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It's amusing to see programmers in the US promoting remote work. Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the wor

It's amusing to see programmers in the US promoting remote work. Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?

nitwit005 1y ago
They've been trying to offshore the work for most of a century now. There are still millions of software engineers in the US.
deanmoriarty 1y ago
You’ll get downvoted but in my experience, which may not be representative of the entire population, this is true. A mid-size US tech company I know well went fully remote after a lot of insistence from the workforce, prior to the pandemic they were fully in office. Soon enough they started hiring remotely from EU, and now the vast majority of their technical folks are from there. The only US workers remaining are mostly GTM/sales. I personally heard the founder saying “why should we pay US comp when we can get extremely good talent in EU for less than half the cost”. EU workers, on average, also tend to not switch job as frequently, so that’s a further advantage for the company. Once you adapt to remote-only, you can scoop some amazing talent in Poland/Ukraine/Serbia/etc for $50k a year.
- raincole 1y ago
  I think most programmers in the US simply don't realize how much they earn compared to the rest of the world. I'm not talking about rural Chinese villages whose name you can't pronounce. Or the stereotypical Indian call centers. I'm talking about highly educated programmers who can communicate fluently in English, in cities like Beijing or Munich. If people in SV know how (relatively) little their counterparts make in these places, they'd be much more opposed to remote work. And that was before LLM. Today practically the entire planet can write passable English.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - geodel 1y ago
    Agree. It is harsh truth. Even the good old outsourcing seems in resurgence. Lately I see at work large delegations of IT bodyshops claiming 60% saving with AI + a dev/support center in India. It may or may not work but it can crater 70% of IT/software department by 2027 as per their plan.
  - oefrha 1y ago
    Yeah, for $100k or slightly less you can hire very good devs with 5+ yr experience in CN or DE. Often speaks English at full professional proficiency without the help of LLMs too. I know because I currently work for a fully remote startup with people from both countries. For that kind of money you can do what in the U.S., hire below average juniors? Even the most clueless junior likely makes more in SV.
    - simonh 1y ago
      Flip that around. Junior devs in the US earning $100k is the anomaly. The fact this is the case indicates the pipeline for competent developer talent is bottlenecked. Right now is still an amazing time to be in Tech. The fact the industry is so hungry for talent it’s paying such rates and is expanding abroad in search of new supply is a sign of it’s health.
- typewithrhythm 1y ago
  It's interesting, ai seems to be enabling the middle in a positive way. On the other side, we have started to find that the value of outsourcing to very low cost regions has completely disappeared. I expect that the wages in eastern Europe will quickly rise in a way they never did in former outsourcing hotspots (India for example), because they are able to do similarly complex and quality work to westerners, and are now enabled by awesome translation tools. The low quality for cheaper is now better served by the Artificial Indian.
- imtringued 1y ago
  The fixed exchange rates between EU countries massively drags down the international cost of a German software engineer, and US companies have yet to wisen up to that fact.
- matwood 1y ago
  There's a lot of nuance in these types of stories. First, the US is far from uniform in salaries. Salaries in large metro areas are different from smaller areas and are different from CA/SV. Europe also isn't uniform, and in Western Europe if a company doesn't move to all contractors they will pay significantly more into a countries equivalent to social security. Personally, I would be uncomfortable having my entire development staff be contractors as their interests are not exactly aligned with mine. Amazing talent may end up cheaper in certain locales for a period of time, but if they are amazing they will become more expensive. IMO, what's at risk are the entry/mid FAANG type jobs that pay a lot for what they are.
- mosburger 1y ago
  My previous employer stopped hiring in the EU (except for the UK, where they were based, and South Africa, where the CTO was from) because the labor laws there made it too difficult for them to fire people, which was a particularly troublesome for them as they had almost quarterly layoffs. They switched back to hiring in the UK and US where there are fewer worker protections.
  - sensanaty 1y ago
    Does the UK really not have labor laws as strong as most countries in the EU? It's not like you can't fire people in EU, you just have to have an actual legitimate reason to do so, exactly because doing quarterly layoffs is absurd and shouldn't be tolerated by anyone.
    - mosburger 1y ago
      The UK seemed generally slightly less strict than, say, Germany, France, or Poland. It sorta felt like it was splitting the difference between the US and the EU.
  - LtWorf 1y ago
    Maybe he should not hire people and then fire them after 3 months? Could it be that your previous employer is a terrible employer?
    - mosburger 1y ago
      Oh it absolutely was a terrible employer.
cm2187 1y ago
And being "superior" doesn't necessarily mean extraordinary coding skills. The vast majority of code to be written doesn't require that. What it requires however is a combination of common sense and good understanding of the underlying business. This is in short supply in many of the locations the jobs are being offshored to. But let's be honest, it was also on short supply in the corporate IT departments being offshored, though not quite to the same degree.
hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
You're getting downvoted, but IMO what you're saying is exactly true, and I've seen it happen. In my experience, pre-2015 or so, offshoring was limited in its utility. Communication was a bitch because videoconferencing from everyday laptops wasn't quite there yet, and a lot of the favored offshoring centers like India had horrible time zone overlap with the US. And perhaps most importantly, companies as a whole weren't used to fully supporting remote colleagues. Now, though, if I interact with the majority of my colleagues over Zoom/Teams/Meet anyway, what difference does it matter where they're sitting? I've worked with absolutely phenomenal developers from Argentina, Poland and Ukraine, and there was basically no difference logistically between working with them and American colleagues. Even the folks in Eastern Europe shifted their day slightly later so that we would get about 4 hours of overlap time, which was plenty of time for communication and collaboration, and IMO made folks even more productive because it naturally enforced "collaboration hours" vs. "heads down hours". I understand why people like remote, but I agree, US devs pushing for remote should understand they're going to be competing against folks making less than half their salaries.
