[deathpanels]

Everyone is talking about layoffs and lack of hiring, but I've found the problem to be that companies are cutting costs by silently increasing workload on existing employees. Everyone is getting burnt out trying to keep a 300-person engineering team running on only 100 head count. That leads to more incidents, slower delivery, less innovation, longer hours. Even those who are still employed are seeing working conditions deteriorating.

[orochimaaru]

I think a lot of big-co are setting up subsidiaries overseas and hiring there. It's different from the contract based offshoring model that happened in 2007 or so which had rather disastrous results. I know my company has and plans to have almost 1/2 its IT workforce as direct employees overseas.

[deadghost]

My previous company was doing this. I basically quit out of frustration. They weren't much better than picking random people off the street and pointing them at code. It bled into my work life when they took over a project I was on and was pinging me constantly with "hello" and "good morning" expecting to jump on calls with their teams to explain exactly how to do their jobs.

An example to illustrate what I was working with:

Problem: input validation is too restrictive

Their solution: remove all input validation

For my mental well-being, I couldn't stay on.

[pram]

Pro tip: just don’t respond to the “good morning” messages. If they don’t follow up it wasn’t important anyway.

[unixfg]

This is the reference I like: https://nohello.net

[marcus0x62]

Bottom Line Up Front - opening your message with the core request or message first - is a related practice from the military that works really well for email. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)

The way I apply this to emails is to ask myself: if someone only reads the first sentence would they know what I need and if they need to act on it immediately, read it at their leisure, or file it away?

[tarxvf]

I like this one, it's a little more subtle: https://yeshello.org/

[neilv]

I fear that one would be misinterpreted by a significant percentage of American office workers.

And by an even higher percentage of overseas colleagues in some countries.

[causality0]

People, particularly family, calling me on the phone and then asking me what I'm doing as if it's any of their business and it's their decision whether what they need is more important than what I'm doing is such a pet peeve of mine.

[mmcgaha]

How do you start the conversation when you call your brother/sister?

[agar]

I admit to being guilty of the "YT?" or "Hi" type messages, but it's for a reason: the person may be presenting to a client and shared their screen instead of their window.

I've been on too many Zooms where the presenter's Slack pops up saying, "John, we have a call with <company name> about <topic> at 3:00. Can you join?"

Multiple times, this information was probably sensitive. I'd rather avoid that by waiting until I get a response.

[pjmlp]

While you have a point, the golden rule is to shut down everything related to email and IM during meetings.

[saalweachter]

There may be a middle ground. In this example, you could say, "Are you available to join a call at 3:30?"; that gives a little information about the topic and the time sensitivity, but it may still require a follow-up.

[paulryanrogers]

At one point I installed a filter on my IM client to silently discard trivial messages like "thanks" and "OK". There were already delivery indicators so nothing was lost.

Perhaps a hello filter and "yes?" auto responder could help, at least during business hours. Then send an OOO message if after hours.

[droopyEyelids]

The next level of this is waiting a couple hours and reacting to their message with a waving emoji- not replying! only putting the reaction in there.

If they don't want to talk business then a friendly greeting is appropriate.

[kaashif]

This is the real answer. If they ask you why you didn't respond, you can honestly tell them you were waiting for them to ask their question.

If someone says "how are you?" that doesn't work though.

[gumballindie]

Imagine being this guy.

[nostrademons]

My company's doing apprenticeships; take somebody with no CS education, not even a college degree, and teach them to code.

It's an interesting model, I remember folks on HN calling for more companies to try it since it seems to have had some success in Germany, but I predict a lot more security bugs and unmaintainable code in the near future.

[oooyay]

I'm not college educated and I've been coding since I was about nine in different capacities. I was inspired by two engineers my dad worked with that were the same; one of them was a SWE and the other was a Systems Engineer. I ended up dropping out before I hit any of my CS courses, so I basically did a repeat of high school.

The stuff you need to know for most jobs can be learned through books (DS&A); everyone, including grads, learn to actually code on the job. Systemic thinking and breaking problems down into manageable chunks is harder to train for; this is where I think something that's akin to apprenticeship could really help. At least the way I view it, and maybe I'm wrong, is that in the early 2000's, much less the 90's, there weren't many CS or CE schools - much less accredited ones that followed CAC standards. If your company is doing this then they're just getting back to the roots of what a computer programmer used to be.

[grotted]

What's DS&A?

