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Such a commonly parroted fallacy. This assumes that all the talent in the world has a cheaper, equally skilled counterpart in India. This is not true, and even

Such a commonly parroted fallacy. This assumes that all the talent in the world has a cheaper, equally skilled counterpart in India. This is not true, and even if it was, why wouldn't talented Indians leave the country in search for better wages?

alephnerd 3y ago
> why wouldn't talented Indians leave the country in search for better wages 1. Living far away from your entire family sucks. You'll miss birthdays, weddings, funerals, and plenty of wholesome moments with family 2. The talent doesn't really leave India anymore. Product companies (both MNCs and Local) can pay $20-50k/yr now in India, which is roughly comparable to the rest of Eurasia. Working at top Western companies like Amazon, Google, MS, Oracle, etc means that your mid-career TC can hit $60-80k/yr. 3. Depending on the industry, this shift has already happened. In the Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, and Cloud space, other than the main CSPs, most hiring of talent is now in Israel and India due to the lack of training in kernel development, OS, networking, DBs, etc at American universities.
- manuelabeledo 3y ago
  > In the Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, and Cloud space, other than the main CSPs, most hiring of talent is now in Israel and India due to the lack of training in kernel development, OS, networking, DBs, etc at American universities. Working in Cybersecurity for the past 6 years, based in the US. What you say is nowhere near accurate, and the reason why the landscape is still quite green in the US is simply because money.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    Have you been able to hire US based developers with experience in eBPF, C/C++, XDP, Linux internals, K8s internals, and/or Go because we sure as shit haven't despite trying for almost half a decade. Our entire agent team is now split across Eastern Europe, Israel, and India for this very reason. P.S. We were offering market rate (TC $200-300k/yr) before calling it quits and hiring in Eastern Europe/Israel/India for a TC of $60-110k/yr.
    - manuelabeledo 3y ago
      We had an agent team at my previous employer, five people, all with several years of experience with C/C++, Linux and Mach kernels, etc. Most based in Austin, and this wasn't a large operation by any means. But of course you could easily find cheaper engineers somewhere else, you are looking at a pool of people two or three times larger after all. We also outsourced to Israel, India, and Ukraine, between 2012 and 2018. The final outcome was to dismantle all the operations there, move some to Mexico, and repatriate most of the work to the US.
      - alephnerd 3y ago
        Idk why our search hasn't been as great (ps I'm going to assume the previous employer was CRWD because Austin). The talent pool just doesn't seem as deep anymore in the US despite us offering pretty good salaries. At this point we were able to get US level engineering talent outside the US and I don't see us turning back, especially now that stsrtups like Wiz, Orca, etc are further enhancing the talent pool for our needs plus VMWare, Cisco, and Symantec/Broadcom's layoffs bringing us plenty of skilled engineers who returned back to the home country.
rhuru 3y ago
> This assumes that all the talent in the world has a cheaper, equally skilled counterpart in India. In the context of tech, this is true in general. > This is not true, and even if it was, why wouldn't talented Indians leave the country in search for better wages? You can't be this ignorant. Indians flock to USA, Canada, Australia, UK and numbers that are only limited by the receiving country's immigration laws. To give you an example, last week 7000 students from just one Indian state left for Canada. They rented an entire stadium to throw themselves a big farewell party. H1B visa lottery has only 85K spots in USA but is subscribed by around 300K folks. Out of which around 200K are Indians trying to come to /settle in USA. When canada created a special work permit for digital nomads who have h1b visa over 10K Indians applied for it matter of 48 hours. There is a quit India movement among Indian workers.
- manuelabeledo 3y ago
  > In the context of tech, this is true in general. If this was true, forty plus years of outsourcing efforts would have turned the US tech landscape into a purely legal and sales market. It is not, thus it cannot be true. > You can't be this ignorant. Indians flock to USA, Canada, Australia, UK and numbers that are only limited by the receiving country's immigration laws. So you are saying that we could replace all the talent in the western hemisphere with Indian graduates, and, at the same time, too many Indians try to immigrate to these same countries? If you knew anything about immigration law, you would understand that these two are mutually exclusive. Indians in the US or Canada will not be paid the same rates as in India.
  - rhuru 3y ago
    My original comment was the following: > If you[r] job can be done 100% remotely it can also be done in India. In context of that let me examine your points: > If this was true, forty plus years of outsourcing efforts would have turned the US tech landscape into a purely legal and sales market. For many cases it already is. A ton of tech work has *already* moved to India making their US branches primarily sales offices. But as I said, not all work can be outsourced to India. A lot of it must happen in offices in USA. This work is often high value, high collaboration work, as many companies including Google and Meta have figured, 100% remote hurts their competitive edge, reduces innovation and hurts collaborative problem solving. Not all jobs need this and all those jobs can be 100% remote but they will eventually move to India or someplace else where they can be cheaper. > So you are saying that we could replace all the talent in the western hemisphere with Indian graduates, and, at the same time, too many Indians try to immigrate to these same countries? I never made such strong claim, my claim was limited to remote jobs only. Yes, every remote job that pays well can move to some other region where someone will do it better than you for a lower pay. It is not a west v/s India but that is how markets function. Indians do hire a lot of western world people for things they are cheaper for example translation and content generation. People are useful resource and jobs are not a zero sum game. When your remote job goes to India you don't become worthless, you rather find a job that is better suited for your skills and situation making your economy more resilient and efficient. My broader point however is that if you are living in one of those high cost areas like Silicon Valley or NYC or Sydney and if your employer is okay with you being 100% remote, trust me that you wont have that job for long.

