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> It can be done from India, China, Pakistan, or any other place where they have smart people Software engineers in these countries are significantly less comp

> It can be done from India, China, Pakistan, or any other place where they have smart people Software engineers in these countries are significantly less competent than their American counterparts. This has been documented by academic literature.[1] That still doesn't mean that there aren't great engineers in Pakistan, but what makes you think you have the ability to recruit, interview, hire and retain the top decile of engineer in Pakistan? Are you able to discriminate between a great Pakistani engineer's resume looks compared to an average one? Do you have a network of contacts in Pakistan to make recommendations? Will you be able to speak Urdu when you check their references? Does your company have any reputation or prestige in Pakistan? Why would a highly in-demand Pakistani engineer be interested in working for a company without any career progression, who's only outsourcing work because it's cheap? It's not like this is the first time in history that companies have realized they can offshore programmers to low-cost markets. It's literally been a constant theme in IT management circles for fifty years. It's not like they needed WFH to make it happen. It really doesn't cost much to open an office in Bangalore. Cassandras have been predicting the collapse of the American software market for decades, yet engineer compensation just keeps growing. If anything the economics are far less compelling than they were 20 years ago, since the wage differential is much smaller. If offshoring didn't work in 1995, there's no reason to expect it to work in 2021. [1]https://www.pnas.org/content/116/14/6732 https://www.pnas.org/content/116/14/6732

hinkley 5y ago
I hesitate to earmark this as competence, but what I see again and again is that my colleagues in Asia (India, China, Russia on one occasion) have a much higher tolerance for pain than the majority of their North American and Western European contemporaries. This is not a good thing. The dominant form of 'bullshit' in code is pointlessly self-inflicted pain, and so people who don't hit the 'enough is enough' point are wallowing in bullshit code most of the time, and writing more bullshit the rest of the time. We politely call this 'accidental complexity' to water it down and not point fingers. It wasn't an accident. It was deliberate, or thoughtless. Anyone who hits the 'enough' point now starts to consider high threshold people as mess-makers. As being less than 1x employees (worst case, -x employees). Doing that kind of janitorial work for long is a quick road to burnout. It's taking and challenging to explain to people that 'okay' is not universal and just because you think something is 'okay' doesn't mean anyone else does and as you work on a team you need to adjust your levels to match expectations.

hinkley 5y ago

I hesitate to earmark this as competence, but what I see again and again is that my colleagues in Asia (India, China, Russia on one occasion) have a much higher tolerance for pain than the majority of their North American and Western European contemporaries. This is not a good thing. The dominant form of 'bullshit' in code is pointlessly self-inflicted pain, and so people who don't hit the 'enough is enough' point are wallowing in bullshit code most of the time, and writing more bullshit the rest of the time. We politely call this 'accidental complexity' to water it down and not point fingers. It wasn't an accident. It was deliberate, or thoughtless. Anyone who hits the 'enough' point now starts to consider high threshold people as mess-makers. As being less than 1x employees (worst case, -x employees). Doing that kind of janitorial work for long is a quick road to burnout. It's taking and challenging to explain to people that 'okay' is not universal and just because you think something is 'okay' doesn't mean anyone else does and as you work on a team you need to adjust your levels to match expectations.