8 ms·

GitHub India's entire Engineering team is fired

90 points by amrrs 4y ago

satvikpendem 4y ago
> It does go against the notion that lower cost of labor places are safer from cuts, though. Interesting, people were talking about remote work meaning that companies will now pay less due to a global talent pool, but it might just go to show that workers are not all fungible with other workers in different countries. It rings of the same fears as outsourcing a few decades ago.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Quality talent has a cost regardless of geography.
  - xiaodai 4y ago
    indian developers are extraordinarily talented. it's just more convenient to give up on them in one go. good luck to github for hiring in india again in the future. very short-sighted
    - Fervicus 4y ago
      That's a broad generalization. I have worked with a few great and plenty of terrible Indian devs.
      - Supermancho 4y ago
        Anecdotally, from at least 2005 to 2015, every single India-based team had negative productivity output across the 5 SoCal companies I worked for, as an engineer. At 4 of the companies, the India teams were liquidated during my tenure. In 2 cases, one or two top performers were cherry picked out and brought to the US on work visas. These individuals each became US citizens, in time. They are awesome and they are still good friends of mine.
        satvikpendem 4y ago
        So continues the brain drain, it's quite a legitimate problem, at least as I've seen it with my other Indian friends.
        thunkshift1 4y ago
        Anecdotally, the us teams I have worked with are surprisingly bureaucratic and super bloated. The reason they were NOT liquidated was because they controlled the purse strings.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  People vastly underestimated the effect the timezone difference would have. Years ago I worked closely with a team in India, and I will never do a job that requires that again. The engineers were fine, but the timezone difference made things hellish for everyone - someone was either staying super late or getting up super early (time difference was 11.5 hours). I contrast that with a team I work with now from South America - they're also high quality developers, but, importantly, the time difference is only a couple hours so nobody has to sacrifice their personal lives.
  - xeromal 4y ago
    Yup, South America is the way to go. We call it near-shoring which I guess is technically true. haha
- rr808 4y ago
  India layoffs were ~100 people. MSFT USA layoffs were 10,000? Offshore trend remains intact.
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    Seems true overall. I doubt that the total # of devs fired in the US vs India is comparable
fwungy 4y ago
Between the timezones, language and dialect differences, and cultural differences, offshoring can be more trouble than it's worth.
- nirushiv 4y ago
  Precisely. Especially in India - which is almost as large a time zone offset as you can have. Furthermore, India pays competitively enough that you’re not saving that much money for top talent as compared to e.g Eastern Europe. When I ran engineering teams, the language/dialect barrier between our US mothership and India was much much wider than South American and European devs, even though India is technically the largest English-speaking country in the world.
  - prottog 4y ago
    > India - which is almost as large a time zone offset as you can have Not just that, it's a half-hour offset from pretty much the rest of the world! I wonder which genius thought of that one.
    - not2b 4y ago
      It makes perfect sense: the "natural" lines would give India two time zones; combining them into one half-hour time zone gives the whole country the same time. It did cause problems with the early Bell Labs Unix releases, which didn't contemplate that a time zone might not be a whole number of hours away from Greenwich.
      - prottog 4y ago
        Surely India as a large federal nation would be OK with two time zones! It makes about as much sense as China having one time zone for its sixty degrees of longitude.
        Xixi 4y ago
        You don't have to adjust the clocks though, you can adjust business hours instead. Just look at Spain, which shares the same timezone as Poland: they simply wake up/go to bed later on the clock, but not with regard to the sun.
flappyeagle 4y ago
If you make your high-cost employees much more productive with AI, you may not need to reduce per-headcount cost so much anymore. The cultural and language benefits start to dominate the calculation. That said, India will only grow in importance, so I wouldn't be surprised if the team was reinstated in a few years
- aiappreciator 4y ago
  This, AI more directly competes with service outsourcing than anything else. AI isn't reliable. But is your outsourced team any better? Outsourcing is cheap, but AI is 100 times cheaper. Communicating with AI, via prompt engineering, is easier than setting up cross-cultural + timezone communications. India really depends on service outsourcing. So I'm curious regarding how it'll be impacted by AI. That being said, nothing stopping the Indians themselves using the AIs and reinventing their companies.
  - killjoywashere 4y ago
    That may be the market insight of the week. So the next question: how much cheaper?
- Jeff_Brown 4y ago
  > make your high-cost employees much more productive with AI Might happen soon, might not. AI has so far proven astounding for problems to which solutions are robust to small perturbations -- natural language, visual art -- but code is different.
