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I think US salaries are more to do with it than anything else. It's just not sustainable anymore for most tech companies. So they hire where talent is cheaper.

I think US salaries are more to do with it than anything else. It's just not sustainable anymore for most tech companies. So they hire where talent is cheaper. It was obvious it will happen with remote work.

Clubber 5y ago
>It's just not sustainable I'm not sure if it's a sustainability issue or tactic to eek out every dollar possible given the landscape. I suspect it's the latter. I'll bet most don't do the leet code interviews for offshore developers though.
thatfrenchguy 5y ago
The US salaries force you to go in more competitive markets though and use your engineers better, because your costs are higher. Salaries in France have been 1/3 of US salaries forever, and yet people don't outsource to French engineers, more like French engineers move to the US.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  If you outsourced to French engineers you would have to accommodate all of their rights and work styles which don’t exist so much in “developing economies”. A French engineer probably would not be online at 6am and 11pm on the same day to attend meetings and solve problems for their American managers. Eastern European, African, or SE Asian engineers would though.
- nemo44x 5y ago
  I’ve hired French engineers in France and they’ve done great work. Hard workers too. But the impression France has is probably a turn off for many. There are other problems too like it taking 3 months for a new French hire to start. Getting rid of them is extremely difficult as well. There are lots of additional taxes you have to pay the French government too. There’s just so much risk in hiring there that you’re better off going elsewhere with more modern employment law for skilled, high demand workers. Don’t remind me of the monthly paperwork we have to send the government to assure them the French employee isn’t working too much and is taking vacation. An absolute joke. The French government doesn’t make French engineers very attractive unfortunately.
  - marvin 5y ago
    Haha, modern employment law :D You'd cause hilarity if you used that expression anywhere in the Scandinavian public discourse, or at least the Norwegian. You'd get tomatoes thrown at you and no one would listen to a single word. Not that I necessarily disagree with you or miss your point, but this is a very strong ideological divide. It's not about modern vs. archaic unless you posit that employment law that protects employees is such a detriment to an economy's effectiveness that it's effectively obsolete. Maybe at some point it will be a question of what economies actually manage to get things done and thrive and those who don't, but that's the kind of long-term, almost geopolitical shift that happens over decades at the least. E.g. no one who wants a position of power would advocate for a pure planned economy today, rather than a market economy. I sort of doubt that employee protections are such a millstone around the neck that they will go the same way, but who knows. It's an interesting question as you see a tendency of economies with less protections and higher salary luring away lots of really high performers.
    - nemo44x 5y ago
      What I mean by that is how worker protection laws from the Industrial Age and which apply to hourly wage employees are applied to professional workers that have autonomy and other attributes that make them very different from hourly workers. The USA has a concept of an “exempt” and “nonexempt” worker and a series of questions that determine this status. In general, hourly workers (nonexempt) get many protections encoded into law that professionals don’t. And professionals don't want them except for a very small minority of oddballs that want to unionize. So in essence, applying the same set of outdated rules to everyone. It even makes it hard to compete with colleagues for promotions if your hours are limited. Of course the French engineers I had lied to the government about hours worked as they wanted to maximize bonuses, stock grants, and promotions.
      - BigRedDog1669 5y ago
        The legal protections on hourly workers aren't enforced in the US or are skirted around by making hourly employees contractors. Professionals would like some of the protections but only if they are actually enforced.
colechristensen 5y ago
I’ve been at and seen plenty of places where a growing layer of middle management was paying for itself by outsourcing engineers. Outsourced engineers very often need much more management and company directors either lose touch or decide to run the company in ways that justify raising their own salaries. It’s not that the cost of engineers is unsustainable, it’s that aging companies tend to want to take power and decisions away from engineers towards management and accomplish this with outsourcing.
- downut 5y ago
  This has happened in my wife's rather staid manufacturing industry. Many plants in the US have no on-site engineers. The "engineering" design is performed by remote fresh-outs at the exurban headquarters, and a lot of that work is simply regurgitating the specs from the equipment manufacturers. Who quite rightly charge exorbitantly to have their own engineers perform the inevitable changes that would be nearly trivial for an in-house on-site engineer to make. It's not unique to her particular company; this is the way her industrial customers and suppliers work too. The backend software is managed the same way. Buy Oracle/MS/Google whatever integrated functionality, and hire consultants to make changes. No expertise in-house. No in-house expertise means no management responsibility for failure: it's the supplier's fault. Yet those same vendors are more often than not locked in by prohibitive replacement economics. Gruesome for old skool highly competent engineers, like my wife. Most of these companies are profitable, so who can argue? This is the present and inevitable future.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    This is how startups succeed and take market share very quickly. A small number of highly paid highly competent people build something which is significantly cheaper and better than the incumbent because they aren’t weighed down by very large numbers of unnecessary people doing things poorly in the most expensive way possible. Then the startup either gets bought by the incumbent who has existed so long they just have piles of money or the startup grows into a similarly inefficient monster. It is a sign that there is something wrong with the game created by the economic and legal environment which tends towards a large proportion of useless work and barely adequate quality. I.e this is why we can’t have nice things and it’s not exactly clear how to fix it.
Accujack 5y ago
>It's just not sustainable anymore for most tech companies. Translation: Most tech companies are addicted to cheap labor, either through exploiting new graduates or handing out potentially worthless stock options. They won't choose to reduce their profits regardless of what happens. Very few startups "need" to hire less experienced people, mostly the ones that do just haven't got a viable business model. The ones that can't afford to hire the people they need at a reasonable salary for the work they expect shouldn't exist. They're just machines for turning venture capital into personal wealth for the founders as they exploit their employees then sell out.
- iamstupidsimple 5y ago
  I mean, if you were CEO, would you choose to reduce profit when you have investors on your back or want to grow staff quickly? Outside of VC driven cash cows or big tech, there's not that much money to go around at the bottom.
  - Accujack 5y ago
    I think you really mean that in your experience there's not that much cash that makes it to the bottom... more cash COULD filter down if the corporation was run that way. Most corporations aren't.
syshum 5y ago
>>It was obvious it will happen with remote work. Not to many, Many still believe that remote work for programmers simply means lower cost of living for them while keeping their high salaries... They are about the learn the lesson US steal workers, and other blue collar works in many American industries did when globalization hit them....

