything to manage the tuple (name of medicine taken, surname of medicine taken). I stopped worrying about India about that time. Don't get me wrong, there are smart people in India. But if you're outsourcing for cheaper labor, you're not getting these smart people.
- rocknor 5y ago
  This generalization that happens every time "outsourcing" and "India" get mentioned in the same thread needs to stop. The culprit here is your employer who is probably hiring graduates in India at 5-10% of SV salaries, while to get competent graduates you need like 20-25%. So you can still outsource for cheap labor, but don't make the mistake of being too cheap.
  - mrkstu 5y ago
    It is still true that the very best of India is suctioned into the United States- though there is definitely some backflow as they gather enough capital to go back and invest in Indian based companies. The gravity of magnitudes better compensation insures that the very best will migrate. FAANG level engineers are completely insulated from overseas competition due to this, but of course the lower echelons will have to worry about this if the current demand spike falls off.
  - zentiggr 5y ago
    Ok, counterpoint again. The support contract for a huge multinational I was a small part of a while back, was bought out by an Indian-based company, who wanted the prestige and new line of business, but bit off WAY more than they could chew, and threw the entire tier 1/2/3 process into near chaos. Had they looked even a little deeper, they might have realized that they had no pratical experience in customer facing sw/hw support, and saved everyone two years of flailing, panic-driven, blame-everyone-you-can-point-a-finger-at, the-technicians-are-wrong-since-our-process-says-otherwise-oh-wait-our-process-is-shit-what-now-MORE-METRICS unbelieveable bullshit. All because somebody in high level management managed to bend somebodys ear, and the parent company got swindled into it. So glad to be gone.
    - rocknor 5y ago
      This does not counter what I said in any way.
  - hyperman1 5y ago
    My experience is western europe, smaller cities. For 25% of SV salaries you get close enough to the local salaries. Add a language barrier (we dont speak English), a time zone barrier (I like my meetings between 8:00 and 17:00 local time), and a cultural barrier, and its simply not worth the hassle. Outsourcing for talent is fine, but there is plenty of competition to make India rare, at least around here. So when I hear India, it's unfortunately a pretty safe assumption that someone went for bottom of the barrel cheap. I'm not saying this is right or fair.
    - rocknor 5y ago
      Disagree. Let's assume 25% of a graduate SV salary is $25k. That's €20k. With this salary you can only hire bottom of the barrel graduates in Portugal (cheapest country in western europe) since most graduates leave to other EU countries. With that money, in India you can get many more graduates with good English proficiency from world-class universities that are extremely hard to get into. Plus cultural barrier is overrated, if there is a barrier it's only disappearing in this internet era.
  - prepend 5y ago
    I would expect that if software programmers were of similar quality they would produce similar per capita software products, companies, and open source projects. But it’s not nearly as common. I think the best programmers in the world get sucked into US companies so while there are decent programmers around the world, the quality isn’t the same. Whether it’s 5 or 25%, I don’t think there’s quality parity.
rocknor 5y ago
Logical fallacy. The average competence of an engineer in a pool does not imply that the number of the talented devs in that pool is small. The global pool of talented devs will probably be several times the size of the US pool simply because of the world population (would be good if someone has actual numbers on this though).
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  This presupposes that a hiring manager can perfectly judge the quality of candidates. There are a ton of great engineers in, say Romania. But unless you know how to find and discriminate, you will be stuck with the average Romanian engineer. As anyone who's done serious hiring can tell you, judging candidates is damn tough. There's only a loose correlation between how a candidate looks on paper and how he performs. Now imagine translating this process to a completely foreign culture halfway across the world. Do you know which universities in Romania are good? Do you know who the most prestigious employers and positions in Romania are? Do you have a network of Romanians to recommend new hires? In fact, even if you try, most likely you'll be stuck with below average engineers. Not only will the top ones get scooped up by those with better local knowledge, but the lack of knowledge goes both ways. Top engineers aren't going to join some fly-by-night employer with no local brand, track record in that country, and no career track to senior positions. The only way I've seen a company actually succeed at this is by being willing to fully embrace the country. It's not just enough to hire off-the-shelf Romanian engineers, the company has to actually become "Romanian". Are companies willing to hire senior management from Romania? Are Romanian employees "first class citizens" with equivalent work to their American counterparts? Is the company raising money from Romanian VCs? Are they pushing Romania as a primary markets for their product? If the answer to any of those questions is no, then it's highly unlikely that you'll succeed in recruiting, interviewing, hiring and retaining top talent in that local market.