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    Disagree. The overwhelming amount of software being written is almost entirely plagiarizable from stack overflow or GitHub. It will need to be slightly reworked, but that’s it. The real trick is figuring out how to ask your copilot for the bite-sized pieces one at a time.
    - 4y ago
noodlesUK 4y ago
I'm not privy to anything special here, but I do get the impression that (intuitively) it's easier to target layoffs in areas with weaker employee protection laws. In most EU countries, it's pretty hard to make these kinds of redundancies without going through a slow and expensive process, as well as paying severance.
- ethicalsmacker 4y ago
  Or areas with weaker employees. I doubt they axed an entire team for monetary reasons alone. They could have axed 1/10th the employees in the bay area and probably covered the entire India roster (financial cost wise).
  - howinteresting 4y ago
    Senior-level engineers in India, of the caliber that GitHub would hire, easily clear USD 100k+/year. It's not as expensive as Bay Area talent but not cheap either.
    - pcthrowaway 4y ago
      Maybe in general this is true? But then Github's hires were not those, according to https://www.levels.fyi/companies/github/salaries/software-engineer?country=113&offset=0 https://www.levels.fyi/companies/github/salaries/software-en...
      - unmole 4y ago
        I don't know about GitHub in particular but levels.fyi in general is not accurate for positions in India.
        zuhayeer 4y ago
        Founder of Levels.fyi here, we have a page for salaries in India more specifically here: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/india https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/india We just haven’t done a great job of building awareness for all of our different locations, but you can find them on our location directory here: https://levels.fyi/locations https://levels.fyi/locations
joezydeco 4y ago
Punishment for a leaked private key?
- gukov 4y ago
  Was my thought as well: https://github.blog/2023-03-23-we-updated-our-rsa-ssh-host-key/ https://github.blog/2023-03-23-we-updated-our-rsa-ssh-host-k...
- xref 4y ago
  I don’t see India mentioned in the postmortem. Would a random offshore team even have/need access to this ssh private key?
  - joezydeco 4y ago
    If a private key made it into a repo, it was probably everywhere.
chrisbolt 4y ago
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35336870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35336870
yieldcrv 4y ago
What towns in South America have a concentration of software developers? Might target my real estate purchases there I’m finding that there's a lot more focus on timezone quality of life for US centric organizations, and that includes getting rid of their teams in Asia now and avoiding that Re-Discovering South America over and over again for similar help and cost
- breckenedge 4y ago
  Towns? You mean Buenos Aires. Conveniently, real estate transactions are done in USD.
  - 1-more 4y ago
    Plus all of my colleagues in Argentina are happy to be paid in USD. So much easier for them to deal with.
    - breckenedge 4y ago
      Might not want to call them out on that. Last I heard, working in Argentina and getting paid in USD was illegal.
- morkalork 4y ago
  Having worked with developers in both India and Argentina, given the choice I would choose the guys from Buenos Aires every time. It's not just the time zone, the cultural gap is so much smaller.
  - conanbatt 4y ago
    Go long argentina :)
- moneywoes 4y ago
  Big cities in Columbia I’d imagine
- jamesfinlayson 4y ago
yumraj 4y ago
Perhaps the laidoff team can clone Gitea and start a competitor to GitHub. I would have seriously thought about it if I were there and part of that team.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Zoho certainly did well leveraging FOSS.
  - yumraj 4y ago
    Such as? I don't know much about how various Zoho products are implemented, but I thought most of their stuff is homegrown.
boringuser1 4y ago
[dead]
boringuser1 4y ago
Microsoft stock has been going gangbusters for the past 6 months. What's their excuse for layoffs? When a company is doing well, if it lays off, I think we're looking at a fundamental problem.
fatneckbeard 4y ago
for every US HN commenter talking about their "awful experience" with Indian teams let me talk about my awesome professors from IIT who came to America to work in Math/CS education. Or about the great Indian people I met online working on open source projects on github. Or about the skilled Indian immigrants who work where I work. Or the immigrant Indian doctors who saved my family members life in the hospital.
- CapstanRoller 4y ago
  Sadly, India's "body shop" tech sub-sector (aka WITCH [0]) has an outsize effect on the perception of India's professional sector as a whole. Working for (and with) these companies is truly a miserable experience. It's a shame that people make hasty generalization about entire countries and blame workers for the behavior of these companies. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707
rapsacnz 4y ago
I think the first casualties of ChatGPT for developers are going to be offshore teams. These teams get given small, discrete programming tasks. They are also often teams with very high turnover. This means that tasks need to be heavily specified and managed. I think it's a small step from this to just getting a LLM to do the work. I also think that this could potentially be a huge disruptor for India as a whole and that there could well be some very big lawsuits coming brought by Indian companies who have lost millions (Billions?) to a machine trained on a largely open source codebase. This sort of thing makes me reconsider whether I should be putting any code up on github or answering anything on stackoverflow - why would I do this, if my code is harvested and used against me?

