37 ms·

Your job was probably outsourced for the reason you suspected

99 points by samizdis 4y ago

jsiaajdsdaa 4y ago
Coding isn't the hard part, it's business logic.
- brianwawok 4y ago
  Eh. Writing code that is maintainable and bug free is a skill. Meeting the acceptance criteria with guess and check isn’t hard.
  - pdimitar 4y ago
    Hardest yet: apply professional rigor and be actually given time to do so because apparently just hacking something together that looks to work is the best thing ever (in the eyes of managers and business owners).
  - trention 4y ago
    >Meeting the acceptance criteria with guess and check isn’t hard. Acceptance criteria often don't exist or are wrong. Incidentally, when someone says "business requirements are easy", that's a pretty big tell they have never worked on a complicated project.
    - mgkimsal 4y ago
      > that's a pretty big tell they have never worked on a complicated project. Even an 'easy' project, it's not easy. Edge cases, security, performance, dealing with error conditions, dealing with bad external vendor/data. "We'll just import data from vendor X". Yeah, that can never go wrong!
  - jsiaajdsdaa 4y ago
    Imagine having good ACs, or any ACs at all. Wouldn't be me!
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Software engineering is a well understood science in many cultures. Parsing acceptance criteria written by someone of another culture and domain experience can be difficult for some, and it’s not something learned in computer science courses.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  Working for a while in a very small team, outsourcing has been discussed a lot. What stopped us every time was the coding part. Imagine having perfect business requirements, and preparing perfect acceptance tests. Once your feature is delivered you safely ship, and after a week or two come up with improvements. You prepare to redo the cycle, except your outsourcing firm is busy and you need to ask elsewhere. They come up for twice the expected price and want to rewrite half of the logic. From there, it will basically cost more and more each time to make the feature evolve, as arguably it will have become complex and touched by many hands. A solution to that is to keep a stable outsourced team. Except it’s not actually stable, people come and go and quality vary. Either way you keep someone on your team busy making sure you don’t get screwed. More often than not, that person has coding skills, that could be used to actually clean code the feature instead. Basically, outsourcing only made sense if we had no way to hire more at any reasonable price, or for one-shot project with no future behind.
  - vbezhenar 4y ago
    Why do you think that you can hire stable team in your country, but you can't do that in a distant country? Seems that problem roots in those "outsourcing companies". Avoid those companies then. Hire directly.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      I think that is still a middle layer problem. A root layer problem would be "pay your developers enough they don't leave", but that in general is in conflict with business practices optimized to make as much profit as possible next quarter.
    - makeitdouble 4y ago
      Setting up a payroll in a different country is a lot more effort than what most companies want. You can do consulting contracts instead, but it then becomes harder to find people who want long term contracts for single clients (those people need a solid reason to not choose a local company or a bigger global company that has a full payroll in their countries). Not considering you have to do the hiring in the first place. It’s not intractable, but we wouldn’t have been hiring full remote teams of 10 or 20 people so the effort doesn’t scale much, and the price difference really isn’t worth the hassle. PS: looking back at the last 2 years, many employees have looked at moving long term to another country while keeping their current jobs. I’m pretty sure even in these cases (= established relationship, proven skillset etc.) most companies bailed on dealing with the international ongoing paperwork.
- drieddust 4y ago
  IMHO idiomatic defensive coding is very hard.
kwatsonafter 4y ago
I love how nobody commented. AI, new tools, and globalization is going to destroy the software developer class. Alright, great. I'm now the 3000th person since the late 80's to predict this!
- flyinglizard 4y ago
  It’s mostly just going to drive up developer productivity, resulting in even more software. Even without AI, with modern languages, frameworks and SaaS/PaaS the amount of code writing you need to do is quite diminished, as opposed to plumbing and troubleshooting things that won’t work with other things.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- dmitriid 4y ago
  We've been hearing that for years. And yet here we are. When an AI can understand and implement the customer's "parallel red lines some of which are perpendicular and some of them are green"[1], only then we're doomed. Until then, we're secure. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
  - kwatsonafter 4y ago
    Massive! Take an upvote.
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      Is it in the form of a kitten?
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Call me when it's there so I can retire.
- tmaly 4y ago
crikeyjoe 4y ago
yieldcrv 4y ago
One thing I noticed is missing from the outsourcing discussion, which I noticed after I started doing it myself, is that they don't factor in how many transactions just simply wouldn't have happened if it wasn't outsourced. Like domestic labor was never a factor, one project just wouldn't have been pursued because the overhead costs would have ruled it out. I know people think about their massive enterprise getting cheaper labor, but its prudent to think about smaller shops and smaller clients who simply wouldn't have built anything if it wasn't for cheaper labor.
- ozim 4y ago
  Imagine being software company now in Poland all good devs that can speak English are getting insane rates by the local standards. All the software houses having rates that local company cannot afford. Good luck making software for local market.
citizenpaul 4y ago
I've had some unfortunate first hand experience with outsourcing to India. New CEO needed to prove he was a hotshot, fired one of my dev's and used the "savings" to outsource an entire project to an India "firm." The first project was a finance import tool for some real estate data. A 2 month project. 1Year later the project was still being worked on. Not only that the project had to be worked on by our in house devs to actually get it working after the Indian company claimed it was done. One of the problems was anytime the India company got anyone competent, that person would jump ship to a better offer within a couple of weeks. They would then have to find someone else. The only reason that I know this is my team had to interact with them for some integration reasons. Hi can I talk to Akash, he is no longer here your contact is now Kanta.... forever and ever. The code was also...interesting to look at. Talk about unmaintainable lol. The app was loudly launched when "done" then never used then quietly taken offline a couple years later.
- bdcravens 4y ago
  Was that an issue with them being Indian, or that your CEO did a terrible job of vetting the firm he hired?
  - civilized 4y ago
    From what I hear this is a pretty common experience. It would be interesting to hear the other side - when outsourcing works. I think it tends to be when the task is extremely well-defined, like "follow this standard workflow to deal with this stream of requests to grant/remove access".
    - causality0 4y ago
      Right. The impact of different cultures and worldviews cannot be overstated. Mental interpretation of general directives varies wildly enough between Americans of different backgrounds, different ages, different neurodivergences to create problems even with them all sharing the same language and culture. The further you go the less you can rely on everybody being on the same page.
  - 4y ago
trention 4y ago
>Poland and Ukraine pay between $22,000 and $23,000 per year Good luck finding a developer in Eastern Europe with more than 2 years of experience willing to work for 23 thousand a year. And if that's a gross number (as I suspect it's supposed to be) - good luck finding anyone with even 1 year of experience.
- bdcravens 4y ago
  The same article said the US average was $110k, which in many markets won't even hire a junior.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    That’s the median according to the BLS. In some US markets, $110k will get you a very experienced dev. Cost of living is wildly different in a midwest suburb vs the northeast corridor or the Bay Area.
  - tmaly 4y ago
    What’s that work out to with inflation?
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Exactly. Reasonable quality starts at $50K and if someone is really good you probably want to pay them more so they'll stay.
- lormayna 4y ago
  You can find in Italy for sure. I just found lot of offer on Linkedin for Junior developer at 25k€/years.
  - jen20 4y ago
    > I just found lot of offer on Linkedin for Junior developer at 25k€/years. Perhaps the reason there's lots offers for that kind of money is because no-one is willing to take the jobs at that rate?
orzig 4y ago
I love anecdotes and I have some of my own, but does anyone have real data-backed arguments for why Americans still get hired for 10x a comparable developer in India? Are we, (I’m an American developer) really 10x as productive?
- bdcravens 4y ago
  It's flawed logic to think that pay is (exclusively) based on productivity.
- carschno 4y ago
  Also, is there any data confirming that equally well educated Indian developers are 10x cheaper than American ones? How does it compare to European ones? I'd love a serious answer, but I am aware that software quality is almost impossible to measure, and quantifying the skills level of developers might be even harder.
  - trention 4y ago
    I can't comment about India but in Eastern Europe software engineers have a comparable purchasing power than in the US - it's just that it's achieved at ~50% of the wages because of cost of living differences.
    - carschno 4y ago
      It's not like I don't believe that. But I am interested in any data taking salaries and qualification/experience into account. Local costs of living are certainly important for the employees, but not so much for the employer (assuming that they impact the salaries level to some degree). Even though the latter is probably still an approximation to the actual skills level of a developer.
  - orzig 4y ago