[oooyay]

Data structures and algorithms

[pavel_lishin]

We've done this, and it's worked out pretty well - all of our apprentices were dedicated to learning to write software, about half were offered jobs at the end of the apprenticeships, and half of those accepted.

Remember that they're not just mashing code straight to the main branch; they're apprentices, so other engineers paired with them, others read their pull requests, etc. It wasn't a free-for-all, nor should it be.

[mschuster91]

> It's an interesting model, I remember folks on HN calling for more companies to try it since it seems to have had some success in Germany, but I predict a lot more security bugs and unmaintainable code in the near future.

German here. The secret sauce behind the Duales System is that it's, as the name suggests, a split system - one part of the training is at government-run schools ("Berufsschule"), and the other part at the company that trains and pays you. And since the curricula are virtually the same across the schools, even if they're a bit outdated, they still produce decent graduates.

[alasdair_]

Can you list some things graduates of this “secret sauce” have built?

[mschuster91]

We don't make glamorous "unicorns" in the US style as we lack both the financials (aka enormous amounts of dumb money floating around waiting to be invested - remember, we don't have 401k, we have rolling-contribution pensions so no need for that) and the culture (we're very risk averse)... but our "Mittelstand" has produced hundreds of small and medium size companies that are world leaders in their respective market [1], often dominating their market with 70-90% [2]. And the foundation of that, especially for the older companies, isn't academics, it's trades, training and apprenticeship. Many of the Mittelstand companies, you enter in your youth and remain there for the rest of your life.

Our pride as a nation, our role models, is not a few people who struck it right to become multi-billionaires, our pride is the millions of people working for the Mittelstand and the consistently high quality of the stuff they produce. Boring, but wildly profitable and very, very resilient.

PS: You actually might know some of these things our tradespeople built. BMW/Audi/Mercedes/Volkswagen cars, MAN trucks, Rheinmetall, KMW and ThyssenKrupp military hardware from tanks to the massive Panzerhaubitze 2000, Diehl's IRIS-T anti-air defense, Heckler & Koch/Walther guns, anything with "Siemens" on it built before Siemens fell to MBA shenanigans, all developed and prior to globalization also built in Germany. And a lot of it, especially the military tech, is up to par with what the US military builds - for IRIS-T SLM and PzH 2000, the Ukraine war shows that they are even better to some experts.

One thing we sadly lost was pharmaceuticals - up until the 60s-70s, Germany used to be the "apothecary of the world" [3], but we lost that to India and China.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions

[2] https://hbr.org/1992/03/lessons-from-germanys-midsize-giants

[3] https://www.deutsche-apotheker-zeitung.de/daz-az/2018/daz-44...

[bvvg]

Very likely core-competence in technical work, which is priceless in my opinion.

[p1necone]

This only works if you hire enough really good engineers and have them spend most of their time mentoring, and most companies aren't willing to accept the senior engineers individual contributions on paper dropping to zero.

[oooyay]

I disagree. Actively mentoring, like what this demands, is more supervisory. I do it with college interns all the time. It's not suddenly different because the pipeline doesn't originate with college. The process generally goes:

1. In weekly one on ones we may discuss a topic. I ask them to apply that topic.

2. They pick up sprint tasks and look to apply the knowledge they've gained.

3. They may ask some questions along the way; it's important that other engineers are also available for question asking - the same way peers may depend on each others knowledge.

4. You peer review the outcome in a PR.

Rinse and repeat.

I'll add I end up having to do this with everyone if they're fresh to industry or came from a place with poor standards for code writing and/or problem solving.

[ofcrpls]

https://www.yearup.org/ A non-profit that I've volunteered with,that explicitly trains folks from alternate pathways to place them at entry-level positions, with support from certain corporate entities, ranging from training support to directly hiring via internships/apprenticeships.

[pjmlp]

In Germany, and Portugal (where I went through similar system), you still need to finish high school, and there is a programming related curriculum anyway.

The part-time work is like doing the labs part.

Also at the end of it, you can still go to the university if feeling like it. I did so.

Going through technical school was a secure way to have a job, in case the university exams weren't good enough for the engineering degree, which by the way is mostly state sponsored on this side of the Atlantic.

[claytongulick]

My 23 year old son has ops experience, but not much development, though he's eager to learn.

This sounds like the kind of situation he'd excel with - is your company currently hiring U.S. based folks?