90 points by amrrs 4y ago

> It does go against the notion that lower cost of labor places are safer from cuts, though. Interesting, people were talking about remote work meaning that companies will now pay less due to a global talent pool, but it might just go to show that workers are not all fungible with other workers in different countries. It rings of the same fears as outsourcing a few decades ago.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
Quality talent has a cost regardless of geography.
- xiaodai 4y ago
  indian developers are extraordinarily talented. it's just more convenient to give up on them in one go. good luck to github for hiring in india again in the future. very short-sighted
  - Fervicus 4y ago
    That's a broad generalization. I have worked with a few great and plenty of terrible Indian devs.
    - Supermancho 4y ago
      Anecdotally, from at least 2005 to 2015, every single India-based team had negative productivity output across the 5 SoCal companies I worked for, as an engineer. At 4 of the companies, the India teams were liquidated during my tenure. In 2 cases, one or two top performers were cherry picked out and brought to the US on work visas. These individuals each became US citizens, in time. They are awesome and they are still good friends of mine.
      - satvikpendem 4y ago
        So continues the brain drain, it's quite a legitimate problem, at least as I've seen it with my other Indian friends.
      - thunkshift1 4y ago
        Anecdotally, the us teams I have worked with are surprisingly bureaucratic and super bloated. The reason they were NOT liquidated was because they controlled the purse strings.
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
People vastly underestimated the effect the timezone difference would have. Years ago I worked closely with a team in India, and I will never do a job that requires that again. The engineers were fine, but the timezone difference made things hellish for everyone - someone was either staying super late or getting up super early (time difference was 11.5 hours). I contrast that with a team I work with now from South America - they're also high quality developers, but, importantly, the time difference is only a couple hours so nobody has to sacrifice their personal lives.
- xeromal 4y ago
  Yup, South America is the way to go. We call it near-shoring which I guess is technically true. haha
rr808 4y ago
India layoffs were ~100 people. MSFT USA layoffs were 10,000? Offshore trend remains intact.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  Seems true overall. I doubt that the total # of devs fired in the US vs India is comparable

fwungy 4y ago

Between the timezones, language and dialect differences, and cultural differences, offshoring can be more trouble than it's worth.

nirushiv 4y ago
Precisely. Especially in India - which is almost as large a time zone offset as you can have. Furthermore, India pays competitively enough that you’re not saving that much money for top talent as compared to e.g Eastern Europe. When I ran engineering teams, the language/dialect barrier between our US mothership and India was much much wider than South American and European devs, even though India is technically the largest English-speaking country in the world.
- prottog 4y ago
  > India - which is almost as large a time zone offset as you can have Not just that, it's a half-hour offset from pretty much the rest of the world! I wonder which genius thought of that one.
  - not2b 4y ago
    It makes perfect sense: the "natural" lines would give India two time zones; combining them into one half-hour time zone gives the whole country the same time. It did cause problems with the early Bell Labs Unix releases, which didn't contemplate that a time zone might not be a whole number of hours away from Greenwich.
    - prottog 4y ago
      Surely India as a large federal nation would be OK with two time zones! It makes about as much sense as China having one time zone for its sixty degrees of longitude.
      - Xixi 4y ago
        You don't have to adjust the clocks though, you can adjust business hours instead. Just look at Spain, which shares the same timezone as Poland: they simply wake up/go to bed later on the clock, but not with regard to the sun.

flappyeagle 4y ago

If you make your high-cost employees much more productive with AI, you may not need to reduce per-headcount cost so much anymore. The cultural and language benefits start to dominate the calculation. That said, India will only grow in importance, so I wouldn't be surprised if the team was reinstated in a few years

aiappreciator 4y ago
This, AI more directly competes with service outsourcing than anything else. AI isn't reliable. But is your outsourced team any better? Outsourcing is cheap, but AI is 100 times cheaper. Communicating with AI, via prompt engineering, is easier than setting up cross-cultural + timezone communications. India really depends on service outsourcing. So I'm curious regarding how it'll be impacted by AI. That being said, nothing stopping the Indians themselves using the AIs and reinventing their companies.
- killjoywashere 4y ago
  That may be the market insight of the week. So the next question: how much cheaper?
Jeff_Brown 4y ago
> make your high-cost employees much more productive with AI Might happen soon, might not. AI has so far proven astounding for problems to which solutions are robust to small perturbations -- natural language, visual art -- but code is different.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  Disagree. The overwhelming amount of software being written is almost entirely plagiarizable from stack overflow or GitHub. It will need to be slightly reworked, but that’s it. The real trick is figuring out how to ask your copilot for the bite-sized pieces one at a time.
  - 4y ago

noodlesUK 4y ago

I'm not privy to anything special here, but I do get the impression that (intuitively) it's easier to target layoffs in areas with weaker employee protection laws. In most EU countries, it's pretty hard to make these kinds of redundancies without going through a slow and expensive process, as well as paying severance.

