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Tech Industry Warns That More Remote-Work Jobs Are Headed Out of U.S.

56 points by ushakov 4y ago

amykhar 4y ago
So, the tech industry warns that unless the government allows more low-paid immigrants in, they'll outsource. What else is new?
ggm 4y ago
Pre covid H1B was already huge and somewhat under fire for being a cost of labour diluting trend. If your company was willing to pay a US immigration cost to get somebody in, and can now shave 10%+ off salary to get the same awesome brains from another country AND get 24/7 effort on the problem... what's not to love?
- ushakov 4y ago
  because that’s not how capitalism works capitalism means making profits making profits means lowering costs outsourcing is a way to lower costs
  - ggm 4y ago
    coming back to this late, I think my english-language sentences confused people. What I said in "whats not to love" is "this is how capitalism works" but clearly you thought I was saying something else.
  - throwmeariver1 4y ago
    eh... if the only way for you to increase profits is to cut costs you have a problem that will accelerate after you have nothing more to cut.
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      >> making profits means lowering costs > eh... if the only way for you to increase profits is to cut costs you have a problem that will accelerate after you have nothing more to cut. You're nitpicking, the GP's post can be easily repaired by reading that as "lowering costs means making more profits." Businesses like to turn all the dials to increase their profits.
keikobadthebad 4y ago
'Tech industry' has offices in India, China, Canada already to exploit the cheaper labor directly.
- Pet_Ant 4y ago
  During the last year I know multiple people who have doubled there salaries with being hired remotely and local companies being unhappy about the situation.
- ARandumGuy 4y ago
  India, Canada, and (especially) China also have their own 'tech industries,' which are able to hire talent locally without dealing with the headaches of having an international team.
  - LegitShady 4y ago
    Canada doesn't have much in the way of a "tech industry" because all the new grads who can move to the US for much higher pay and few unicorn companies (like shopify) stay here. Many of the offices in Canada are here for the purpose of hiring people from other countries who can't get through the US immigration system. Housing has become insanely expensive and people aren't getting paid enough to offset the high cost of housing. Meanwhile our government is importing low wage low skill workers via the temporary worker program for things like fast food restaurants because people don't make enough to get out of fast food while working at fast food, so they have trouble attracting workers. The bottom line is canada is quickly becoming a place to import workers from cheaper countries to keep pay low while any Canadians who have the education and experience flee to the USA for higher wages. I've seen it in my lifetime with non computer engineering disciplines. A structural engineer making 70k because it's easy to import them from other countries and it drives wages down. The last PEO survey I saw said something like 2/3rd of Canadian engineering grads are not finding work in their industry of choice at all.
- alaricus 4y ago
  Replace "exploit" with "pay less because the cost of living there is much lower". My colleague in India gets paid a fraction of what I make, but he is able to afford a bigger house and more luxuries. The cost of living in the Western word is out of control.
jleyank 4y ago
This trend was fully present pre covid, especially in the high cost areas. If your task requires “programmers”, there’s lots of them and companies seek the lowest cost. If, rather, you have a task that requires “top-notch” or speciality programmers, there’s far fewer of them to choose from. Before, companies needed to find them, then convince them to relocate and deal with the immigration hassles associated with relocation. This was tedious and companies hire companies to do this. If these people are not required to relocate, the size of the hiring pool increases to include multi-professional families or those with strong geographic preferences. I guess this can be rephrased to: if programmers are a commodity, work will flow to the lowest cost area possible. If it’s anti-commodity/bespoke work, one must gather the craftspeople one needs. And these people know they’re valuable which makes the negotiation more even.
zcw100 4y ago
A better headline would have been, “Tech industry uses scare tactics to try and force people back into the office”. Been there, done that. If it could have been outsourced it would have already been outsourced. Do you really think they were sitting around saying,”I know they cost more but I’m too busy playing golf to bother” and they’re only getting around to it now?
- JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
  Actually yes I do. Feel very strongly that the tech work from home movement is shining a light on something they don’t want a light shined on. They should be vehemently making cases that teams need to be in offices together and that “face to face is best” to keep their jobs in their citadel.
  - commandlinefan 4y ago
    If work (of any kind) can only be done face-to-face, why do companies have satellite offices? I've never worked for a company with more than a few hundred employees that didn't have offices in multiple states and co-workers who had never met in person, yet still conducted business just fine remotely.
  - scandox 4y ago
    Absolutely. I am seeing this unfold right in front of me and I'm amazed how happy people are to cut their own throat. I guess it's just because a lot of people have only ever experienced being highly in demand.
  - TimPC 4y ago
