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> 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 th

> 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.
- jedberg 1y ago
  > I think those attributes are evenly spread into all countries, but equally I think they are uncommon in all countries. The data does not support your statement. From a startup report just four days ago: The United States alone generates 46.6% of all startup activity worldwide, nearly half of the global total. Together with China (9.2%), the United Kingdom (5.6%), and India (5%), these four countries account for 66.4% of the absolute global startup activity. I will give you that Israel in particular has a strong risk taking culture, as does Singapore and Estonia. And there are a lot of startups coming out of there. But overall the US has way more risk taking. And like I said at the very beginning, there are of course exceptions. Yes, every culture has some brilliant risk takers. But at least until recently, many of them came to the USA after they got successful.
  - watwut 1y ago
    Creativity and startup are two different things. Many of those startups are not creative in any way. And conversely being creative does not imply creating a company. This is about how capital work. America is unique in way it businessmen tend to think that creating a business is the only way to be creative. And incidentally, post was about employee creativity.
  - matusp 1y ago
    There is startup activity in the US because there is enough capital to fund it. Getting funding for a startup even in pretty rich countries in EU is more difficult by an order of magnitude.
    - nxm 1y ago
      It’s not just funding but also bankruptcy laws are written in a way that encourages entrepreneurship, while not being overburdened by regulations
  - closewith 1y ago
    It's interesting that your metrics for creativity and risk taking are financial. I think you should reflect on that.
laughing_man 1y ago
>What I've found is that only Americans exhibit self-starting and creativity. Isn't that mostly a function of how incentives are aligned? I had a job with a lot of outsourcing to India. The Indians were given specific bits of code to write. They didn't even know how their code fit into the application. Their entire incentive structure was geared toward getting them to write those bits of code as quickly as possible, finish, and take another task. There just wasn't any room for "self-starting and creativity". I have a feeling if the entire application had been moved to India things would have been different.
- jedberg 1y ago
  It could be. But I worked at companies where we had full time employees all around the world, all of whom had full access to the same information the rest of us had. And I still saw this behavior generally. There were of course exceptions. Interestingly the biggest exceptions were ones that had at some point lived and worked in the USA, and then had returned to their home country for some reason or another. > I have a feeling if the entire application had been moved to India things would have been different. I had direct experience with this. We had an office of full time employees in India tasked with a project, but I still had to hand hold them through most of the key decisions (which I didn't have to do with the US based teams nearly as much).
  - closewith 1y ago
    I think what you saw is more related to work/life balance than any innate difference in people. That's certainly my experience. Employment is central to American's identity in a way that's almost considered perverse elsewhere.
    - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
      Exactly!! Its also like, no I don't think a family is supposed to be where some guy on the top extracts all the money and then trickes it down and I get %'s of what I did. This doesn't sound like a family. Someone create a blog post on this phenomenon as to me, this seems like americans having an parasocial bond with companies (I vaguely remember the stripe CEO had said my name once or something along that lines, a blog post and it felt parasocial man) I mean, I just feel like americans complaining about indians devs are complaining about the wrong things, like maybe I don't get them but its not true as to what they are saying. I just don't get it man. I have seen Indian govt jobs to be much more like american private jobs in the sense that employment becomes central to their identity and there is this sense of tightknit community for the most part and maybe that has to do with the fact that the govt isn't usually exploiting its own workers and the tight knit sense of community comes from helping really poor children in teaching, building roads that my uncle flexes on me that I built this road or this college and showing me the absolute chad he sometimes is.
nurettin 1y ago
I've worked with experts from around the world. After a certain level of competitiveness they are all pretty much the same. Once you become "pals" they all start suggesting improvements. Maybe you socialize better with americans.
- jedberg 1y ago
  Sure, at the highest levels you'll find these traits everywhere. But there is a reason these folks have ascended to the highest levels. What I'm saying is that you find it far more often in junior people in the USA.
  - closewith 1y ago
    No, you found it in your self-selecting experience.
  - hdgvhicv 1y ago
    I gif it far more often in UK juniors, US juniors tend to be more concerned with moving to their next job than doing the current one. Maybe we just have different cultural expectations.
    - yonaguska 1y ago
      US juniors are getting paid a lot more at their second job.
watwut 1y ago
> America has a much higher risk tolerance than the rest of the world. America is one of the most risk averse countries in the world, seriously. Americans are constantly scared - of loosing job, of physical injury, of everything and everywhere. > Failing is considered a good thing in the USA America punishes failure pretty hard. Some peoples failures are ignored, but most peoples failures are punished in pretty significant ways.
- closewith 1y ago