- Moru 1y ago
  > ... should understand they're going to be competing against folks making less than half their salaries. The lower salary can be offset by the lower need for money when you don't need to buy your lunch, you don't need that expensive car to get to work and so on. The time you used for commuting could instead be spent working for another company part time.
jmspring 1y ago
As some have said, it's not about being superior. Common language, background, maybe overlaps in education, and avoiding cultures like those at Indian offshore companies where there is a lot of churn, maybe 1 Sr person you "hired" really farming the work out to multiple Jr people. Timezone overlap is also a big one.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
  I agree with what you've written, but I've worked with colleagues in South America and Eastern Europe where none of those problems existed: folks spoke perfect English, people were incredibly motivated to do a good job, and they spoke up proactively when problems arose. I have had issues with Indian outsourcers like you say (lots of churn, time zone hell, a culture of pretending everything is fine until release day and then saying "sorry, nothing works", etc.), but it's a bigger world now, and there are still lots of folks making half of US dev salaries where none of these problems exist.
  - DrewADesign 1y ago
    My intuition says there are some stylistic differences. It seems like some development cultures somewhat have better results with more rigid computer engineering sort of tasks with high granularity requirements and more straightforward goals, even if the tasks are really hard, deeply technical and the goals are difficult. I think some are better at the more nebulous sort of tasks with a lot of flexibility. Both are really useful mindsets that seem much less useful if improperly applied. Given, outsourcing is probably going to be hit-or-miss regardless of who’s doing it.
Aurornis 1y ago
It’s amusing to see these comments as if American tech companies don’t already have offices all over the world. Even a mid-size tech company I worked for had over a dozen small offices around the world to collect as many qualified developers as they could. They had some remote work too. Still hired a lot of Americans. Thinking that remote work will be the end of American workers has been the driving force behind outsourcing pushes for decades, but it hasn’t worked that way.
- fakedang 1y ago
  > Still hired a lot of Americans. Thinking that remote work will be the end of American workers has been the driving force behind outsourcing pushes for decades, but it hasn’t worked that way. The difference is that back then the project lead could explore outsourcing certain roles to India, EE and LatAm, while today the VP can explore outsourcing the project lead roles to those countries. These countries have built up their own native tech talent, many of whom already bring more to the table than the typical American - they work longer hours, for cheaper, and often bring a lot more experience. I've seen companies who only run sales teams with Americans, with the rest of the workforce being shipped out. Notably, India already has nearly 2000 GCCs (Global Capability Centers, mega complexes of offices for foreign companies) set up, with that number only projected to increase as more mid-market firms expand. While many of them are just back offices, some of them, like Walmart's GCC, is the entire tech division - the CTO remains in the US, while the entire software team is in India. While earlier the Indian team would have had to adjust their timings to USA's, now quite a few US-based employees have had to adjust their timings to India's.
  - jimbokun 1y ago
    All of that has been true for decades, except maybe the specific numbers.
Buttons840 1y ago
If remote work is cheaper for the owners, then why are the workers the ones promoting it?
jedberg 1y ago
> what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place? I've worked with remote workers from around the world. Let me preface by saying there are of course exceptions but: What I've found is that most often Americans exhibit self-starting and creativity. What I mean by that is non-us workers are great if you give them a specific task, even a really hard task. But if you give them a nebulous problem, or worse, a business outcome, they tend to perform much more poorly. And I rarely see non-americans say something like "I think our customers would like it if we added X to the product, can I work on that?". I don't think it's because Americans are better at this -- I think it's cultural. America has a much higher risk tolerance than the rest of the world. Failing is considered a good thing in the USA. And the USA is much more entrepreneurial than the rest of the world. These two things combined create a culture difference that makes a business difference. Additionally, what I've found is that the exceptions tend to move here because their risk taking is much more acceptable here (or they are risk takers willing to move across the world, hard to say which way the causation goes).
- biztos 1y ago
  > non-us workers are great if you give them a specific task, even a really hard task ...which is a lot like the LLMs! Maybe the skillset required to manage non-US workers is the same as for managing ChatGPT 6o, but the latter scales better.
- bruce511 1y ago
  >> What I've found is that only Americans exhibit self-starting and creativity. I'm going to counterpoint somewhat. I think those attributes are evenly spread into all countries, but equally I think they are uncommon in all countries. I don't live in the US. I have traveled there and elsewhere. I would agree that there are lots of cultural differences between places, even places as nominally similar as say the UK, Australia and the US. Of course who you interact with in various places matters. If you go to India and visit a remote-programming-company you'll meet a specific kind of person, one well suited to providing the services they offer. Dig a bit deeper elsewhere and you'll find some very bright, very creative, engineers in every culture. In some cases those folk are doing remote work for US companies. In a few cases they're building the software (creatively and all) that the US company is selling. In countries that are isolated for one or other reason creativity thrives. Israel, South Africa, Russia, all have (or had) exceptional engineering abilities developed because international support was withheld. Yes, it is hard to find good talent. It is hard to develop and nurture it. But it exists everywhere. And more and more I'm seeing folks outside the US take American jobs, precisely because American workers are so keen to explain how portable those jobs are. I understand that the American psyche is built on exceptionalism. And that does exist in some areas. But unfortunately it also acts as a filter blinding you to both exceptionalism elsewhere and inferiority at home. By the time you realise someone else has the edge, it's too late. We've seen this in industry after industry. Programing is no different. I understand also that shooting the messenger is easier than absorbing the message. Let the down-voting begin.