    Or maybe it’s enough to have people in the same time zone working the same hours and communicating using technology. There is a big difference between questions being answered right away and questions being answered overnight that one still has to consider for outsourcing.
    - jghn 4y ago
      Right. Both sides of this debate have been disingenuous. The remote-or-bust crowd always seems to assume salaries would stay the same. Most, not all, but most software development jobs don't require specialty skills. If the job can truly be done anywhere, why would we assume the answer will be to pay SF salaries all around the world? The must-be-in-office crowd tends to ignore that most of the time remote work mostly is fine. Yes, everyone has an anecdote of this going horribly wrong. But they ignore that minimizing costs as first priority is not going to yield optimal results. And a lot of those horror stories involve bottom rate outsourcing operations. There exists a world in which outsourcing/remote covers most needs but pays less than we're used to in the US software industry. It's neither the penny on the dollar model of traditional outsourcing nor junior devs making 500K TC in theo there extreme.
vsskanth 4y ago
H1B visas are a lottery with <30% chance of getting picked up. Employment-based immigration to the US is a long process (1.5-2 yrs), on top of only 15% green cards being allocated to it, not to mention all the rate throttling quotas. USCIS is primarily paper run and super backlogged so those already here are also stuck in paperwork and in many cases end up losing work auth because they are so slow. Many don't realize how bad its gotten lately on the immigration front. Last year, USCIS wasted 160K green cards, this year they are on track to waste 200K green cards, simply because they are too slow to process paperwork. Companies are probably tired of all this uncertainty and legal overhead so they now offer relocation to their offices outside US if you have visa problems and to have easier access to talent. Remote work has accelerated this since teams are now learning to be geographically distributed. Companies are now finding it easier to just let their top talent work from their home country, pay them way more than local rates (helps retention) and setup payroll than deal with US visas and immigration. It's only a few years ordeal to get a green card if you're not Indian, otherwise it's a multi-decade wait. So many are starting to take the offer and move out once they've earned a decent amount.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  Also, if you (as an employer) don't bother with the US immigration system, you don't have to pay US-competitive salaries as that system requires. Sure, FAANG companies may be too rich to care, but they're also probably a small fraction of US tech employment.
- usrn 4y ago
  What's the difference between outsourcing and immigration? It's still taking jobs away from the native population.
  - vsskanth 4y ago
    Its a very common misconception that immigration takes away jobs from the native population. Also known as "Lump of Labor Fallacy".
    - 4y ago
kurupt213 4y ago
This is the obvious end result. All those whiners revolting against returning to the office are destroying their own employment opportunities
- silicon2401 4y ago
  > All those whiners It never ceases to amaze me how completely unsympathetic people are towards other people just for wanting different things.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    >> All those whiners > It never ceases to amaze me how completely unsympathetic people are towards other people just for wanting different things. Some of it is whining, though. Whining isn't a preference, it's an attitude and style of expressing that preference.
- potta_coffee 4y ago
  Frankly, you sound like a bit of a whiner who holds the opposite opinion. I don't understand why most conversations orient to this binary right / wrong argumentation when the issue is almost always more subtle.
ideamotor 4y ago
Unless it’s a hierarchical remote-first tech-only company, in-person is the only way to really see the business problems and stay in the loop. And when (not if) the current tech boom busts (which may have started) the remote jobs that are lost won’t come back to the US.
dipsplacemat 4y ago
The obvious response is: "do it, you won't." They might scare the new grads with that sort of talk, but we've seen what happens when you outsource jobs with the sole aim of saving money. Those of us old enough to remember those times, also have a special rate for helping to clean up projects which started that way. It's usually somewhere in the 200-500% range.
diogenescynic 4y ago
Can’t say I’m too concerned. Every project I’ve ever worked on that outsourced something ended in failure or a major decline in quality. We used to need 3 accountants in the US, now we have an army of BPO accountants and none of them know what they’re doing and things take longer than ever. Outsourcing doesn’t work. It’s not even clear it costs less when you factor in the decline in quality, delays, and extra work needed by everyone else to monitor the outsourced work. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > Can’t say I’m too concerned. Every project I’ve ever worked on that outsourced something ended in failure or a major decline in quality. We used to need 3 accountants in the US, now we have an army of BPO accountants and none of them know what they’re doing and things take longer than ever. Honestly, I don't think corporate decision-makers really care about those metrics. > It’s not even clear it costs less when you factor in the decline in quality, delays, and extra work needed by everyone else to monitor the outsourced work. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze. So it's six of one, half a dozen of the other then? That's not a very persuasive argument against outsourcing.
  - taylodl 4y ago
