[reverse_list]

These comments about how the market is on fire for developers always make me sad. Not your fault, but outside the US (and maybe western/northern Europe) you get lowballed hard, even with years of experience. And the supposedly lower CoL doesn't make up for it, at all, not even remotely. I'm not even talking about getting crazy bay area compensations, I'm talking about hoping something better than a $25k-$45k range for experienced engineers.

[screye]

Filter bubbles are incredibly dangerous.

Every time I hang out my with most ambitious friends, I am reminded of how MSFT is 'low balling' company. That I could be making 2x if only I kept up with interviewing. On one hand, I can't avoid the objective truth of the statement. But, on the other hand, the hedonic treadmill is infinite.

I'm glad I am not in the bay area. I would've been paralyzed by the persistent reminders around me of my monetarily sub-optimal life choices. Get out out of my head: 'over-achieving friendo', I am already well into the 99th percentile of wage earners of my age in the world's richest country.

Over the last 5 years, I've seen a (COL non-adjusted) 100x (20x if I use a more practically true number) increase in salary. So far, My happiest moments have rarely required much money, let alone 100x as much as I had then.

[gumby]

If it makes you feel better: there was, and remains, a tech subculture more focused on the tech than the money, but it’s been drowned out over the past 25 years because a gold rush makes for better press. Unfortunately that press attracts people who like that sort of thing.

So if you like what you are doing and can live comfortably you are at the top of your game. The rest is merely froth.

[jart]

Says the Cygnus Solutions cofounder. Wow. Where are people like you working today?

[gumby]

Since the Cygnus days I have worked on on small solar thermal power plants (fit in a pair of containers), pharmaceutical chemistry, distributed databases, Symbolic AI, and Rand CastAR for a while.

Some programming, some hardware, some chemistry, always lots of fun.

Right now I’m working on data control and privacy.

[jart]

Data control and privacy are two of the most important things. I wrote a popular open source project where I've sought to improve that. Would you be interested in taking a quick look and offering candid feedback? See https://justine.lol/redbean/ and discussion thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26271117 and interview https://youtu.be/1ZTRb-2DZGs and polyglot executable format https://justine.lol/ape.html Someone like you could help me know if I'm doing it in the best possible way, since studying the influence of groups like cygnus was what helped me learn the hacking stunts that allowed me to pull it off in the first place.

[DiggyJohnson]

This is beautifully captured. I work in a city I love (consider Charleston, SC - y'all) at a rate that puts me in a very similar position to myself. I'm so grateful to be able to have the space to not obsess over optimizing comp. I also like the knowledge/"feeling" that I can choose to focus on this in the future - and realize the benefits.

[askafriend]

> I am reminded of how MSFT is 'low balling' company. That I could be making 2x if only I kept up with interviewing.

It doesn't take much to interview and double your comp. You don't have to interview at Google or Facebook to double your comp - many pre-IPO startups are paying up and their interview processes are often less rigorous.

If you're happy with your situation then more power to you. But something tells me deep down inside, you're not OK with it. I'm here to tell you that a couple weeks of prep and looking around can go a long way.

[brailsafe]

Maybe if you're already in a famous company, but I've been itnerviewing/applying for a while and it's absolutely draining, especially with a lot of companies just trying to mimick the hiring practices of FAANG. Many are going to require a 1-2 hr coding test just to apply (not that I've been bothering with those). After that, a series of 3-6 interviews, and it just scales like shit. So I really have you read your comment as "If you've already got a famous company on your resume, are extremely lucky, or very well-known for some other reason or have great contacts in hiring positions at other companies, then you can double your comp easy!"

[ipaddr]

Interesting thread. I thought everyone was clinging. How would you prepare if you had the rest of the summer?

[Siira]

> the hedonic treadmill is infinite

It actually diminishes very quickly for most people, which I suspect is why they aren’t that motivated.

Still true that being content with what you have can be a wise choice.

[golergka]

After 2020, there's much more fully remote openings in us that hire from across the globe and pay over $100k.