[wyclif]

Are you allowed to say what company you work for?

[mewpmewp2]

Do you want to avoid it or do you want to join it?

[wyclif]

Join.

[nostrademons]

It's a FANG.

[wyclif]

Thanks. If it's Google (and I suspect it is), what are they calling this employee development program and where can people apply?

[zztop44]

That sounds like a frustrating experience. I wonder what caused this problem? We’re the people leading your company’s subsidiary’s hiring efforts incompetent? Was it a management issue? It’s not like there’s something about being German or British or Indian or Filipino or Australian, as opposed to American, that makes you think input validation doesn’t matter.

With contracted outsourcing the root of the problem is generally a third party with misaligned incentives. But here this is no third party.

[AnthonyMouse]

Companies can have internal intermediaries.

Suppose you go to a country and talk to a charlatan who tells you that they have many qualified people and they'll work for 30% of what you're paying in the US. You hire them and tell them to hire more staff there.

Then it turns out there are many qualified people in that country, but they don't work for 30% of what you're paying in the US, because it's a global market and actually they can command the same wages as their skills imply anywhere else. But there are plenty of unqualified people who will sign on for lower wages, and you've been promised workers for lower wages, so that's what you get.

[coredog64]

The good news: Each employee only asks for 30% of what your onshore resources want. The bad news: You need four of them.

[schnitzelstoat]

You kind of can though. In Europe even 30% of a US FAANG wage would be an incredible wage here. 50% certainly would be.

There are other problems like timezones etc. and maybe payroll taxes are higher here too but I think the possibility for labour arbitrage is definitely real.

[everforward]

In my dealings with companies that had European offices, European workers had far higher non-salary costs that brought the total compensation numbers closer together.

Eg Europeans usually had much more time off. The costs of that time off scale with salary.

I do think labor arbitrage could work, I just don't think it would be in Europe. I suspect the total employee cost in Europe approaches that of the US, the money just goes to non-salary places (taxes, time off, labor protection, etc).

[deathpanels]

Now that's problem solving!

[psunavy03]

[little_bobby_tables.png]

[throwup238]

At the very least it makes pivoting from mediocre engineer to ransomware kingpin much easier.

Pivot! Lean startup! Four hour workweek!

[kevin_thibedeau]

I've had them confidently tell me they verified functionality by decrypting a TLS session even though that was impossible because I hadn't yet implemented a way to expose ephemeral TLS keys and there was no way to do it from the other side of the link.

[alasdair_]

Maybe you encrypted with 8-bit keys? :)

[jncfhnb]

Good news, I got rid of ALL the tickets!

[deathanatos]

You probably say that in jest, but I have seen — multiple times — someone just go and delete all the tickets. Boom! 0 tickets. No bugs, totes. /s

[Tommah]

Reposting my comment from a couple of months ago:

At one of my jobs, they used Asana when I started. It was too full of backlogged issues, so we moved over to Jira. Then Jira got too full. A month before I was laid off, one of my coworkers said, "Maybe we should try out Asana."

[democracy]

that could be a great feature of a new product - "your jira is full? time to move on to...." ))

[wyclif]

I've seen it too. Actually, I'm in SE Asia right now and the ISP I'm using routinely deletes tickets that haven't been resolved.

[mewpmewp2]

That's called ruthless prioritization.

[derwiki]

I worked at a company that was doing this, but the candidates I interviewed were all below [what had been] the bar. Recruiters asked me why no one was passing the interviews; I told them I ran the interview the same way I had been doing for 3 years. I stopped being scheduled for interviews.

[ChumpGPT]

As soon as your company hires a Indian CIO, you're done. More and more of the staff will be H1B's and over time they will transition the work to India. I could name a very big corporation doing that right now. The CIO they just hired (last 6 months) is an Indian who just finish doing this to the previous corporation he was a CIO at. Both these companies are the largest in their respective industries in the world.

[booleandilemma]

We don't have an Indian CIO but the trend is generally true. Indian managers hire more Indians.

[avasii]

I will guess that the two industries are agricultural machinery and transportation.

[closeparen]

At the same time, US salaries are either $300k+ in the Bay Area or $0 and unemployed, there's still no appetite to let someone work for e.g. $150k in a normal metro area.