alexgmcm 5y ago
But you could hire devs in Western Europe at 50% of SV salaries. With UK-based devs there wouldn't even be a language barrier. There is quite a lot of red-tape involved with hiring foreign workers though.
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  Even between the US and Western Europe, there's a significant gap in workforce quality. Researchers have found that American companies consistently achieve higher levels of IT productivity than their Western European counterparts.[1] [1]https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.102.1.167 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.102.1.167
  - lidi122 5y ago
    Article states, that's because of "Combining pan-European firm-level IT data with our management practices survey, we find that the US IT related productivity advantage is primarily due to its tougher "people management" practices." So it's not related to IT engineering skills but rather how the company handles those engineers. An US based company will handle EU based engineers like their own, thus nullifying your argument.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      And this could lead to higher turnover due a transatlantic work culture shock.
  - wiz21c 5y ago
    How do you think they achieve that ? We use the same tools all over the world, maybe the same processes, intelligence is uniformly distributed. Maybe training ? I've worked with many people from abroad (even some from the US) and truth is : there were people better than others, there were people who worked more than the others. But this is never tied to nationality. It is much more tied to : does the guy want to be top notch ? If he asks the question then he probably has the ability and willing to make the sacrifices.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
I disagree, I worked with a lot of terrible American software engineers. I would never work with an American developers because I'm competing on price with American employers. If someone is looking for IT work outside of the states, they're most likely not good enough to work for better paying companies in the states. Likewise, FAANGs routinely hire talent from abroad. As for everything, there are plenty of exceptions: two of the most talented and fastest growing Software Engineers I met were Americans - and they didn't have any formal CS education. Over the years I definitely picked my political incorrect biased list of countries to avoid for talent sourcing. I could spend hours talking about funny stories involving bad contractors from India, Hungary, Eastern Europe and Spain but it's absolutely pointless. You'll find terrible engineers everywhere, even in the states. USA companies have incredible wealth compared to other companies and they can afford to spend ridiculous amount to try and weed out the majority of terrible engineers. Having hired contractors who used to work at FAANGs, I can tell you I found some pretty terrible hires there as well. Almost like memorising algorithms and CS exercises and then spending 4 years trying to build a case for your promotion isn't going to make you improve as an engineer.
screye 5y ago
It is not a myth, it is merely overreported. For every competent Indian that moves to the US for a tech job, there are 4 that decide to stay back home for a $10-15k-ish job. India is increasingly training several orders of magnitude more engineers than the US. Even if estimates were overestimating the number of competent Individuals in India by an order of magnitude, the number will still over shadow the American workforce. It has already happened once with China. It would not be surprising if it happens with India. Only this time, the competing workforce will be fluent in English.
- valarauko 5y ago
  > For every competent Indian that moves to the US for a tech job, there are 4 that decide to stay back home for a $10-15k-ish job. Given the vagaries of the US visa regime, plenty of talented Indians can't come over even if they wanted to.
- jholman 5y ago
  > several orders of magnitude more engineers than the US Wait, what? Several orders of magnitude, like at least 3 orders of magnitude? So even though India has 4x the population of the United States, it's training at least a thousand times as many engineers? That's amazing! It's also totally not true at all. Spend a few seconds on Google. Note that I don't particularly disagree with the rest of your comment.
  - screye 5y ago
    My bad, I should have specified. An order of magnitude does not need to be decimal. Order of 2 is also sufficient. The US produces between 50-100K CS grads (depending on how you count majors). India produces about 1 million by the same metric. That's a 10-20x difference.

