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Oh man! Our entire team has been replaced by Vietnam developers.
- loloquwowndueo 2y agoPlot twist: it’s actually about developers in India bemoaning being replaced with Vietnamese ones.
- hinkley 2y agoI thought you were being sarcastic.
- NetOpWibby 2y agoThis made me click the link. There’s always a marginalized group to exploit.
- readthenotes1 2y agoAka https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudsill_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudsill_theory
- tim333 2y agoI'm not sure the Vietnamese are a marginalized group. More a country that was kept poor by communism and is now recovering in a similar way to China but a few years behind.
- NetOpWibby 2y agoWouldn’t that recovery be a form of marginalization? They’re being financially exploited at cost and made to work ridiculously long by hours.
- nurettin 2y agoIn 20 years they will be on par with their counterparts only to be replaced by Malawians.
- tim333 2y agoProbably by AI before then though.
- moralestapia 2y agoI'm surprised it was a cost-based decision as Indian-based teams are already on the lower end of that. I believe there was some other kind of added value involved, perhaps they hired a more competent team or with a broader skillset.
- SargeDebian 2y ago> Two months ago, they replaced the Director of Engineering from India with a Vietnamese Director of Engineering, and things started to change By te way, I love the negative comments about the level of English proficiency in the Vietnamese team in a post riddled with mistakes.
- GasTheKayaks88 2y ago[flagged]
- bobosha 2y ago> It seems like people of European ethnicities are the only people on earth who don't practice this brazen ethnic nepotism I beg to differ, Eastern European rivalries/grudges are no less: Russian v Ukrainians/Poles, Poles vs Czech and so on...
- GasTheKayaks88 2y ago[flagged]
- jmspring 2y agoI've seen this happen. I've also seen where someone hired into a management/planning role with the ability to make offshore decisions can impact things for good or bad. A company I was at long ago, the Director of Engineering insisted on offshoring some non-critical things. It was fine, but it was one of those body shops where you talk to person X and it's likely some complete other group doing the work. The output we were getting out them was so bad and wasting the other engineeers time, we had to push back. The excuses made by the director almost made it look like they were getting kickbacks. Same company, different oursourcing situation - needed some critical low level (assembler) code written. Outsourced to a different region, the developers understood what was needed and turned things around much faster than expected. A small consultancy instead of one of the body shops.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- t0mas88 2y agoIn the not too distant future the basic CRUD-development for boring enterprise apps is going to be done by AI models. You only need a human to write the prompts and review the output. That human may become less and less technically skilled over time as the models become better. But costs for AI could be similar to developer wages in emerging markets for a while... I think nobody is currently charging the real cost of their AI stuff to end users yet.
- ajkjk 2y agoEveryone seems to say it will be done by AI! I don't understand this thing where people know the future before it's been proven to happen. It's wrong. It's a 'maybe' at best. Not too long ago, the near future was supposed to have self-serving cars everywhere and that is still hobbling along instead.
- Zambyte 2y agoLanguage models have been able to spit out CRUD apps for a while now. The "maybe" is not about technical limitations, it's about social and economic forces. In contrast, we don't have flying cars at all due to limits in our current technology.
- georgeburdell 2y agoHave you personally used one to make a CRUD app? I use it to generate scripts to parse some dataset from time to time, but that’s about it
- jstanley 2y agoWe do have flying cars, but we call them helicopters and they're very expensive to operate.
- ben_w 2y agoWe also have human-sized quadcopers with similar (identical?) fly-by-wire control as toy drones. Add "legal obligations" and the "cost of a pilot license" to the list.
- vietnamrocks 2y ago[flagged]
- RandomThoughts3 2y agoIndian strength is that it’s a country of 1.4 billions people with a large educated population of which many chose IT as a career path. From outside, that’s a nearly bottomless pool of talent. The issue is that there is simply more people at every levels in India not only at the top and finding good developers when you are not there and Indian/familiar with India is an Herculean task.
- Ekaros 2y agoOr the weird expectations that with large population the decent people would be the cheapest... If you are paying bottom prices you will also get bottom quality or bottom talent...
- RandomThoughts3 2y agoWhat a strange reply. Nowhere in my comment is that implied. The fact is that average salaries are far lower in India than in Europe. Even a very competitive salary is a lot lower than what you would pay here. That’s why we go to India. If the salary was the same, we would simply hire here and avoid dealing with the different time zone and culture entirely.