    That’s a great point, thanks. One collection-of-anecdotes from my company is 3x in the same role (10x was from the article), which might actually equate to a similar standard of living (with huge fuzziness given the different amenities of the two countries - I’ll never have a personal driver)
bluepizza 4y ago
Outsourcing is a tool. It is pretty bad to outsource the crown jewels, if it is a tech company that needs to innovate to stay competitive. Not so bad if it is about managing off the shelf components that are set up by consultants.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Also with cheaper outsourcing I'd assume all your remotely developed source is being stolen, and you have to assume being sold off. Even more worrisome is code review companies seem to be mostly complete crap. Finding glaring RCE's in code in code that's passed multiple reviews is jarring for me. Mostly because I'm more on the operational/support side of things and write more scripting than code.
- SicSemperUranus 4y ago
  Part of the issue with the mindset of never outsourcing mission-critical tasks is, if something is not important, why are we doing it? Do we just like wasting money? For example, if I work at an accounting firm and we build our own account software (or modules, or whatever), is this development work not mission-critical? If the solution is good, our processes will become dependent on the tools, and the tools will need to be maintained and even improved. So then, what can be outsourced? Team-building exercises? Not sure, but in any case, this "mission-critical" mindset should err on the side of always doing software development in-house. Which seems to me like a wise decision long-term, though it may seem too rigid a view in the short term.
piskov 4y ago
Most of the developers are just translators from business requirements into react code. Nothing hard about that. Learning how to implement CRUD with validation in <insert framework / stack> is not software engineering. That’s why it can be easily replaced with bootcamp students and — surely — later with AI. Because if it’s just a translation there’s no need for a human translator.
- np_tedious 4y ago
  Those "business requirements" vary greatly in their specificity. Dealing with the ambiguity and making reasonable judgment calls is the kind of thing you can usually expect from a more expensive engineer
- nebulousthree 4y ago
  I don't see how the translation is easy. If anything, accurate and precise requirements gathering is one of the hardest parts of software. How many times do you 100% correctly interpret client needs. Better yet, how many times does the client even interpret their own needs correctly and then communicate that?
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  > Most of the developers are just translators from business requirements into react code. This is where the real software engineering practice takes place, understanding what the business needs while staying within scope and being able to deliver a solution that's functional and maintainable long term. I see a world in the not-too-distant future where new apps are built entirely by AI, but there will always be a need for people to translate non-technical business requirements into action items and software decisions. And legacy apps developed entirely by AI? Maybe we'll see it my lifetime but I kind of doubt it.
- mattmerc 4y ago
  Respectfully, I see this as an oversimplification. Though, I can definitely understand why someone would say this and I do agree to some extent. The thing is, I think there is a lot of subtlety in most implementations. Those subtleties come from unique requirements outlined by the client/business need/ or existing patterns. As someone who has implemented a lot of CRUD functionality, I can honestly say there is very little code overlap between any two projects. Sure, the frontend calls the same CRUD endpoints. The backend essentially performs the same DB edits... but there's a lot to be considered before and after this. And no, it has nothing to do with just validation. It's about UX, performance, maintainability, extensibility, etc. All considerations when writing the code. When you're done the CRUD project, it's distinct. I think there's empirical evidence for this in the sense that the most we can abstract CRUD, is through CMSs. I've worked with a lot of clients that have great CMSs but still need to retain developers to support the CRUD ops and everything in between. Is this the same type of "software engineering" employed as someone writing a custom backend for a electronic stock exchange? Likely not, though that's a whole other discussion.
mkl95 4y ago
I used to work for a Python shop where developers were routinely replaced by workers from an Asian country after quitting. Results were mixed. The quality of their work was mediocre, which is impressive considering how cheap they were. Their biggest weaknesses were their inability to follow [well-documented] processes and their poor communication skills, which was a bit of a nightmare for middle management. All in all, if your company is a bodyshop, you will probably benefit from outsourcing some projects to an even cheaper bodyshop. If your company is looking for people with that "X factor", you will just get frustrated and lose money.
indymike 4y ago
Price is a bad reason to outsource it just shifts cost from developer headcount to management headcount. There are two really, really good reasons to consider offshore outsourcing: * Hire the best. Not every great dev is from North America. There is fantastic talent out there, and you can hire them. Now that most dev teams are used to working remote, it's not nearly as difficult to hire great developers in other parts of the world. * 24 hour development cycle. Teams can operate 6-12 hours offset, and you can go faster. This only works if the offshore team is as good at what they do as the home team.
- ehnto 4y ago
  Have you experienced real benefits from a 24 hour cycle? I've worked in environments like that and I feel like you're not actually gaining anything except a new layer of asynchronous communication requirements. It's not like you get more man hours after all.
  - indymike 4y ago
    Yep. Twice. Once for a big job ad scraping operation (we did this for ofccp compliance) where 24 hour dev enabled our scraping to not miss when our competitors would take 24-48 hours to re-tool when a targeted site changed. The second time was a webdev agency where we routinely were able to win business and delivery by promising to be done in 1/2 the calendar days as our competitors on the same bids. In the second situation I wouldn't have been able to hire enough people locally to just double the local man-hours anyway (small midwest town).
    - addicted 4y ago
      The first one is clearly a situation tailor made for 24/7 because your requirements change in such short periods. This is similar to how companies that offer 24/7 technical support benefit from 24/7 dev availability. The second doesn’t seem to be an advantage for 24/7 availability. You would have achieved the same if you had hired the second team in a different country but in the same time zone as you. Arguably, with the more synchronous communication (I, on team A, have a question for someone on team B that’s blocking me can get the answer immediately instead of having to wait for my next shift) you may have been done even earlier.
88913527 4y ago
They'll pay for it on the other end. If you hire junior overseas developers, and give them minimal product guidance and have no foundation technical leadership, it goes without saying what the quality of the deliverable will be. (To be clear, you could do all of this in the US with the same outcome too, though you'd have spent more money in the process). The applications blow over like a house of cards and the overseas developers don't last long what little business context (institutional knowledge) was adequately communicated isn't being transferred between the rotating staff. There are no free lunches.
testing_acc 4y ago
Why pay 300k in Bay Area when you can pay much less in India or Turkey? Those guys are also more productive as well. It's not like these are slave farms or sweatshops. Those much smaller salaries can buy a much better standard of living because they don't have to enrich greedy Bay Area landlords.
- rejectfinite 4y ago
  >Those guys are also more productive as well. Sure but as seen in this very thread there is communication issues, business logic issues etc Even if a company can do remote employees in the same country, its very different to do overseas. FYI: I am not American.
- baron816 4y ago
  Why do Bay Area devs cost $300K+? It's not that cost of living is so much higher in the Bay Area. It's that most of the worlds top developers have chosen to live in the Bay Area. Sure, you can find fantastic developers elsewhere, but top talent has figured out they can optimize their income (and quality of life) by moving to the US West Coast.
  - celdon25 4y ago
    If they were actually top talent, they wouldn't need to move there to get what they want (unless the goal is to work in-person at a specific company that happens to be in the bay area). > and quality of life I certainly hope that you're not suggesting that San Francisco in 2022 is a nice place to live (or commute to), even on 300k income. Cue the south park episode.
    - baron816 4y ago
      > If they were actually top talent, they wouldn't need to move there to get what they want This may be true now, but it has not been that way for all of the last 15 years. Top talent was moving here for at least a decade because it was the epicenter of tech, and the vast majority of them aren’t going anywhere. SF has many very well documented problems that I’ve definitely done plenty of ranting about. But SF still has a lot going for it, and it does not make up the entirety of the Bay Area. Aside from the near perfect weather, you have easy access to an unbeatable amount of natural beauty. Yeah, maybe you could get a big, comfortable house in Texas for a fraction what you could buy here, but then what?
JOnAgain 4y ago
I feel like there’s something weird with the dataset. It’s says the average US salary is $110k. That’s seems incredibly low.
- js4ever 4y ago
  Agreed, the dataset seems to date from 10y ago
- NineStarPoint 4y ago
  There are a lot of “good enough” developers making a reasonable living in the 60k-90k range, and not actually that many developers making 200k+ to balance that out. Seems a bit low to me too, but it’s about what I would have expected the average to be a year or two ago.
vaidhy 4y ago
