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> LinkedIn is now ramping up hiring in India, according the person familiar. So, laying off people in the US and hiring in India?
by LewisVerstappen 3y ago
> LinkedIn is now ramping up hiring in India, according the person familiar.
So, laying off people in the US and hiring in India?
- tannedNerd 3y agoI feel like if US companies are proven to off shore jobs they should take a massive tax hit the same year. Like you are required to pay 5 years worth of the salary of the job you off shored into unemployment or retraining funds.
- dougSF70 3y agoMicrosoft about to swallow a $25bn+ tax hit.
- mpclark 3y agoOw! That's nearly half an Activision...
- passion__desire 3y agoIf there are global markets for products, they should be global markets for employment.
- elashri 3y agoThere is no global tax system so you don't have this effect you think you have.
- creato 3y agoThe global market for tech products isn’t that much lower friction than tech employment. India has a lot of tariffs. China has the great firewall and the “local partner” shakedown. US has export controls of many high tech products.
- passion__desire 3y agoTariffs may reduce volume slightly but not margins. I doubt Apple is selling it's devices at a loss.
- coldpie 3y agoI think you'd get the same result with a lot less overhead by just increasing corporate taxes a fraction of a percent (or just enforcing our current tax laws better) and making vocational training schools tuition-free.
- zitterbewegung 3y agoAssuming they pay their taxes and this is how we have to enforce it by a lawsuit which costs the government more. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/11/irs-says-microsoft-owes-an-additional-29-billion-in-back-taxes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/11/irs-says-microsoft-owes-an-a... If the corporate tax would increase then it might be cheaper to litigate.
- syntaxing 3y agoFunny you say that because this was part of the NAFTA agreement (I know this agreement doesn’t apply to India). I knew engineers that went to college with sponsorship from this agreement when they were laid off as technicians from off shoring due to the agreement. This absolutely should be the status quo.
- WalterBright 3y agoProtectionism doesn't make an economy more prosperous. Quite the reverse, it makes an economy uncompetitive.
- cryptonector 3y agoI used to think so, before I understood that we live in a mercantilist world economy. I still think protectionism would be bad in a less distorted economy, and I think it's bad in as-distorted an economy as ours (because people who are subjected to pressure are more likely to be adaptive and dynamic), but it's harder to make the case, don't you think?
- WalterBright 3y agoProtectionism means you're protecting inefficient industries. In a global marketplace, this means industries in other countries will out-compete yours.
- coolspot 3y agoUsually they out-compete yours because they burn coal and you have to buy solar, they commute in packed trains while you drive tesla to work, they live in tiny apartments, while your house has a backyard and frontyard.
- WalterBright 3y agoProtectionism is not a fix for comparative advantage. Regardless of the motives for protectionism, it will make your economy less competitive and less prosperous.
- Apocryphon 3y agoThe East Asian Tigers being a major counterexample: https://hir.harvard.edu/the-east-asian-miracle-where-did-adam-smith-go-wrong/ https://hir.harvard.edu/the-east-asian-miracle-where-did-ada... It's basically Ha-Joon Chang's whole deal- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Samaritans:_The_Myth_of_Free_Trade_and_the_Secret_History_of_Capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Samaritans:_The_Myth_of_Fr... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/hajoon-chang-protectionism-the-truth-is-on-a-10-bill-5334137.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/hajoon-c...
- lotsofpulp 3y agoShould California impose massive tax hits to businesses that move jobs to other states?
- kozikow 3y agoThat would be very easy to circumvent. You can describe effectively the same software engineering job in a way that sounds completely different. "close a project" of the old team, etc.
- bee_rider 3y agoCompanies outsource because they think they can find better workers in another country (where better is some combination of better skills, lower compensation, or harder working). Fair enough. We should welcome that kind of competition, it makes everyone better when we fairly and do our best. They also outsource because they think they can take advantage of lax labor and/or environmental regulation in other countries. We should impose tariffs to level the playing field when countries don’t have these sort of regulations. Competition keeps us honest and innovating, it shouldn’t be avoided, it just needs to be fair and non-exploitive.