  Yes, only a tiny minority of palatable failures is allowed in the US. For everything else, society will discard you like rubbish.
bubblyworld 1y ago
Only Americans exhibit creativity and drive? What nationalistic nonsense is this? Step outside of your bubble lol.
- jedberg 1y ago
  That's not at all what I said. I said I see it far more often in Americans than other cultures. And I have stepped out of my bubble many times. I've worked with a lot of people in a lot of countries. They agree with me.
  - bubblyworld 1y ago
    > 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. I mean come on, how do you expect people to interpret this paragraph? I can only assume you are trolling, so I'm done here.
  - closewith 1y ago
    And now you're talking to people who don't agree with you. Maybe you hadn't punctured your bubble as much as you believe.
  - hdgvhicv 1y ago
    So does ChatGPT. Have fun changing French fries into salad.
- siva7 1y ago
  It's easy to criticize that part but his last sentence is spot on: the creative it minds from those countries tend to migrate to places that match their entrepreneurial personality better and those usually won't be China or India but rather somewhere in America or even Europe.
  - Moru 1y ago
    They go where they are told it's easier to get money for their ideas. This has long been the US. However it looks like it is changing in some fields lately.
eastbound 1y ago
> I don't think it's because Americans are better at this -- I think it's cultural. My experience is ANY delegation incurs a big loss in agency. I want to create a startup -> my employees are much less invested than I am. My remote (French) employees are even less invested. My Ukrainian employees are completely passive and I fired them. The more the distance, the less invested, the more passive. It’s tempting to attribute this to your country’s qualities, but my experience is every country is a mixed bag.
anal_reactor 1y ago
I work for an American company. 90% of my job is covering my ass because if I push for a novel idea and it fails, it's going to be a huge problem.
KronisLV 1y ago
> Failing is considered a good thing in the USA. And the USA is much more entrepreneurial than the rest of the world. I wonder how many devs have been sacked for going out of their way and making stuff nobody in business asked for, or perhaps that broke something along the way and ended up being a net negative: in the EU vs US and other parts of the world. Might be loosely related to how much money the company has to burn and the nature of their work (e.g. probably not looked well upon in consulting where you have to convince clients to pay for whatever you've made), as well as how popular each type of work is in each part of the world.
Cthulhu_ 1y ago
While on the one side I think you have a point, on the other there's different dynamics in place as well; you're comparing offshore workers to internal employees. An offshore worker gets hired to do a job for another company, an internal employee is part of the company. That is, an external worker (and I'm a consultant, I know) gets paid per hour, if the company goes under for whatever reason they just move on to the next assignment, while an internal employee leans more on their job. Anyway that's just a theory. I'm a "consultant" which is just a fancy word for a temp / hired hand, and I'm somewhere in the middle in that I will think along with the company and propose improvements, but at the same time have lower risk and much less attachment to the companies I work for. I don't think it's cultural per se. As an extreme example, the CEOs of Google and Microsoft were both born and raised in India.
- jedberg 1y ago
  > An offshore worker gets hired to do a job for another company, an internal employee is part of the company. I've experienced both. Working with offshore employees and full time employees who happened to be in foreign countries. It was a similar experience with both, the exception being the ones that had previously lived and worked in the US. > I don't think it's cultural per se. As an extreme example, the CEOs of Google and Microsoft were both born and raised in India. Sundar Pichai moved to the US when he was in college. His entire working career and a bunch of his schooling was in the US. Satya Nadella did the same. As I said in my original reply, the ones who are more entrepreneurial or successful tend to move to the US (or at least used to).
charlieyu1 1y ago
I don't know about others but for me, I don't really care about business outcome. Why should I? It's the manager or the business side's job.
DecoySalamander 1y ago
> 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?". The most crucial difference in this context is that Americans are employed directly by the company, while foreign workers are behind several layers of management belonging to several companies. While you can walk around and deliver elevator pitches to higher-ups, foreign workers must track their time spent on tasks down to the minute in Jira. Then, they must find a manager who would like to pitch a feature to a manager who would pitch a feature to a manager in the U.S.
- trinix912 1y ago
  Exactly. I used to work in such a situation for a few years (consulting company hiring EE devs). I tried suggesting things, building PoC’s, pitching it to the manager, all was met with just “we’re on a limited budget, so stick with what we’ve arranged.” Had I built the things anyway it wouldn’t be met with praise, but looked down upon for bypassing the manager (or I just wouldn’t get paid for those hours). Many big corporations tend to be similar even when you’re employed directly. You can’t truly be creative when you’re stuck 7 layers of mgmt deep. You also have to understand that for those who’ve only worked in such situations, “risking” their position at a foreign company just to appear smart doesn’t seem like a good idea, so they don’t do it.
guappa 1y ago
In my own experience (EU company, acquired by USA) USA developers are good at burning money, less good at actually delivering a reliable product. But it can be due to terrible management hiring terribly.