Everyone has a story about how software projects go off-track and generally, it is not the nationality of the developers that matter. But here is an interesting observation - you do not manage a remote, outsourced team of developers as if they were local. We know about this from software architecture too - a remote object is not the same as local object, no matter how much of abstraction you write to hide the fact. The abstraction is even more leaky for people. The rest of the comments ring true - if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. I recently read somewhere that software salaries are US > China > India > EU. A lot of people in US still carry the colonial mindset and that ship has sailed long past. For India, you are paying between 40% - 70% of an equivalent US developer pay if you hire them directly. You are likely to be paying more if you go through a contracting agency and the only reason to do it is because you want people fast and for a short term.
- closewith 4y ago
  > I recently read somewhere that software salaries are US > China > India > EU. This seems to read that EU software salaries are lower than China or India? That may be true for some EU countries, but definitely not all (or even on average).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
rejectfinite 4y ago
Not coding but another anecdote. Was visiting another universities networking lab (switches, routers, computers) for CCNA study. There where was an Indian student doing a MASTERS IN IT there. MASTERS. He asked about a firewall issue, where he could not SSH into it. And he said "SSH ONLY WORKS IN LOCAL NETWORKS" so it must be that and not that he confed the fw wrong. MASTERS in IT. Shows the quality of schools/degrees.
- stonecharioteer 4y ago
  I am an Indian and I don't have a formal CS degree. I studied Mechanical Engineering at a really small college. The biggest eye-opener I've seen is the lack of awareness and interest in almost everyone pursuing technology. Most of my country folk aren't in tech because they programmed an Atari as kids like I did. They're in tech because it's the only thing that pays. The same goes for most of these. It's sad, and it is also a big reason why most companies only see Indian teams as a way to cut costs, also slightly insinuating that you also accept quality cuts because you get devs who don't get the "download more ram" joke. I'm not making excuses for them, it's just the way it is. I spoke at a conference yesterday and very few people I work with even bothered asking what it was about.
- sha256sum 4y ago
  Probably not relevant that this person was Indian considering the amount of American cybersecurity MS grads you’ll find who don’t know what nmap is.
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    I will cast an uninformed "yes" to this as an American. Long ago, I studied philosophy and discovered Vedic influences, along with pop-culture American visions of spiritual India. I was impressed by the thinking and erudition of Vedic (and Buddhist) scholars, and immediately found links to English and German scholarship. All together, I had an early-adult vision of India as a place with high literacy and a long religious and scholarly history. Meanwhile, my urban life in America confirmed daily that there are illiterate people who thrive on being loud, pushy and often fat -- of every national origin. As the years go by, my views have changed. I always knew India was a populated place, but I did not understand that it means there are low-education and low-culture people in such numbers. I have met far more people from India now than I had in the past, and their human stories show me how I had been fortunate to see great writing, thinking and devout practice from India, but that is not the whole story. This is a long intro to basically seeing both India and America as a place with strikingly different people, next to each other, filling the cities. Very high skill, very high education, visiting a store right next to very low skill, very low education people, in great numbers. I respect my colleagues from India and I trust that they can also respect Americans. There is no single story here, and low quality outsourcing did cost me personally as a coder in the USA for decades.
giantg2 4y ago
"while the poorest-paying countries are led by Nigeria, which pays an average of just $7,255 annually to software devs – less than seven percent of the average US salary." This is pretty much meaningless. I would much rather see something about cost of living or overall median salary vs developer median. Also, it seem a lot of devs in the US live in HCOL areas, dragging up up the average of even median.
- AdrianB1 4y ago
  In some of these countries the cost of living and the median salary are skewed. For example rent is cheap, but for very low quality places, while something that compares to USA is very expensive. Average price for a smartphone is $100-200 because most people buy that, but an iPhone or Google Pixel is more expensive than in USA. In many places software developers earn 2-3 times the city average and several times the country average, but their quality of life is very low, while the quality of the output of their work most of the time has nothing to do with the amount they are paid. In the same city one can find a few excellent developers, but paid less than mediocre ones working for a different company. In outsourcing companies, one can find a few excellent developers paid the same as the mediocre ones, all working for the same client. The end result is a randomness of quality that makes outsourcing a high risk bet.
immigrantheart 4y ago
Wife works in a bank (not gonna name it here) who outsourced development to India. Everyday I hear horror stories, from logistical problem to admin problem to losing money in the millions problem, morale fading away and people are leaving. Heck, there was one month where my wife couldn’t work at all due to email problems because of that. One month free salary, we’ll take it. It’s been 2 years and still a shitshow.
- seibelj 4y ago
  The sign of someone who doesn’t know anything about software dev is when they suggest outsourcing as an easy way to cut costs, regardless of country. “We can get 10 people there for every person here!” Alarm bells should start ringing. It can be done but it takes very strong planning and foresight. Otherwise start dusting off the resume.
  - jcadam 4y ago
    Agree. If you identify a great talent who happens to live on the other side of the globe, hire that individual as an FTE. Outsourcing to some body-shop firm is always a mistake. At least I've never seen it work.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    ...and only requires triple the management, analysis, oversight, and QC. I guess they assume their onshore people will work harder. What also isn't appreciated besides the immediate dead pool effect outsourcing creates, is that it creates a scapegoat for the onshore people. When your IT department is down the hall and you throw them under the rug, they walk down and ... meetings... ensue. When they are around the world and subservient (because they are cheap and everyone knows it, so it's assumed they're bad and you can blame anything on them), then everyone will use that as an excuse, ESPECIALLY since all the extra management/requirements/analysis burden falls on them. The issue with failed projects in the mythical man month is and has ALWAYS been communication and understanding. 10 time zones and a language and cultural barrier does not make up for that. It is amazing a 1970s era book remains so ignored. It should be taught in MBA school. No I mean MBA not MIS. I highly doubt it is. It amazes me that accounting is treated as a core subject of MBA, while basic IT literacy and process is not, even though there is FAR more IT that accounting in a modern enterprise.
js4ever 4y ago
I had terrible experience with projects outsourced to india... But on the other side I got amazing experience with indian talents... hired at European salary level like rest of the team. I'm now hiring more and more dev from India and they are in the top performers tier from my team. Just don't try to pay them peanuts... And respect them as any other good dev from western countries.
- kyriakos 4y ago
  Same here, complete project outsourced, outcome was a security and code quality nightmare. While incorporating individuals in the team and follow the same workflow had good results.
- aldebran 4y ago
  You probably already know this: This has less to do with India or Indians and more to do with the fact that outsourcing a whole project tends to go to low bidders and hiring is held at a high bar. This is just self selection. Pay top dollar and you’ll get really good results with outsourcing as well.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    tl;dr - Large IT consultancies profit on arbitrage between their salary costs and your billing rates. And give zero damns about your project's success.
- MAMAMassakali 4y ago
  I see this happening all the time, majority of the people working in service based companies are bad at all the steps of development of any kind of software project. But there is an other side to it. Form a long time I am trying to get into consulting, companies don't want to see the background of us(devs). Majority of the times there is no response or they want to see some "white papers".
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    Would recommend you look at more focused consultancies that do one thing, very well. Avoid shops that have diner-style "We can do anything, and we're great at all of it!" marketing. And also ones which require a heavy PM footprint: that's a good sign they don't trust their own devs. The former cares about capability; the latter just cares about minimizing labor costs and getting clients to sign.
hbarka 4y ago
The history of outsourcing would be a great book, starting with the H1B visa, their conversion to permanent status as green card holders, becoming managers themselves, and then the manager preferring to outsource additional staffing due to affinity, thus completing the cycle. Repeat.
- dutchCourage 4y ago
  Are you saying legal immigration caused outsourcing? That's a bold claim. Anecdotally, I was in a large company with offices in India. None of the management was Indian.
  - jibe 4y ago
    I don't know the answer, but it seems like the parent might have it backwards. A handful of outsourcing companies control a massively disproportionate number of H-1Bs, and lobby heavily on expanding H-1B policy. They can place the US based H-1Bs to complement their local teams back in India.
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    I'm not sure I understand your comment, but I do know that you must be oversimplifying the comment you're replying to.