root_axis 1y ago
It doesn't matter what they promote, remote labor is an economic reality. It's not as if employers are going to forget they can offshore your job because you show up to the office 8am sharp every morning. The moment they can replace you for cheaper, they will, whether you insist on working remotely or not.
estimator7292 1y ago
In an ideal world, we'd have some sort of central system that businesses are bound by, in the interest of the common good, to employ domestic workers. But alas, such a system is fundamentally impossible. Physics just won't allow it.
slt2021 1y ago
>>Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place? capitalism dictates that a capable remote person will not keep working for a single employer, as it will be a waste of time. he/she will work for multiple employers (overemployed and such), maximizing earnings, thus it will constantly keep a gap between in-office and remote workers
laughing_man 1y ago
That's my argument against looking for a 100% remote job. Even if the company is happy with you now, eventually there will be new management that sees your job as low-hanging fruit for expense reduction.
PeterStuer 1y ago
When I was on projects with India, churn there was very much higher than from EU sources.
trod1234 1y ago
Regulation is for when businesses cannot regulate themselves. In many larger companies also, nationstate threats and national security are a trending issue. If you deal with a lot of PII, outsourcing your data processing pipelines to China isn't going to fly with Congress when you get subpoena'ed for a round with Hawley.
elevation 1y ago
As a US-based developer I do not feel threatened by the "cheap" offshore developers I encounter. I've repeatedly been hired to clean up after offshore developers who: * lied about their capabilities/experience to get the job, * failed to grok requirements through the language barrier, * were unable to fix critical bugs in their own code base, * committed buggy chatgpt output verbatim, * and could not be held liable because their firm is effectively beyond the reach of the US legal system. In a couple of projects I've seen a single US based developer replace an entire offshore team, deliver a superior result, and provide management with a much more responsive communication loop, in 1% of the billable hours. The difference in value is so stark that one client even fired the VP who'd lead the offshoring boondoggle. Software talent is simply not as fungible as some MBAs would like to believe.
- throwaway48476 1y ago
  That's not the talent not being fungible but the trust and accountability not being fungible. Which is a structural issue and unlikely to be resolved. I suspect it's more profitable for a lot of VPs for offshore labor to be as inefficient as possible.
  - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
    Exactly, its an incentives issue (see my comment as I talk about it in detail there)
- tayo42 1y ago
  More or less my experience too. But at the same time, I doubt there is anything special about me or my US born coworkers. We aren't superior just because of the continent we live in. But offshore work is almost as a rule terrible quality done by people that are frustrating to work with. It doesn't make sense
  - FpUser 1y ago
    This experience most likely because dealing with offshore software farms. Those are the same shit as their western counterparts and even worse because of language and logistics. On an individual scale however one can for example easily find great developers in Eastern Europe, and former USSR countries that do amazing job and for very attractive price. Just not dirt cheap. And yes. There is nothing special about North America as far as quality of software developers in general. Mostly you get average buzzword indoctrinated not so great people with some amazing expectation salary wise.
Tade0 1y ago
As an outsider I think Americans still have the upper hand in, for lack of a better term, work ethic. A lot of that stems from a lack of job security. Stuff like suddenly being locked out of your work email/slack or being escorted out of company premises is largely unheard of in the rest of the world. As a point of comparison: I'm a contractor based in a popular outsourcing destination. My contract is extended well over a month before it expires and I would need to do something particularly harmful to be let go just like that, as our client values continuity of services and will hold the agency accountable should that suffer. Over here if a job listing mentions "US client" it typically means considerably more work for considerably more pay. Some go for that, others opt for more relaxed roles. I can't imagine having US jobs as the only option.
deadbabe 1y ago
Oh look, another person who thinks engineers are commodities, especially in a field as loosely defined and unregulated as software engineering. They always ask “if a job can be done remote why not just hire a foreigner in a cheap place?” and never ask “if the foreigner was so good as the American engineer why wouldn’t they be getting paid the same as the American?” It’s like they think companies are dumb and there is some undiscovered engineering arbitrage opportunity waiting to be tapped that will end the high 6 figure salaries of American software engineers forever. And yet, since the 90s, software engineer salaries only go up. Millions of Indians flood the foreign markets, but American tech salaries only go up. Covid hits and everyone goes remote, but the salaries only go up. They always go up. American tech holds a supremacy over the world that you will likely not see the end of in your lifetime. There is so much money, so much risk taking, so much drive to dominate, other countries are generations behind. But hey keep doing what you’re doing. Maybe you’ll save a couple bucks while your competitors gobble up the market with far better engineering talent. Not “equivalent” talent: better talent..
- DecoySalamander 1y ago
  > if the foreigner was so good as the American engineer why wouldn’t they be getting paid the same as the American You should also ask whether you're paying American so much because they are so good, or are you paying them so much because rents in SF are so high? > Covid hits and everyone goes remote, but the salaries only go up. They always go up. Once again, did it go up because COVID infections somehow made american workers even better or because lockdowns caused mini tech boom while money printing tanked the dollar's value?
  - deadbabe 1y ago