ethicalsmacker 4y ago
Or areas with weaker employees. I doubt they axed an entire team for monetary reasons alone. They could have axed 1/10th the employees in the bay area and probably covered the entire India roster (financial cost wise).
- howinteresting 4y ago
  Senior-level engineers in India, of the caliber that GitHub would hire, easily clear USD 100k+/year. It's not as expensive as Bay Area talent but not cheap either.
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    Maybe in general this is true? But then Github's hires were not those, according to https://www.levels.fyi/companies/github/salaries/software-engineer?country=113&offset=0 https://www.levels.fyi/companies/github/salaries/software-en...
    - unmole 4y ago
      I don't know about GitHub in particular but levels.fyi in general is not accurate for positions in India.
      - zuhayeer 4y ago
        Founder of Levels.fyi here, we have a page for salaries in India more specifically here: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/india https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/india We just haven’t done a great job of building awareness for all of our different locations, but you can find them on our location directory here: https://levels.fyi/locations https://levels.fyi/locations

joezydeco 4y ago

Punishment for a leaked private key?

gukov 4y ago
Was my thought as well: https://github.blog/2023-03-23-we-updated-our-rsa-ssh-host-key/ https://github.blog/2023-03-23-we-updated-our-rsa-ssh-host-k...
xref 4y ago
I don’t see India mentioned in the postmortem. Would a random offshore team even have/need access to this ssh private key?
- joezydeco 4y ago
  If a private key made it into a repo, it was probably everywhere.

chrisbolt 4y ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35336870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35336870

yieldcrv 4y ago

What towns in South America have a concentration of software developers? Might target my real estate purchases there I’m finding that there's a lot more focus on timezone quality of life for US centric organizations, and that includes getting rid of their teams in Asia now and avoiding that Re-Discovering South America over and over again for similar help and cost

breckenedge 4y ago
Towns? You mean Buenos Aires. Conveniently, real estate transactions are done in USD.
- 1-more 4y ago
  Plus all of my colleagues in Argentina are happy to be paid in USD. So much easier for them to deal with.
  - breckenedge 4y ago
    Might not want to call them out on that. Last I heard, working in Argentina and getting paid in USD was illegal.
morkalork 4y ago
Having worked with developers in both India and Argentina, given the choice I would choose the guys from Buenos Aires every time. It's not just the time zone, the cultural gap is so much smaller.
- conanbatt 4y ago
  Go long argentina :)
moneywoes 4y ago
Big cities in Columbia I’d imagine
jamesfinlayson 4y ago

yumraj 4y ago

Perhaps the laidoff team can clone Gitea and start a competitor to GitHub. I would have seriously thought about it if I were there and part of that team.

pessimizer 4y ago
Zoho certainly did well leveraging FOSS.
- yumraj 4y ago
  Such as? I don't know much about how various Zoho products are implemented, but I thought most of their stuff is homegrown.

boringuser1 4y ago

[dead]

boringuser1 4y ago

Microsoft stock has been going gangbusters for the past 6 months. What's their excuse for layoffs? When a company is doing well, if it lays off, I think we're looking at a fundamental problem.

fatneckbeard 4y ago

for every US HN commenter talking about their "awful experience" with Indian teams let me talk about my awesome professors from IIT who came to America to work in Math/CS education. Or about the great Indian people I met online working on open source projects on github. Or about the skilled Indian immigrants who work where I work. Or the immigrant Indian doctors who saved my family members life in the hospital.

CapstanRoller 4y ago
Sadly, India's "body shop" tech sub-sector (aka WITCH [0]) has an outsize effect on the perception of India's professional sector as a whole. Working for (and with) these companies is truly a miserable experience. It's a shame that people make hasty generalization about entire countries and blame workers for the behavior of these companies. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707

rapsacnz 4y ago

I think the first casualties of ChatGPT for developers are going to be offshore teams. These teams get given small, discrete programming tasks. They are also often teams with very high turnover. This means that tasks need to be heavily specified and managed. I think it's a small step from this to just getting a LLM to do the work. I also think that this could potentially be a huge disruptor for India as a whole and that there could well be some very big lawsuits coming brought by Indian companies who have lost millions (Billions?) to a machine trained on a largely open source codebase. This sort of thing makes me reconsider whether I should be putting any code up on github or answering anything on stackoverflow - why would I do this, if my code is harvested and used against me?