27 ms·

Hacker News doesn't like to hear it, but remote work is a big part of this. All that effort convincing management you're just as effective working remotely was

by dehrmann 11mo ago

Hacker News doesn't like to hear it, but remote work is a big part of this. All that effort convincing management you're just as effective working remotely was also a collective sales pitch to outsource your role.

dingnuts 11mo ago
sure but people on the other side of the world are harder to communicate with for practical reasons like time zones and also for cultural reasons that matter big time in many markets
- skywhopper 11mo ago
  Yeah this is the reason most offshoring projects ultimately fail to deliver the promised savings. The overseas staff can never be as effective as folks in the same time zone.
  - lanstin 11mo ago
    Offshoring is valuable not to save money but to increase the development and operational bandwidth of the organization. This truth may not be known to the decision makers, but it is clear to the workers over time. It does increase the cost of coordination and the difficulty of establishing a common technical vision, but these are mitigatable by for example sending entire software project to one region, with the colocated workers having a higher degree of autonomy to make decisions. One way of partitioning work that fits with the power dynamics is to have all the new shiny things done in North America and mature profitable software is owned by a remote region. Half smiley but this effect is real.
- paulcole 11mo ago
  Sure but if the cost savings is significant enough then there is plenty of incentive to overcome (or live with) those obstacles.
- nradov 11mo ago
  For certain types of projects it's possible to accelerate delivery by using a "follow the sun" model where at the end of the workday each team hands off tasks to another team farther west. This will obviously decrease productivity per team member due to additional communication overhead and increase the risk of errors, but the trade-offs can be acceptable if the project has to hit a fixed external deadline. Doing this successfully requires a high level of project management discipline that most organizations lack.
- hexbin010 11mo ago
  > sure but people on the other side of the world are harder to communicate with for practical reasons like time zones and also for cultural reasons that matter big time in many markets That's a pain management are willing to inflict upon /you/ CTOs are aware of all the tradeoffs
- izacus 11mo ago
  People in Brazil and Mexico can work within US timezones just fine and aren't dumb.
CivBase 11mo ago
I'd be more inclined to work in the office if most of my coworkers weren't in India anyways. I can't exactly have water cooler talk with Manglesh while he's asleep on the opposite side of the planet. At least at home I don't have to spend 10 minutes of each meeting finding an empty conference room and getting the audio/video setup to barely function.
- dingnuts 11mo ago
  physically being in the office is irrelevant. I can and do have water cooler chats with my remote teammates in the same tz as me while Manglesh is asleep in his Timezone matters
- lanstin 11mo ago
  If you do work with folks in India a lot, it is a really good boost to your group productivity to go visit them in India, as an IC programmer. It is a safe place, people are very good at hospitality, and you can forge much stronger bonds of connection and of shared technical vision when people are people not just arbitrary strings in Slack (video conferencing can sustain connections but it is hard to make them over laggy video at inconvenient times of day). I have been working from home to various degrees since 1997 or so and I go in more when I need more work to do and work from home more when I am super busy with coding stuff or similar that can be done better and faster from home. But yeah going to office to sit in meetings with of people in other offices is silly.
  - Tomcollins4 11mo ago
    this is the funniest comment I've read in a while
- alfiedotwtf 11mo ago
  Kind of ironic and hypocritical that companies forced people back into the office, but have zero fucks about remote offshoring!
echelon 11mo ago
This is the biggest unspoken story in tech. The era of American developer exceptionalism is over. Talent abroad has access to the same tools, education, and increasingly, network. American engineers will be replaced wholesale with overseas engineers that cost a fraction of American labor. You can hire talented React engineers for $50k that will work harder than their American counterparts. It's not just React. Overseas markets have DevOps, SREs, embedded, systems engineers, you name it. For years Americans joked that overseas labor was subpar. It's not, or at least it isn't in today's world.
- thesmtsolver 11mo ago
  Any data backing this? If this were the case, why isn’t most innovation done outside the US? Jobs that have a high 0-1 component will still be in the US but jobs that are more 1-n may be offshored.
  - brazukadev 11mo ago
    > If this were the case, why isn’t most innovation done outside the US? Capital
    - deeznuttynutz 11mo ago
      That's not even close to remotely true. If that is the case, why is the UAE throwing their money at US startups and not their own? They have more than enough "capital".
  - Ekaros 11mo ago
    It is less so about skills of workers. And more so about having lot of investors who are willing to throw money at everything and then even more after the fact. Or to just outright having enough money to buy out the better ideas.
  - hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago
    Because most of the smartest people in the world moved to the U.S. because of the education system, great access to capital, and the fact that they and other smart people could easily move to, live and work with each other in the U.S. The U.S. also has the largest useful single market in the world (the EU is broken up across many languages/cultures, China is isolated so you can’t really expand out). The U.S. is actively working to destroy several of those planks right now. Even the capital plank, which superficially looks strong, is being hurt by the government picking winners and choosers. If the current govt bets don’t turn out to be the right ones we’re looking at an ugly, probably tax payer funded (OpenAI has already hinted at this) collapse.
hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago
Yeah. One of the most ridiculous things in my entire life of 40 years was seeing 90% of my fellow SW industry workers using the 2 or so years during/after COVID where we had more power than we’ve ever had to advocate hard for making ourselves much more easy to replace by insisting on remote work, and insisting on reducing our productivity (even if not actually, at least in the eyes of the employers) so we couldn’t justify our higher salaries anymore. Just outright insane.
- munificent 11mo ago
  Remote work benefits workers too, though: 1. It enables them to live in lower cost of living cities. This makes them more competitive relative to outsourcing because a lower wage in a cheaper city goes farther. 2. It opens up the job pool. If you work remote, you can work at any company that takes remote workers regardless of where you live. 3. It reduces the cost of switching jobs. Many people are stuck in jobs they don't want because there are few other local opportunities and switching jobs means uprooting and moving. For a single 20-something in an apartment, that doesn't sound so bad. But once you have a partner with their own career, kids with meaningful friendships, a mortgage, etc. then moving can be extremely disruptive. In general, more job flexibility increases the efficiency of the job market for employees.
  - gruez 11mo ago
    >In general, more job flexibility increases the efficiency of the job market for employees. It increases the efficiency of the market as a whole, but that's not the same as saying that first world software engineers (already highly paid and previously protected from foreign competition) would be better off.
  - hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago
    1. The cheapest American city is maybe half thr cost of the most expensive. Meanwhile in the most expensive Indian city, one could live like a king at 1/3 the cost of the cheapest American city with far more culture and things to do. And if you were willing to move to the cheapest Indian cities you could halve that again. 2. Correct. Given that the majority of SW jobs, especially the highest paying ones, were located in the U.S. this is a net benefit to anyone living outside the U.S. even before you take cost into consideration. More American jobs opened up to a Londoner than global jobs opened up to someone living in SF. 3. Efficiency approximately = lower costs. In this case costs = developer salaries. So you’re right. We got more efficient. We reduced the average cost of developer salaries per job. Since very few people are willing to take a pay cut this means jobs are moving/will move to places where people are willing to work for less.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
YZF 11mo ago
Offshoring didn't start in Covid and it still has the issues of time zone, culture, etc. You're not wrong in that companies are looking to hire in cheaper geographies but I think the remote aspect is just a small part of it. Another part is that SV comp has shot through the roof because RSUs. There are also arguably more and better people available in the cheaper geographies. But it's not a zero sum game and there are still a lot of tech jobs in North America. AI hasn't reduced that total number of jobs.
xienze 11mo ago
> All that effort convincing management you're just as effective working remotely was also a collective sales pitch to outsource your role. Here’s the thing though. People have been trying to outsource software development since the late 90s. Every time I’ve been around offshoring efforts wherever they were implemented, a few years later onshoring would happen again. It turns out time zones, thick Indian accents, and poor quality control have been and still are major obstacles to overcome.
candiddevmike 11mo ago
There are plenty of studies showing that remote work increases productivity that have been published before or after COVID, and similar case studies showing the dangers of off shoring. In a perfect world, a business that correctly understands these studies would be rewarded.
questionableans 11mo ago
Admittedly privileged counterpoint: I want to work with the best co-workers in the world. Most candidates I’ve interviewed both in the US and in other countries aren’t anywhere near that level. If just anybody will do for a job, I’ll probably get bored and frustrated by it. High pay has been a mixed blessing for the tech field. For every aspiring top mathematician or physicist who’s been tempted by the pay and relevant new problems, I often feel like we’ve gotten 10x as many people who would otherwise have been uninspired doctors and lawyers or top business majors.
- normie3000 11mo ago
  Where do you find these people?
  - hunterpayne 11mo ago
    Check the pile of CVs that HR rejected. You will be shocked at the talent in there.
    - questionableans 11mo ago
      Yeah, it is shockingly bad. I’m assuming you’re using “talent” euphemistically here. For a recent job opening I was looking to fill, HR sent us all of the applications rather than doing their own filtering (they did first round calls with people engineering highlighted). The level of resume spam is absolutely staggering. So many applicants to jobs that have no obvious connection to their stated skills & experience, with job application questions filled out by LLMs. I’m not saying they’re all bad people, but all of these people who don’t know what they’re looking for other than an income is really disheartening.
      - mgh95 11mo ago
        > For a recent job opening I was looking to fill, HR sent us all of the applications rather than doing their own filtering (they did first round calls with people engineering highlighted). If I can ask, what is it you think of work as? Most jobs are just that: a job, an economic transfer from employer to employee to perform specific tasks. I hate to say it, but what do you think most Indians working for google, or facebook, or any of the other companies that open centers in India see their purpose there as?
oxfordmale 11mo ago
Outsourcing comes and goes in waves. Good talent in India and the Philippines tend to work for FAANG companies, often at very comparable salaries to the west. The remainder of the talent tends to struggle with some of the outsourced work, but with AI they can now give a semblance of competence. In the UK a major retailer, Mark and Spencer got hacked after outsourcing work to India. They couldn't fulfill orders online for months, and they are now reducing the amount of work they outsource to India. We will see something similar happen to other companies in a year or two, but until then we just have to tighten our belts and hope we don't get layed off before then.
- moneywoes 11mo ago
  > Outsourcing comes and goes in waves. Good talent in India and the Philippines tend to work for FAANG companies, often at very comparable salaries to the west. In those locations? Based on sheer CS grad numbers why wouldn't companies just shift their r& operations there then?