Clubber 5y ago

>It's just not sustainable I'm not sure if it's a sustainability issue or tactic to eek out every dollar possible given the landscape. I suspect it's the latter. I'll bet most don't do the leet code interviews for offshore developers though.

thatfrenchguy 5y ago

The US salaries force you to go in more competitive markets though and use your engineers better, because your costs are higher. Salaries in France have been 1/3 of US salaries forever, and yet people don't outsource to French engineers, more like French engineers move to the US.

colechristensen 5y ago
If you outsourced to French engineers you would have to accommodate all of their rights and work styles which don’t exist so much in “developing economies”. A French engineer probably would not be online at 6am and 11pm on the same day to attend meetings and solve problems for their American managers. Eastern European, African, or SE Asian engineers would though.
nemo44x 5y ago
I’ve hired French engineers in France and they’ve done great work. Hard workers too. But the impression France has is probably a turn off for many. There are other problems too like it taking 3 months for a new French hire to start. Getting rid of them is extremely difficult as well. There are lots of additional taxes you have to pay the French government too. There’s just so much risk in hiring there that you’re better off going elsewhere with more modern employment law for skilled, high demand workers. Don’t remind me of the monthly paperwork we have to send the government to assure them the French employee isn’t working too much and is taking vacation. An absolute joke. The French government doesn’t make French engineers very attractive unfortunately.
- marvin 5y ago
  Haha, modern employment law :D You'd cause hilarity if you used that expression anywhere in the Scandinavian public discourse, or at least the Norwegian. You'd get tomatoes thrown at you and no one would listen to a single word. Not that I necessarily disagree with you or miss your point, but this is a very strong ideological divide. It's not about modern vs. archaic unless you posit that employment law that protects employees is such a detriment to an economy's effectiveness that it's effectively obsolete. Maybe at some point it will be a question of what economies actually manage to get things done and thrive and those who don't, but that's the kind of long-term, almost geopolitical shift that happens over decades at the least. E.g. no one who wants a position of power would advocate for a pure planned economy today, rather than a market economy. I sort of doubt that employee protections are such a millstone around the neck that they will go the same way, but who knows. It's an interesting question as you see a tendency of economies with less protections and higher salary luring away lots of really high performers.
  - nemo44x 5y ago
    What I mean by that is how worker protection laws from the Industrial Age and which apply to hourly wage employees are applied to professional workers that have autonomy and other attributes that make them very different from hourly workers. The USA has a concept of an “exempt” and “nonexempt” worker and a series of questions that determine this status. In general, hourly workers (nonexempt) get many protections encoded into law that professionals don’t. And professionals don't want them except for a very small minority of oddballs that want to unionize. So in essence, applying the same set of outdated rules to everyone. It even makes it hard to compete with colleagues for promotions if your hours are limited. Of course the French engineers I had lied to the government about hours worked as they wanted to maximize bonuses, stock grants, and promotions.
    - BigRedDog1669 5y ago
      The legal protections on hourly workers aren't enforced in the US or are skirted around by making hourly employees contractors. Professionals would like some of the protections but only if they are actually enforced.