[ptero]

There are many large, stable, profitable companies that are hiring software engineers. They are not software houses, but they pay well for a comfortable life (outside of NYC and Bay Area) and offer good work-life balance. For some examples you can look at medical devices, utilities, manufacturing, IBMs and Walmarts and R&D departments of virtually any large non-software company.

But there are frictions, too. Unless you go into management, comp tops out around $200k in most metros. HR -- instead of write-your-own-rules in a startup you have to take corporate training and get approval for things folks at the startups take for granted. Limited tools, externally managed corporate OS and software, Outlook instead of Slack. Office time requirements -- fully remote is very rare. And so on.

Not saying this is the wrong choice, just that there are tradeoffs.

[closeparen]

Absolutely. It’s weird though that tech focused companies with Silicon Valley style cultures who are looking to cut costs are completely uninterested in those regions. With more developer-friendly working conditions, they wouldn't have to compete as aggressively on TC. And with more normal cost of living, it could be sustainable for senior people who are not independently wealthy to have long tenures there.

[ptero]

I think you are absolutely right that there appears to be some low hanging fruit for tech companies to pick by looking to "second tier metros". But I inertia and (lack of) critical mass play a big role.

In the past decade (i.e., when the money was plentiful) when a startup is young, the TC of its engineers rarely makes or breaks the startup. Being able to get an MVP out and iterate quickly is more important, so it was a rational choice to stay in the Bay Area even if it means 30% inflated TC. And after that moving is expensive in both time and money and risky (e.g., a key engineer might not want to go).

And having a critical mass of tech companies helps attract talent: if a company goes under or has large layoffs it is perceived to be easier to find a new job in the center of the tech hub.

I think covid helped nudge along the process of moving tech development out of SV, but it is a slow process. My 2c.

[closeparen]

Tech is moving rapidly out of Silicon Valley... but strangely, straight to the developing world, skipping second-tier metros.

[alasdair_]

I just looked at Walmart. Base pay was 240k remote plus a lot of bonuses and benefits. Even Walmart isn’t paying Walmart wages any more.

[democracy]

Frankly I miss these annoying outlook calendar notifications, these days nothing comes close to be that invasive )

[deathpanels]

Those companies exist but they are being squeezed by borrowing costs so they're either not growing or are cutting staff.

[cableshaft]

There's definitely $150k jobs in a normal metro area. Chicago, for example, has a lot of posted software engineering jobs in that range (I've even seen more that are lower than that lately after this past year of tech layoffs, like around $120k, unfortunately)

[vel0city]

> there's still no appetite to let someone work for e.g. $150k in a normal metro area

There are "normal metro areas" that aren't the Bay Area where a $150k salary leads to a very comfortable life, with loads of $150k jobs for people with decent skills.

[IntelMiner]

I'd happily take 150K/year and go live in nowhere Wyoming or something. As much as I loathe Musk I'm sure I could get by on something like Starlink

Except oops Amazon would absolutely decimate my yearly comp because they base it entirely off where you live, and adjust it if you try to move somewhere cheaper

Though of course that's all moot anyway since we've all gotta go back to the office because the people who own all the realestate are weirdly chummy with all the management of these companies. Weird how that worked

[vel0city]

> Except oops Amazon would absolutely decimate my yearly comp

There are other employers hiring tech people other than Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon.

In fact, a teammate of mine is a software developer just got his Starlink connection up and running replacing his WISP in a rural area where he's farming as well on the side. Another friend works as an SRE and lives way out in the desert pursuing his amateur astronomy hobby. I know of several other friends and coworkers who live similar lives.

Technically I'm 100% remote, but personally I enjoy the metro life so I'm living in an affordable metro area living a lifestyle I enjoy.

[hnthrowaway0328]

Yep ours are hiring from India directly. Rumor says head of IT has a affiliated company set up...

[democracy]

It's possible, in one of my jobs the senior project manager was found to hold a stake in one of the outsourcing companies working for us and was terminated under conflict of interest.

[freddie_mercury]

This was a pretty forseeable event after US based developers repeatedly told their bosses that development could be done just as productively remotely.

[wyclif]

just as productively remotely

...with the same staff and teams, that's the important qualifier. Nobody thinks they're going to get the same quality team by body shopping their hiring funnel.

[bruce511]

The problem with this argument is that it implies "you're special".

And you likely have experience, domain knowledge, product knowledge, customer knowledge and so on, so I'd argue you Are special.

But then you leave, and need to be replaced. Since I'm hiring from a pool where no-one has this special, I may as well hire from overseas. Its cheaper.