    It’s not even clear it costs less when you factor in the decline in quality, delays, and extra work needed by everyone else to monitor the outsourced work. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze. How do you read that as six one way, half a dozen the other? Outsourcing often leads to lower quality, delays (which has business opportunity costs) and extra expense to monitor and review the work. Instead of being faster, cheaper, better outsourcing is slower, more expensive, and worse. Why would anybody choose that?
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      >> It’s not even clear it costs less when you factor in the decline in quality, delays, and extra work needed by everyone else to monitor the outsourced work. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze. >> So it's six of one, half a dozen of the other then? That's not a very persuasive argument against outsourcing. > How do you read that as six one way, half a dozen the other? If the costs aren't significantly higher than in-sourced work in ways quantifiable in dollars, then I don't think it's going to matter much to business leaders. In other words, they just don't plain care about the things we care about. If the thing gets done crappily and painfully, it's still done, and that's fine with them. Also, I don't think businesses are logical or rigorous places. IMHO, it's par for the course to "save" money by shifting costs into more difficult to quantify areas. For instance: cut desktop support, and the costs move into the groups being supported, so long as the complaints aren't loud enough to reach up through many layers of management, you have yourself a "win".
thenerdhead 4y ago
They’ve been saying this for over two decades now. Nothing has changed. We know what the cost of cheaper labor means in software. We also know that people are generally happier working from home if they are tech workers. The companies that embrace remote first or even hybrid scenarios will be the winner in the long run. Happier employees = better outcomes. If my job could be outsourced, it would’ve been ten years ago when I first joined the workforce as a remote employee.
- TAMSFT051022 4y ago
  > If my job could be outsourced, it would’ve been ten years ago when I first joined the workforce as a remote employee The difference this time is that we are heading for a recession. Company leadership doesn't want to take the risk of outsourcing while times are good and profits are doubling each year. But when the stock price is in freefall and they are under pressure to cut costs, then the risk/reward of outsourcing looks more attractive. We haven't had a recession since '08, and the landscape is very different now. Remote work tech was in its infancy back then - Zoom, Slack, Google Drive weren't even created yet. Plus India and China (and others) have developed further and starting pumping out 100s of thousands of CS grads each year that didn't exist in '08. I think we're about to see a big wave of outsourcing over the next few years. And if companies are smart about it (e.g. do it slowly to allow knowledge transfer and compete for top talent, not bottom of the barrel) then it will be successful.
  - Clubber 4y ago
    >The difference this time is that we are heading for a recession. >I think we're about to see a big wave of outsourcing over the next few years. Yes, but if companies are gonna outsource, they are gonna outsource whether their employees work at the office or work remote. It's purely a financial decision, not a "if you don't come to the office, we are going to outsource you," decision. Executives might use that ploy/threat to get people into the office, but they will still outsource regardless, if it makes sense for their company, just like they have been doing for the last 20+ years.
  - thenerdhead 4y ago
dnndev 4y ago
It’s more about trust than finances. Face to face and remote work within the companies legal boundaries is the safer choice. Remote work with no legal leverage is scary when you think about handing over company assets. But then again, many large companies have managers looking to climb the ladder so they outsource at all costs to make the budget look better- it’s a risky gamble and sometimes it just works. Most times this ends with years of waste in other areas of the company. Trust issues will limit the adoption of remote work.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  > But then again, many large companies have managers looking to climb the ladder so they outsource at all costs to make the budget look better- it’s a risky gamble and sometimes it just works. Most times this ends with years of waste in other areas of the company. This works in the short term, in the same way you could probably lay off 90% of your developers and keep thinks chugging along for a couple years (albeit with next to zero new development). These things take time to fully poison the host but the exec climbing the ladder doesn't care. They get the praise for cutting costs, they aren't responsible for the code/product, and they will jet off to some new company to ruin things before the shit hits the fan.
  - dnndev 4y ago
    I partially agree. Some companies are so dysfunctional contractors are the only ones getting stuff done. Some IT departments are just so slow and have so much red tape (no incentive to change the status quo - or have their hands tied for other internal political reasons) that nothing gets done as long as paychecks are cashing. I feel like this is off the main thread but none the less a reason for outsourcing in some cases may turn into a net gain for the company.
    - joshstrange 4y ago
