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I think a lot of big-co are setting up subsidiaries overseas and hiring there. It's different from the contract based offshoring model that happened in 2007 or
by orochimaaru 3y ago
I think a lot of big-co are setting up subsidiaries overseas and hiring there. It's different from the contract based offshoring model that happened in 2007 or so which had rather disastrous results. I know my company has and plans to have almost 1/2 its IT workforce as direct employees overseas.
- giantg2 3y agoSame. My "team" is doubling in size, but all the hires are international.
- Mc91 3y agoSame. I work as an SWE at a non-FAANG, non-tech Fortune 100 company. We already had an IT staff in India and would hire consultants in India, but this has been accelerating over the past year - virtually all hires or new consulting contracts have been in India. Some of the SWEs in the US are even being put under PMs in India.
- giantg2 3y agoMy company is actually doing mostly Europe and ex-US North America
- pc86 3y agoI've actually considered setting up a Mexican corporation to run C2C contracts through for those who want LATAM hires, but the logistics seemed pretty onerous, especially since I don't live near the border. I'd be willing to do a single trip there to finalize everything, but it seems like as a US resident/citizen you'd need to basically stay there for weeks/months while everything is set up, or make multiple trips for each step of the process. It's hard not to get angry at the company when you see them hiring at median US wages ($100-120k US equivalent) but specifically refusing to hiring folks in the US, when the company is US-based.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoYeah seeing a lot of Canadian and Mexico hires. Mexico City, especially -- general consensus is that the level of expertise is good, it's not hard to find a Spanish speaker in the US, better cultural fits, and the timezones overlap better; MXC is on Central Time. Not India-level cheap, but competitive enough. Canada is even better in that sense, but at a higher price. NAFTA TN visas are also attractive there, too. No H1B nonsense, and can easily bring personnel over for short (~3 year) tours. Disclaimer: USA-ian of Hispanic extraction in Canada, so I follow these gigs reasonably closely.
- __turbobrew__ 3y agoAt my company many of the new hires are within Canada. You get similar talent, similar culture, native English, and same time zones for about 2/3 the cost of a USA dev. You also don’t have to pay for healthcare of your Canadian employees since they pay for it on their income taxes.
- dukeyukey 3y agoBeing in the UK I see a lot of that too - we're cheaper than Americans, speak the same language, are pretty close culturally, and while we're a few timezones off, we're far enough east to overlap with both the West Coast and India. Plus, London alone has 10 million people, and if you lump in the London commuter belt that adds up to aroun 15 million people, more than all of Ontario! That's a hell of a skilled worker base to work with.
- hotpotamus 3y agoI've been down this road, and I'm sorry to tell you that your team will be halving again once the international hires are considered onboarded. They might sell it as going to a follow the sun model, but the plan is to move to cheaper labor. I've been through it myself.
- yesdocs 3y agoIt’s time we unionize as software developers. You saw what the UAW achieved, Software Engineering needs the same type of protections
- pc86 3y agoProtectionism doesn't work beyond selfish short-term interests. American cars are not exactly paragons of technical or mechanical prowess compared to their Japanese or German counterparts. I've been a software developer for the better part of two decades, I'm not worried about the C-tier code coming out of rural India. You shouldn't be either unless you're a really bad dev.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoI’m okay with my fellow citizens being selfish and protecting their livelihood. No one else will. “Whose interests?” You’re advocating for shareholder returns (labor arb savings->profits). Ain’t nobody coming to save us. If we can mandate EV batteries be built in the US to get subsidies (Inflation Reduction Act), other protectionism mechanisms should be on the table. Otherwise, businesses will do their best to maximize profits in the market they’re offering in without any labor contribution back, extractionist style.