Equally, when you work remotely your special is invisible. The way you keep the customer happy is invisible. The way you enable your team (assuming your special is passed on) is invisible.

Of course there are very smart people, with lots of experience, and lots of special of their own. Finding them is hard (of course) but the reward for finding them is significant.

FAANG companies are skipping the labor broker, and building subsidiaries offshore. Those offices pay local rates, have as-strict hiring policies, and are growing.

So your point us well made- existing employees have value. But companies deal with churn. And we don't need 300 people onshore with your special skills. We can offshore 200 posts, and wait for them to come up to speed.

Being a remote worker makes this process easier.

[marcus0x62]

> Those offices pay local rates, have as-strict hiring policies, and are growing.

Everybody goes into these arrangements believing, against all history and experience, that they aren't going to lower their hiring bar. Good luck with that.

[wait_a_minute]

Once those 200 posts offshore come up to speed, soon they'll be acquiring incomes at comparable levels since skilled thought-work and crafts are always going to be sought after until labor is meaningless.

We saw this trend happening with manufacturing overseas. Chasing the cheapest labor is not an effective strategy in the mid to long term because it means that eventually your supply chain is at risk and the savings delta shrinks to the savings being irrelevant.

[7speter]

>Nobody thinks they're going to get the same quality team by body shopping their hiring funnel.

Management does.

[giantg2]

Same. My "team" is doubling in size, but all the hires are international.

[deathpanels]

I bailed on a small local company in early 2021. I checked in with how they were doing recently. They laid off all the local developers, minus management (of course). They're hiring exclusively in Africa, the Middle-East, and South America. My current company has done the same thing by emphasizing that we're only hiring in our EU office. I've not seen many US based roles unless they are customer support related.

It is predictable that remote work would lead to another wave of off-shoring. The question now is whether or not these companies can actually innovate with a remote, largely foreign workforce. We've all seen the abominations produced by offshore teams. Moving to a fully remote foreign workforce may be short-sighted.

[giantg2]

At least so far, we've seen foreign direct hires work out well. Much better than the outsourcing teams by a long shot.

[bruce511]

>> actually innovate with a remote, largely foreign workforce.

As distinct from a remote, largely local, expensive workforce?

Innovation is often the mix of vision, direction, and implementation. AWS for example, was implemented by an offshore team. [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services#:~:text=....

[dh2022]

AWS was not implemented by an offshore team. The link you pasted implies that EC2 was implemented by an offshore team - which is not correct either. EC2 had two teams, one of which was in Cape Town. The other team was in Seattle - and larger than the one in Cape Town. The rest of AWS at the time (2007) consisted of S3, SQS, DevPay, CDN, SimpleDB (AWS' own DB implementation at the time) etc... These teams were all in Seattle (in the red brick building by I5).

[hotpotamus]

I've been down this road, and I'm sorry to tell you that your team will be halving again once the international hires are considered onboarded. They might sell it as going to a follow the sun model, but the plan is to move to cheaper labor. I've been through it myself.

[Mc91]

Same. I work as an SWE at a non-FAANG, non-tech Fortune 100 company. We already had an IT staff in India and would hire consultants in India, but this has been accelerating over the past year - virtually all hires or new consulting contracts have been in India. Some of the SWEs in the US are even being put under PMs in India.

[giantg2]

My company is actually doing mostly Europe and ex-US North America

[pc86]

I've actually considered setting up a Mexican corporation to run C2C contracts through for those who want LATAM hires, but the logistics seemed pretty onerous, especially since I don't live near the border. I'd be willing to do a single trip there to finalize everything, but it seems like as a US resident/citizen you'd need to basically stay there for weeks/months while everything is set up, or make multiple trips for each step of the process.

It's hard not to get angry at the company when you see them hiring at median US wages ($100-120k US equivalent) but specifically refusing to hiring folks in the US, when the company is US-based.

[red-iron-pine]

Yeah seeing a lot of Canadian and Mexico hires.

Mexico City, especially -- general consensus is that the level of expertise is good, it's not hard to find a Spanish speaker in the US, better cultural fits, and the timezones overlap better; MXC is on Central Time. Not India-level cheap, but competitive enough.

Canada is even better in that sense, but at a higher price.

NAFTA TN visas are also attractive there, too. No H1B nonsense, and can easily bring personnel over for short (~3 year) tours.