  - decimalenough 11mo ago
    The FAANG I work for is trying to do just that. But while new grads are indeed a dime a dozen, you can't staff an R&D with only new grads, and finding and retaining skilled seniors is so tough that it has resorted to offering US-based Indians packages with US level comp to entice them to move back for a few years to bootstrap teams.
  - supriyo-biswas 11mo ago
    > Based on sheer CS grad numbers why wouldn't companies just shift their r& operations there then? There are lots of CS grads, yes. But most colleges out there are mostly degree mills, and this carries on to the workplace, where your average software engineer or engineering manager has very little understanding of what they’re actually doing (this[1] article was posted on HN, which will tell you the quality of engineering in India). For anything slightly complicated, companies seem to be only interested in hiring from the best colleges and pay out of their nose in the process. A friend of a friend does some hardware work at a FAANG, and gets paid at almost that level. [1] https://eaton-works.com/2025/10/28/tata-motors-hack/ https://eaton-works.com/2025/10/28/tata-motors-hack/
whoknowsidont 11mo ago
No one likes to hear it because it's not a part of it lol. Paying fair market wages is different than trying to exploit differences in vastly different standards of living between very very different economies. Talented workers get talented pay -- a fact many company's and execs don't like. It has very little to do with their literal position on earth in relation to a company's real estate foot print. Workers need to be more intelligent and what was that word you used in your comment... "collective." The U.S. managerial class has been GORGING off worker's labor for decades and workers are about to have nothing to show for it.
- paulddraper 11mo ago
  > Talented workers get talented pay > It has very little to do with their literal position on earth in relation to a company's real estate foot print. Which is why they will happily pay for talented labor in other positions on earth.
  - whoknowsidont 11mo ago
    >Which is why they will happily pay for talented labor in other positions on earth. Which to be clear: is not happening. They're buying very low cost labor and are hoping to power through it for some sweet juicy numbers.
    - cj 11mo ago
      What makes someone in India (or the EU for that matter) an inherently worse developer than someone in the US? (Unless that’s not what you’re implying?)
      - whoknowsidont 11mo ago
        Nothing. Don't think I said that, I certainly don't think it.
        cj 11mo ago
gedy 11mo ago
Like every person I knew who "went remote" was so they could afford a home. Which they weren't able to do next to office with what you all are paying. It wasn't some digital nomad work in my jammies lifestyle thing. It gets tiresome to hear: "see it's all your fault"
- ghaff 11mo ago
  By no means universal. I was increasingly remote even before COVID because I did a lot of business and other travel--even if I was never officially fully remote until very late in the game. Never moved from the house I owned through a number of jobs with better and worse commutes. But, then, didn't live in California though did live in what is generally considered a tech center.
blackqueeriroh 11mo ago
Remote work and outsourcing are two very different beasts, and companies have outsourced long before remote work. In fact, remote work is rarely an option in countries where outsourcing happens because the quality of high-speed internet isn’t uniform enough for folks to be able to just work from home. Additionally, companies can’t just hire individuals in other countries. They have to set up business entities and that costs significant money to do. It’s why they mostly work with outsourcing companies, who often do have offices where these people come in and work.
- phil21 11mo ago
  Everything about this is the opposite from my experience. No one is talking about outsourcing to body shops like the old times a decade ago. I went from employing offshored devs and IT talent competing with low-effort body shops, to now competing directly with the largest names in the industry for those workers. It is not hard at all to employ people “directly” in most countries. Plenty of global payroll services that will handle this for you at a small scale, and you just stand up a local “office” with a cheap office manager and attorney on retainer if you outgrow that. The legal entities and structure might be opaque, but the end result is effectively direct employee as far as anyone working with them is concerned. Offshoring does not mean what it used to. These people are treated and expectations are the same as anyone employed from Iowa or California. The largest difference and source of friction is timezone. Reliable internet is more or less ubiquitous in the entire world now in any even moderately sized city. It’s not 2005 any more. This is utterly a non-issue. And this was before Starlink. A $200/mo paycheck bonus usually covers this anywhere I’ve done business. I’ve worked with hundreds of folks around the world at this point. The HN take on outsourcing is so ridiculous to me, and explains the hubris you see here regarding remote work.
  - hn_throwaway_99 11mo ago
    This is absolutely my experience as well - so many posts on HN are just in denial or clueless. > The largest difference and source of friction is timezone. Completely agree with this, and that's why I've seen much less desire to outsource software work to India or China (like I did in the 2001-2012 timeframe) than I have to Latin America or Eastern Europe (or heck, even Western Europe where dev salaries are still much lower) for US-based companies.
phil21 11mo ago
One of the most myopic self-owns by a certain segment of industry I can think of in my lifetime. I guess folks really did think that location had nothing to do with Silicon Valley paying 4x or more the worldwide average. That there was simply no talent anywhere in the world who could even compete at their level. No project managers anywhere who could do the job for less than $200k/yr. One the dam broke and it was clear that remote work could be productive it simply opened up a rather insular industry to extreme worldwide competition. Far more smart and talented folks out there in the world than many anticipated. The hubris was (and is) crazy to me.
- overfeed 11mo ago