- gumballindie 3y agoLmao they wont allow remote work in the west but are fine with remote work elsewhere.
- nerdponx 3y agoThat or they are opening local offices overseas and expecting people to work on site there.
- dominick-cc 3y agoThe new doublethink
- paxys 3y agoWho says the overseas positions are going to be remote?
- passion__desire 3y agoThere would be communication overhead between teams. If companies are willing to take that, then they shouldn't have any argument against remote work irrespective of location and timezones.
- paxys 3y agoCommunication overhead between teams is very different from communication overhead between individual people on a team.
- gumballindie 3y agoOverseas means remote from the main office. So regardless if they will be forced to be on site at their overseas office they will still be remote compared to their us office. And guess what - those bros in the us that wanted to be onsite to be creative will now have to communicate clearly with their remote colleagues in india whether they like it or not. But the idiots took away the rights of those in the us while those above them gave zero shits about them anyway and moved lots of jobs abroad. The winers here? Indians. Good luck and enjoy scuttlebutt, if still employed, suckers.
- d3w4s9 3y agoGoogle is doing the same thing. Same as my own employer. Funny that some people think "if we work in the office more, companies won't outsource jobs as much".
- pixelatedindex 3y agoMaybe not, but from the company’s perspective if you’re not in the office then it doesn’t matter how far away you are (with some time zone restrictions maybe, but remote work heavily relies on async communication anyway). So they’ll look for the cheapest labor they can get away with. I guess you can now have RTO in India though?
- WalterBright 3y ago> they’ll look for the cheapest labor they can get away with Don't you look for the best deal when you buy things? That's how markets work.
- pixelatedindex 3y agoYes, I am very much aware of that. My point is that as a worker if you really push for remote / WFH policies, it can backfire on you because location isn’t a constraint anymore. Why pay someone in the Bay Area when I can pay someone in Idaho? Or in this case India. I’m not saying I like it or prefer it, but it makes sense.
- paxys 3y agoIs anyone really surprised? Did you think the end result of the WFH movement was going to be companies continuing to pay you to live out of your Bay Area house?
- newsclues 3y agoNo people thought they could cash Bay Area paycheques while working from low cost rural areas with WFH.
- bluGill 3y agoThere is one advantage to Bay area when WFH: you can go into the office on request. I go into the office every 3 months or so - it is only a 7 mile bike ride. Sometimes things are better handled in person (I don't live in the Bay area). WFH with the ability to get into the office in a couple hours is valuable. Once you cannot get into the office easily if you need to you are worth less even if the need to get into the office is rare.
- paxys 3y agoIf you need to go to the office once every 3 months you can fly in from anywhere in the country. No need to live within commuting distance for that.
- bluGill 3y agoI cannot fly and be there with 2 hours notice though. Sometimes flights are full and you can't get there at all with less than a few weeks notice. Often you can, but the cost for same day tickets can be very high. Planning months in advance is done all the time, but it is hard. It is always easier to plan if you can look at the current most urgent project list and pick the top item. if you have to plan what will be on top in a few months that is a lot harder.
- paxys 3y ago
- dehrmann 3y agoIf people can work effectively from home, they can work effectively from their homes in Hyderabad.
- hackernewds 3y agoBold of you to assume it's the same people, that will deliver the same quality of work
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoDoesn't need to be the same quality if it's 1/5th the price. Businesses care about profits - not quality.
- halfmatthalfcat 3y agoThat will only last so long until consumers reject the terrible quality and move on to another, higher quality competitor - so the wheel will continue to turn and high quality developers will still be hired to produce high quality work.
- bogtog 3y agoAn Indian employee's salary being 1/5th of an American's, doesn't mean their cost to the company is only 1/5th. There is a general organizational/overhead cost to taking on more people. This cost, for one additional person, may be higher than even the American's salary
- smsm42 3y agoIn order to get a baby in 1 month just hire 9 women!