Disclaimer: USA-ian of Hispanic extraction in Canada, so I follow these gigs reasonably closely.

[__turbobrew__]

At my company many of the new hires are within Canada. You get similar talent, similar culture, native English, and same time zones for about 2/3 the cost of a USA dev.

You also don’t have to pay for healthcare of your Canadian employees since they pay for it on their income taxes.

[dukeyukey]

Being in the UK I see a lot of that too - we're cheaper than Americans, speak the same language, are pretty close culturally, and while we're a few timezones off, we're far enough east to overlap with both the West Coast and India.

Plus, London alone has 10 million people, and if you lump in the London commuter belt that adds up to aroun 15 million people, more than all of Ontario! That's a hell of a skilled worker base to work with.

[yesdocs]

It’s time we unionize as software developers. You saw what the UAW achieved, Software Engineering needs the same type of protections

[orochimaaru]

How would unionizing help stop a company from setting up an offshore subsidiary? It may prevent layoffs in the short term - but even with big3 auto manufacturers it hasn’t prevented a move in manufacturing to Mexico and Canada.

I think the solution here has to come from the federal government to explicitly increase sw development employment in the US. Just like we find ourselves in a bad place with scaling chip manufacturing, we will find ourselves hamstrung in sw dev.

I doubt unions can help here - except maybe pressure the government (and that too works mostly on democrats if at all).

[tharkun__]

Canada (close to Detroit) has always been part of the US auto manufacturing scene. In fact you could take what you write and replace the US with Canada and you have what people (and unions) in Canada are complaining about. Not sure what to replace Canada with in your text though. Maybe Mexico a second time?

[linuxftw]

Easy: The union can negotiate they don't have to train or work with anyone overseas (or non-union members generally).

[PeterisP]

The union can force an all-or-nothing decision, but some companies can and will easily choose "nothing" and keep only the overseas developers, not the local unionized ones.

[giantg2]

Then they just hire consultants for overseas training.

[nebula8804]

It remains to be seen if the UAW's achievements will work out in the EV era. They need to unionize Tesla or they will lose hard. Looking at the teardown of GM & Fords EVs vs Tesla, there is no profit being made whatsoever by the old guys. Everyone either loves to idolize Musk or downright hate him with a passion. At the end of the day, the union companies need to still sell a compelling product at a good price. Couple that with how freakin fast Musk moves and the Union companies will eventually end up in bankruptcy court unless something drastically changes: Either the legacy OEMs turn their act around (unlikely see Boeing) or the Unions successfully unionize Tesla. Will be interesting to see the show nonetheless.

[Spooky23]

The truck is a disaster, as is Twitter. I’d guess you have 18-24 months before something pops.

[nebula8804]

People have been saying 18-24 months for the last 15 plus years. Its not going to happen at this point. Lets say the truck is a complete flop, the amount of runway they have allows them to just pivot to something else. Plus these engineering achievements give them massive breathing room to cut costs compared to their competitors. This is what I said by people unable to look past their hatred or love of Musk and look at the actual details on the ground.

As for Twitter well, I can't explain why his other companies get 1 million plus applicants while this company languishes.

[pc86]

Protectionism doesn't work beyond selfish short-term interests. American cars are not exactly paragons of technical or mechanical prowess compared to their Japanese or German counterparts.

I've been a software developer for the better part of two decades, I'm not worried about the C-tier code coming out of rural India. You shouldn't be either unless you're a really bad dev.

[toomuchtodo]

I’m okay with my fellow citizens being selfish and protecting their livelihood. No one else will. “Whose interests?” You’re advocating for shareholder returns (labor arb savings->profits). Ain’t nobody coming to save us.

If we can mandate EV batteries be built in the US to get subsidies (Inflation Reduction Act), other protectionism mechanisms should be on the table. Otherwise, businesses will do their best to maximize profits in the market they’re offering in without any labor contribution back, extractionist style.

[rayiner]

And at the end of the day, the ones doing the outsourcing will have outsourced themselves out of a job too. China won’t need American MBAs when they can do everything in house.

[pc86]

I appreciate you telling me what I'm advocating for. Any basic macroeconomics class covers the effects of protectionism. Yes, in the short term wages may be artificially propped up, industries may be (temporarily) saved, but you do long-term damage to the economy, and the people are better off with free, open markets long term.

[gedy]

> You shouldn't be either unless you're a really bad dev.