- pyb 2y agoReminded of Steve Yegge's claim a couple years ago that India had run out of developers. What happens when Vietnam runs out too?
- renewiltord 2y agoFascinating. It's an eternal competition. Surprised that the transformation isn't more LLMs. I think outsourcing teams can be much smaller now.
- Teknomancer 2y agoStarlink in Nairobi City high rise, soon the Africans will be stealing the Vietnamese Devs work. Life is a cycle. Karma is a bitch. So be nice and diversify your skillset.
- geor9e 2y agoThat is a really good point. https://www.starlink.com/map https://www.starlink.com/map Once starlink coverage expands, the poorest, most remote villages on earth can technically become eligible for remote work. It will probably be exploitative, mechanical-turk type work.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago> Once starlink coverage expands, the poorest, most remote villages on earth can technically become eligible for remote work I suspect some tight number crunching - of money and bits - is necessary for this to work. I could see a joblord popping up who provides the (not cheap) Starlink connection and sells the local labor at a profit. I wager the arrangement will be as exploitive as possible.
- pavlov 2y agoThey already have Internet in Nairobi, they don’t need Elon Musk.
- markus_zhang 2y agoThe only way for individuals to fight offshoring: get deep into a tech skill or/and human connection so it's tough to replace you in the industry. You will get laid off but another company will pick you up quickly. More thoughts: A system programmer in a non-cost center is the best pick. A game engine programmer is better than a devops in that perspective.
- tdb7893 2y agoI think you're right that's the main practical way as an individual but I'll add that collectively there are other ways. Just as an example, one of my friends works for a place where the employees own most of the company through and ESOP and obviously they don't offshore so as a group there are multiple ways to get leverage (whether it's through ownership, labor organization, specialized knowledge, or anything else)
- johnnyanmac 2y ago>You will get laid off but another company will pick you up quickly. That was my hope with my trajectory, but I suppose I underestimated corporate greed/incompetence and overestimated how much people care about a proper engine programmer. Had people connections but 90% of them were also laid off or on the cusp. Some simply had the entire studio shut down. I probably wouldn't feel too bad if, despite all this, the industry is pretending that they are still hiring as some facade to investors. Many aren't, based on what loose contacts I had remaining.
- markus_zhang 2y agoMan that's tough :/ But as an engine programmer I'm sure you can find some other places, maybe other than studios? I know Unity is hiring, and ARM is also hiring (checkout Felipe lira on LinkedIn).
- johnnyanmac 2y agoFunny thing about that. I was a part of the Unity layoffs a while back. I still do have some contacts there (brilliant engineers), but so far the consensus I get from there is "the layoffs have finally ended, hiring is still frozen/very slow". Of course, it will vary from team to team so I wouldnt take that as company wide gospel. Haven't looked into ARM, so I'll check that out. Thanks. I could use any leads at this point.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rhelz 2y agoExactly why I think American employees should agree with executives that it is important to not work remote. If there really is no discernible advantages to on-site working, the jobs are going to go to the countries where employees are paid the least.
- jmspring 2y agoThis is not an argument for RTO/on site work. Having been remote for more than a baker's dozen of years, remote can be successful but things like slack and teams are not a drop in replacement for "on site" either. That said, any sizeable company there is a likelihood you are working with people across timezones. My last couple of roles, I dealt with timezones around the world - AUS, CET, IST, across the US, etc. When working with others that aren't in the same office, there is no need for "on site". Management and infrastructure has to cater to it. Now, face time with quarterly/etc meetings for planning and design could be useful.
- loloquwowndueo 2y agoThe US loves a free market - well, here it is!
- redleggedfrog 2y agoI can educated guess the subtext on this from seeing it so many, many times: software is being deprecated and/or going into maintenance mode, or isn't good ROI, so bean-counters trying to save money by finding sub-minimum wage labor with zero concern for software quality. Now starts the death spiral of weeks to get anything done because ESL developers can't understand the specifications nor the docs and focus on just getting shit hacked in because they couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. Bugs proliferate and more hacks applied until development collapses in a pile of un maintainable junk and then new shiney is brought in in an attempt to make progress before business folds. High probability business folds. When this happens get out. The shitty developers will taint your own skills eventually.