- pc86 3y agoI appreciate you telling me what I'm advocating for. Any basic macroeconomics class covers the effects of protectionism. Yes, in the short term wages may be artificially propped up, industries may be (temporarily) saved, but you do long-term damage to the economy, and the people are better off with free, open markets long term.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago> but you do long-term damage to the economy, and the people are better off with free, open markets long term. The evidence does not show the American worker being better off after these policies you support were enacted and have had decades to run. Free trade is great for shareholders and some consumer cohorts who get excess utility, but terrible for workers. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp147/ https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp147/ https://www.epi.org/publication/botched-policy-responses-to-globalization/ https://www.epi.org/publication/botched-policy-responses-to-... https://www.epi.org/press/globalization-lowered-wages-american-workers/ https://www.epi.org/press/globalization-lowered-wages-americ... https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/12/09/459087477/the-tipping-point-most-americans-no-longer-are-middle-class https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/12/09/459087477...
- deathpanels 3y agoI bailed on a small local company in early 2021. I checked in with how they were doing recently. They laid off all the local developers, minus management (of course). They're hiring exclusively in Africa, the Middle-East, and South America. My current company has done the same thing by emphasizing that we're only hiring in our EU office. I've not seen many US based roles unless they are customer support related. It is predictable that remote work would lead to another wave of off-shoring. The question now is whether or not these companies can actually innovate with a remote, largely foreign workforce. We've all seen the abominations produced by offshore teams. Moving to a fully remote foreign workforce may be short-sighted.
- giantg2 3y agoAt least so far, we've seen foreign direct hires work out well. Much better than the outsourcing teams by a long shot.
- bruce511 3y ago>> actually innovate with a remote, largely foreign workforce. As distinct from a remote, largely local, expensive workforce? Innovation is often the mix of vision, direction, and implementation. AWS for example, was implemented by an offshore team. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services#:~:text=Thereafter%20Pinkham%2C%20Willem%20van%20Biljon,Simple%20Queue%20Service%20(SQS) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services#:~:text=....
- dh2022 3y agoAWS was not implemented by an offshore team. The link you pasted implies that EC2 was implemented by an offshore team - which is not correct either. EC2 had two teams, one of which was in Cape Town. The other team was in Seattle - and larger than the one in Cape Town. The rest of AWS at the time (2007) consisted of S3, SQS, DevPay, CDN, SimpleDB (AWS' own DB implementation at the time) etc... These teams were all in Seattle (in the red brick building by I5).
- taude 3y agoYeup, we're expanding and only hiring off-shore.
- rngname22 3y agoWhat industry?
- derwiki 3y agoI worked at a company that was doing this, but the candidates I interviewed were all below [what had been] the bar. Recruiters asked me why no one was passing the interviews; I told them I ran the interview the same way I had been doing for 3 years. I stopped being scheduled for interviews.
- closeparen 3y agoAt the same time, US salaries are either $300k+ in the Bay Area or $0 and unemployed, there's still no appetite to let someone work for e.g. $150k in a normal metro area.
- cableshaft 3y agoThere's definitely $150k jobs in a normal metro area. Chicago, for example, has a lot of posted software engineering jobs in that range (I've even seen more that are lower than that lately after this past year of tech layoffs, like around $120k, unfortunately)
- deathpanels 3y agoThose companies exist but they are being squeezed by borrowing costs so they're either not growing or are cutting staff.
- ptero 3y agoThere are many large, stable, profitable companies that are hiring software engineers. They are not software houses, but they pay well for a comfortable life (outside of NYC and Bay Area) and offer good work-life balance. For some examples you can look at medical devices, utilities, manufacturing, IBMs and Walmarts and R&D departments of virtually any large non-software company. But there are frictions, too. Unless you go into management, comp tops out around $200k in most metros. HR -- instead of write-your-own-rules in a startup you have to take corporate training and get approval for things folks at the startups take for granted. Limited tools, externally managed corporate OS and software, Outlook instead of Slack. Office time requirements -- fully remote is very rare. And so on. Not saying this is the wrong choice, just that there are tradeoffs.
- closeparen 3y agoAbsolutely. It’s weird though that tech focused companies with Silicon Valley style cultures who are looking to cut costs are completely uninterested in those regions. With more developer-friendly working conditions, they wouldn't have to compete as aggressively on TC. And with more normal cost of living, it could be sustainable for senior people who are not independently wealthy to have long tenures there.