I dislike the tone as there are plenty of good devs who've been cut and replaced (sort of) by offshore. Don't equate laid off/replaced with "really bad dev".

[giantg2]

The downside is for people disabled. Maybe they aren't a terrible dev but they aren't a great dev either. If they're on par with outsourced labor, they aren't so safe. But what else can they do?

If I lost my job right now, I'd be totally fucked. I'd end up working at Walmart. Masters degrees might as well be toilet paper.

[pc86]

I remember driving through West Virginia with my parents to visit family as a kid, and my dad was lamenting the fact that its full of the haves and the have nots, with the distinct implication that the haves did something wrong to end up there, and the have nots would be just fine if it wasn't for those pesky rich people. I was just left thinking that if life was haves and have nots, shouldn't you spend your time trying to be one of the haves rather than lamenting the way reality was? But in reality, both those views are overly simplistic.

It's a pretty big leap to go from a software engineer to Walmart. The median software developer (~$110k/yr last I checked but could be outdated) is somewhere in the upper teens as far as income percentile (20% being around $100k and 10% being around $150k[0]). Pretty much any non-management role at Walmart is going to land you in the bottom half.

I'd be curious (but it's none of my business) what about your situation makes that the most likely outcome. I'd bet there are ways to head that off.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_States

[mistrial9]

the new CEO of Google is from India, no?

I see a lot of very qualified people coming from India, around a big University here.. They have had twenty years to build to this.

[frank_nitti]

There are extremely talented Indian engineers, but I don’t think this discussion is about the elite “cream of the crop” but more so the rank and file.

I have been assigned to lead offshore teams with engineers that need direct guidance on very basic coding tasks, produce low quality code and become combative when receiving feedback.

So many times I’ve reviewed and requested the same changes to code, classic example: a try/catch then completely ignore a caught exception, just to get some code “working” for the example inputs. When I call this out as a problem, it’s met with “well you did not say that in the specification, I have completed what was asked”. Another commenter had a similar anecdote where all input validation was removed to get test cases passing… are we expected to write things like that into a work spec? Seems like this would take longer than for me to write the damn code myself

[realusername]

Those talented indian engineers are paid on the global market rate though. The logic also goes the other way, those don't want to be underpaid.

That's why these outsourcing threats from companies make me laugh, they don't understand that software is a global market and they also are competing in it.

The world class FAANG-level Indian engineers which are underpaid just do not exist.

[changoplatanero]

the only thing i want from UAW is a refund for all the dues they made me pay in grad school

[madsbuch]

I now understand why American unions have such a bad name.

[depereo]

I've seen a bunch of US companies setting up offices here in New Zealand and hiring SRE/DevOps types. Our wages are garbage so it's much cheaper for them! Plus our timezone means having staff here leads to much less on-call requirement for US/UK staff.

[fuzztester]

The overseas subsidiary business model was happening well before 2007. I left a company doing it, in 2004, for example. And they had been doing it for some years before I joined. And they were not the only one.

[taude]

Yeup, we're expanding and only hiring off-shore.

[nobodyandproud]

My company is doing this, with the end goal of reducing engineering headcount in the US..

The only way for me to protest is to leave, but the job market is terrible.

[fnordpiglet]

My exposure to bigco is they aren’t hiring anywhere.

[Bluescreenbuddy]

When you can hire engineers in South America or Easter Europe for a tiny fraction of US salaries, you bet they're going to do it.

[rngname22]

What industry?

[Workaccount2]

To me it looks like tech is just falling more in line with other industries pay/workload. I think there are many who joined the tech workforce during the pandemic thinking the norm was to make $135k while doing 10 hours of real work a week from home, twiddling a few lines of bootcamp level javascript to appease your largely absent boss.

Many may forget, or not have been there, but 10-15 years ago tech jobs were notorious for ridiculous workloads/long hours. The pay was just decent too. Not jaw dropping like today.

[spacemadness]

I am dumbfounded this idea gets trotted around HN so freely. I’ve met nobody like this in the industry. Most people I know are burnt out from many years of having to work over 40 hours.

[chii]

> I’ve met nobody like this in the industry.

nobody is going to admit to other people they know that this (slacking off) is what they do. You only get this on an anonymous forum like HN or reddit. Of course, some of them might be lying, but where there's smoke, there's fire imho.

[Nimitz14]

I work at FAANG. People here coast while making mountains of money.