hyperman1 5y ago

A company outsourced some work to India. They wanted to add a few forms to their application for managing roughly the tuple (name,surname,medicine taken). A few weeks later, the first release came in. It contained everything to manage the tuple (name of medicine taken, surname of medicine taken). I stopped worrying about India about that time. Don't get me wrong, there are smart people in India. But if you're outsourcing for cheaper labor, you're not getting these smart people.

rocknor 5y ago
This generalization that happens every time "outsourcing" and "India" get mentioned in the same thread needs to stop. The culprit here is your employer who is probably hiring graduates in India at 5-10% of SV salaries, while to get competent graduates you need like 20-25%. So you can still outsource for cheap labor, but don't make the mistake of being too cheap.
- mrkstu 5y ago
  It is still true that the very best of India is suctioned into the United States- though there is definitely some backflow as they gather enough capital to go back and invest in Indian based companies. The gravity of magnitudes better compensation insures that the very best will migrate. FAANG level engineers are completely insulated from overseas competition due to this, but of course the lower echelons will have to worry about this if the current demand spike falls off.
- zentiggr 5y ago
  Ok, counterpoint again. The support contract for a huge multinational I was a small part of a while back, was bought out by an Indian-based company, who wanted the prestige and new line of business, but bit off WAY more than they could chew, and threw the entire tier 1/2/3 process into near chaos. Had they looked even a little deeper, they might have realized that they had no pratical experience in customer facing sw/hw support, and saved everyone two years of flailing, panic-driven, blame-everyone-you-can-point-a-finger-at, the-technicians-are-wrong-since-our-process-says-otherwise-oh-wait-our-process-is-shit-what-now-MORE-METRICS unbelieveable bullshit. All because somebody in high level management managed to bend somebodys ear, and the parent company got swindled into it. So glad to be gone.
  - rocknor 5y ago
    This does not counter what I said in any way.
- hyperman1 5y ago
  My experience is western europe, smaller cities. For 25% of SV salaries you get close enough to the local salaries. Add a language barrier (we dont speak English), a time zone barrier (I like my meetings between 8:00 and 17:00 local time), and a cultural barrier, and its simply not worth the hassle. Outsourcing for talent is fine, but there is plenty of competition to make India rare, at least around here. So when I hear India, it's unfortunately a pretty safe assumption that someone went for bottom of the barrel cheap. I'm not saying this is right or fair.
  - rocknor 5y ago
    Disagree. Let's assume 25% of a graduate SV salary is $25k. That's €20k. With this salary you can only hire bottom of the barrel graduates in Portugal (cheapest country in western europe) since most graduates leave to other EU countries. With that money, in India you can get many more graduates with good English proficiency from world-class universities that are extremely hard to get into. Plus cultural barrier is overrated, if there is a barrier it's only disappearing in this internet era.
- prepend 5y ago
  I would expect that if software programmers were of similar quality they would produce similar per capita software products, companies, and open source projects. But it’s not nearly as common. I think the best programmers in the world get sucked into US companies so while there are decent programmers around the world, the quality isn’t the same. Whether it’s 5 or 25%, I don’t think there’s quality parity.

rocknor 5y ago

Logical fallacy. The average competence of an engineer in a pool does not imply that the number of the talented devs in that pool is small. The global pool of talented devs will probably be several times the size of the US pool simply because of the world population (would be good if someone has actual numbers on this though).

dcolkitt 5y ago
This presupposes that a hiring manager can perfectly judge the quality of candidates. There are a ton of great engineers in, say Romania. But unless you know how to find and discriminate, you will be stuck with the average Romanian engineer. As anyone who's done serious hiring can tell you, judging candidates is damn tough. There's only a loose correlation between how a candidate looks on paper and how he performs. Now imagine translating this process to a completely foreign culture halfway across the world. Do you know which universities in Romania are good? Do you know who the most prestigious employers and positions in Romania are? Do you have a network of Romanians to recommend new hires? In fact, even if you try, most likely you'll be stuck with below average engineers. Not only will the top ones get scooped up by those with better local knowledge, but the lack of knowledge goes both ways. Top engineers aren't going to join some fly-by-night employer with no local brand, track record in that country, and no career track to senior positions. The only way I've seen a company actually succeed at this is by being willing to fully embrace the country. It's not just enough to hire off-the-shelf Romanian engineers, the company has to actually become "Romanian". Are companies willing to hire senior management from Romania? Are Romanian employees "first class citizens" with equivalent work to their American counterparts? Is the company raising money from Romanian VCs? Are they pushing Romania as a primary markets for their product? If the answer to any of those questions is no, then it's highly unlikely that you'll succeed in recruiting, interviewing, hiring and retaining top talent in that local market.