  It wasn't a "self own" unless you're taking the perspective of Covid. Remote work was forced onto sceptical employers due to shutdowns. The industry suffers from fads and cargo-culting. Stealth diffuse offshoring is currently in, it's going to take a while for the downsides to percolate: I suspect will mostly boil down to jurisdiction impedance mismatches. What does it mean for employers if it is 1000x harder to extradite an employee to Delaware (or whatever jurisdiction is agreed to in their employment contract) if they clone their product from code? Without e-Verify, what are the chances that your remote employee is a North Korean unit, or working for your competitor? Boom times ahead for corporate intelligence - as well as the traditional kind. How many security teams and policies are geared to face Iran as an adversary? An unstated e-Verify benefit is free FBI COINTEL
  - phil21 11mo ago
    There was and is a collective push to show remote work is just as effective as in-office. To the point of absurdity, where there were never any benefits to office work. It was absolutely a self-own. People not understanding why they were being paid the salaries they were and how replaceable they might be. It was more or less an entire workforce demanding that their job positions be opened up to global competition thinking there would be no negative long term outcomes from it. They effectively helped offshore their own jobs. This is just starting - inertia is a thing, and it takes years to stand up competent local engineering teams in various countries. The past few years has simply been laying down the base infrastructure for what is starting to visibly happen today.
throw-52 11mo ago
I think it's both more simple and more complex than AI or out-sourcing, though these are symptoms. Leadership everywhere is just kind of moving further away from reality, and don't care about progress, results, or fundamentals as they focus more on optics and spin, and controlling narratives or choices. Circular financing, ad fraud, trendy scam products or whole sectors.. does anyone want to do anything real when it's easier to make huge profits being fake? Enshittification is another sign of the times, but that's just about products and platforms, we need a better term. That leadership really wants a scammy rotten economy/product/company which ignores quality isn't that surprising, but the extent to which investors and even workers are often onboard too is surprising. Vandalism economy? Expertise simply isn't valued for the same reason that enlightenment values and rationalism generally are on the decline, in SWE sure, but also just in general.
acephal 11mo ago
Only in America is this kind of anti-labor sentiment masquerading as "if you knew what was good for you now look what happened", as if businesses were so stupid as to be fooled by "if we don't make it apparent, they won't notice" and somehow this would shield programming from off-shoring. The actual reality is that post-WW2 exceptionalism in literacy ended; the developing world caught up. The entire premise of American labor exceptionalism was built on this faulty assumption. And rather than reconfigure your negotiation as labor, your first thought is how you can get back in the good graces of the 'big boss'.
- fruitworks 11mo ago
  What does renegotiating labor in the face of increased labor supply mean other than just "accept a worse deal"?
  - callc 11mo ago
    Unionization
nickpsecurity 11mo ago
I didn't think about that but you may be right. I think what might be non-debatable is that setting up the ability to work remotely definitely makes it easier to outsource someone's job. Whether that's causal or makes sense with other factors would vary company by company. Remote jobs are easier to outsource, though. One of my friends from school has long worked in robotics. He showed me a machine he programmed to cut glass or something at a Volvo factory. I asked him about outsourcing back then. He told me his job required being physical plant to assess, program, and monitor it. He was going to stick with that over the higher-paying alternatives that he believed would be outsourced or automated more easily. Today, outsourcing only threatens work opportunities for one of us.
leros 11mo ago
I spent some time consulting over the last few years. So many companies are laying off their US engineering teams and replacing them with offshore teams. There used to be this notion that offshore meant lower quality but it doesn't seem like that as much these days. I've worked with some Ukrainian teams for example. They're 20% the price of Americans, produce the same quality, work harder, and speak great English. It seems like a no-brainer to go offshore.
- Workaccount2 11mo ago
  There is an eternal cycle between uncomfortable and productive and comfortable and lazy. 15-20 years ago SWE work was brutal and paid OKish, but not great if you calculated the hourly. Then the era of free VC money came, culminating in the pandemic boom, where people were crash coursing JavaScript to land a remote job doing 4 hours of work a week for $170k. The pendulum is now swinging in the other direction.
  - hn_throwaway_99 11mo ago
    So much fantasy landing in the comments here. I worked in software 15-20 years ago. The work was not "brutal". I worked hard, but mostly because I enjoyed the work. I lived in a major American city and my pay was essentially the highest pay you could get outside of professions requiring professional degrees like doctor or lawyer, or some high finance positions. And even then, I made more than some doctors in lower-tier specialties.
  - SoftTalker 11mo ago
    Before the first dotcom era, software jobs paid like most other professional office jobs. Decent money but nothing really remarkable. With the dotcom boom and VC money, that changed. I doubled my salary going to a startup in 1998. I was not a better developer all of a sudden, it was just that startups had piles of money and investors demanding that they spend it. 15-20 years ago software development was still very well paid compared to 30 years ago. And then the really insane FAANG money started flowing.
    - 11mo ago
groundzeros2015 11mo ago
This could not have been said here in 2021 or 2022. It’s disappointing to see how easily opinions change with the zeitgeist.
ugh123 11mo ago
100%
ponector 11mo ago
Cannot fully agree with this. I've just been fired from remote job. My remote contact position after 4 years was replaced with internal full-time position. I could convert to employee if I was willing to relocate to Bratislava and take a huge pay cut. I'm in Eastern Europe already, but cannot agree to €40k salary offer. It's not like they don't have money, it was an insurance company with $1bn in quarterly profit. Market is extremely unfavorable for IT talents currently.