    Do you really think companies are paying high tech salaries out of the goodness of their hearts? Like “oh this individual lives in a HCOL area, let’s pay them an appropriate amount” or “let’s share the spoils of this tech boom with our workers! $1.5million dollar bonus for everyone!”
sensanaty 1y ago
I'm one of those offshore people that live in a cheaper place and works remotely for a US co. The majority of people in the company are still in the US, and even for the East coast, the timezones are just annoying to work around sometimes. Either I need to do late days, or they have to do uber early mornings/SUPER late days, don't even get me started on West coast where the hours basically never match. And I'm in the closest timezone I can be for the US. And there's also a cultural aspect to it. I simply work differently to how the US bosses expect, because my employer has to respect worker's rights if they want to hire people in the EU unless they hire them as contractors (they still have many protections in that case though). I clock off at exactly 17:00, I never answer messages outside working hours, I don't do overtime or anything resembling it etc. And yes, they don't pay me the same as I would in the US, but it's really not that much lower, plus life is just cheaper, even here in the Netherlands. I get paid less relatively, but from what I can tell other that the people getting paid obscene amounts, my quality of life is higher than most of my US counterparts I've noticed my US colleagues are much more willing to waste away their lives for their employer as well, even if there's no real expectation for them to do so, and the business obviously prefers those kind of employees over the ones like me. So there's still plenty of reasons to keep hiring US-based devs, from cultural to logistical. Maybe you guys should work on getting some actual worker protections first, though...
- weatherlite 1y ago
  > but it's really not that much lower, plus life is just cheaper, even here in the Netherlands. Lived in the NL for 4 years, it was many things - cheap wasn't one of them. With the enormous taxes , high rents and mediocre salaries I don't think you can make the case it's somehow cheaper than the U.S unless you specifically mean Manhattan and Silicon Valley.
  - sensanaty 1y ago
    There's a reason I included that "even", because indeed NL is not cheap. However if you're not in SV or NYC, you're also not making the ludicrous half-a-million figures that people often talk about as well. Myself having lived in NYC, I can tell you right now QoL is dramatically higher in NL even if I'm earning a lot less cash. Also, it definitely is cheaper than those cities, even if you're in Amsterdam (and cities like Utrecht or Den Haag are a lot cheaper than Amsterdam too). Around the 50-60k Euro mark is a VERY decent and comfortable living in the Netherlands and you'll be hard pressed to find companies not paying that much for medior roles, yet alone senior ones. Plus you have the bigger companies like Adyen, Booking, ASML etc. plus remote US companies that pay ~100-125k for Medior+ talent (I know this as I literally today, a mere 4 hours ago got an offer letter from one of the mentioned companies as a SWE II). The taxes only really start hurting in the 70k-90k region, but since it's progressively taxed it's still not the end of the world. Also if you work for one of the aforementioned big boys then you're probably going to be in the party bracket (literally what it's called :p) where the sting is lessened, stupidly enough. Remember, average salary in NL is around 40k-45k EUR. If anyone above a medior level manages to work at a tech-adjacent company as is getting paid less than that, it's time to move jobs because the market has shifted up massively as of late in terms of wages, at least anecdotally from what I can see. And most importantly, money isn't everything which is so often missed in these discussions talking about EU vs US comp. Most importantly of all is that I never have to worry about healthcare costs should anything happen to me or my loved ones that don't have the privilege of being sponsored by a megacorp, and very importantly I have job security and a permanent contract that makes it damned hard to get rid of me. Now things aren't perfect here obviously, train costs are astronomical, the tax brackets are absurd (the aforementioned party bracket being an absolute farce), the healthcare system while great can be very annoying to navigate alone, and indeed rent in the private sector and housing costs in general is completely detached from reality... But compared to anywhere in the US I've ever lived, especially if we zoom out a bit and look at it from a lens of someone not in tech and not making FAANG-level money? I'll take Utrecht 100 times out of 10, thank you very much.
safety1st 1y ago
I have no comment on your strawmanning about programmers thinking they're geniuses or something. But I've yet to meet an accountant who puts in their 40 hours a week and somehow manages to grow their backlog rather than shrink it. Whereas bad programmers who will do that exist in spades. Clearly the two professions are not identical. That said, I've had two mind bogglingly bad accountants on my payroll in the past who made $100K+ mistakes if we hadn't caught them and fired the fuck out of those dumbasses. One was American and one was Filipino.
celeryd 1y ago
Yes. I think American programmers are at a local optimum for combining ingenuity and work ethic. You can get more ingenuity vs work ethic or the other way around elsewhere, but the American blend seems to be best.
lexandstuff 1y ago
The trend of offshoring came and went nearly two decades ago. Time zone differences, language barriers and cultural differences proved insurmountable. Hybrid remote seems to work quite well, on the other hand.
guappa 1y ago
Being in the office won't stop offshoring anyway.
goodpoint 1y ago
You think having a HQ in US would prevent a company from opening an office in another country?
crimsoneer 1y ago
I mean, while this might be true, Europe is full to the brim of developers who speak fluent English, and yet cost maybe a third of their US counterparts. Programming is really quite far from being a global market.
0xbadcafebee 1y ago
It's not intellectual superiority. They've already offshored all the other jobs they can. If they could offshore my job, they would. But it's very hard to find reliable talent anywhere, much less offshore. It is easier to find the talent here, and there's more of it. Then there's the complexity of hiring, the timezones, language barrier, and all the other small complications that add up. Once you have world-class experts all over the developing world, my job might disappear. But you need experience to get there, which they aren't getting, because they aren't here. It's privilege 101: if you have it, you get more of it; if you don't have it, you don't get any of it. We're very privileged to be high-value domestic workers. And by the way, remote work has been a thing here for decades, yet the calculation hasn't changed. Our remote jobs are still safe.