      These types of places absolutely exist but while outsourcing might see a net gain I think they'd see an even bigger gain by getting rid of the dead weight and hiring people who aren't so stale/set in their ways. As in this is a failing of management and not something that outsourcing really "fixes". It's been my experience that companies are not willing to make these choices. I'm not saying "Bob had a bad week, let's fire him" or "Tom is going through some personal stuff and his work has slacked, let him go" but rather repeated failures with attempts to rectify them with the employee that aren't fixed. The bar to let someone go is absurdly high at some places and kills motivation for people who are doing the work "Well, John isn't doing any work and the company don't seem to care, I guess I'll stop caring as well and just coast". At my last job I had a coworker who refused to pull their own weight. We had the same title and I (and others on the team) were producing 3x+ what they were (when this team member even did anything, 3*0 = 0). Repeated complaints to our manager fell on deaf ears even with irrefutable evidence of this team member doing practically nothing. Some weeks they would move a ticket between statuses and that was all they did, no comments, no commits, no PRs, no reviews, no testing, nothing. Some weeks there was literally 0 activity by them on any of the tools we used and they were always distracted/distant in meetings, hardly contributing at all. That wasn't the only reason I left that company but it was one of them.
immigrantheart 4y ago
The only people that win in this are people with dual citizenship/permanent residence in LCOL countries. It isn’t that big of a pool.
Sytten 4y ago
There was a poll on LinkedIn for tech salaries in Quebec (same timezone as New York, most people speak English well enough, good universities) and the result was that 50% make less than 100k (75k USD). Only 20% make more than 125k (96k USD). Plus the government will subsidize the salaries anywhere from 25% to 60% using tax credits (even more in video games). So it does make sense to hire here for a US based company without sacrifing quality like we all had the experience with cheap outsourced.
- ActionHank 4y ago
  Until companies start competing for talent in Quebec.
- hungryforcodes 4y ago
  So wait -- 50% make more than 100k. Thats pretty good! Montreal isn't that expensive -- yet.
- betaby 4y ago
  While frequenting Montreal meetups before COVID I came to realization that skilled folks work for US companies directly as contractors and thus outsourcing agencies are not needed (for them at least).
newaccount2021 4y ago
Most tech work isn't that hard Other people around the world have been getting CS degrees too. Americans think everyone in Africa is starving...everyone in Mexico is in a drug cartel...and yet, I know folks who are extremely happy with the tech talent in both regions. These other people tend to work for less than US tech workers So, why is anyone surprised?
alaricus 4y ago
Of course. Why pay US salaries and US rents, when the rest of the world is cheaper and probably has better tech talent?
- newaccount2021 4y ago
MontyCarloHall 4y ago
I agree with many of the comments saying that overseas outsourcing is unlikely to happen en masse. While I don't think the quality of foreign developers is necessarily lower than domestic developers (look at all the great Eastern European software companies, like JetBrains), timezone issues and language barriers prove that there's a limit to just how remote workers can be. [*] However, as more and more companies adopt regional cost-of-living adjustments for salaries, domestic "outsourcing" (i.e. preferential hiring of employees in lower CoL areas) is likely to increase. Assuming developers in Ohio are just as skilled as Bay Area developers and a two hour timezone difference is easily surmountable, why would Silicon Valley companies not preferentially hire Ohioans if they can pay them 2/3rds as much as Bay Area employees? A $200k salary in lower CoL parts of the country goes much further than a $300k salary in the Bay. [*] That said, even in high CoL parts of Western Europe, tech salaries are far lower than salaries in high CoL parts of the US (e.g. developers in London make on average ~70% of NYC salaries [0,1]). For certain tech companies on the East Coast, a 6 hour timezone difference might be acceptable for such a dramatic reduction in labor costs. Imagine how much lower salaries are in lower CoL parts of Western Europe. [0] https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/London/ https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/London/ (median compensation: $133k) [1] https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/New-York-City/ https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/New-York-C... (median compensation: $188k)
endisneigh 4y ago
Why are people saying overseas outsourcing is unlikely to happen? Hasn’t it already happened? Isn’t it just because tech has been expanding greatly that there’s no perceived reduction in jobs in the USA?
aweb 4y ago
To be honest, as a European I think it's a good thing and we're already seeing its consequences: salaries which are way lower than US ones have already started rising, and lots of interesting startups that didn't want to hire us before have changed their minds. So at least on our side of the ocean it's pretty good! I just hope there's no negative impact for Americans and we can all enjoy this change.
RestlessMind 4y ago
Called this out 10 months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27696235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27696235 The most FAQ is "hey we tried it in 2000's with outsourcing and nothing happened. why worry now?" The answer is "now with fully remote, it is easy to replace a USA team member with a Mexican or Canadian or Brazilian and do it one by one. boil the frog slowly. and very soon, majority of your team will be outside USA". I am still watching it happen at my current shop. Majority of new hires and new headcount is from other countries.
Georgelemental 4y ago
"unless the U.S. admits more high-skilled immigrants" Some things never change