swellguy 4y ago
Language classification is a bit weird - doesn't mean that Golang/Ruby/Python developers are better than C programmers - just that the companies with better funding or better products are using those languages. So, in other words, pay is not based on programmer competence or language superiority, necessarily.
andrewmutz 4y ago
Increased outsourcing will almost surely be a consequence of the significant shift to remote work. If it is normal for companies to be hiring people at good salaries to work on zoom remotely from, say, Montana, why not just go the next step and hire in Latin America? There are plenty of brilliant software engineers in Latin America (I have met and worked with many), and even if the company is not motivated strictly by cost savings, they can just get better engineers at any given price point. They speak English well enough and work on zoom from a reasonable time zone, like any usa-based candidates USA-based software engineers have been the initial beneficiaries of the COVID push to remote work (and this will continue), but the long term benefits will go to the brilliant people in other countries who no longer are hampered by geography.
- addicted 4y ago
  Not even long term. This upcoming recession will flip everything over. There are 3 ways I can look at it. 1) Agglomeration effects are real. And physical proximity matters. And having all these really smart people in the same physical space led to results that were greater than not having them in the same space. This is the belief tech companies held. And that’s why they were willing to pay people in the Bay Area 5-10x what they would pay people not in the Bay Area. And that’s why they pushed for a return to office. If this is true, then US workers have shot themselves in the foot by pushing for WFH because they’ve voluntarily eliminated their advantage over cheaper workers offshore. 2) Physical proximity doesn’t matter. Agglomeration effects don’t exist. Companies were duped into believing that there was something special about American water. If that’s the case, the the beneficiaries of this misconception, US workers, have voluntarily chosen to clarify that it’s not true. That the companies paying them extra were kind of foolish to do so. 3) For whatever reason, the smartest people only lived in the Bay Area for reasons that had nothing to do with geographical advantages of physical proximity to people (lets say it was the high salaries that drew them to it, but this has a huge chicken and egg problem). So the people earning those high salaries deserved those high salaries purely on their merit. But this isn’t any better. With the push for WFH, all it means is that they will be pushed out to cheaper places to live. Everyone seems to think that this cheaper place will be out in a suburb in Arizona, but in reality, Brazil is gonna be even cheaper and in the same time zone (and in many ways better). Portugal is really nice. Lots of Indians might decide to keep their US salaries and live back in India where they can have a better lifestyle and have their children spend time with their grandparents. And all these people may be willing to take a marginal salary cut to do so, because they will still be much better off. Those marginal salary cuts will add up. Personally, I believe #1 is the answer. But either way, it’s gonna be a lot worse for a lot of us.
MontyCarloHall 4y ago
How easily can a developer in a lower cost-of-living country whose skills are on par with a top-tier dev in the US demand a commensurate salary from a US-based company? I’ve heard conflicting evidence on this matter.
indian_dev_Bias 4y ago
Outsourced to Indian software company is not the same as software coded by an Indian developer. It is the business model of saving costs. If quality would have been a deal breaker the company owning the software could have tried SLAs that would have ensured that. These companies ensure lowest costs as they pay very very less like 4000 USD per year. At that price point they get mostly college graduates neither having majors in computer science nor having any prior coding experience.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
What ever happened with US nearshoring in the rurals? It just fell to the lowest bidder effect with 12-timezones-off teams winning the race to the bottom?
pcmoney 4y ago
I don’t care where you pay them you tend to get what you pay for. Been a part of too many “reshoring” projects after budget Indian devs bungled the code base beyond recognition. Also have worked with phenomenal Indian devs who were paid the same as me.
- turns0ut 4y ago
  - listenallyall 4y ago
    Can you expand on your last paragraph? Exactly who is an asshole and why?
    - turns0ut 4y ago
      No. Not when the forum would flag open discourse because traditions dictate certain emotional tones are forbidden. I don’t consider metaphorical sticking fingers in ears over colloquial language a sign of maturity. Social media moderation fosters thought ending behavior more so than “foul language.” The result is what conforms closest to expectations.
- tadfisher 4y ago
  It's weird, once they get integrated with a team and have regular communication, peer reviews, and defined goals, the software quality goes up. I wonder what explains this phenomenon.
- joyfylbanana 4y ago
  > Also have worked with phenomenal Indian devs who were paid the same as me. I have almost never seen a company where people are paid exactly the same... Usually there are differences. I'm pretty sure your Indian buddies didn't have exactly the same salary. If you pay 80% less to Indian remote worker it would stupid to expect the same result. But maybe you are in some bullshit corporate environment and don't even want the results, you just want to look like you are saving the corporate some money or whatever. Often these outsourcing choices are about corporate bullshit. However if you are looking for results, you could hire top people from cheap cost of living like India or so with maybe 10% or 20% cheaper than the western counterparts. I'm pretty sure that's possible, you don't save 50% but you can for sure get a little bit more bang for the buck if you are willing to do the work of filtering good candidates remotely.
more_corn 4y ago
It also doesn’t work.
aynyc 4y ago
I've dealt with outsource work from India, Ireland, Eastern Europe. All are complete shit show. Western Europe is the only place I saw quality work and receptive to criticism in professional manner. Nothing surprising because I have yet to find an outsourcing dev shop that have good professionalism and take pride in their work. It's about churn and bill rate, not about the quality.
andrewallbright 4y ago
Outsourcing stories are interesting to me for a couple reasons. (1) Why do people think subpar programming from outsourcing companies will always hold true? The more business/experience these shops acquire the more likely the engineers develop better software practices. The developers writing crappy code have an opportunity to learn how and why it is bad. Over a long enough period the environment will eventually produce excellent developers I would argue. (2) What happens to the displaced talent? If big corp decides to slash its talent and compete in the software world with the equivalent of a zerg rush (many outsourced engineers versus one onshore engineer), what if they are really sowing the seeds of their own destruction? If amazing engineer with business domain knowledge and enough to comfortably live on savings for 6-12 months is laid off, perhaps they decide to join a competitor or even start their own competing software?
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  Point one: Outsourcing companies typically win with bottom barrel bids so the bean counters have maximum organizational leverage to perform the transition and the execs get maximum balance sheet/stock option strike price effects. The people that work at these firms (TCS/Wipro for example) are very high turnover. The bad people get punted, the good people leave as soon as they can get a better job. And as explained elsewhere, the bean counters don't add up the increased load on the managers, the reduced execution/delivery, the dead pool effect of chasing away not only your good IT people, but the good non-IT people that were effectively "interfacing" with IT (not a small skill) that get frustrated with the extra communication barriers. There are other ramifications: the onshore people will use the offshore as excuses (deservedly or otherwise). This will create adversarial or paranoia relations, a lot of the IT - not-IT projects require trust and openness to get to the final product. The offshore people also know that the onshore people are "stuck" with them, and they have 12 timezones and a language barrier and to hide behind. They know that if the onshore bitches about them to the upper management, upper management are going to tell them "tough shit this is the way it is make it work". Point Two: oh yes, your best people will leave (dead pool effect) not only on IT but in your main business who don't want to deal with the huge overhead increase. And that is to the benefit of your competitors. And they'll go to your industry competitors because that's there depth of skill. And they'll be resentful and motivated. --- But we need to get real about the markets in America. Almost every market is a cartel, duopoly, or monopoly. They aren't looking to dominate the world and compete, they are about defending their market share, and making their stock option prices/expected performance. So companies won't view IT as a weapon. You deploy IT as a weapon if you're competing, like Amazon or startups. Large enterprises will do outsourcing in the same way they do pointless reorgs/restructures. It moves the deck chairs, as long as it doesn't hurt things TOO much, they next management team will come in and get to invest money to clean things up. Tesla is another example where a company used IT like a weapon. It's software integration in the cars far outstripped main auto and caught them with their pants down. But they had to, because they were penetrating a fairly ossified market. Their self-driving may be a lot of smoke and mirrors to some, I see it and think "wow that, while absolutely not ready for primetime and a long way off, is very impressive", but it is undeniably being invested in because Tesla sees software as a weapon.
known 4y ago
vova_sanin 4y ago
I'm working in this space and from my experience with 200+ founders of early-stage startups, they don't just contract offshore bc of money, they really have no leverage to attract local talent + retain it for long :( have you seen median tenures startups have on Linkedin profiles? 1.5 years is great