dingnuts 11mo ago

sure but people on the other side of the world are harder to communicate with for practical reasons like time zones and also for cultural reasons that matter big time in many markets

skywhopper 11mo ago
Yeah this is the reason most offshoring projects ultimately fail to deliver the promised savings. The overseas staff can never be as effective as folks in the same time zone.
- lanstin 11mo ago
  Offshoring is valuable not to save money but to increase the development and operational bandwidth of the organization. This truth may not be known to the decision makers, but it is clear to the workers over time. It does increase the cost of coordination and the difficulty of establishing a common technical vision, but these are mitigatable by for example sending entire software project to one region, with the colocated workers having a higher degree of autonomy to make decisions. One way of partitioning work that fits with the power dynamics is to have all the new shiny things done in North America and mature profitable software is owned by a remote region. Half smiley but this effect is real.
paulcole 11mo ago
Sure but if the cost savings is significant enough then there is plenty of incentive to overcome (or live with) those obstacles.
nradov 11mo ago
For certain types of projects it's possible to accelerate delivery by using a "follow the sun" model where at the end of the workday each team hands off tasks to another team farther west. This will obviously decrease productivity per team member due to additional communication overhead and increase the risk of errors, but the trade-offs can be acceptable if the project has to hit a fixed external deadline. Doing this successfully requires a high level of project management discipline that most organizations lack.
hexbin010 11mo ago
> sure but people on the other side of the world are harder to communicate with for practical reasons like time zones and also for cultural reasons that matter big time in many markets That's a pain management are willing to inflict upon /you/ CTOs are aware of all the tradeoffs
izacus 11mo ago
People in Brazil and Mexico can work within US timezones just fine and aren't dumb.

CivBase 11mo ago

I'd be more inclined to work in the office if most of my coworkers weren't in India anyways. I can't exactly have water cooler talk with Manglesh while he's asleep on the opposite side of the planet. At least at home I don't have to spend 10 minutes of each meeting finding an empty conference room and getting the audio/video setup to barely function.

dingnuts 11mo ago
physically being in the office is irrelevant. I can and do have water cooler chats with my remote teammates in the same tz as me while Manglesh is asleep in his Timezone matters
lanstin 11mo ago
If you do work with folks in India a lot, it is a really good boost to your group productivity to go visit them in India, as an IC programmer. It is a safe place, people are very good at hospitality, and you can forge much stronger bonds of connection and of shared technical vision when people are people not just arbitrary strings in Slack (video conferencing can sustain connections but it is hard to make them over laggy video at inconvenient times of day). I have been working from home to various degrees since 1997 or so and I go in more when I need more work to do and work from home more when I am super busy with coding stuff or similar that can be done better and faster from home. But yeah going to office to sit in meetings with of people in other offices is silly.
- Tomcollins4 11mo ago
  this is the funniest comment I've read in a while
alfiedotwtf 11mo ago
Kind of ironic and hypocritical that companies forced people back into the office, but have zero fucks about remote offshoring!

echelon 11mo ago

This is the biggest unspoken story in tech. The era of American developer exceptionalism is over. Talent abroad has access to the same tools, education, and increasingly, network. American engineers will be replaced wholesale with overseas engineers that cost a fraction of American labor. You can hire talented React engineers for $50k that will work harder than their American counterparts. It's not just React. Overseas markets have DevOps, SREs, embedded, systems engineers, you name it. For years Americans joked that overseas labor was subpar. It's not, or at least it isn't in today's world.

thesmtsolver 11mo ago
Any data backing this? If this were the case, why isn’t most innovation done outside the US? Jobs that have a high 0-1 component will still be in the US but jobs that are more 1-n may be offshored.
- brazukadev 11mo ago
  > If this were the case, why isn’t most innovation done outside the US? Capital
  - deeznuttynutz 11mo ago
    That's not even close to remotely true. If that is the case, why is the UAE throwing their money at US startups and not their own? They have more than enough "capital".
- Ekaros 11mo ago
  It is less so about skills of workers. And more so about having lot of investors who are willing to throw money at everything and then even more after the fact. Or to just outright having enough money to buy out the better ideas.
- hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago
  Because most of the smartest people in the world moved to the U.S. because of the education system, great access to capital, and the fact that they and other smart people could easily move to, live and work with each other in the U.S. The U.S. also has the largest useful single market in the world (the EU is broken up across many languages/cultures, China is isolated so you can’t really expand out). The U.S. is actively working to destroy several of those planks right now. Even the capital plank, which superficially looks strong, is being hurt by the government picking winners and choosers. If the current govt bets don’t turn out to be the right ones we’re looking at an ugly, probably tax payer funded (OpenAI has already hinted at this) collapse.

hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago

Yeah. One of the most ridiculous things in my entire life of 40 years was seeing 90% of my fellow SW industry workers using the 2 or so years during/after COVID where we had more power than we’ve ever had to advocate hard for making ourselves much more easy to replace by insisting on remote work, and insisting on reducing our productivity (even if not actually, at least in the eyes of the employers) so we couldn’t justify our higher salaries anymore. Just outright insane.