56 points by ushakov 4y ago

So, the tech industry warns that unless the government allows more low-paid immigrants in, they'll outsource. What else is new?

ggm 4y ago

Pre covid H1B was already huge and somewhat under fire for being a cost of labour diluting trend. If your company was willing to pay a US immigration cost to get somebody in, and can now shave 10%+ off salary to get the same awesome brains from another country AND get 24/7 effort on the problem... what's not to love?

ushakov 4y ago
because that’s not how capitalism works capitalism means making profits making profits means lowering costs outsourcing is a way to lower costs
- ggm 4y ago
  coming back to this late, I think my english-language sentences confused people. What I said in "whats not to love" is "this is how capitalism works" but clearly you thought I was saying something else.
- throwmeariver1 4y ago
  eh... if the only way for you to increase profits is to cut costs you have a problem that will accelerate after you have nothing more to cut.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    >> making profits means lowering costs > eh... if the only way for you to increase profits is to cut costs you have a problem that will accelerate after you have nothing more to cut. You're nitpicking, the GP's post can be easily repaired by reading that as "lowering costs means making more profits." Businesses like to turn all the dials to increase their profits.

keikobadthebad 4y ago

'Tech industry' has offices in India, China, Canada already to exploit the cheaper labor directly.

Pet_Ant 4y ago
During the last year I know multiple people who have doubled there salaries with being hired remotely and local companies being unhappy about the situation.
ARandumGuy 4y ago
India, Canada, and (especially) China also have their own 'tech industries,' which are able to hire talent locally without dealing with the headaches of having an international team.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  Canada doesn't have much in the way of a "tech industry" because all the new grads who can move to the US for much higher pay and few unicorn companies (like shopify) stay here. Many of the offices in Canada are here for the purpose of hiring people from other countries who can't get through the US immigration system. Housing has become insanely expensive and people aren't getting paid enough to offset the high cost of housing. Meanwhile our government is importing low wage low skill workers via the temporary worker program for things like fast food restaurants because people don't make enough to get out of fast food while working at fast food, so they have trouble attracting workers. The bottom line is canada is quickly becoming a place to import workers from cheaper countries to keep pay low while any Canadians who have the education and experience flee to the USA for higher wages. I've seen it in my lifetime with non computer engineering disciplines. A structural engineer making 70k because it's easy to import them from other countries and it drives wages down. The last PEO survey I saw said something like 2/3rd of Canadian engineering grads are not finding work in their industry of choice at all.
alaricus 4y ago
Replace "exploit" with "pay less because the cost of living there is much lower". My colleague in India gets paid a fraction of what I make, but he is able to afford a bigger house and more luxuries. The cost of living in the Western word is out of control.

jleyank 4y ago

This trend was fully present pre covid, especially in the high cost areas. If your task requires “programmers”, there’s lots of them and companies seek the lowest cost. If, rather, you have a task that requires “top-notch” or speciality programmers, there’s far fewer of them to choose from. Before, companies needed to find them, then convince them to relocate and deal with the immigration hassles associated with relocation. This was tedious and companies hire companies to do this. If these people are not required to relocate, the size of the hiring pool increases to include multi-professional families or those with strong geographic preferences. I guess this can be rephrased to: if programmers are a commodity, work will flow to the lowest cost area possible. If it’s anti-commodity/bespoke work, one must gather the craftspeople one needs. And these people know they’re valuable which makes the negotiation more even.

zcw100 4y ago

A better headline would have been, “Tech industry uses scare tactics to try and force people back into the office”. Been there, done that. If it could have been outsourced it would have already been outsourced. Do you really think they were sitting around saying,”I know they cost more but I’m too busy playing golf to bother” and they’re only getting around to it now?

JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
Actually yes I do. Feel very strongly that the tech work from home movement is shining a light on something they don’t want a light shined on. They should be vehemently making cases that teams need to be in offices together and that “face to face is best” to keep their jobs in their citadel.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  If work (of any kind) can only be done face-to-face, why do companies have satellite offices? I've never worked for a company with more than a few hundred employees that didn't have offices in multiple states and co-workers who had never met in person, yet still conducted business just fine remotely.
- scandox 4y ago
  Absolutely. I am seeing this unfold right in front of me and I'm amazed how happy people are to cut their own throat. I guess it's just because a lot of people have only ever experienced being highly in demand.
- TimPC 4y ago
  Or maybe it’s enough to have people in the same time zone working the same hours and communicating using technology. There is a big difference between questions being answered right away and questions being answered overnight that one still has to consider for outsourcing.
  - jghn 4y ago
    Right. Both sides of this debate have been disingenuous. The remote-or-bust crowd always seems to assume salaries would stay the same. Most, not all, but most software development jobs don't require specialty skills. If the job can truly be done anywhere, why would we assume the answer will be to pay SF salaries all around the world? The must-be-in-office crowd tends to ignore that most of the time remote work mostly is fine. Yes, everyone has an anecdote of this going horribly wrong. But they ignore that minimizing costs as first priority is not going to yield optimal results. And a lot of those horror stories involve bottom rate outsourcing operations. There exists a world in which outsourcing/remote covers most needs but pays less than we're used to in the US software industry. It's neither the penny on the dollar model of traditional outsourcing nor junior devs making 500K TC in theo there extreme.

vsskanth 4y ago

H1B visas are a lottery with <30% chance of getting picked up. Employment-based immigration to the US is a long process (1.5-2 yrs), on top of only 15% green cards being allocated to it, not to mention all the rate throttling quotas. USCIS is primarily paper run and super backlogged so those already here are also stuck in paperwork and in many cases end up losing work auth because they are so slow. Many don't realize how bad its gotten lately on the immigration front. Last year, USCIS wasted 160K green cards, this year they are on track to waste 200K green cards, simply because they are too slow to process paperwork. Companies are probably tired of all this uncertainty and legal overhead so they now offer relocation to their offices outside US if you have visa problems and to have easier access to talent. Remote work has accelerated this since teams are now learning to be geographically distributed. Companies are now finding it easier to just let their top talent work from their home country, pay them way more than local rates (helps retention) and setup payroll than deal with US visas and immigration. It's only a few years ordeal to get a green card if you're not Indian, otherwise it's a multi-decade wait. So many are starting to take the offer and move out once they've earned a decent amount.

tablespoon 4y ago
Also, if you (as an employer) don't bother with the US immigration system, you don't have to pay US-competitive salaries as that system requires. Sure, FAANG companies may be too rich to care, but they're also probably a small fraction of US tech employment.
usrn 4y ago
What's the difference between outsourcing and immigration? It's still taking jobs away from the native population.
- vsskanth 4y ago
  Its a very common misconception that immigration takes away jobs from the native population. Also known as "Lump of Labor Fallacy".
  - 4y ago

kurupt213 4y ago

This is the obvious end result. All those whiners revolting against returning to the office are destroying their own employment opportunities

silicon2401 4y ago
> All those whiners It never ceases to amaze me how completely unsympathetic people are towards other people just for wanting different things.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  >> All those whiners > It never ceases to amaze me how completely unsympathetic people are towards other people just for wanting different things. Some of it is whining, though. Whining isn't a preference, it's an attitude and style of expressing that preference.
potta_coffee 4y ago
Frankly, you sound like a bit of a whiner who holds the opposite opinion. I don't understand why most conversations orient to this binary right / wrong argumentation when the issue is almost always more subtle.

ideamotor 4y ago

Unless it’s a hierarchical remote-first tech-only company, in-person is the only way to really see the business problems and stay in the loop. And when (not if) the current tech boom busts (which may have started) the remote jobs that are lost won’t come back to the US.

dipsplacemat 4y ago

The obvious response is: "do it, you won't." They might scare the new grads with that sort of talk, but we've seen what happens when you outsource jobs with the sole aim of saving money. Those of us old enough to remember those times, also have a special rate for helping to clean up projects which started that way. It's usually somewhere in the 200-500% range.

diogenescynic 4y ago

Can’t say I’m too concerned. Every project I’ve ever worked on that outsourced something ended in failure or a major decline in quality. We used to need 3 accountants in the US, now we have an army of BPO accountants and none of them know what they’re doing and things take longer than ever. Outsourcing doesn’t work. It’s not even clear it costs less when you factor in the decline in quality, delays, and extra work needed by everyone else to monitor the outsourced work. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