nitwit005 1y ago

They've been trying to offshore the work for most of a century now. There are still millions of software engineers in the US.

deanmoriarty 1y ago

You’ll get downvoted but in my experience, which may not be representative of the entire population, this is true. A mid-size US tech company I know well went fully remote after a lot of insistence from the workforce, prior to the pandemic they were fully in office. Soon enough they started hiring remotely from EU, and now the vast majority of their technical folks are from there. The only US workers remaining are mostly GTM/sales. I personally heard the founder saying “why should we pay US comp when we can get extremely good talent in EU for less than half the cost”. EU workers, on average, also tend to not switch job as frequently, so that’s a further advantage for the company. Once you adapt to remote-only, you can scoop some amazing talent in Poland/Ukraine/Serbia/etc for $50k a year.

raincole 1y ago
I think most programmers in the US simply don't realize how much they earn compared to the rest of the world. I'm not talking about rural Chinese villages whose name you can't pronounce. Or the stereotypical Indian call centers. I'm talking about highly educated programmers who can communicate fluently in English, in cities like Beijing or Munich. If people in SV know how (relatively) little their counterparts make in these places, they'd be much more opposed to remote work. And that was before LLM. Today practically the entire planet can write passable English.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- geodel 1y ago
  Agree. It is harsh truth. Even the good old outsourcing seems in resurgence. Lately I see at work large delegations of IT bodyshops claiming 60% saving with AI + a dev/support center in India. It may or may not work but it can crater 70% of IT/software department by 2027 as per their plan.
- oefrha 1y ago
  Yeah, for $100k or slightly less you can hire very good devs with 5+ yr experience in CN or DE. Often speaks English at full professional proficiency without the help of LLMs too. I know because I currently work for a fully remote startup with people from both countries. For that kind of money you can do what in the U.S., hire below average juniors? Even the most clueless junior likely makes more in SV.
  - simonh 1y ago
    Flip that around. Junior devs in the US earning $100k is the anomaly. The fact this is the case indicates the pipeline for competent developer talent is bottlenecked. Right now is still an amazing time to be in Tech. The fact the industry is so hungry for talent it’s paying such rates and is expanding abroad in search of new supply is a sign of it’s health.
typewithrhythm 1y ago
It's interesting, ai seems to be enabling the middle in a positive way. On the other side, we have started to find that the value of outsourcing to very low cost regions has completely disappeared. I expect that the wages in eastern Europe will quickly rise in a way they never did in former outsourcing hotspots (India for example), because they are able to do similarly complex and quality work to westerners, and are now enabled by awesome translation tools. The low quality for cheaper is now better served by the Artificial Indian.
imtringued 1y ago
The fixed exchange rates between EU countries massively drags down the international cost of a German software engineer, and US companies have yet to wisen up to that fact.
matwood 1y ago
There's a lot of nuance in these types of stories. First, the US is far from uniform in salaries. Salaries in large metro areas are different from smaller areas and are different from CA/SV. Europe also isn't uniform, and in Western Europe if a company doesn't move to all contractors they will pay significantly more into a countries equivalent to social security. Personally, I would be uncomfortable having my entire development staff be contractors as their interests are not exactly aligned with mine. Amazing talent may end up cheaper in certain locales for a period of time, but if they are amazing they will become more expensive. IMO, what's at risk are the entry/mid FAANG type jobs that pay a lot for what they are.
mosburger 1y ago
My previous employer stopped hiring in the EU (except for the UK, where they were based, and South Africa, where the CTO was from) because the labor laws there made it too difficult for them to fire people, which was a particularly troublesome for them as they had almost quarterly layoffs. They switched back to hiring in the UK and US where there are fewer worker protections.
- sensanaty 1y ago
  Does the UK really not have labor laws as strong as most countries in the EU? It's not like you can't fire people in EU, you just have to have an actual legitimate reason to do so, exactly because doing quarterly layoffs is absurd and shouldn't be tolerated by anyone.
  - mosburger 1y ago
    The UK seemed generally slightly less strict than, say, Germany, France, or Poland. It sorta felt like it was splitting the difference between the US and the EU.
- LtWorf 1y ago
  Maybe he should not hire people and then fire them after 3 months? Could it be that your previous employer is a terrible employer?
  - mosburger 1y ago
    Oh it absolutely was a terrible employer.

cm2187 1y ago

And being "superior" doesn't necessarily mean extraordinary coding skills. The vast majority of code to be written doesn't require that. What it requires however is a combination of common sense and good understanding of the underlying business. This is in short supply in many of the locations the jobs are being offshored to. But let's be honest, it was also on short supply in the corporate IT departments being offshored, though not quite to the same degree.

hn_throwaway_99 1y ago

You're getting downvoted, but IMO what you're saying is exactly true, and I've seen it happen. In my experience, pre-2015 or so, offshoring was limited in its utility. Communication was a bitch because videoconferencing from everyday laptops wasn't quite there yet, and a lot of the favored offshoring centers like India had horrible time zone overlap with the US. And perhaps most importantly, companies as a whole weren't used to fully supporting remote colleagues. Now, though, if I interact with the majority of my colleagues over Zoom/Teams/Meet anyway, what difference does it matter where they're sitting? I've worked with absolutely phenomenal developers from Argentina, Poland and Ukraine, and there was basically no difference logistically between working with them and American colleagues. Even the folks in Eastern Europe shifted their day slightly later so that we would get about 4 hours of overlap time, which was plenty of time for communication and collaboration, and IMO made folks even more productive because it naturally enforced "collaboration hours" vs. "heads down hours". I understand why people like remote, but I agree, US devs pushing for remote should understand they're going to be competing against folks making less than half their salaries.