colechristensen 5y ago

I’ve been at and seen plenty of places where a growing layer of middle management was paying for itself by outsourcing engineers. Outsourced engineers very often need much more management and company directors either lose touch or decide to run the company in ways that justify raising their own salaries. It’s not that the cost of engineers is unsustainable, it’s that aging companies tend to want to take power and decisions away from engineers towards management and accomplish this with outsourcing.

downut 5y ago
This has happened in my wife's rather staid manufacturing industry. Many plants in the US have no on-site engineers. The "engineering" design is performed by remote fresh-outs at the exurban headquarters, and a lot of that work is simply regurgitating the specs from the equipment manufacturers. Who quite rightly charge exorbitantly to have their own engineers perform the inevitable changes that would be nearly trivial for an in-house on-site engineer to make. It's not unique to her particular company; this is the way her industrial customers and suppliers work too. The backend software is managed the same way. Buy Oracle/MS/Google whatever integrated functionality, and hire consultants to make changes. No expertise in-house. No in-house expertise means no management responsibility for failure: it's the supplier's fault. Yet those same vendors are more often than not locked in by prohibitive replacement economics. Gruesome for old skool highly competent engineers, like my wife. Most of these companies are profitable, so who can argue? This is the present and inevitable future.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  This is how startups succeed and take market share very quickly. A small number of highly paid highly competent people build something which is significantly cheaper and better than the incumbent because they aren’t weighed down by very large numbers of unnecessary people doing things poorly in the most expensive way possible. Then the startup either gets bought by the incumbent who has existed so long they just have piles of money or the startup grows into a similarly inefficient monster. It is a sign that there is something wrong with the game created by the economic and legal environment which tends towards a large proportion of useless work and barely adequate quality. I.e this is why we can’t have nice things and it’s not exactly clear how to fix it.

Accujack 5y ago

>It's just not sustainable anymore for most tech companies. Translation: Most tech companies are addicted to cheap labor, either through exploiting new graduates or handing out potentially worthless stock options. They won't choose to reduce their profits regardless of what happens. Very few startups "need" to hire less experienced people, mostly the ones that do just haven't got a viable business model. The ones that can't afford to hire the people they need at a reasonable salary for the work they expect shouldn't exist. They're just machines for turning venture capital into personal wealth for the founders as they exploit their employees then sell out.

iamstupidsimple 5y ago
I mean, if you were CEO, would you choose to reduce profit when you have investors on your back or want to grow staff quickly? Outside of VC driven cash cows or big tech, there's not that much money to go around at the bottom.
- Accujack 5y ago
  I think you really mean that in your experience there's not that much cash that makes it to the bottom... more cash COULD filter down if the corporation was run that way. Most corporations aren't.

syshum 5y ago

>>It was obvious it will happen with remote work. Not to many, Many still believe that remote work for programmers simply means lower cost of living for them while keeping their high salaries... They are about the learn the lesson US steal workers, and other blue collar works in many American industries did when globalization hit them....