99 points by samizdis 4y ago

jsiaajdsdaa 4y ago

Coding isn't the hard part, it's business logic.

brianwawok 4y ago
Eh. Writing code that is maintainable and bug free is a skill. Meeting the acceptance criteria with guess and check isn’t hard.
- pdimitar 4y ago
  Hardest yet: apply professional rigor and be actually given time to do so because apparently just hacking something together that looks to work is the best thing ever (in the eyes of managers and business owners).
- trention 4y ago
  >Meeting the acceptance criteria with guess and check isn’t hard. Acceptance criteria often don't exist or are wrong. Incidentally, when someone says "business requirements are easy", that's a pretty big tell they have never worked on a complicated project.
  - mgkimsal 4y ago
    > that's a pretty big tell they have never worked on a complicated project. Even an 'easy' project, it's not easy. Edge cases, security, performance, dealing with error conditions, dealing with bad external vendor/data. "We'll just import data from vendor X". Yeah, that can never go wrong!
- jsiaajdsdaa 4y ago
  Imagine having good ACs, or any ACs at all. Wouldn't be me!
- kube-system 4y ago
  Software engineering is a well understood science in many cultures. Parsing acceptance criteria written by someone of another culture and domain experience can be difficult for some, and it’s not something learned in computer science courses.
makeitdouble 4y ago
Working for a while in a very small team, outsourcing has been discussed a lot. What stopped us every time was the coding part. Imagine having perfect business requirements, and preparing perfect acceptance tests. Once your feature is delivered you safely ship, and after a week or two come up with improvements. You prepare to redo the cycle, except your outsourcing firm is busy and you need to ask elsewhere. They come up for twice the expected price and want to rewrite half of the logic. From there, it will basically cost more and more each time to make the feature evolve, as arguably it will have become complex and touched by many hands. A solution to that is to keep a stable outsourced team. Except it’s not actually stable, people come and go and quality vary. Either way you keep someone on your team busy making sure you don’t get screwed. More often than not, that person has coding skills, that could be used to actually clean code the feature instead. Basically, outsourcing only made sense if we had no way to hire more at any reasonable price, or for one-shot project with no future behind.
- vbezhenar 4y ago
  Why do you think that you can hire stable team in your country, but you can't do that in a distant country? Seems that problem roots in those "outsourcing companies". Avoid those companies then. Hire directly.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    I think that is still a middle layer problem. A root layer problem would be "pay your developers enough they don't leave", but that in general is in conflict with business practices optimized to make as much profit as possible next quarter.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    Setting up a payroll in a different country is a lot more effort than what most companies want. You can do consulting contracts instead, but it then becomes harder to find people who want long term contracts for single clients (those people need a solid reason to not choose a local company or a bigger global company that has a full payroll in their countries). Not considering you have to do the hiring in the first place. It’s not intractable, but we wouldn’t have been hiring full remote teams of 10 or 20 people so the effort doesn’t scale much, and the price difference really isn’t worth the hassle. PS: looking back at the last 2 years, many employees have looked at moving long term to another country while keeping their current jobs. I’m pretty sure even in these cases (= established relationship, proven skillset etc.) most companies bailed on dealing with the international ongoing paperwork.
drieddust 4y ago
IMHO idiomatic defensive coding is very hard.

kwatsonafter 4y ago

I love how nobody commented. AI, new tools, and globalization is going to destroy the software developer class. Alright, great. I'm now the 3000th person since the late 80's to predict this!

flyinglizard 4y ago
It’s mostly just going to drive up developer productivity, resulting in even more software. Even without AI, with modern languages, frameworks and SaaS/PaaS the amount of code writing you need to do is quite diminished, as opposed to plumbing and troubleshooting things that won’t work with other things.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
dmitriid 4y ago
We've been hearing that for years. And yet here we are. When an AI can understand and implement the customer's "parallel red lines some of which are perpendicular and some of them are green"[1], only then we're doomed. Until then, we're secure. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
- kwatsonafter 4y ago
  Massive! Take an upvote.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    Is it in the form of a kitten?
jacquesm 4y ago
Call me when it's there so I can retire.
tmaly 4y ago

crikeyjoe 4y ago

yieldcrv 4y ago

One thing I noticed is missing from the outsourcing discussion, which I noticed after I started doing it myself, is that they don't factor in how many transactions just simply wouldn't have happened if it wasn't outsourced. Like domestic labor was never a factor, one project just wouldn't have been pursued because the overhead costs would have ruled it out. I know people think about their massive enterprise getting cheaper labor, but its prudent to think about smaller shops and smaller clients who simply wouldn't have built anything if it wasn't for cheaper labor.

ozim 4y ago
Imagine being software company now in Poland all good devs that can speak English are getting insane rates by the local standards. All the software houses having rates that local company cannot afford. Good luck making software for local market.

citizenpaul 4y ago

I've had some unfortunate first hand experience with outsourcing to India. New CEO needed to prove he was a hotshot, fired one of my dev's and used the "savings" to outsource an entire project to an India "firm." The first project was a finance import tool for some real estate data. A 2 month project. 1Year later the project was still being worked on. Not only that the project had to be worked on by our in house devs to actually get it working after the Indian company claimed it was done. One of the problems was anytime the India company got anyone competent, that person would jump ship to a better offer within a couple of weeks. They would then have to find someone else. The only reason that I know this is my team had to interact with them for some integration reasons. Hi can I talk to Akash, he is no longer here your contact is now Kanta.... forever and ever. The code was also...interesting to look at. Talk about unmaintainable lol. The app was loudly launched when "done" then never used then quietly taken offline a couple years later.

bdcravens 4y ago
Was that an issue with them being Indian, or that your CEO did a terrible job of vetting the firm he hired?
- civilized 4y ago
  From what I hear this is a pretty common experience. It would be interesting to hear the other side - when outsourcing works. I think it tends to be when the task is extremely well-defined, like "follow this standard workflow to deal with this stream of requests to grant/remove access".
  - causality0 4y ago
    Right. The impact of different cultures and worldviews cannot be overstated. Mental interpretation of general directives varies wildly enough between Americans of different backgrounds, different ages, different neurodivergences to create problems even with them all sharing the same language and culture. The further you go the less you can rely on everybody being on the same page.
- 4y ago

trention 4y ago

>Poland and Ukraine pay between $22,000 and $23,000 per year Good luck finding a developer in Eastern Europe with more than 2 years of experience willing to work for 23 thousand a year. And if that's a gross number (as I suspect it's supposed to be) - good luck finding anyone with even 1 year of experience.

bdcravens 4y ago
The same article said the US average was $110k, which in many markets won't even hire a junior.
- kube-system 4y ago
  That’s the median according to the BLS. In some US markets, $110k will get you a very experienced dev. Cost of living is wildly different in a midwest suburb vs the northeast corridor or the Bay Area.
- tmaly 4y ago
  What’s that work out to with inflation?
jacquesm 4y ago
Exactly. Reasonable quality starts at $50K and if someone is really good you probably want to pay them more so they'll stay.
lormayna 4y ago
You can find in Italy for sure. I just found lot of offer on Linkedin for Junior developer at 25k€/years.
- jen20 4y ago
  > I just found lot of offer on Linkedin for Junior developer at 25k€/years. Perhaps the reason there's lots offers for that kind of money is because no-one is willing to take the jobs at that rate?

orzig 4y ago

I love anecdotes and I have some of my own, but does anyone have real data-backed arguments for why Americans still get hired for 10x a comparable developer in India? Are we, (I’m an American developer) really 10x as productive?

bdcravens 4y ago
It's flawed logic to think that pay is (exclusively) based on productivity.
carschno 4y ago
Also, is there any data confirming that equally well educated Indian developers are 10x cheaper than American ones? How does it compare to European ones? I'd love a serious answer, but I am aware that software quality is almost impossible to measure, and quantifying the skills level of developers might be even harder.
- trention 4y ago
  I can't comment about India but in Eastern Europe software engineers have a comparable purchasing power than in the US - it's just that it's achieved at ~50% of the wages because of cost of living differences.
  - carschno 4y ago
    It's not like I don't believe that. But I am interested in any data taking salaries and qualification/experience into account. Local costs of living are certainly important for the employees, but not so much for the employer (assuming that they impact the salaries level to some degree). Even though the latter is probably still an approximation to the actual skills level of a developer.
- orzig 4y ago
  That’s a great point, thanks. One collection-of-anecdotes from my company is 3x in the same role (10x was from the article), which might actually equate to a similar standard of living (with huge fuzziness given the different amenities of the two countries - I’ll never have a personal driver)

bluepizza 4y ago

Outsourcing is a tool. It is pretty bad to outsource the crown jewels, if it is a tech company that needs to innovate to stay competitive. Not so bad if it is about managing off the shelf components that are set up by consultants.