Moru 1y ago
> ... should understand they're going to be competing against folks making less than half their salaries. The lower salary can be offset by the lower need for money when you don't need to buy your lunch, you don't need that expensive car to get to work and so on. The time you used for commuting could instead be spent working for another company part time.

jmspring 1y ago

As some have said, it's not about being superior. Common language, background, maybe overlaps in education, and avoiding cultures like those at Indian offshore companies where there is a lot of churn, maybe 1 Sr person you "hired" really farming the work out to multiple Jr people. Timezone overlap is also a big one.

hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
I agree with what you've written, but I've worked with colleagues in South America and Eastern Europe where none of those problems existed: folks spoke perfect English, people were incredibly motivated to do a good job, and they spoke up proactively when problems arose. I have had issues with Indian outsourcers like you say (lots of churn, time zone hell, a culture of pretending everything is fine until release day and then saying "sorry, nothing works", etc.), but it's a bigger world now, and there are still lots of folks making half of US dev salaries where none of these problems exist.
- DrewADesign 1y ago
  My intuition says there are some stylistic differences. It seems like some development cultures somewhat have better results with more rigid computer engineering sort of tasks with high granularity requirements and more straightforward goals, even if the tasks are really hard, deeply technical and the goals are difficult. I think some are better at the more nebulous sort of tasks with a lot of flexibility. Both are really useful mindsets that seem much less useful if improperly applied. Given, outsourcing is probably going to be hit-or-miss regardless of who’s doing it.

Aurornis 1y ago

It’s amusing to see these comments as if American tech companies don’t already have offices all over the world. Even a mid-size tech company I worked for had over a dozen small offices around the world to collect as many qualified developers as they could. They had some remote work too. Still hired a lot of Americans. Thinking that remote work will be the end of American workers has been the driving force behind outsourcing pushes for decades, but it hasn’t worked that way.

fakedang 1y ago
> Still hired a lot of Americans. Thinking that remote work will be the end of American workers has been the driving force behind outsourcing pushes for decades, but it hasn’t worked that way. The difference is that back then the project lead could explore outsourcing certain roles to India, EE and LatAm, while today the VP can explore outsourcing the project lead roles to those countries. These countries have built up their own native tech talent, many of whom already bring more to the table than the typical American - they work longer hours, for cheaper, and often bring a lot more experience. I've seen companies who only run sales teams with Americans, with the rest of the workforce being shipped out. Notably, India already has nearly 2000 GCCs (Global Capability Centers, mega complexes of offices for foreign companies) set up, with that number only projected to increase as more mid-market firms expand. While many of them are just back offices, some of them, like Walmart's GCC, is the entire tech division - the CTO remains in the US, while the entire software team is in India. While earlier the Indian team would have had to adjust their timings to USA's, now quite a few US-based employees have had to adjust their timings to India's.
- jimbokun 1y ago
  All of that has been true for decades, except maybe the specific numbers.

Buttons840 1y ago

If remote work is cheaper for the owners, then why are the workers the ones promoting it?

jedberg 1y ago

> what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place? I've worked with remote workers from around the world. Let me preface by saying there are of course exceptions but: What I've found is that most often Americans exhibit self-starting and creativity. What I mean by that is non-us workers are great if you give them a specific task, even a really hard task. But if you give them a nebulous problem, or worse, a business outcome, they tend to perform much more poorly. And I rarely see non-americans say something like "I think our customers would like it if we added X to the product, can I work on that?". I don't think it's because Americans are better at this -- I think it's cultural. America has a much higher risk tolerance than the rest of the world. Failing is considered a good thing in the USA. And the USA is much more entrepreneurial than the rest of the world. These two things combined create a culture difference that makes a business difference. Additionally, what I've found is that the exceptions tend to move here because their risk taking is much more acceptable here (or they are risk takers willing to move across the world, hard to say which way the causation goes).

biztos 1y ago
> non-us workers are great if you give them a specific task, even a really hard task ...which is a lot like the LLMs! Maybe the skillset required to manage non-US workers is the same as for managing ChatGPT 6o, but the latter scales better.
bruce511 1y ago
>> What I've found is that only Americans exhibit self-starting and creativity. I'm going to counterpoint somewhat. I think those attributes are evenly spread into all countries, but equally I think they are uncommon in all countries. I don't live in the US. I have traveled there and elsewhere. I would agree that there are lots of cultural differences between places, even places as nominally similar as say the UK, Australia and the US. Of course who you interact with in various places matters. If you go to India and visit a remote-programming-company you'll meet a specific kind of person, one well suited to providing the services they offer. Dig a bit deeper elsewhere and you'll find some very bright, very creative, engineers in every culture. In some cases those folk are doing remote work for US companies. In a few cases they're building the software (creatively and all) that the US company is selling. In countries that are isolated for one or other reason creativity thrives. Israel, South Africa, Russia, all have (or had) exceptional engineering abilities developed because international support was withheld. Yes, it is hard to find good talent. It is hard to develop and nurture it. But it exists everywhere. And more and more I'm seeing folks outside the US take American jobs, precisely because American workers are so keen to explain how portable those jobs are. I understand that the American psyche is built on exceptionalism. And that does exist in some areas. But unfortunately it also acts as a filter blinding you to both exceptionalism elsewhere and inferiority at home. By the time you realise someone else has the edge, it's too late. We've seen this in industry after industry. Programing is no different. I understand also that shooting the messenger is easier than absorbing the message. Let the down-voting begin.