- _fizz_buzz_ 3y ago20 years ago when the first wave of outsourcing to India happened, a lot of the engineers there were not great. Nowadays there are amazing engineers in India also. They do know what they are worth though, so you cannot low ball them. But they are still working for quite a bit less than Bay Area folks.
- huytersd 3y agoWhy wouldn’t they? It’s like 7-10x cheaper.
- ss1996 3y agoThe difference is much lesser 7-10x in big tech (Google, Amazon, Msft, etc). Big tech's Indian offices pays about 1/3 to 1/4 of what they would earn in the company's USA office. Levels.fyi will corroborate this. Yes, while the average software engineer in India might earn 7-10x less than in the US, this isn't the case within major tech companies.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoSalaries are 1/4th - but you also don't have as high of pension / payroll costs as in US. At l3 & l4 - when you factor in benefits (including health care costs), 401k matching, payroll taxes - it's probably 1/5th or less.
- ss1996 3y agoFair points, 1/5th is a good estimate.
- bluGill 3y agoPay in India is variable. They have a lot of great engineers who make good money - not what they would in the US, but the difference is not that much. They also have a lot of "engineers" who shouldn't be engineers doing the simplest tasks who may 10x less than they would in the US. If you just need a simple web app that is just like every other web app except with your logo you don't need the great engineers.
- berdario 3y agoGoogle L3 SWE in BLR: 36k https://www.levels.fyi/offer/4bb28696-b3a9-430e-af6b-87e139ba6399?currency=USD https://www.levels.fyi/offer/4bb28696-b3a9-430e-af6b-87e139b... Google L4 SWE in BLR: 64k https://www.levels.fyi/offer/3631ce80-f5fa-41e3-bd22-192a98ad493f?currency=USD https://www.levels.fyi/offer/3631ce80-f5fa-41e3-bd22-192a98a... Google L3 SWE in Bay Area: 236k https://www.levels.fyi/offer/8cb64099-ffcf-437f-baa3-a88ae7d71c48 https://www.levels.fyi/offer/8cb64099-ffcf-437f-baa3-a88ae7d... Google L4 SWE in Bay Area: 260k https://www.levels.fyi/offer/4468e21b-6650-4e6c-948b-e90ea1d293aa https://www.levels.fyi/offer/4468e21b-6650-4e6c-948b-e90ea1d... That's a difference between 4x and 6.5x I think that your 3x difference is definitely a lower bound, and it'll be closer to 6.5x than to 3x or 4x most of the time (though I don't see aggregated data per-company, per-region in levels.fyi (but I didn't bother logging in)
- throwaway9191aa 3y agoThis is something my company's internal RTO channels seem to have missed. What if large corporations really *did* collect enough data during covid to justify working from home? Now faang can justify outsourcing the rest of US based jobs. Force RTO in the US, replace those who leave with less expensive resources.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y agoThis is actually a brilliant bit of insight/tinfoil that I'd totally missed, largely because all the things that FAANGs have been saying to justify RTO have been so daft. You're totally right, though. If the data shows that RTO has negligible benefit — or even, say, just a marginal 5-10% benefit — then the logical move is to force RTO for the most expensive headcount (since a 5% boost there will be the most valuable) and then hire globally-remote headcount for all the rest. That... really feels quite grim, the more I think about it. Time to go stare at my early-retirement spreadsheets and see where I can squeeze out some more velocity for myself, I suppose.
- sebazzz 3y agoMicrosoft has also been outsourcing parts of core development of other products, like dotnet and Windows components.
- eikenberry 3y agoAny reason it will work out better this time than it did the last time outsourcing was the new big thing? In my anecdotal experience this is just a rehashing of the last outsourcing craze with a new crowd and will end up the same way.
- muzz 3y agoSalaries in India have increased a lot-- they used to be one-tenth that of Silicon Valley but now they are more than one-third and closing in on one-half