pixl97 4y ago
Also with cheaper outsourcing I'd assume all your remotely developed source is being stolen, and you have to assume being sold off. Even more worrisome is code review companies seem to be mostly complete crap. Finding glaring RCE's in code in code that's passed multiple reviews is jarring for me. Mostly because I'm more on the operational/support side of things and write more scripting than code.
SicSemperUranus 4y ago
Part of the issue with the mindset of never outsourcing mission-critical tasks is, if something is not important, why are we doing it? Do we just like wasting money? For example, if I work at an accounting firm and we build our own account software (or modules, or whatever), is this development work not mission-critical? If the solution is good, our processes will become dependent on the tools, and the tools will need to be maintained and even improved. So then, what can be outsourced? Team-building exercises? Not sure, but in any case, this "mission-critical" mindset should err on the side of always doing software development in-house. Which seems to me like a wise decision long-term, though it may seem too rigid a view in the short term.

piskov 4y ago

Most of the developers are just translators from business requirements into react code. Nothing hard about that. Learning how to implement CRUD with validation in <insert framework / stack> is not software engineering. That’s why it can be easily replaced with bootcamp students and — surely — later with AI. Because if it’s just a translation there’s no need for a human translator.

np_tedious 4y ago
Those "business requirements" vary greatly in their specificity. Dealing with the ambiguity and making reasonable judgment calls is the kind of thing you can usually expect from a more expensive engineer
nebulousthree 4y ago
I don't see how the translation is easy. If anything, accurate and precise requirements gathering is one of the hardest parts of software. How many times do you 100% correctly interpret client needs. Better yet, how many times does the client even interpret their own needs correctly and then communicate that?
thr0wawayf00 4y ago
> Most of the developers are just translators from business requirements into react code. This is where the real software engineering practice takes place, understanding what the business needs while staying within scope and being able to deliver a solution that's functional and maintainable long term. I see a world in the not-too-distant future where new apps are built entirely by AI, but there will always be a need for people to translate non-technical business requirements into action items and software decisions. And legacy apps developed entirely by AI? Maybe we'll see it my lifetime but I kind of doubt it.
mattmerc 4y ago
Respectfully, I see this as an oversimplification. Though, I can definitely understand why someone would say this and I do agree to some extent. The thing is, I think there is a lot of subtlety in most implementations. Those subtleties come from unique requirements outlined by the client/business need/ or existing patterns. As someone who has implemented a lot of CRUD functionality, I can honestly say there is very little code overlap between any two projects. Sure, the frontend calls the same CRUD endpoints. The backend essentially performs the same DB edits... but there's a lot to be considered before and after this. And no, it has nothing to do with just validation. It's about UX, performance, maintainability, extensibility, etc. All considerations when writing the code. When you're done the CRUD project, it's distinct. I think there's empirical evidence for this in the sense that the most we can abstract CRUD, is through CMSs. I've worked with a lot of clients that have great CMSs but still need to retain developers to support the CRUD ops and everything in between. Is this the same type of "software engineering" employed as someone writing a custom backend for a electronic stock exchange? Likely not, though that's a whole other discussion.

mkl95 4y ago

I used to work for a Python shop where developers were routinely replaced by workers from an Asian country after quitting. Results were mixed. The quality of their work was mediocre, which is impressive considering how cheap they were. Their biggest weaknesses were their inability to follow [well-documented] processes and their poor communication skills, which was a bit of a nightmare for middle management. All in all, if your company is a bodyshop, you will probably benefit from outsourcing some projects to an even cheaper bodyshop. If your company is looking for people with that "X factor", you will just get frustrated and lose money.

indymike 4y ago

Price is a bad reason to outsource it just shifts cost from developer headcount to management headcount. There are two really, really good reasons to consider offshore outsourcing: * Hire the best. Not every great dev is from North America. There is fantastic talent out there, and you can hire them. Now that most dev teams are used to working remote, it's not nearly as difficult to hire great developers in other parts of the world. * 24 hour development cycle. Teams can operate 6-12 hours offset, and you can go faster. This only works if the offshore team is as good at what they do as the home team.

ehnto 4y ago
Have you experienced real benefits from a 24 hour cycle? I've worked in environments like that and I feel like you're not actually gaining anything except a new layer of asynchronous communication requirements. It's not like you get more man hours after all.
- indymike 4y ago
  Yep. Twice. Once for a big job ad scraping operation (we did this for ofccp compliance) where 24 hour dev enabled our scraping to not miss when our competitors would take 24-48 hours to re-tool when a targeted site changed. The second time was a webdev agency where we routinely were able to win business and delivery by promising to be done in 1/2 the calendar days as our competitors on the same bids. In the second situation I wouldn't have been able to hire enough people locally to just double the local man-hours anyway (small midwest town).
  - addicted 4y ago
    The first one is clearly a situation tailor made for 24/7 because your requirements change in such short periods. This is similar to how companies that offer 24/7 technical support benefit from 24/7 dev availability. The second doesn’t seem to be an advantage for 24/7 availability. You would have achieved the same if you had hired the second team in a different country but in the same time zone as you. Arguably, with the more synchronous communication (I, on team A, have a question for someone on team B that’s blocking me can get the answer immediately instead of having to wait for my next shift) you may have been done even earlier.

88913527 4y ago

They'll pay for it on the other end. If you hire junior overseas developers, and give them minimal product guidance and have no foundation technical leadership, it goes without saying what the quality of the deliverable will be. (To be clear, you could do all of this in the US with the same outcome too, though you'd have spent more money in the process). The applications blow over like a house of cards and the overseas developers don't last long what little business context (institutional knowledge) was adequately communicated isn't being transferred between the rotating staff. There are no free lunches.

testing_acc 4y ago

Why pay 300k in Bay Area when you can pay much less in India or Turkey? Those guys are also more productive as well. It's not like these are slave farms or sweatshops. Those much smaller salaries can buy a much better standard of living because they don't have to enrich greedy Bay Area landlords.

rejectfinite 4y ago
>Those guys are also more productive as well. Sure but as seen in this very thread there is communication issues, business logic issues etc Even if a company can do remote employees in the same country, its very different to do overseas. FYI: I am not American.
baron816 4y ago
Why do Bay Area devs cost $300K+? It's not that cost of living is so much higher in the Bay Area. It's that most of the worlds top developers have chosen to live in the Bay Area. Sure, you can find fantastic developers elsewhere, but top talent has figured out they can optimize their income (and quality of life) by moving to the US West Coast.
- celdon25 4y ago
  If they were actually top talent, they wouldn't need to move there to get what they want (unless the goal is to work in-person at a specific company that happens to be in the bay area). > and quality of life I certainly hope that you're not suggesting that San Francisco in 2022 is a nice place to live (or commute to), even on 300k income. Cue the south park episode.
  - baron816 4y ago
    > If they were actually top talent, they wouldn't need to move there to get what they want This may be true now, but it has not been that way for all of the last 15 years. Top talent was moving here for at least a decade because it was the epicenter of tech, and the vast majority of them aren’t going anywhere. SF has many very well documented problems that I’ve definitely done plenty of ranting about. But SF still has a lot going for it, and it does not make up the entirety of the Bay Area. Aside from the near perfect weather, you have easy access to an unbeatable amount of natural beauty. Yeah, maybe you could get a big, comfortable house in Texas for a fraction what you could buy here, but then what?