alephnerd 3y ago

> why wouldn't talented Indians leave the country in search for better wages 1. Living far away from your entire family sucks. You'll miss birthdays, weddings, funerals, and plenty of wholesome moments with family 2. The talent doesn't really leave India anymore. Product companies (both MNCs and Local) can pay $20-50k/yr now in India, which is roughly comparable to the rest of Eurasia. Working at top Western companies like Amazon, Google, MS, Oracle, etc means that your mid-career TC can hit $60-80k/yr. 3. Depending on the industry, this shift has already happened. In the Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, and Cloud space, other than the main CSPs, most hiring of talent is now in Israel and India due to the lack of training in kernel development, OS, networking, DBs, etc at American universities.

manuelabeledo 3y ago
> In the Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, and Cloud space, other than the main CSPs, most hiring of talent is now in Israel and India due to the lack of training in kernel development, OS, networking, DBs, etc at American universities. Working in Cybersecurity for the past 6 years, based in the US. What you say is nowhere near accurate, and the reason why the landscape is still quite green in the US is simply because money.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  Have you been able to hire US based developers with experience in eBPF, C/C++, XDP, Linux internals, K8s internals, and/or Go because we sure as shit haven't despite trying for almost half a decade. Our entire agent team is now split across Eastern Europe, Israel, and India for this very reason. P.S. We were offering market rate (TC $200-300k/yr) before calling it quits and hiring in Eastern Europe/Israel/India for a TC of $60-110k/yr.
  - manuelabeledo 3y ago
    We had an agent team at my previous employer, five people, all with several years of experience with C/C++, Linux and Mach kernels, etc. Most based in Austin, and this wasn't a large operation by any means. But of course you could easily find cheaper engineers somewhere else, you are looking at a pool of people two or three times larger after all. We also outsourced to Israel, India, and Ukraine, between 2012 and 2018. The final outcome was to dismantle all the operations there, move some to Mexico, and repatriate most of the work to the US.
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      Idk why our search hasn't been as great (ps I'm going to assume the previous employer was CRWD because Austin). The talent pool just doesn't seem as deep anymore in the US despite us offering pretty good salaries. At this point we were able to get US level engineering talent outside the US and I don't see us turning back, especially now that stsrtups like Wiz, Orca, etc are further enhancing the talent pool for our needs plus VMWare, Cisco, and Symantec/Broadcom's layoffs bringing us plenty of skilled engineers who returned back to the home country.

rhuru 3y ago

> This assumes that all the talent in the world has a cheaper, equally skilled counterpart in India. In the context of tech, this is true in general. > This is not true, and even if it was, why wouldn't talented Indians leave the country in search for better wages? You can't be this ignorant. Indians flock to USA, Canada, Australia, UK and numbers that are only limited by the receiving country's immigration laws. To give you an example, last week 7000 students from just one Indian state left for Canada. They rented an entire stadium to throw themselves a big farewell party. H1B visa lottery has only 85K spots in USA but is subscribed by around 300K folks. Out of which around 200K are Indians trying to come to /settle in USA. When canada created a special work permit for digital nomads who have h1b visa over 10K Indians applied for it matter of 48 hours. There is a quit India movement among Indian workers.

manuelabeledo 3y ago
> In the context of tech, this is true in general. If this was true, forty plus years of outsourcing efforts would have turned the US tech landscape into a purely legal and sales market. It is not, thus it cannot be true. > You can't be this ignorant. Indians flock to USA, Canada, Australia, UK and numbers that are only limited by the receiving country's immigration laws. So you are saying that we could replace all the talent in the western hemisphere with Indian graduates, and, at the same time, too many Indians try to immigrate to these same countries? If you knew anything about immigration law, you would understand that these two are mutually exclusive. Indians in the US or Canada will not be paid the same rates as in India.
- rhuru 3y ago
  My original comment was the following: > If you[r] job can be done 100% remotely it can also be done in India. In context of that let me examine your points: > If this was true, forty plus years of outsourcing efforts would have turned the US tech landscape into a purely legal and sales market. For many cases it already is. A ton of tech work has *already* moved to India making their US branches primarily sales offices. But as I said, not all work can be outsourced to India. A lot of it must happen in offices in USA. This work is often high value, high collaboration work, as many companies including Google and Meta have figured, 100% remote hurts their competitive edge, reduces innovation and hurts collaborative problem solving. Not all jobs need this and all those jobs can be 100% remote but they will eventually move to India or someplace else where they can be cheaper. > So you are saying that we could replace all the talent in the western hemisphere with Indian graduates, and, at the same time, too many Indians try to immigrate to these same countries? I never made such strong claim, my claim was limited to remote jobs only. Yes, every remote job that pays well can move to some other region where someone will do it better than you for a lower pay. It is not a west v/s India but that is how markets function. Indians do hire a lot of western world people for things they are cheaper for example translation and content generation. People are useful resource and jobs are not a zero sum game. When your remote job goes to India you don't become worthless, you rather find a job that is better suited for your skills and situation making your economy more resilient and efficient. My broader point however is that if you are living in one of those high cost areas like Silicon Valley or NYC or Sydney and if your employer is okay with you being 100% remote, trust me that you wont have that job for long.