munificent 11mo ago
Remote work benefits workers too, though: 1. It enables them to live in lower cost of living cities. This makes them more competitive relative to outsourcing because a lower wage in a cheaper city goes farther. 2. It opens up the job pool. If you work remote, you can work at any company that takes remote workers regardless of where you live. 3. It reduces the cost of switching jobs. Many people are stuck in jobs they don't want because there are few other local opportunities and switching jobs means uprooting and moving. For a single 20-something in an apartment, that doesn't sound so bad. But once you have a partner with their own career, kids with meaningful friendships, a mortgage, etc. then moving can be extremely disruptive. In general, more job flexibility increases the efficiency of the job market for employees.
- gruez 11mo ago
  >In general, more job flexibility increases the efficiency of the job market for employees. It increases the efficiency of the market as a whole, but that's not the same as saying that first world software engineers (already highly paid and previously protected from foreign competition) would be better off.
- hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago
  1. The cheapest American city is maybe half thr cost of the most expensive. Meanwhile in the most expensive Indian city, one could live like a king at 1/3 the cost of the cheapest American city with far more culture and things to do. And if you were willing to move to the cheapest Indian cities you could halve that again. 2. Correct. Given that the majority of SW jobs, especially the highest paying ones, were located in the U.S. this is a net benefit to anyone living outside the U.S. even before you take cost into consideration. More American jobs opened up to a Londoner than global jobs opened up to someone living in SF. 3. Efficiency approximately = lower costs. In this case costs = developer salaries. So you’re right. We got more efficient. We reduced the average cost of developer salaries per job. Since very few people are willing to take a pay cut this means jobs are moving/will move to places where people are willing to work for less.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

YZF 11mo ago

Offshoring didn't start in Covid and it still has the issues of time zone, culture, etc. You're not wrong in that companies are looking to hire in cheaper geographies but I think the remote aspect is just a small part of it. Another part is that SV comp has shot through the roof because RSUs. There are also arguably more and better people available in the cheaper geographies. But it's not a zero sum game and there are still a lot of tech jobs in North America. AI hasn't reduced that total number of jobs.

xienze 11mo ago

> All that effort convincing management you're just as effective working remotely was also a collective sales pitch to outsource your role. Here’s the thing though. People have been trying to outsource software development since the late 90s. Every time I’ve been around offshoring efforts wherever they were implemented, a few years later onshoring would happen again. It turns out time zones, thick Indian accents, and poor quality control have been and still are major obstacles to overcome.

candiddevmike 11mo ago

There are plenty of studies showing that remote work increases productivity that have been published before or after COVID, and similar case studies showing the dangers of off shoring. In a perfect world, a business that correctly understands these studies would be rewarded.

questionableans 11mo ago

Admittedly privileged counterpoint: I want to work with the best co-workers in the world. Most candidates I’ve interviewed both in the US and in other countries aren’t anywhere near that level. If just anybody will do for a job, I’ll probably get bored and frustrated by it. High pay has been a mixed blessing for the tech field. For every aspiring top mathematician or physicist who’s been tempted by the pay and relevant new problems, I often feel like we’ve gotten 10x as many people who would otherwise have been uninspired doctors and lawyers or top business majors.

normie3000 11mo ago
Where do you find these people?
- hunterpayne 11mo ago
  Check the pile of CVs that HR rejected. You will be shocked at the talent in there.
  - questionableans 11mo ago
    Yeah, it is shockingly bad. I’m assuming you’re using “talent” euphemistically here. For a recent job opening I was looking to fill, HR sent us all of the applications rather than doing their own filtering (they did first round calls with people engineering highlighted). The level of resume spam is absolutely staggering. So many applicants to jobs that have no obvious connection to their stated skills & experience, with job application questions filled out by LLMs. I’m not saying they’re all bad people, but all of these people who don’t know what they’re looking for other than an income is really disheartening.
    - mgh95 11mo ago
      > For a recent job opening I was looking to fill, HR sent us all of the applications rather than doing their own filtering (they did first round calls with people engineering highlighted). If I can ask, what is it you think of work as? Most jobs are just that: a job, an economic transfer from employer to employee to perform specific tasks. I hate to say it, but what do you think most Indians working for google, or facebook, or any of the other companies that open centers in India see their purpose there as?

oxfordmale 11mo ago

Outsourcing comes and goes in waves. Good talent in India and the Philippines tend to work for FAANG companies, often at very comparable salaries to the west. The remainder of the talent tends to struggle with some of the outsourced work, but with AI they can now give a semblance of competence. In the UK a major retailer, Mark and Spencer got hacked after outsourcing work to India. They couldn't fulfill orders online for months, and they are now reducing the amount of work they outsource to India. We will see something similar happen to other companies in a year or two, but until then we just have to tighten our belts and hope we don't get layed off before then.