JOnAgain 4y ago

I feel like there’s something weird with the dataset. It’s says the average US salary is $110k. That’s seems incredibly low.

js4ever 4y ago
Agreed, the dataset seems to date from 10y ago
NineStarPoint 4y ago
There are a lot of “good enough” developers making a reasonable living in the 60k-90k range, and not actually that many developers making 200k+ to balance that out. Seems a bit low to me too, but it’s about what I would have expected the average to be a year or two ago.

vaidhy 4y ago

Everyone has a story about how software projects go off-track and generally, it is not the nationality of the developers that matter. But here is an interesting observation - you do not manage a remote, outsourced team of developers as if they were local. We know about this from software architecture too - a remote object is not the same as local object, no matter how much of abstraction you write to hide the fact. The abstraction is even more leaky for people. The rest of the comments ring true - if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. I recently read somewhere that software salaries are US > China > India > EU. A lot of people in US still carry the colonial mindset and that ship has sailed long past. For India, you are paying between 40% - 70% of an equivalent US developer pay if you hire them directly. You are likely to be paying more if you go through a contracting agency and the only reason to do it is because you want people fast and for a short term.

closewith 4y ago
> I recently read somewhere that software salaries are US > China > India > EU. This seems to read that EU software salaries are lower than China or India? That may be true for some EU countries, but definitely not all (or even on average).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

rejectfinite 4y ago

Not coding but another anecdote. Was visiting another universities networking lab (switches, routers, computers) for CCNA study. There where was an Indian student doing a MASTERS IN IT there. MASTERS. He asked about a firewall issue, where he could not SSH into it. And he said "SSH ONLY WORKS IN LOCAL NETWORKS" so it must be that and not that he confed the fw wrong. MASTERS in IT. Shows the quality of schools/degrees.

stonecharioteer 4y ago
I am an Indian and I don't have a formal CS degree. I studied Mechanical Engineering at a really small college. The biggest eye-opener I've seen is the lack of awareness and interest in almost everyone pursuing technology. Most of my country folk aren't in tech because they programmed an Atari as kids like I did. They're in tech because it's the only thing that pays. The same goes for most of these. It's sad, and it is also a big reason why most companies only see Indian teams as a way to cut costs, also slightly insinuating that you also accept quality cuts because you get devs who don't get the "download more ram" joke. I'm not making excuses for them, it's just the way it is. I spoke at a conference yesterday and very few people I work with even bothered asking what it was about.
sha256sum 4y ago
Probably not relevant that this person was Indian considering the amount of American cybersecurity MS grads you’ll find who don’t know what nmap is.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  I will cast an uninformed "yes" to this as an American. Long ago, I studied philosophy and discovered Vedic influences, along with pop-culture American visions of spiritual India. I was impressed by the thinking and erudition of Vedic (and Buddhist) scholars, and immediately found links to English and German scholarship. All together, I had an early-adult vision of India as a place with high literacy and a long religious and scholarly history. Meanwhile, my urban life in America confirmed daily that there are illiterate people who thrive on being loud, pushy and often fat -- of every national origin. As the years go by, my views have changed. I always knew India was a populated place, but I did not understand that it means there are low-education and low-culture people in such numbers. I have met far more people from India now than I had in the past, and their human stories show me how I had been fortunate to see great writing, thinking and devout practice from India, but that is not the whole story. This is a long intro to basically seeing both India and America as a place with strikingly different people, next to each other, filling the cities. Very high skill, very high education, visiting a store right next to very low skill, very low education people, in great numbers. I respect my colleagues from India and I trust that they can also respect Americans. There is no single story here, and low quality outsourcing did cost me personally as a coder in the USA for decades.

giantg2 4y ago

"while the poorest-paying countries are led by Nigeria, which pays an average of just $7,255 annually to software devs – less than seven percent of the average US salary." This is pretty much meaningless. I would much rather see something about cost of living or overall median salary vs developer median. Also, it seem a lot of devs in the US live in HCOL areas, dragging up up the average of even median.

AdrianB1 4y ago
In some of these countries the cost of living and the median salary are skewed. For example rent is cheap, but for very low quality places, while something that compares to USA is very expensive. Average price for a smartphone is $100-200 because most people buy that, but an iPhone or Google Pixel is more expensive than in USA. In many places software developers earn 2-3 times the city average and several times the country average, but their quality of life is very low, while the quality of the output of their work most of the time has nothing to do with the amount they are paid. In the same city one can find a few excellent developers, but paid less than mediocre ones working for a different company. In outsourcing companies, one can find a few excellent developers paid the same as the mediocre ones, all working for the same client. The end result is a randomness of quality that makes outsourcing a high risk bet.

immigrantheart 4y ago

Wife works in a bank (not gonna name it here) who outsourced development to India. Everyday I hear horror stories, from logistical problem to admin problem to losing money in the millions problem, morale fading away and people are leaving. Heck, there was one month where my wife couldn’t work at all due to email problems because of that. One month free salary, we’ll take it. It’s been 2 years and still a shitshow.

seibelj 4y ago
The sign of someone who doesn’t know anything about software dev is when they suggest outsourcing as an easy way to cut costs, regardless of country. “We can get 10 people there for every person here!” Alarm bells should start ringing. It can be done but it takes very strong planning and foresight. Otherwise start dusting off the resume.
- jcadam 4y ago
  Agree. If you identify a great talent who happens to live on the other side of the globe, hire that individual as an FTE. Outsourcing to some body-shop firm is always a mistake. At least I've never seen it work.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  ...and only requires triple the management, analysis, oversight, and QC. I guess they assume their onshore people will work harder. What also isn't appreciated besides the immediate dead pool effect outsourcing creates, is that it creates a scapegoat for the onshore people. When your IT department is down the hall and you throw them under the rug, they walk down and ... meetings... ensue. When they are around the world and subservient (because they are cheap and everyone knows it, so it's assumed they're bad and you can blame anything on them), then everyone will use that as an excuse, ESPECIALLY since all the extra management/requirements/analysis burden falls on them. The issue with failed projects in the mythical man month is and has ALWAYS been communication and understanding. 10 time zones and a language and cultural barrier does not make up for that. It is amazing a 1970s era book remains so ignored. It should be taught in MBA school. No I mean MBA not MIS. I highly doubt it is. It amazes me that accounting is treated as a core subject of MBA, while basic IT literacy and process is not, even though there is FAR more IT that accounting in a modern enterprise.

js4ever 4y ago

I had terrible experience with projects outsourced to india... But on the other side I got amazing experience with indian talents... hired at European salary level like rest of the team. I'm now hiring more and more dev from India and they are in the top performers tier from my team. Just don't try to pay them peanuts... And respect them as any other good dev from western countries.

kyriakos 4y ago
Same here, complete project outsourced, outcome was a security and code quality nightmare. While incorporating individuals in the team and follow the same workflow had good results.
aldebran 4y ago
You probably already know this: This has less to do with India or Indians and more to do with the fact that outsourcing a whole project tends to go to low bidders and hiring is held at a high bar. This is just self selection. Pay top dollar and you’ll get really good results with outsourcing as well.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  tl;dr - Large IT consultancies profit on arbitrage between their salary costs and your billing rates. And give zero damns about your project's success.
MAMAMassakali 4y ago
I see this happening all the time, majority of the people working in service based companies are bad at all the steps of development of any kind of software project. But there is an other side to it. Form a long time I am trying to get into consulting, companies don't want to see the background of us(devs). Majority of the times there is no response or they want to see some "white papers".
- ethbr0 4y ago
  Would recommend you look at more focused consultancies that do one thing, very well. Avoid shops that have diner-style "We can do anything, and we're great at all of it!" marketing. And also ones which require a heavy PM footprint: that's a good sign they don't trust their own devs. The former cares about capability; the latter just cares about minimizing labor costs and getting clients to sign.

hbarka 4y ago

The history of outsourcing would be a great book, starting with the H1B visa, their conversion to permanent status as green card holders, becoming managers themselves, and then the manager preferring to outsource additional staffing due to affinity, thus completing the cycle. Repeat.

dutchCourage 4y ago
Are you saying legal immigration caused outsourcing? That's a bold claim. Anecdotally, I was in a large company with offices in India. None of the management was Indian.
- jibe 4y ago
  I don't know the answer, but it seems like the parent might have it backwards. A handful of outsourcing companies control a massively disproportionate number of H-1Bs, and lobby heavily on expanding H-1B policy. They can place the US based H-1Bs to complement their local teams back in India.
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  I'm not sure I understand your comment, but I do know that you must be oversimplifying the comment you're replying to.

