[degif]

I'm a developer from one of the cheaper engineering countries to where Ubiquiti has moved to. I'm not sure what are you implying with your comment and I hope it's not "the company is declining because the company moved talent to countries where developers are cheaper". I do personally have friends working there and they are top class developers. Living costs don't necessarily correlate with talent levels.

That said I don't hear the best about the company (long working hours, not the highest pay) and have declined a job offer there myself.

[smokey_circles]

> Living costs don't necessarily correlate with talent levels.

As someone who lives in a low cost country: rubbish. There's a reason we're a lower cost.

1. We have a lower standard of education

2. We have a higher cost of technology (relative to average income)

3. We have a lower need for the luxury market where most technology resides

You can also look at the proportion of field leaders. Are more from the developed nations or the developing ones?

The developed nations had a headstart on technology, do you think the developing ones have overcome that, despite most of us going backwards in terms of access to education and the wealth gap?

Don't take it personally, I'm not trying to tell you that you're a bad developer. What I'm saying is we have to work harder to uplift our country's fields and not fall into the trap of "well I'm the biggest fish in this tiny pond so therefore I'm an equally big fish in the ocean". It does not work that way.

[varjag]

> You can also look at the proportion of field leaders. Are more from the developed nations or the developing ones?

Lower cost of living does not imply developing nation.

Czhech Republic or Poland or Taiwan are developed nations, all with the cost of living a fraction of Bay Area.

I see Ubiquiti dev center apparently moved to Latvia. You can argue it's a depressed region of the EU but it is not a developing country by any metric.

[Nux]

Latvia? That's home to Mikrotik, this sounds quite dodgy. Prolly it was a move aimed at draining some talent from them.

[xkqd]

I’ve spent a lot of time in Czech and Poland, and while someone could argue they’re developed countries when looking at the wider gamut, it doesn’t compare well Canada, USA, UK, etc engineering talent.

A lot of the engineering talent you find there is extremely limited in quantity, but it is untapped.

Overall I think it’s a step in the right direction as compared to other countries we’ve outsourced work to, but let’s not pretend Poland is an exemplary ray of developed industry and society.

[zzen]

As somebody who founded and ran R&D-heavy companies in Czech Republic and in Bay Area - this is complete bullshit. Arguably the per-capita amount engineering talent is much higher in Eastern Europe, and it is untapped because the target market is small and there's lack of entrepreneurship tradition.

Sure, if you take 300M market like US and pool all the best talent to west-coast, there is a lot of engineers. But the market is saturated, and it's nigh-impossible to hire a team of the magnitude you can get in Eastern Europe. Canada? Oh please...

[BrandoElFollito]

Well, if you look at teh rsults of the CS Olympiads, you will see Poland as teh 5th overall (http://stats.ioinformatics.org/countries/?sort=medals_desc)

Having worked (as a French) with dev teams over there, I can assure you they have a whole bunch of A+ devs and the market is very competitive.

[varjag]

Developed in "developed country" customary means certain things. Like a decent standard of governance, sanitation, education, healthcare, welfare and quality of life. All these countries I mentioned are roughly on the same level.

You don't have problems with access to clean water in Poland. You ain't going to die from hunger in Czech Republic. There are no issues getting education in Latvia.

And mythical Anglo engineering talent, please. They are approximately the same anywhere you mentioned.

[kubanczyk]

I guess in reality the opposite can be said. In 'poorer' countries actually more folks want to work in IT or software. Hence a possible perception of a bit worse talent.

[cutemonster]

And i suppose it can become/seem important to embellish ones resume, to land a job and get "food for the day" for one's family -- if there's no functioning social welfare system

But I wouldn't think of the Baltics as such a place?

Instead, just hanging over the code and infra to new people, is risky in itself and can easily make security problems happen?

[Tepix]

Look at the US health system and the declining life expectancy in the US if you believe that higher cost equals better.

[a_imho]

Clearly false unless you think a fresh graduate in a high cost area is let's say twice as skilled as someone with decades of experience in a low cost area? Salary is a good proxy of bargaining power, not a good proxy for skill.

[MrBuddyCasino]

As a developer from a lower-cost country: all of this is true.

[Daho0n]

If living costs does equal quality code, most quality logically must be from Scandinavia. If that is fact or not I won't try to judge.

[cutemonster]

They didn't write "equals", but "correlates".