root_axis 1y ago

It doesn't matter what they promote, remote labor is an economic reality. It's not as if employers are going to forget they can offshore your job because you show up to the office 8am sharp every morning. The moment they can replace you for cheaper, they will, whether you insist on working remotely or not.

estimator7292 1y ago

In an ideal world, we'd have some sort of central system that businesses are bound by, in the interest of the common good, to employ domestic workers. But alas, such a system is fundamentally impossible. Physics just won't allow it.

slt2021 1y ago

>>Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place? capitalism dictates that a capable remote person will not keep working for a single employer, as it will be a waste of time. he/she will work for multiple employers (overemployed and such), maximizing earnings, thus it will constantly keep a gap between in-office and remote workers

laughing_man 1y ago

That's my argument against looking for a 100% remote job. Even if the company is happy with you now, eventually there will be new management that sees your job as low-hanging fruit for expense reduction.

PeterStuer 1y ago

When I was on projects with India, churn there was very much higher than from EU sources.

trod1234 1y ago

Regulation is for when businesses cannot regulate themselves. In many larger companies also, nationstate threats and national security are a trending issue. If you deal with a lot of PII, outsourcing your data processing pipelines to China isn't going to fly with Congress when you get subpoena'ed for a round with Hawley.

elevation 1y ago

As a US-based developer I do not feel threatened by the "cheap" offshore developers I encounter. I've repeatedly been hired to clean up after offshore developers who: * lied about their capabilities/experience to get the job, * failed to grok requirements through the language barrier, * were unable to fix critical bugs in their own code base, * committed buggy chatgpt output verbatim, * and could not be held liable because their firm is effectively beyond the reach of the US legal system. In a couple of projects I've seen a single US based developer replace an entire offshore team, deliver a superior result, and provide management with a much more responsive communication loop, in 1% of the billable hours. The difference in value is so stark that one client even fired the VP who'd lead the offshoring boondoggle. Software talent is simply not as fungible as some MBAs would like to believe.

throwaway48476 1y ago
That's not the talent not being fungible but the trust and accountability not being fungible. Which is a structural issue and unlikely to be resolved. I suspect it's more profitable for a lot of VPs for offshore labor to be as inefficient as possible.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  Exactly, its an incentives issue (see my comment as I talk about it in detail there)
tayo42 1y ago
More or less my experience too. But at the same time, I doubt there is anything special about me or my US born coworkers. We aren't superior just because of the continent we live in. But offshore work is almost as a rule terrible quality done by people that are frustrating to work with. It doesn't make sense
- FpUser 1y ago
  This experience most likely because dealing with offshore software farms. Those are the same shit as their western counterparts and even worse because of language and logistics. On an individual scale however one can for example easily find great developers in Eastern Europe, and former USSR countries that do amazing job and for very attractive price. Just not dirt cheap. And yes. There is nothing special about North America as far as quality of software developers in general. Mostly you get average buzzword indoctrinated not so great people with some amazing expectation salary wise.

Tade0 1y ago

As an outsider I think Americans still have the upper hand in, for lack of a better term, work ethic. A lot of that stems from a lack of job security. Stuff like suddenly being locked out of your work email/slack or being escorted out of company premises is largely unheard of in the rest of the world. As a point of comparison: I'm a contractor based in a popular outsourcing destination. My contract is extended well over a month before it expires and I would need to do something particularly harmful to be let go just like that, as our client values continuity of services and will hold the agency accountable should that suffer. Over here if a job listing mentions "US client" it typically means considerably more work for considerably more pay. Some go for that, others opt for more relaxed roles. I can't imagine having US jobs as the only option.

deadbabe 1y ago

Oh look, another person who thinks engineers are commodities, especially in a field as loosely defined and unregulated as software engineering. They always ask “if a job can be done remote why not just hire a foreigner in a cheap place?” and never ask “if the foreigner was so good as the American engineer why wouldn’t they be getting paid the same as the American?” It’s like they think companies are dumb and there is some undiscovered engineering arbitrage opportunity waiting to be tapped that will end the high 6 figure salaries of American software engineers forever. And yet, since the 90s, software engineer salaries only go up. Millions of Indians flood the foreign markets, but American tech salaries only go up. Covid hits and everyone goes remote, but the salaries only go up. They always go up. American tech holds a supremacy over the world that you will likely not see the end of in your lifetime. There is so much money, so much risk taking, so much drive to dominate, other countries are generations behind. But hey keep doing what you’re doing. Maybe you’ll save a couple bucks while your competitors gobble up the market with far better engineering talent. Not “equivalent” talent: better talent..