[tgtweak]

All the shops in Ukraine and India I know of are solidly heading up in price for developers. Engineers make 20-30x the average salary and junior devs are making 24k USD per year out of uni there. Compare that to 35k USD in Canada.

I think if anything, the decreased concerns about hiring remote AND the increase in overall demand has lead to very favorable conditions for engineers even abroad.

[mandelbrotwurst]

Out of curiosity, where are you located?

[aurelianito]

Not the original commenter, but this is the situation in Argentina. I would love to do a remote gig and get 100k a year. I am a programmer with over 20 years of experience and I can program professionally in over 10 different programming languages.

[rubicon33]

It is worth noting that software salaries are artificially inflated HEAVILY due to a general unwillingness or lack of interest in hiring overseas developers.

The second this changes, the bottom drops out of software.

I don't know if it will ever happen that big companies begin openly accepting overseas applicants but if/when it does, you can expect that it wont be for 100k. Suddenly when you consider the entire planet, there's no longer a shortage of developers, and the employer has all the power.

[akiselev]

> It is worth noting that software salaries are artificially inflated HEAVILY due to a general unwillingness or lack of interest in hiring overseas developers.

Because it's been tried before and for the most part it was an abysmal failure. I was just starting out doing some basic web freelancing as a teenager in the 2000s and even I got roped in to clean up an outsourced project after being outbid a year earlier by an overseas firm during the first outsourcing wave. Lots of people on HN have horror stories of cleaning up from that era.

We've been here several times before - like literally just this past year of everyone saying "oh but now you have to compete with remote workers everywhere!" Salaries keep rising because software is an arms race. The companies making the most profit will continue to invest in getting the best people and outside of the odd global crisis, the industry will continue to grow as everyone else tries to keep up both in technology and in hiring. All those firms I cleaned up after as a kid are still around today and bigger than ever, yet on this side of the ocean we keep making more and more money.

I think we've got at least a century before software hits the diminishing returns that the industrial revolution did. My local lumberyard is still using DOS machines probably made before I was born.

[rootusrootus]

Overall I agree with you, and my experience has been similar, but I think the comparison with outsourcing is not correct.

I would argue that outsourcing failed primarily due to companies trying to farm out the coding to uninterested entities whose incentives did not align well. Not necessarily because the foreign workers doing the coding were bad.

Back to the guy in Argentina -- I imagine that he/she is actually in a reasonably good position as the amount of remote work increases. Indians not so much, because they are 12.5 hours ahead (of Pacific time). Argentina is only 4 hours ahead, which makes for a lot more overlap.

So I think the field has leveled a little bit in that sense, because if you have a remote developer in another state, they are not very different than one in another country who happens to be in a similar time zone. The other big barrier IMO is communication, so someone in Argentina who is not merely fluent in English but speaks it very clearly could be in a really strong position.

[akiselev]

> I would argue that outsourcing failed primarily due to companies trying to farm out the coding to uninterested entities whose incentives did not align well. Not necessarily because the foreign workers doing the coding were bad.

It failed because the intent was to cut costs and they got what they paid for. The successful ones were genuinely trying to expand their engineering talent pool and quickly figured out that the cost savings were a marginal benefit that made up for some of the extra overhead of international accounting and management. Quality engineers are one visa lottery away from Western salaries so the local median salary is often completely disconnected from what a FAANG might pay for a decent engineer, which is a rude awakening for anyone trying to cut costs without destroying the quality of their output. On top of that, the people most likely to make it a smooth transition are also the people most in demand (arms race!) and competition for them helps evaporate any savings for the business.

The guy in Argentina is in a great position to get hired to work remotely for an American company, but I don't seem him as competition regardless of how good he is. It's an arms race so my employer's competitor can't replace their team with Argentinians because that down time will give my employer time to crush them (which we learned in the 2000s). They can hire an extra team of Argentinians on top of their existing head count but if they do that my employer will be pressured to hire a team of Brazilians. Before you know it, both companies are hiring even more local teams to help manage the flow of work between their existing local teams and the outsourced ones.

There's more work and money to pay for it than there are people to do it. Until that changes, we're not the ones competing, the employers are.