alexgmcm 5y ago

But you could hire devs in Western Europe at 50% of SV salaries. With UK-based devs there wouldn't even be a language barrier. There is quite a lot of red-tape involved with hiring foreign workers though.

dcolkitt 5y ago
Even between the US and Western Europe, there's a significant gap in workforce quality. Researchers have found that American companies consistently achieve higher levels of IT productivity than their Western European counterparts.[1] [1]https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.102.1.167 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.102.1.167
- lidi122 5y ago
  Article states, that's because of "Combining pan-European firm-level IT data with our management practices survey, we find that the US IT related productivity advantage is primarily due to its tougher "people management" practices." So it's not related to IT engineering skills but rather how the company handles those engineers. An US based company will handle EU based engineers like their own, thus nullifying your argument.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    And this could lead to higher turnover due a transatlantic work culture shock.
- wiz21c 5y ago
  How do you think they achieve that ? We use the same tools all over the world, maybe the same processes, intelligence is uniformly distributed. Maybe training ? I've worked with many people from abroad (even some from the US) and truth is : there were people better than others, there were people who worked more than the others. But this is never tied to nationality. It is much more tied to : does the guy want to be top notch ? If he asks the question then he probably has the ability and willing to make the sacrifices.

jokethrowaway 5y ago

I disagree, I worked with a lot of terrible American software engineers. I would never work with an American developers because I'm competing on price with American employers. If someone is looking for IT work outside of the states, they're most likely not good enough to work for better paying companies in the states. Likewise, FAANGs routinely hire talent from abroad. As for everything, there are plenty of exceptions: two of the most talented and fastest growing Software Engineers I met were Americans - and they didn't have any formal CS education. Over the years I definitely picked my political incorrect biased list of countries to avoid for talent sourcing. I could spend hours talking about funny stories involving bad contractors from India, Hungary, Eastern Europe and Spain but it's absolutely pointless. You'll find terrible engineers everywhere, even in the states. USA companies have incredible wealth compared to other companies and they can afford to spend ridiculous amount to try and weed out the majority of terrible engineers. Having hired contractors who used to work at FAANGs, I can tell you I found some pretty terrible hires there as well. Almost like memorising algorithms and CS exercises and then spending 4 years trying to build a case for your promotion isn't going to make you improve as an engineer.

screye 5y ago

It is not a myth, it is merely overreported. For every competent Indian that moves to the US for a tech job, there are 4 that decide to stay back home for a $10-15k-ish job. India is increasingly training several orders of magnitude more engineers than the US. Even if estimates were overestimating the number of competent Individuals in India by an order of magnitude, the number will still over shadow the American workforce. It has already happened once with China. It would not be surprising if it happens with India. Only this time, the competing workforce will be fluent in English.

valarauko 5y ago
> For every competent Indian that moves to the US for a tech job, there are 4 that decide to stay back home for a $10-15k-ish job. Given the vagaries of the US visa regime, plenty of talented Indians can't come over even if they wanted to.
jholman 5y ago
> several orders of magnitude more engineers than the US Wait, what? Several orders of magnitude, like at least 3 orders of magnitude? So even though India has 4x the population of the United States, it's training at least a thousand times as many engineers? That's amazing! It's also totally not true at all. Spend a few seconds on Google. Note that I don't particularly disagree with the rest of your comment.
- screye 5y ago
  My bad, I should have specified. An order of magnitude does not need to be decimal. Order of 2 is also sufficient. The US produces between 50-100K CS grads (depending on how you count majors). India produces about 1 million by the same metric. That's a 10-20x difference.