tablespoon 4y ago
> Can’t say I’m too concerned. Every project I’ve ever worked on that outsourced something ended in failure or a major decline in quality. We used to need 3 accountants in the US, now we have an army of BPO accountants and none of them know what they’re doing and things take longer than ever. Honestly, I don't think corporate decision-makers really care about those metrics. > It’s not even clear it costs less when you factor in the decline in quality, delays, and extra work needed by everyone else to monitor the outsourced work. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze. So it's six of one, half a dozen of the other then? That's not a very persuasive argument against outsourcing.
- taylodl 4y ago
  It’s not even clear it costs less when you factor in the decline in quality, delays, and extra work needed by everyone else to monitor the outsourced work. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze. How do you read that as six one way, half a dozen the other? Outsourcing often leads to lower quality, delays (which has business opportunity costs) and extra expense to monitor and review the work. Instead of being faster, cheaper, better outsourcing is slower, more expensive, and worse. Why would anybody choose that?
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    >> It’s not even clear it costs less when you factor in the decline in quality, delays, and extra work needed by everyone else to monitor the outsourced work. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze. >> So it's six of one, half a dozen of the other then? That's not a very persuasive argument against outsourcing. > How do you read that as six one way, half a dozen the other? If the costs aren't significantly higher than in-sourced work in ways quantifiable in dollars, then I don't think it's going to matter much to business leaders. In other words, they just don't plain care about the things we care about. If the thing gets done crappily and painfully, it's still done, and that's fine with them. Also, I don't think businesses are logical or rigorous places. IMHO, it's par for the course to "save" money by shifting costs into more difficult to quantify areas. For instance: cut desktop support, and the costs move into the groups being supported, so long as the complaints aren't loud enough to reach up through many layers of management, you have yourself a "win".

thenerdhead 4y ago

They’ve been saying this for over two decades now. Nothing has changed. We know what the cost of cheaper labor means in software. We also know that people are generally happier working from home if they are tech workers. The companies that embrace remote first or even hybrid scenarios will be the winner in the long run. Happier employees = better outcomes. If my job could be outsourced, it would’ve been ten years ago when I first joined the workforce as a remote employee.

TAMSFT051022 4y ago
> If my job could be outsourced, it would’ve been ten years ago when I first joined the workforce as a remote employee The difference this time is that we are heading for a recession. Company leadership doesn't want to take the risk of outsourcing while times are good and profits are doubling each year. But when the stock price is in freefall and they are under pressure to cut costs, then the risk/reward of outsourcing looks more attractive. We haven't had a recession since '08, and the landscape is very different now. Remote work tech was in its infancy back then - Zoom, Slack, Google Drive weren't even created yet. Plus India and China (and others) have developed further and starting pumping out 100s of thousands of CS grads each year that didn't exist in '08. I think we're about to see a big wave of outsourcing over the next few years. And if companies are smart about it (e.g. do it slowly to allow knowledge transfer and compete for top talent, not bottom of the barrel) then it will be successful.
- Clubber 4y ago
  >The difference this time is that we are heading for a recession. >I think we're about to see a big wave of outsourcing over the next few years. Yes, but if companies are gonna outsource, they are gonna outsource whether their employees work at the office or work remote. It's purely a financial decision, not a "if you don't come to the office, we are going to outsource you," decision. Executives might use that ploy/threat to get people into the office, but they will still outsource regardless, if it makes sense for their company, just like they have been doing for the last 20+ years.
- thenerdhead 4y ago

dnndev 4y ago

It’s more about trust than finances. Face to face and remote work within the companies legal boundaries is the safer choice. Remote work with no legal leverage is scary when you think about handing over company assets. But then again, many large companies have managers looking to climb the ladder so they outsource at all costs to make the budget look better- it’s a risky gamble and sometimes it just works. Most times this ends with years of waste in other areas of the company. Trust issues will limit the adoption of remote work.

joshstrange 4y ago
> But then again, many large companies have managers looking to climb the ladder so they outsource at all costs to make the budget look better- it’s a risky gamble and sometimes it just works. Most times this ends with years of waste in other areas of the company. This works in the short term, in the same way you could probably lay off 90% of your developers and keep thinks chugging along for a couple years (albeit with next to zero new development). These things take time to fully poison the host but the exec climbing the ladder doesn't care. They get the praise for cutting costs, they aren't responsible for the code/product, and they will jet off to some new company to ruin things before the shit hits the fan.
- dnndev 4y ago
  I partially agree. Some companies are so dysfunctional contractors are the only ones getting stuff done. Some IT departments are just so slow and have so much red tape (no incentive to change the status quo - or have their hands tied for other internal political reasons) that nothing gets done as long as paychecks are cashing. I feel like this is off the main thread but none the less a reason for outsourcing in some cases may turn into a net gain for the company.
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    These types of places absolutely exist but while outsourcing might see a net gain I think they'd see an even bigger gain by getting rid of the dead weight and hiring people who aren't so stale/set in their ways. As in this is a failing of management and not something that outsourcing really "fixes". It's been my experience that companies are not willing to make these choices. I'm not saying "Bob had a bad week, let's fire him" or "Tom is going through some personal stuff and his work has slacked, let him go" but rather repeated failures with attempts to rectify them with the employee that aren't fixed. The bar to let someone go is absurdly high at some places and kills motivation for people who are doing the work "Well, John isn't doing any work and the company don't seem to care, I guess I'll stop caring as well and just coast". At my last job I had a coworker who refused to pull their own weight. We had the same title and I (and others on the team) were producing 3x+ what they were (when this team member even did anything, 3*0 = 0). Repeated complaints to our manager fell on deaf ears even with irrefutable evidence of this team member doing practically nothing. Some weeks they would move a ticket between statuses and that was all they did, no comments, no commits, no PRs, no reviews, no testing, nothing. Some weeks there was literally 0 activity by them on any of the tools we used and they were always distracted/distant in meetings, hardly contributing at all. That wasn't the only reason I left that company but it was one of them.