[ghaff]

I'm in regular calls from the East coast US to central Europe so, usually, a six hour difference. That feels about the limit to me before things get more difficult, people need to work outside of normal business hours, etc.

You can do bigger differences and many of us do on occasion. But on a multiple times a week basis, both 5am calls and 11pm calls get old.

[erik_seaberg]

I think a presence in the same legal system is also a barrier. If you open a branch office and hire and manage them seriously, you can find a sharp team, but this isn’t all that cheap. If you try to write a small check to some contracting company with no reputation, they will deliver “tested” tarballs that are littered with syntax errors because they know suing them isn’t really feasible.

[dcist]

I recall this period as well (early to mid 2000s) and the fears of overseas workers led me to change my college major at the time. There was also still a big hangover effect from the 2000 dot com bubble. I remember seeing low developer salaries and, although I at least somewhat enjoyed coding and tinkering around with technical things, there were other pursuits I enjoyed more. I kind of regret not sticking with computer science but my career has turned out fairly well (although I think I would have optimized my income faster if I had stayed a computer science major).

[mech422]

I've been thru off-shorting with India, China, Russia...

I'm sorta wondering what country would be next. It has to have a large enough labor pool to fill the positions, and still be cheap enough to at least look good on paper..

[rootusrootus]

My guess is most likely Africa, though I think somewhere in Central or South America would have a very strong advantage due to the narrower time offset.

[Tarsul]

at least here in Germany the biggest companies like to expand into Eastern Europe (think Slovakia, Hungary, also Russia), where these IT experts help in the German projects. They even get many of those people to learn German! The price pressure doesn't really stop there because while at first Slovakia was the way to go, now Hungary is xx% cheaper.. and so on and so on...

[Volrath89]

I'm located in Colombia, and all my developers friends/acquaintances that speak English are already working for US companies. Some of them earning 100k+, but most of them earning about 50-70k.

I'd say there is not a general unwillingness to hire overseas developers, on the contrary, if more people could speak english in south america US companies would be more than happy to hire even more here.

There is a shortage in english speaking developers globally, but not a shortage on companies' interest in hiring anywhere

[rootusrootus]

I agree 100%. Aside from time differences, the biggest problem we have with remote teams in faraway places is communication. We have really sharp folks in our Hyderabad office, but some of them really struggle to communicate clearly, and a poor Zoom connection doesn't help at all. That would be my one piece of advice to someone outside the US who wants some of that sweet, sweet income we have grown accustomed to. Being a good coder is fine, but not really distinctive. Work hard on speaking English as clearly as possible. It absolutely will give you a competitive advantage.

[alasdair_]

Buying a decent microphone is also something I'd strongly recommend, especially for people (like me) that have a non-local accent.

In addition, high quality audio makes you sound smarter :) https://tips.ariyh.com/p/good-sound-quality-smarter

[majormajor]

South America is an interesting one for a lot of US companies because the timezones line up much better with US-local folks than in any other continents.

There are still other substantial collaboration challenges, but if more places move to be truly remote-first, those places will necessarily have solutions for that anyway.

[foobiekr]

Agreed the time zones are killer.

If I start another company I’d really like to hire a competent offshore team in south or Central America but I have a lot of trouble getting there from here. If I wanted to hire a team in Israel, Pakistan or India, I could do it immediately, because I have trusted friends who can hook me up with people that they themselves trust plus or minus some skeeviness that I know how to manage. For south-of-us I have no connections and basically no way to start.

[esel2k]

Agreed. I am a product manager for a startup software acquired from Brazil. Nearly all engineering sit in Brazil (or some squads in India). I am the EU based PM that has to deal with the timezone issues and requirements- do I like it? Not really, but it is existing and the company might hire a an architect or tech lead on europe, the rest will remain outsourced. Generally speaking some of the developpers speak good English and so with Jira and Figma it works.

[aurelianito]

I could get a 60k USD a year remote thing but I would be out of the system (I mean, now I am an Argentinian employee with all the rights it entails). For 60k, it is not worth it. For 100k it would be worth to solve all the issues associated with getting money from abroad (maybe make a corporation somewhere?). Anyway, I am listening to 100k+ offers.