swellguy 4y ago

Language classification is a bit weird - doesn't mean that Golang/Ruby/Python developers are better than C programmers - just that the companies with better funding or better products are using those languages. So, in other words, pay is not based on programmer competence or language superiority, necessarily.

andrewmutz 4y ago

Increased outsourcing will almost surely be a consequence of the significant shift to remote work. If it is normal for companies to be hiring people at good salaries to work on zoom remotely from, say, Montana, why not just go the next step and hire in Latin America? There are plenty of brilliant software engineers in Latin America (I have met and worked with many), and even if the company is not motivated strictly by cost savings, they can just get better engineers at any given price point. They speak English well enough and work on zoom from a reasonable time zone, like any usa-based candidates USA-based software engineers have been the initial beneficiaries of the COVID push to remote work (and this will continue), but the long term benefits will go to the brilliant people in other countries who no longer are hampered by geography.

addicted 4y ago
Not even long term. This upcoming recession will flip everything over. There are 3 ways I can look at it. 1) Agglomeration effects are real. And physical proximity matters. And having all these really smart people in the same physical space led to results that were greater than not having them in the same space. This is the belief tech companies held. And that’s why they were willing to pay people in the Bay Area 5-10x what they would pay people not in the Bay Area. And that’s why they pushed for a return to office. If this is true, then US workers have shot themselves in the foot by pushing for WFH because they’ve voluntarily eliminated their advantage over cheaper workers offshore. 2) Physical proximity doesn’t matter. Agglomeration effects don’t exist. Companies were duped into believing that there was something special about American water. If that’s the case, the the beneficiaries of this misconception, US workers, have voluntarily chosen to clarify that it’s not true. That the companies paying them extra were kind of foolish to do so. 3) For whatever reason, the smartest people only lived in the Bay Area for reasons that had nothing to do with geographical advantages of physical proximity to people (lets say it was the high salaries that drew them to it, but this has a huge chicken and egg problem). So the people earning those high salaries deserved those high salaries purely on their merit. But this isn’t any better. With the push for WFH, all it means is that they will be pushed out to cheaper places to live. Everyone seems to think that this cheaper place will be out in a suburb in Arizona, but in reality, Brazil is gonna be even cheaper and in the same time zone (and in many ways better). Portugal is really nice. Lots of Indians might decide to keep their US salaries and live back in India where they can have a better lifestyle and have their children spend time with their grandparents. And all these people may be willing to take a marginal salary cut to do so, because they will still be much better off. Those marginal salary cuts will add up. Personally, I believe #1 is the answer. But either way, it’s gonna be a lot worse for a lot of us.

MontyCarloHall 4y ago

How easily can a developer in a lower cost-of-living country whose skills are on par with a top-tier dev in the US demand a commensurate salary from a US-based company? I’ve heard conflicting evidence on this matter.

indian_dev_Bias 4y ago

Outsourced to Indian software company is not the same as software coded by an Indian developer. It is the business model of saving costs. If quality would have been a deal breaker the company owning the software could have tried SLAs that would have ensured that. These companies ensure lowest costs as they pay very very less like 4000 USD per year. At that price point they get mostly college graduates neither having majors in computer science nor having any prior coding experience.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

What ever happened with US nearshoring in the rurals? It just fell to the lowest bidder effect with 12-timezones-off teams winning the race to the bottom?

pcmoney 4y ago

I don’t care where you pay them you tend to get what you pay for. Been a part of too many “reshoring” projects after budget Indian devs bungled the code base beyond recognition. Also have worked with phenomenal Indian devs who were paid the same as me.

turns0ut 4y ago
- listenallyall 4y ago
  Can you expand on your last paragraph? Exactly who is an asshole and why?
  - turns0ut 4y ago
    No. Not when the forum would flag open discourse because traditions dictate certain emotional tones are forbidden. I don’t consider metaphorical sticking fingers in ears over colloquial language a sign of maturity. Social media moderation fosters thought ending behavior more so than “foul language.” The result is what conforms closest to expectations.
tadfisher 4y ago
It's weird, once they get integrated with a team and have regular communication, peer reviews, and defined goals, the software quality goes up. I wonder what explains this phenomenon.
joyfylbanana 4y ago
> Also have worked with phenomenal Indian devs who were paid the same as me. I have almost never seen a company where people are paid exactly the same... Usually there are differences. I'm pretty sure your Indian buddies didn't have exactly the same salary. If you pay 80% less to Indian remote worker it would stupid to expect the same result. But maybe you are in some bullshit corporate environment and don't even want the results, you just want to look like you are saving the corporate some money or whatever. Often these outsourcing choices are about corporate bullshit. However if you are looking for results, you could hire top people from cheap cost of living like India or so with maybe 10% or 20% cheaper than the western counterparts. I'm pretty sure that's possible, you don't save 50% but you can for sure get a little bit more bang for the buck if you are willing to do the work of filtering good candidates remotely.

more_corn 4y ago

It also doesn’t work.

aynyc 4y ago

I've dealt with outsource work from India, Ireland, Eastern Europe. All are complete shit show. Western Europe is the only place I saw quality work and receptive to criticism in professional manner. Nothing surprising because I have yet to find an outsourcing dev shop that have good professionalism and take pride in their work. It's about churn and bill rate, not about the quality.

andrewallbright 4y ago

Outsourcing stories are interesting to me for a couple reasons. (1) Why do people think subpar programming from outsourcing companies will always hold true? The more business/experience these shops acquire the more likely the engineers develop better software practices. The developers writing crappy code have an opportunity to learn how and why it is bad. Over a long enough period the environment will eventually produce excellent developers I would argue. (2) What happens to the displaced talent? If big corp decides to slash its talent and compete in the software world with the equivalent of a zerg rush (many outsourced engineers versus one onshore engineer), what if they are really sowing the seeds of their own destruction? If amazing engineer with business domain knowledge and enough to comfortably live on savings for 6-12 months is laid off, perhaps they decide to join a competitor or even start their own competing software?

AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Point one: Outsourcing companies typically win with bottom barrel bids so the bean counters have maximum organizational leverage to perform the transition and the execs get maximum balance sheet/stock option strike price effects. The people that work at these firms (TCS/Wipro for example) are very high turnover. The bad people get punted, the good people leave as soon as they can get a better job. And as explained elsewhere, the bean counters don't add up the increased load on the managers, the reduced execution/delivery, the dead pool effect of chasing away not only your good IT people, but the good non-IT people that were effectively "interfacing" with IT (not a small skill) that get frustrated with the extra communication barriers. There are other ramifications: the onshore people will use the offshore as excuses (deservedly or otherwise). This will create adversarial or paranoia relations, a lot of the IT - not-IT projects require trust and openness to get to the final product. The offshore people also know that the onshore people are "stuck" with them, and they have 12 timezones and a language barrier and to hide behind. They know that if the onshore bitches about them to the upper management, upper management are going to tell them "tough shit this is the way it is make it work". Point Two: oh yes, your best people will leave (dead pool effect) not only on IT but in your main business who don't want to deal with the huge overhead increase. And that is to the benefit of your competitors. And they'll go to your industry competitors because that's there depth of skill. And they'll be resentful and motivated. --- But we need to get real about the markets in America. Almost every market is a cartel, duopoly, or monopoly. They aren't looking to dominate the world and compete, they are about defending their market share, and making their stock option prices/expected performance. So companies won't view IT as a weapon. You deploy IT as a weapon if you're competing, like Amazon or startups. Large enterprises will do outsourcing in the same way they do pointless reorgs/restructures. It moves the deck chairs, as long as it doesn't hurt things TOO much, they next management team will come in and get to invest money to clean things up. Tesla is another example where a company used IT like a weapon. It's software integration in the cars far outstripped main auto and caught them with their pants down. But they had to, because they were penetrating a fairly ossified market. Their self-driving may be a lot of smoke and mirrors to some, I see it and think "wow that, while absolutely not ready for primetime and a long way off, is very impressive", but it is undeniably being invested in because Tesla sees software as a weapon.

known 4y ago

vova_sanin 4y ago

I'm working in this space and from my experience with 200+ founders of early-stage startups, they don't just contract offshore bc of money, they really have no leverage to attract local talent + retain it for long :( have you seen median tenures startups have on Linkedin profiles? 1.5 years is great