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.

jedberg 1y ago
> I think those attributes are evenly spread into all countries, but equally I think they are uncommon in all countries. The data does not support your statement. From a startup report just four days ago: The United States alone generates 46.6% of all startup activity worldwide, nearly half of the global total. Together with China (9.2%), the United Kingdom (5.6%), and India (5%), these four countries account for 66.4% of the absolute global startup activity. I will give you that Israel in particular has a strong risk taking culture, as does Singapore and Estonia. And there are a lot of startups coming out of there. But overall the US has way more risk taking. And like I said at the very beginning, there are of course exceptions. Yes, every culture has some brilliant risk takers. But at least until recently, many of them came to the USA after they got successful.
- watwut 1y ago
  Creativity and startup are two different things. Many of those startups are not creative in any way. And conversely being creative does not imply creating a company. This is about how capital work. America is unique in way it businessmen tend to think that creating a business is the only way to be creative. And incidentally, post was about employee creativity.
- matusp 1y ago
  There is startup activity in the US because there is enough capital to fund it. Getting funding for a startup even in pretty rich countries in EU is more difficult by an order of magnitude.
  - nxm 1y ago
    It’s not just funding but also bankruptcy laws are written in a way that encourages entrepreneurship, while not being overburdened by regulations
- closewith 1y ago
  It's interesting that your metrics for creativity and risk taking are financial. I think you should reflect on that.

laughing_man 1y ago

>What I've found is that only Americans exhibit self-starting and creativity. Isn't that mostly a function of how incentives are aligned? I had a job with a lot of outsourcing to India. The Indians were given specific bits of code to write. They didn't even know how their code fit into the application. Their entire incentive structure was geared toward getting them to write those bits of code as quickly as possible, finish, and take another task. There just wasn't any room for "self-starting and creativity". I have a feeling if the entire application had been moved to India things would have been different.

jedberg 1y ago
It could be. But I worked at companies where we had full time employees all around the world, all of whom had full access to the same information the rest of us had. And I still saw this behavior generally. There were of course exceptions. Interestingly the biggest exceptions were ones that had at some point lived and worked in the USA, and then had returned to their home country for some reason or another. > I have a feeling if the entire application had been moved to India things would have been different. I had direct experience with this. We had an office of full time employees in India tasked with a project, but I still had to hand hold them through most of the key decisions (which I didn't have to do with the US based teams nearly as much).
- closewith 1y ago
  I think what you saw is more related to work/life balance than any innate difference in people. That's certainly my experience. Employment is central to American's identity in a way that's almost considered perverse elsewhere.
  - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
    Exactly!! Its also like, no I don't think a family is supposed to be where some guy on the top extracts all the money and then trickes it down and I get %'s of what I did. This doesn't sound like a family. Someone create a blog post on this phenomenon as to me, this seems like americans having an parasocial bond with companies (I vaguely remember the stripe CEO had said my name once or something along that lines, a blog post and it felt parasocial man) I mean, I just feel like americans complaining about indians devs are complaining about the wrong things, like maybe I don't get them but its not true as to what they are saying. I just don't get it man. I have seen Indian govt jobs to be much more like american private jobs in the sense that employment becomes central to their identity and there is this sense of tightknit community for the most part and maybe that has to do with the fact that the govt isn't usually exploiting its own workers and the tight knit sense of community comes from helping really poor children in teaching, building roads that my uncle flexes on me that I built this road or this college and showing me the absolute chad he sometimes is.

nurettin 1y ago

I've worked with experts from around the world. After a certain level of competitiveness they are all pretty much the same. Once you become "pals" they all start suggesting improvements. Maybe you socialize better with americans.

jedberg 1y ago
Sure, at the highest levels you'll find these traits everywhere. But there is a reason these folks have ascended to the highest levels. What I'm saying is that you find it far more often in junior people in the USA.
- closewith 1y ago
  No, you found it in your self-selecting experience.
- hdgvhicv 1y ago
  I gif it far more often in UK juniors, US juniors tend to be more concerned with moving to their next job than doing the current one. Maybe we just have different cultural expectations.
  - yonaguska 1y ago
    US juniors are getting paid a lot more at their second job.

watwut 1y ago

> America has a much higher risk tolerance than the rest of the world. America is one of the most risk averse countries in the world, seriously. Americans are constantly scared - of loosing job, of physical injury, of everything and everywhere. > Failing is considered a good thing in the USA America punishes failure pretty hard. Some peoples failures are ignored, but most peoples failures are punished in pretty significant ways.

closewith 1y ago
Yes, only a tiny minority of palatable failures is allowed in the US. For everything else, society will discard you like rubbish.