DecoySalamander 1y ago
> if the foreigner was so good as the American engineer why wouldn’t they be getting paid the same as the American You should also ask whether you're paying American so much because they are so good, or are you paying them so much because rents in SF are so high? > Covid hits and everyone goes remote, but the salaries only go up. They always go up. Once again, did it go up because COVID infections somehow made american workers even better or because lockdowns caused mini tech boom while money printing tanked the dollar's value?
- deadbabe 1y ago
  Do you really think companies are paying high tech salaries out of the goodness of their hearts? Like “oh this individual lives in a HCOL area, let’s pay them an appropriate amount” or “let’s share the spoils of this tech boom with our workers! $1.5million dollar bonus for everyone!”

sensanaty 1y ago

I'm one of those offshore people that live in a cheaper place and works remotely for a US co. The majority of people in the company are still in the US, and even for the East coast, the timezones are just annoying to work around sometimes. Either I need to do late days, or they have to do uber early mornings/SUPER late days, don't even get me started on West coast where the hours basically never match. And I'm in the closest timezone I can be for the US. And there's also a cultural aspect to it. I simply work differently to how the US bosses expect, because my employer has to respect worker's rights if they want to hire people in the EU unless they hire them as contractors (they still have many protections in that case though). I clock off at exactly 17:00, I never answer messages outside working hours, I don't do overtime or anything resembling it etc. And yes, they don't pay me the same as I would in the US, but it's really not that much lower, plus life is just cheaper, even here in the Netherlands. I get paid less relatively, but from what I can tell other that the people getting paid obscene amounts, my quality of life is higher than most of my US counterparts I've noticed my US colleagues are much more willing to waste away their lives for their employer as well, even if there's no real expectation for them to do so, and the business obviously prefers those kind of employees over the ones like me. So there's still plenty of reasons to keep hiring US-based devs, from cultural to logistical. Maybe you guys should work on getting some actual worker protections first, though...

weatherlite 1y ago
> but it's really not that much lower, plus life is just cheaper, even here in the Netherlands. Lived in the NL for 4 years, it was many things - cheap wasn't one of them. With the enormous taxes , high rents and mediocre salaries I don't think you can make the case it's somehow cheaper than the U.S unless you specifically mean Manhattan and Silicon Valley.
- sensanaty 1y ago
  There's a reason I included that "even", because indeed NL is not cheap. However if you're not in SV or NYC, you're also not making the ludicrous half-a-million figures that people often talk about as well. Myself having lived in NYC, I can tell you right now QoL is dramatically higher in NL even if I'm earning a lot less cash. Also, it definitely is cheaper than those cities, even if you're in Amsterdam (and cities like Utrecht or Den Haag are a lot cheaper than Amsterdam too). Around the 50-60k Euro mark is a VERY decent and comfortable living in the Netherlands and you'll be hard pressed to find companies not paying that much for medior roles, yet alone senior ones. Plus you have the bigger companies like Adyen, Booking, ASML etc. plus remote US companies that pay ~100-125k for Medior+ talent (I know this as I literally today, a mere 4 hours ago got an offer letter from one of the mentioned companies as a SWE II). The taxes only really start hurting in the 70k-90k region, but since it's progressively taxed it's still not the end of the world. Also if you work for one of the aforementioned big boys then you're probably going to be in the party bracket (literally what it's called :p) where the sting is lessened, stupidly enough. Remember, average salary in NL is around 40k-45k EUR. If anyone above a medior level manages to work at a tech-adjacent company as is getting paid less than that, it's time to move jobs because the market has shifted up massively as of late in terms of wages, at least anecdotally from what I can see. And most importantly, money isn't everything which is so often missed in these discussions talking about EU vs US comp. Most importantly of all is that I never have to worry about healthcare costs should anything happen to me or my loved ones that don't have the privilege of being sponsored by a megacorp, and very importantly I have job security and a permanent contract that makes it damned hard to get rid of me. Now things aren't perfect here obviously, train costs are astronomical, the tax brackets are absurd (the aforementioned party bracket being an absolute farce), the healthcare system while great can be very annoying to navigate alone, and indeed rent in the private sector and housing costs in general is completely detached from reality... But compared to anywhere in the US I've ever lived, especially if we zoom out a bit and look at it from a lens of someone not in tech and not making FAANG-level money? I'll take Utrecht 100 times out of 10, thank you very much.

safety1st 1y ago

I have no comment on your strawmanning about programmers thinking they're geniuses or something. But I've yet to meet an accountant who puts in their 40 hours a week and somehow manages to grow their backlog rather than shrink it. Whereas bad programmers who will do that exist in spades. Clearly the two professions are not identical. That said, I've had two mind bogglingly bad accountants on my payroll in the past who made $100K+ mistakes if we hadn't caught them and fired the fuck out of those dumbasses. One was American and one was Filipino.

celeryd 1y ago

Yes. I think American programmers are at a local optimum for combining ingenuity and work ethic. You can get more ingenuity vs work ethic or the other way around elsewhere, but the American blend seems to be best.

lexandstuff 1y ago

The trend of offshoring came and went nearly two decades ago. Time zone differences, language barriers and cultural differences proved insurmountable. Hybrid remote seems to work quite well, on the other hand.

guappa 1y ago

Being in the office won't stop offshoring anyway.

goodpoint 1y ago

You think having a HQ in US would prevent a company from opening an office in another country?

crimsoneer 1y ago

I mean, while this might be true, Europe is full to the brim of developers who speak fluent English, and yet cost maybe a third of their US counterparts. Programming is really quite far from being a global market.

0xbadcafebee 1y ago

It's not intellectual superiority. They've already offshored all the other jobs they can. If they could offshore my job, they would. But it's very hard to find reliable talent anywhere, much less offshore. It is easier to find the talent here, and there's more of it. Then there's the complexity of hiring, the timezones, language barrier, and all the other small complications that add up. Once you have world-class experts all over the developing world, my job might disappear. But you need experience to get there, which they aren't getting, because they aren't here. It's privilege 101: if you have it, you get more of it; if you don't have it, you don't get any of it. We're very privileged to be high-value domestic workers. And by the way, remote work has been a thing here for decades, yet the calculation hasn't changed. Our remote jobs are still safe.