immigrantheart 4y ago

The only people that win in this are people with dual citizenship/permanent residence in LCOL countries. It isn’t that big of a pool.

Sytten 4y ago

There was a poll on LinkedIn for tech salaries in Quebec (same timezone as New York, most people speak English well enough, good universities) and the result was that 50% make less than 100k (75k USD). Only 20% make more than 125k (96k USD). Plus the government will subsidize the salaries anywhere from 25% to 60% using tax credits (even more in video games). So it does make sense to hire here for a US based company without sacrifing quality like we all had the experience with cheap outsourced.

ActionHank 4y ago
Until companies start competing for talent in Quebec.
hungryforcodes 4y ago
So wait -- 50% make more than 100k. Thats pretty good! Montreal isn't that expensive -- yet.
betaby 4y ago
While frequenting Montreal meetups before COVID I came to realization that skilled folks work for US companies directly as contractors and thus outsourcing agencies are not needed (for them at least).

newaccount2021 4y ago

Most tech work isn't that hard Other people around the world have been getting CS degrees too. Americans think everyone in Africa is starving...everyone in Mexico is in a drug cartel...and yet, I know folks who are extremely happy with the tech talent in both regions. These other people tend to work for less than US tech workers So, why is anyone surprised?

alaricus 4y ago

Of course. Why pay US salaries and US rents, when the rest of the world is cheaper and probably has better tech talent?

newaccount2021 4y ago

MontyCarloHall 4y ago

I agree with many of the comments saying that overseas outsourcing is unlikely to happen en masse. While I don't think the quality of foreign developers is necessarily lower than domestic developers (look at all the great Eastern European software companies, like JetBrains), timezone issues and language barriers prove that there's a limit to just how remote workers can be. [*] However, as more and more companies adopt regional cost-of-living adjustments for salaries, domestic "outsourcing" (i.e. preferential hiring of employees in lower CoL areas) is likely to increase. Assuming developers in Ohio are just as skilled as Bay Area developers and a two hour timezone difference is easily surmountable, why would Silicon Valley companies not preferentially hire Ohioans if they can pay them 2/3rds as much as Bay Area employees? A $200k salary in lower CoL parts of the country goes much further than a $300k salary in the Bay. [*] That said, even in high CoL parts of Western Europe, tech salaries are far lower than salaries in high CoL parts of the US (e.g. developers in London make on average ~70% of NYC salaries [0,1]). For certain tech companies on the East Coast, a 6 hour timezone difference might be acceptable for such a dramatic reduction in labor costs. Imagine how much lower salaries are in lower CoL parts of Western Europe. [0] https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/London/ https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/London/ (median compensation: $133k) [1] https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/New-York-City/ https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/New-York-C... (median compensation: $188k)

endisneigh 4y ago

Why are people saying overseas outsourcing is unlikely to happen? Hasn’t it already happened? Isn’t it just because tech has been expanding greatly that there’s no perceived reduction in jobs in the USA?

aweb 4y ago

To be honest, as a European I think it's a good thing and we're already seeing its consequences: salaries which are way lower than US ones have already started rising, and lots of interesting startups that didn't want to hire us before have changed their minds. So at least on our side of the ocean it's pretty good! I just hope there's no negative impact for Americans and we can all enjoy this change.

RestlessMind 4y ago

Called this out 10 months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27696235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27696235 The most FAQ is "hey we tried it in 2000's with outsourcing and nothing happened. why worry now?" The answer is "now with fully remote, it is easy to replace a USA team member with a Mexican or Canadian or Brazilian and do it one by one. boil the frog slowly. and very soon, majority of your team will be outside USA". I am still watching it happen at my current shop. Majority of new hires and new headcount is from other countries.

Georgelemental 4y ago

"unless the U.S. admits more high-skilled immigrants" Some things never change