bubblyworld 1y ago

Only Americans exhibit creativity and drive? What nationalistic nonsense is this? Step outside of your bubble lol.

jedberg 1y ago
That's not at all what I said. I said I see it far more often in Americans than other cultures. And I have stepped out of my bubble many times. I've worked with a lot of people in a lot of countries. They agree with me.
- bubblyworld 1y ago
  > 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. I mean come on, how do you expect people to interpret this paragraph? I can only assume you are trolling, so I'm done here.
- closewith 1y ago
  And now you're talking to people who don't agree with you. Maybe you hadn't punctured your bubble as much as you believe.
- hdgvhicv 1y ago
  So does ChatGPT. Have fun changing French fries into salad.
siva7 1y ago
It's easy to criticize that part but his last sentence is spot on: the creative it minds from those countries tend to migrate to places that match their entrepreneurial personality better and those usually won't be China or India but rather somewhere in America or even Europe.
- Moru 1y ago
  They go where they are told it's easier to get money for their ideas. This has long been the US. However it looks like it is changing in some fields lately.

eastbound 1y ago

> I don't think it's because Americans are better at this -- I think it's cultural. My experience is ANY delegation incurs a big loss in agency. I want to create a startup -> my employees are much less invested than I am. My remote (French) employees are even less invested. My Ukrainian employees are completely passive and I fired them. The more the distance, the less invested, the more passive. It’s tempting to attribute this to your country’s qualities, but my experience is every country is a mixed bag.

anal_reactor 1y ago

I work for an American company. 90% of my job is covering my ass because if I push for a novel idea and it fails, it's going to be a huge problem.

KronisLV 1y ago

> Failing is considered a good thing in the USA. And the USA is much more entrepreneurial than the rest of the world. I wonder how many devs have been sacked for going out of their way and making stuff nobody in business asked for, or perhaps that broke something along the way and ended up being a net negative: in the EU vs US and other parts of the world. Might be loosely related to how much money the company has to burn and the nature of their work (e.g. probably not looked well upon in consulting where you have to convince clients to pay for whatever you've made), as well as how popular each type of work is in each part of the world.

Cthulhu_ 1y ago

While on the one side I think you have a point, on the other there's different dynamics in place as well; you're comparing offshore workers to internal employees. An offshore worker gets hired to do a job for another company, an internal employee is part of the company. That is, an external worker (and I'm a consultant, I know) gets paid per hour, if the company goes under for whatever reason they just move on to the next assignment, while an internal employee leans more on their job. Anyway that's just a theory. I'm a "consultant" which is just a fancy word for a temp / hired hand, and I'm somewhere in the middle in that I will think along with the company and propose improvements, but at the same time have lower risk and much less attachment to the companies I work for. I don't think it's cultural per se. As an extreme example, the CEOs of Google and Microsoft were both born and raised in India.

jedberg 1y ago
> An offshore worker gets hired to do a job for another company, an internal employee is part of the company. I've experienced both. Working with offshore employees and full time employees who happened to be in foreign countries. It was a similar experience with both, the exception being the ones that had previously lived and worked in the US. > I don't think it's cultural per se. As an extreme example, the CEOs of Google and Microsoft were both born and raised in India. Sundar Pichai moved to the US when he was in college. His entire working career and a bunch of his schooling was in the US. Satya Nadella did the same. As I said in my original reply, the ones who are more entrepreneurial or successful tend to move to the US (or at least used to).

charlieyu1 1y ago

I don't know about others but for me, I don't really care about business outcome. Why should I? It's the manager or the business side's job.

DecoySalamander 1y ago

> 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?". The most crucial difference in this context is that Americans are employed directly by the company, while foreign workers are behind several layers of management belonging to several companies. While you can walk around and deliver elevator pitches to higher-ups, foreign workers must track their time spent on tasks down to the minute in Jira. Then, they must find a manager who would like to pitch a feature to a manager who would pitch a feature to a manager in the U.S.

trinix912 1y ago
Exactly. I used to work in such a situation for a few years (consulting company hiring EE devs). I tried suggesting things, building PoC’s, pitching it to the manager, all was met with just “we’re on a limited budget, so stick with what we’ve arranged.” Had I built the things anyway it wouldn’t be met with praise, but looked down upon for bypassing the manager (or I just wouldn’t get paid for those hours). Many big corporations tend to be similar even when you’re employed directly. You can’t truly be creative when you’re stuck 7 layers of mgmt deep. You also have to understand that for those who’ve only worked in such situations, “risking” their position at a foreign company just to appear smart doesn’t seem like a good idea, so they don’t do it.

guappa 1y ago

In my own experience (EU company, acquired by USA) USA developers are good at burning money, less good at actually delivering a reliable product. But it can be due to terrible management hiring terribly.