[Jestar342]

You simply cannot ignore the wider context here. The new leadership is moving development to cheaper regions and, if the interviews and comments about "entitlement" etc are to be believed, you can bet they are not fussed about hiring the best talent in the new regions - they are going to be hunting out the "good enough" agencies and/or employees, which is most definitely going to reduce quality.

I'd like to also add that from my own perspective Ubiquiti gear and software is/was _exceptionally_ good. So converting to "just another network gear company" level of quality is going to have a much greater impact on my perception of the company compared to if this news of off-shoring came from say cisco.

[ex_ubiquiti]

Yes! The move to low cost countries is confusing because the company has more than enough profits to pay high wages. I think the company wanted offices in cheaper countries because it was easier to convince the employees to accept the abuse because they had fewer options for employers who could pay well.

In the US, good engineers don't have to tolerate abusive companies in exchange for good wages. Not all countries are so fortunate.

[tda]

Maybe there is no causality, but quality is definitely declining, and the company focus is shifting from making enthusiast hardware to extracting profit at all costs. The fiasco with the UDM firmware, releasing more incompatible PoE products (I think they use every possible variation of the standard now), passive/active, 24v/48v). And discontinuing stand alone video software just to force everyone on new hardware?

Almost forgot, but just last month my wife started complaining about the WiFi, turned out the latest firmware that was pushed to my UAP's is horrible. You have to turn off auto update and check reddit before upgrading firmware, what a joke!

[xfz]

There are many angles to this, I'll just look at one in the hope that it helps.

> I hope it's not "the company is declining because the company moved talent to countries where developers are cheaper"

We probably agree the cost of developers varies considerably in different locations.

Companies operating in markets where local developers are expensive (I work near London for example) sometimes decide to outsource development to locations where it is much cheaper (e.g. India).

What I have seen (admittedly just anecdotally, not carefully studied and subject to bias) is a correlation between companies that don't value high quality software development and companies that are happy to dump a substantial part of their development efforts on cheap developers overseas.

Such companies don't care about their existing team - developers who are expensive but have built the software and understand it, and are to some extent understanding the end customer (often filling gaps left by product managers in smaller organisations). They just see their development team as a huge cost that needs to be reduced. Or they have trouble hiring locally.

When the daily rate of developers overseas is substantially lower, the company also doesn't care about those developers. They will want to outsource the least creative and satisfying work to them. They want to just fire and forget: "here's the spec, go and build it". Lower productivity is less of an issue if the "resources" are cheap. I'm over simplifying and I'm sure some companies try to work more in equal partnership but you get the picture.

Also, the move to outsourcing is often done suddenly; it's more like wielding an axe than an organic growth or shift in development model. Companies don't tend to invest in overseas developers as individuals.

In my view it's not great for either set of developers, or for the customers of that company. Perhaps when done right it can be more beneficial and I hope things will improve overall.

[ex_ubiquiti]

Some of the best engineers I worked with were in non-US offices. They were also smart enough to leave.

You cut my quote short of the important part which was "and employees complained less about constant crunch mode". It is easier to "trap" engineers in countries where average salaries are lower by offering them 20% over market rate and then threatening to fire them if they don't work constant crunch hours. We were promised very large bonuses that never arrived.

> That said I don't hear the best about the company (long working hours, not the highest pay)

It is a sad situation. The pay was very good and the working hours were reasonable when I started, but that changed for the worse. That is why all of my peers left the company.

[klik99]

It doesn't have to imply that developers are lower quality for this to be a troubling signal - if you close an existing office that is doing good work to save money, that shows where your priorities lie. And I agree with your sentiment, I worked with some very talented developers in Shanghai, but there are a lot of factors at play that make it hard to build a solid team from the other side of the world, factors that are legitimate and feed into the misconception that these countries have inferior talent.

[aljarry]

I'm one as well, but I think the OP meant that the company is not trying to keep the existing experienced employees and just replacing them when they leave.

My company started doing the same and erosion of knowledge is really bad.

[pfortuny]

>> That said I don't hear the best about the company (long working hours, not the highest pay) and have declined a job offer there myself.

You are saying the same as the parent. Expecting “short” hours is seen as “feeling entitled”... There are countries where people are not willing to work in those conditions.

[nikanj]

The whole motivation for management moving development to Brutopia is to maximize savings, they are not going for the most expensive, world-class developers of Brutopia.

Bottom-of-the-barrel developers bring even greater savings, and paying peanuts has always been a great way to get monkeys.

[klik99]

I have heard the weather is nice in Brutopia this time of year