moneywoes 11mo ago
> Outsourcing comes and goes in waves. Good talent in India and the Philippines tend to work for FAANG companies, often at very comparable salaries to the west. In those locations? Based on sheer CS grad numbers why wouldn't companies just shift their r& operations there then?
- decimalenough 11mo ago
  The FAANG I work for is trying to do just that. But while new grads are indeed a dime a dozen, you can't staff an R&D with only new grads, and finding and retaining skilled seniors is so tough that it has resorted to offering US-based Indians packages with US level comp to entice them to move back for a few years to bootstrap teams.
- supriyo-biswas 11mo ago
  > Based on sheer CS grad numbers why wouldn't companies just shift their r& operations there then? There are lots of CS grads, yes. But most colleges out there are mostly degree mills, and this carries on to the workplace, where your average software engineer or engineering manager has very little understanding of what they’re actually doing (this[1] article was posted on HN, which will tell you the quality of engineering in India). For anything slightly complicated, companies seem to be only interested in hiring from the best colleges and pay out of their nose in the process. A friend of a friend does some hardware work at a FAANG, and gets paid at almost that level. [1] https://eaton-works.com/2025/10/28/tata-motors-hack/ https://eaton-works.com/2025/10/28/tata-motors-hack/

whoknowsidont 11mo ago

No one likes to hear it because it's not a part of it lol. Paying fair market wages is different than trying to exploit differences in vastly different standards of living between very very different economies. Talented workers get talented pay -- a fact many company's and execs don't like. It has very little to do with their literal position on earth in relation to a company's real estate foot print. Workers need to be more intelligent and what was that word you used in your comment... "collective." The U.S. managerial class has been GORGING off worker's labor for decades and workers are about to have nothing to show for it.

paulddraper 11mo ago
> Talented workers get talented pay > It has very little to do with their literal position on earth in relation to a company's real estate foot print. Which is why they will happily pay for talented labor in other positions on earth.
- whoknowsidont 11mo ago
  >Which is why they will happily pay for talented labor in other positions on earth. Which to be clear: is not happening. They're buying very low cost labor and are hoping to power through it for some sweet juicy numbers.
  - cj 11mo ago
    What makes someone in India (or the EU for that matter) an inherently worse developer than someone in the US? (Unless that’s not what you’re implying?)
    - whoknowsidont 11mo ago
      Nothing. Don't think I said that, I certainly don't think it.
      - cj 11mo ago

gedy 11mo ago

Like every person I knew who "went remote" was so they could afford a home. Which they weren't able to do next to office with what you all are paying. It wasn't some digital nomad work in my jammies lifestyle thing. It gets tiresome to hear: "see it's all your fault"

ghaff 11mo ago
By no means universal. I was increasingly remote even before COVID because I did a lot of business and other travel--even if I was never officially fully remote until very late in the game. Never moved from the house I owned through a number of jobs with better and worse commutes. But, then, didn't live in California though did live in what is generally considered a tech center.

blackqueeriroh 11mo ago

Remote work and outsourcing are two very different beasts, and companies have outsourced long before remote work. In fact, remote work is rarely an option in countries where outsourcing happens because the quality of high-speed internet isn’t uniform enough for folks to be able to just work from home. Additionally, companies can’t just hire individuals in other countries. They have to set up business entities and that costs significant money to do. It’s why they mostly work with outsourcing companies, who often do have offices where these people come in and work.

phil21 11mo ago
Everything about this is the opposite from my experience. No one is talking about outsourcing to body shops like the old times a decade ago. I went from employing offshored devs and IT talent competing with low-effort body shops, to now competing directly with the largest names in the industry for those workers. It is not hard at all to employ people “directly” in most countries. Plenty of global payroll services that will handle this for you at a small scale, and you just stand up a local “office” with a cheap office manager and attorney on retainer if you outgrow that. The legal entities and structure might be opaque, but the end result is effectively direct employee as far as anyone working with them is concerned. Offshoring does not mean what it used to. These people are treated and expectations are the same as anyone employed from Iowa or California. The largest difference and source of friction is timezone. Reliable internet is more or less ubiquitous in the entire world now in any even moderately sized city. It’s not 2005 any more. This is utterly a non-issue. And this was before Starlink. A $200/mo paycheck bonus usually covers this anywhere I’ve done business. I’ve worked with hundreds of folks around the world at this point. The HN take on outsourcing is so ridiculous to me, and explains the hubris you see here regarding remote work.
- hn_throwaway_99 11mo ago
  This is absolutely my experience as well - so many posts on HN are just in denial or clueless. > The largest difference and source of friction is timezone. Completely agree with this, and that's why I've seen much less desire to outsource software work to India or China (like I did in the 2001-2012 timeframe) than I have to Latin America or Eastern Europe (or heck, even Western Europe where dev salaries are still much lower) for US-based companies.

phil21 11mo ago

One of the most myopic self-owns by a certain segment of industry I can think of in my lifetime. I guess folks really did think that location had nothing to do with Silicon Valley paying 4x or more the worldwide average. That there was simply no talent anywhere in the world who could even compete at their level. No project managers anywhere who could do the job for less than $200k/yr. One the dam broke and it was clear that remote work could be productive it simply opened up a rather insular industry to extreme worldwide competition. Far more smart and talented folks out there in the world than many anticipated. The hubris was (and is) crazy to me.

