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by mgrthrow 1286 days ago
Amazon is running out of engineers too. The way that company treats workers is finally catching up to them (hopefully).
2 comments

No, there are millions of engineers in India that will be happy to work for AMZN, same in LATAM
People always say this and I have to ask: have you seen the job market in India lately? It's competitive. Salaries used to be 1/10th that of a US engineer. US-based companies pay a premium, with Google offering L5 engineers over 100K total comp.
Steve Yegge said that India had basically run out of software engineers.
Yep, and in the United States, there's no longer a large generation flooding into the workforce (Millennials); CS degrees have flatlined since 2016.
Is there a source for this? I'd love to also find out if there's some inverse with bootcamp grads, albeit that would be harder to track.
https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20223/trends-in-undergraduate-...

Bootcamps are more challenging to evaluate, as they have a history controversy around their graduation rates / job placement rates. Anecdotally, I just don't see a ton of bootcamp graduates on the market relative to CS degree holders. However, stats seem to indicate there were ~25K graduates in 2020. https://www.statista.com/statistics/626932/north-america-cod...

But this can be somewhat misleading, as it includes all trainings - including existing software developers reskilling.

There are millions of engineers in the USA that would, too. But few of the good ones from any of those places are going to want to.
This is an outdated viewpoint. 10 years ago, outsourcing to India involved a lot of tradeoffs that usually ended poorly. But Bangalore has become a first-world city in some ways, with a middle class that was educated in Western universities or viably-equivalent Indian universities.

Before the pandemic, I worked with a guy (in person) who was educated at an Indian university, who was as good a developer as any of the American intermediate developers I've worked with, including fluency in English. The rise of remote work has further enabled this sub-economy to flourish: since I've gone full-remote myself, I've worked with a few Indian developers and learned a lot from them: they're not worse developers than me (I'm a senior full-stack developer with enough experience to predate the existence of "full-stack developers"--much of my experience with Fortune 500 companies). There's even enough of an economy in Bangalore that one of my coworkers left for a pay raise to work at a company based in Bangalore.

There are still downsides, primarily time zones. And if you are looking to save money, it's not going to really work out that way: you can still hire chop-shop Indian devs for 20% of what you'd pay a Western dev, but Indian devs who are equivalent to Western devs will require Western pay (minus at most 20-30% to account for the time zone issue, but you'll pay that out in management costs due to the time zone issue).

I'll also add that, coming from nonprofits, some people viewed hiring from India as a way to provide "aid" to the poor in India, but it doesn't really play out that way: most of the folks who are educated enough to work Western jobs, obtained that education because they are from the upper castes with generational wealth.

Engineers that can communicate effectively in English, work collaboratively, break cultural barriers and stick to company values are just a handful.
Running out isn’t going to happen, they just lower the hiring bar. Not saying this is a good thing but it’s what’s happening.