- deadghost 3y agoMy previous company was doing this. I basically quit out of frustration. They weren't much better than picking random people off the street and pointing them at code. It bled into my work life when they took over a project I was on and was pinging me constantly with "hello" and "good morning" expecting to jump on calls with their teams to explain exactly how to do their jobs. An example to illustrate what I was working with: Problem: input validation is too restrictive Their solution: remove all input validation For my mental well-being, I couldn't stay on.
- jncfhnb 3y agoGood news, I got rid of ALL the tickets!
- deathanatos 3y agoYou probably say that in jest, but I have seen — multiple times — someone just go and delete all the tickets. Boom! 0 tickets. No bugs, totes. /s
- Tommah 3y agoReposting my comment from a couple of months ago: At one of my jobs, they used Asana when I started. It was too full of backlogged issues, so we moved over to Jira. Then Jira got too full. A month before I was laid off, one of my coworkers said, "Maybe we should try out Asana."
- democracy 3y agothat could be a great feature of a new product - "your jira is full? time to move on to...." ))
- mewpmewp2 3y agoThat's called ruthless prioritization.
- wyclif 3y ago
- hnthrowaway0328 3y agoYep ours are hiring from India directly. Rumor says head of IT has a affiliated company set up...
- democracy 3y agoIt's possible, in one of my jobs the senior project manager was found to hold a stake in one of the outsourcing companies working for us and was terminated under conflict of interest.
- fuzztester 3y agoThe overseas subsidiary business model was happening well before 2007. I left a company doing it, in 2004, for example. And they had been doing it for some years before I joined. And they were not the only one.
- depereo 3y agoI've seen a bunch of US companies setting up offices here in New Zealand and hiring SRE/DevOps types. Our wages are garbage so it's much cheaper for them! Plus our timezone means having staff here leads to much less on-call requirement for US/UK staff.
- ChumpGPT 3y agoAs soon as your company hires a Indian CIO, you're done. More and more of the staff will be H1B's and over time they will transition the work to India. I could name a very big corporation doing that right now. The CIO they just hired (last 6 months) is an Indian who just finish doing this to the previous corporation he was a CIO at. Both these companies are the largest in their respective industries in the world.
- booleandilemma 3y agoWe don't have an Indian CIO but the trend is generally true. Indian managers hire more Indians.
- avasii 3y agoI will guess that the two industries are agricultural machinery and transportation.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoMy exposure to bigco is they aren’t hiring anywhere.
- freddie_mercury 3y agoThis was a pretty forseeable event after US based developers repeatedly told their bosses that development could be done just as productively remotely.
- wyclif 3y agojust as productively remotely ...with the same staff and teams, that's the important qualifier. Nobody thinks they're going to get the same quality team by body shopping their hiring funnel.
- bruce511 3y agoThe problem with this argument is that it implies "you're special". And you likely have experience, domain knowledge, product knowledge, customer knowledge and so on, so I'd argue you Are special. But then you leave, and need to be replaced. Since I'm hiring from a pool where no-one has this special, I may as well hire from overseas. Its cheaper. Equally, when you work remotely your special is invisible. The way you keep the customer happy is invisible. The way you enable your team (assuming your special is passed on) is invisible. Of course there are very smart people, with lots of experience, and lots of special of their own. Finding them is hard (of course) but the reward for finding them is significant. FAANG companies are skipping the labor broker, and building subsidiaries offshore. Those offices pay local rates, have as-strict hiring policies, and are growing. So your point us well made- existing employees have value. But companies deal with churn. And we don't need 300 people onshore with your special skills. We can offshore 200 posts, and wait for them to come up to speed. Being a remote worker makes this process easier.
- marcus0x62 3y ago> Those offices pay local rates, have as-strict hiring policies, and are growing. Everybody goes into these arrangements believing, against all history and experience, that they aren't going to lower their hiring bar. Good luck with that.
- wait_a_minute 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Bluescreenbuddy 3y agoWhen you can hire engineers in South America or Easter Europe for a tiny fraction of US salaries, you bet they're going to do it.
- nobodyandproud 3y agoMy company is doing this, with the end goal of reducing engineering headcount in the US.. The only way for me to protest is to leave, but the job market is terrible.