overfeed 11mo ago
It wasn't a "self own" unless you're taking the perspective of Covid. Remote work was forced onto sceptical employers due to shutdowns. The industry suffers from fads and cargo-culting. Stealth diffuse offshoring is currently in, it's going to take a while for the downsides to percolate: I suspect will mostly boil down to jurisdiction impedance mismatches. What does it mean for employers if it is 1000x harder to extradite an employee to Delaware (or whatever jurisdiction is agreed to in their employment contract) if they clone their product from code? Without e-Verify, what are the chances that your remote employee is a North Korean unit, or working for your competitor? Boom times ahead for corporate intelligence - as well as the traditional kind. How many security teams and policies are geared to face Iran as an adversary? An unstated e-Verify benefit is free FBI COINTEL
- phil21 11mo ago
  There was and is a collective push to show remote work is just as effective as in-office. To the point of absurdity, where there were never any benefits to office work. It was absolutely a self-own. People not understanding why they were being paid the salaries they were and how replaceable they might be. It was more or less an entire workforce demanding that their job positions be opened up to global competition thinking there would be no negative long term outcomes from it. They effectively helped offshore their own jobs. This is just starting - inertia is a thing, and it takes years to stand up competent local engineering teams in various countries. The past few years has simply been laying down the base infrastructure for what is starting to visibly happen today.

throw-52 11mo ago

I think it's both more simple and more complex than AI or out-sourcing, though these are symptoms. Leadership everywhere is just kind of moving further away from reality, and don't care about progress, results, or fundamentals as they focus more on optics and spin, and controlling narratives or choices. Circular financing, ad fraud, trendy scam products or whole sectors.. does anyone want to do anything real when it's easier to make huge profits being fake? Enshittification is another sign of the times, but that's just about products and platforms, we need a better term. That leadership really wants a scammy rotten economy/product/company which ignores quality isn't that surprising, but the extent to which investors and even workers are often onboard too is surprising. Vandalism economy? Expertise simply isn't valued for the same reason that enlightenment values and rationalism generally are on the decline, in SWE sure, but also just in general.

acephal 11mo ago

Only in America is this kind of anti-labor sentiment masquerading as "if you knew what was good for you now look what happened", as if businesses were so stupid as to be fooled by "if we don't make it apparent, they won't notice" and somehow this would shield programming from off-shoring. The actual reality is that post-WW2 exceptionalism in literacy ended; the developing world caught up. The entire premise of American labor exceptionalism was built on this faulty assumption. And rather than reconfigure your negotiation as labor, your first thought is how you can get back in the good graces of the 'big boss'.

fruitworks 11mo ago
What does renegotiating labor in the face of increased labor supply mean other than just "accept a worse deal"?
- callc 11mo ago
  Unionization

nickpsecurity 11mo ago

I didn't think about that but you may be right. I think what might be non-debatable is that setting up the ability to work remotely definitely makes it easier to outsource someone's job. Whether that's causal or makes sense with other factors would vary company by company. Remote jobs are easier to outsource, though. One of my friends from school has long worked in robotics. He showed me a machine he programmed to cut glass or something at a Volvo factory. I asked him about outsourcing back then. He told me his job required being physical plant to assess, program, and monitor it. He was going to stick with that over the higher-paying alternatives that he believed would be outsourced or automated more easily. Today, outsourcing only threatens work opportunities for one of us.

leros 11mo ago

I spent some time consulting over the last few years. So many companies are laying off their US engineering teams and replacing them with offshore teams. There used to be this notion that offshore meant lower quality but it doesn't seem like that as much these days. I've worked with some Ukrainian teams for example. They're 20% the price of Americans, produce the same quality, work harder, and speak great English. It seems like a no-brainer to go offshore.

Workaccount2 11mo ago
There is an eternal cycle between uncomfortable and productive and comfortable and lazy. 15-20 years ago SWE work was brutal and paid OKish, but not great if you calculated the hourly. Then the era of free VC money came, culminating in the pandemic boom, where people were crash coursing JavaScript to land a remote job doing 4 hours of work a week for $170k. The pendulum is now swinging in the other direction.
- hn_throwaway_99 11mo ago
  So much fantasy landing in the comments here. I worked in software 15-20 years ago. The work was not "brutal". I worked hard, but mostly because I enjoyed the work. I lived in a major American city and my pay was essentially the highest pay you could get outside of professions requiring professional degrees like doctor or lawyer, or some high finance positions. And even then, I made more than some doctors in lower-tier specialties.
- SoftTalker 11mo ago
  Before the first dotcom era, software jobs paid like most other professional office jobs. Decent money but nothing really remarkable. With the dotcom boom and VC money, that changed. I doubled my salary going to a startup in 1998. I was not a better developer all of a sudden, it was just that startups had piles of money and investors demanding that they spend it. 15-20 years ago software development was still very well paid compared to 30 years ago. And then the really insane FAANG money started flowing.
  - 11mo ago

groundzeros2015 11mo ago

This could not have been said here in 2021 or 2022. It’s disappointing to see how easily opinions change with the zeitgeist.

ugh123 11mo ago

100%

ponector 11mo ago

Cannot fully agree with this. I've just been fired from remote job. My remote contact position after 4 years was replaced with internal full-time position. I could convert to employee if I was willing to relocate to Bratislava and take a huge pay cut. I'm in Eastern Europe already, but cannot agree to €40k salary offer. It's not like they don't have money, it was an insurance company with $1bn in quarterly profit. Market is extremely unfavorable for IT talents currently.