[yaitsyaboi]

Just curious: what kind of lifestyle does 100k USD get you in Colombia?

[Volrath89]

You can live in a flat in the best parts of major cities comfortably, you could hire one or maybe even two FT employees to help you to cook, clean the house, take care of kids, etc. If you don't like the city life, you could also rent a small "mansion" in the suburbs (but then you'd suffer a bit with the internet connection, fiber only goes to major cities)

You could dine out at nice restaurants every weekend and travel around by plane every time there is a holiday and stay at 5 star hotels

Taking into account the minimum salary here is 300 USD / month and with 50k per year you are already top 1%, 100k gives you an unimaginable level of wealth. You'd earn about the same salary as the president of the country and more than most CEOs from local companies

But that would be if you spend all your salary every month which is not so smart, what most of us (bilingual developers) do is continue living a standard middle class life and just invest heavily, I invest more than 50% of my salary, mostly in real state and US stocks

[moron4hire]

I have seen succesful outsourced projects. They were more expensive than hiring local, because they required a massive amount of up-front analysis, requirements definition, design documentation, and involvement from an expensive middle-management tier of analysts. It took understanding that the process was going to be hard and have a lot of iterative rework. It took understanding that communication is hard.

Markets clear. If outsourcing were so great, it would have completely taken over by now. It has been tested for decades now and it hasn't.

Outsourcing fits really well for organizations that have a lot of explicit, documented, well-understood domain knowledge, for which the org is the key inventor. But that's not most organizations. Most organizations are operating by the seat of their pants, competing in markets where a large number of other orgs know their business. That they turn a profit at all is more a testament to the perseverance of a few, key employees than it is the exceptionalism of the organization itself.

Every axis of communication is a potential friction point, be it collocation, industry, experience levels, language, time zone, culture, personality types, etc. The more you can remove those friction points, the more successful your project can be. But outsourcing throws several of those out the window, never to be touched again. So you're left optimizing on the few that are left, where most companies only ever optimized on those axes that have already been removed.

[momirlan]

Employers had 20+ years to switch to overseas workers. The percentage of jobs that went east has stabilized, and it's not going to change dramatically.

[davedx]

This is absolutely untrue. In The Netherlands the government has a 30% tax rebate for devs who come from elsewhere and it’s leveraged intensely, more than half of the devs I work with at bigger companies here are usually not Dutch.

[azinman2]

So the Dutch government is incentivizing hiring non-Dutch people??!

[estebank]

It is incentivizing highly skilled and highly compensated people moving to The Nederlands from beyond 150km from the border by not charging the 30% tax for up to 5 years. This is similar on intent to the O1 visas in the US.

https://www.iamsterdam.com/en/living/take-care-of-official-m...

[foobiekr]

This is not dumb. This is how you kickstart a network and trust.

[sidlls]

What makes you think that these companies will pay above-market (local) rates sufficient to overcome other frictions? I think it's more likely they'll look at the local market rates and maybe pay a modest premium--not enough to create a huge draw of local talent looking for remote work, and not enough to make a dent in the labor market dynamics in general.

[JTbane]

Will it happen though? Hiring someone from a foreign country is easy for a temporary contract, but in industry we need to "own the code" and continue to maintain it.

Ultimately outsourcing has issues with accountability.

[treeman79]

Overseas can range from:

you are a team of people located all over the world. To Your being off-shored to India as soon as can figure out how.

Worked both, and the culture difference and happiness difference is drastic.

Even a hint of offshoring will induced panic for many employees/ candidates. Definitely makes hiring and retention hard.

[theferret]

> It is worth noting that software salaries are artificially inflated HEAVILY due to a general unwillingness or lack of interest in hiring overseas developers.

Yes that's right; business hates saving money and loves hiring super expensive US talent.

[reverse_list]

East Asia.

If you are looking to fill a position coming with a decent pay, I'm all ears :)

[foobiekr]

Just to be clear, there’s a big difference between China and the rest of east Asia in terms of hiring. So it might be good to edit that and differentiate.