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Head start. Whether or not your friend is right, this is a bad take. America has essentially had peace for the last 150 years. In 1911, the Wuchang Uprising to

Head start. Whether or not your friend is right, this is a bad take. America has essentially had peace for the last 150 years. In 1911, the Wuchang Uprising toppled the Qing Dynasty. China was then brutally attacked by the Japanese in the 1930s where in the fighting and subsequent occupation 14 million Chinese were killed. In 1945, China finally became free from Japanese occupation but the damage was already done, and in 1949 the country underwent a communist revolution. Things were going pretty okayish until the famine of 1960 that killed 10s of millions more Chinese people. For the last 50 odd years, China's growth has been tremendous.

MuffinFlavored 3y ago
He counters me with "why would I pay $100k-$200k/yr for a software engineer when Brazil/India will do it for less". What do I say to that? Like... he has a point from an ecomonic standpoint, right? I tell him "you get what you pay for" and "Microsoft/Google pay some engineers $2m" and he jus says "that's dumb"
- zer0tonin 3y ago
  Good software engineers in Brazil/India are aware they can ask 100-200k you know?
- stuartjohnson12 3y ago
  My experience with overseas developers is that the communication tends to be worse on average. There are lots of exceptions. Many very good communicators who work very hard. Most aren't cheap. Written English is a very important skill for developers. Hard but not impossible to find elsewhere. In the case the communication is not worse, the difficulty of getting everyone together in one place sucks. If you don't care about team harmony, the lack of geographic proximity makes accountability harder in general as there's very little you can do regarding bad behaviour if your contractor is overseas. And if he knows where to find large numbers of skilled technical contractors familiar with engineering systems for scale, have excellent written and spoken English, who are able to travel regularly, are highly accountable and willing to work for well below the US market rate, I applaud him. And if the more realistic case is true and he knows how to point some poor sap from Pakistan he hired from Upwork for $15 an hour at his swanky new mobile app, I wish him the best.

MuffinFlavored 3y ago

He counters me with "why would I pay $100k-$200k/yr for a software engineer when Brazil/India will do it for less". What do I say to that? Like... he has a point from an ecomonic standpoint, right? I tell him "you get what you pay for" and "Microsoft/Google pay some engineers $2m" and he jus says "that's dumb"

zer0tonin 3y ago
Good software engineers in Brazil/India are aware they can ask 100-200k you know?
stuartjohnson12 3y ago
My experience with overseas developers is that the communication tends to be worse on average. There are lots of exceptions. Many very good communicators who work very hard. Most aren't cheap. Written English is a very important skill for developers. Hard but not impossible to find elsewhere. In the case the communication is not worse, the difficulty of getting everyone together in one place sucks. If you don't care about team harmony, the lack of geographic proximity makes accountability harder in general as there's very little you can do regarding bad behaviour if your contractor is overseas. And if he knows where to find large numbers of skilled technical contractors familiar with engineering systems for scale, have excellent written and spoken English, who are able to travel regularly, are highly accountable and willing to work for well below the US market rate, I applaud him. And if the more realistic case is true and he knows how to point some poor sap from Pakistan he hired from Upwork for $15 an hour at his swanky new mobile app, I wish him the best.