[Infinitesimus]

Google is the big tech company with that reputation though. MS has pockets but pays considerably worse

[epolanski]

Which one?

A large part of the IT community does indeed very little work.

As for having to work over 40 hours and being stressed, I guess there's a price to having to work in US under such lax worker's rights and benefits, in Europe you just say no thanks boss see you on Monday.

[StressedDev]

I hate to break it to you but in the US, employees at many companies do not work more than 40 hours a week. There are two reasons for this:

1) People who can leave will leave if the work load is too high. Those who can leave are usually the best team members.

2) It does not work. Research has shown most people are incapable of producing more than 40 hours of work a week over the long term. They can do it for a week, maybe a month but after that their productivity is either the same as a 40 hour/week work or maybe even less. People are not machines and just because they are asked to do something (or ordered to) does not mean they will or even can.

One last thing, what keeps employers inline in the US is people can leave. If you are in a bad job, you can switch to a good one.

[wyclif]

Another thing about Europe v. USA conditions: it is considerably harder to fire a bad hire or team member in Europe.

[metiscus]

It is a testament to the great work they do that many people believe that IT does not do much. The work required to keep things working without noticible downtime is hardly trivial.

[epolanski]

Thanks I work in IT, I'm a dev, and based my comment on both my own and experience and the dozens of peers I know very well in many companies of the world.

And I reiterate, a large parte of our sector does very little practical work.

[closeparen]

Jaw dropping pay is inextricable from the jaw dropping Bay Area housing market. Standard white-collar pay for Bay Area-only roles is a pretty bad deal, and most tech workers would be better off learning something else. But standard white-collar pay with the geographic distribution of other white-collar work (i.e. any mid-sized and up metro is fine) would be a perfectly good equilibrium.

[nox101]

It's arguably more expensive in West Los Angeles (where tech is in LA). Most articles compare LA to SF but LA is giant. If you lived in La Verne (cheap), the east most side of LA, your commute to tech companies on the West Side would be 2 to 3hrs.

Looking at Rent Cafe:

SF: $3267

Santa Monica: $3956

Venice: $3844

Playa Vista: $3726

Marina Del Rey $3896

These are all places near Meta, Google, etc....

I don't know if the "coliving" thing has hit SF yet but in LA on the west side it's all over the place. "Coliviing" where they rent out individual bedrooms for $2500-$3500 a month and you share the living room and dining room. It's like having a roommate except you have have lock on your bedroom door and no choice who your roommates are (and no responcibility if they don't pay their rent).

[baby_souffle]

> I don't know if the "coliving" thing has hit SF yet

There was a startup for just this a few years ago. Home share is what it was called.

[ehnto]

Makes you wonder if these mega corporations wouldn't be better off lobbying to resolve the housing crisis instead of paying more in salaries.

[itsoktocry]

>Many may forget, or not have been there, but 10-15 years ago tech jobs were notorious for ridiculous workloads/long hours.

Exactly. Look at industries that also recruit smart college grads and pay well: consulting, finance, law. These jobs have very demanding schedules.

Not saying that's good, just that it is.

[ehnto]

Software industries outside of VC are still pretty normal, decent pay but in line with other local industries, nothing jawdropping. Working pretty hard still, but balanced enough compared to the overtime all the time days. That's going to depend on your company.

[wizerdrobe]

I’ve had this conversation with my boss, we’ve settled on about 3-4 modes of compensation.

Lowball, either because on ignorance (bro I have an app idea!), intention (fast buck artists preying on folks that don’t know better, maybe it’s a BS startup with 80k S.E. base and worthless ISO), or something like government.

Middle-Road, all the normal companies in all those “flyover” states or something to that affect. You’ll get paid a reasonable market rate for a reasonable expectation of work, e.g. an American 40 hours work week. If you’re lucky these might be a small tech-shop, but no flashy VC driven mania. I’ve worked at several, currently work at one. From the inside looking out the ZIRP issues are nonexistent, Cost-of-Living raises might not be as high as I’d like but I have 0 worries about the trends of tech layoffs I read of here.

Upper-Middle, places that are similar to Middle Road in that they are not flashy VC driven firms but “real” companies delivering profitable software or tech-enabled products and services but they also highly value their IT as a force multiplier. As a result the compensation might be a fair bit higher than Middle Road but nothing insane. You’re not walking about with 300-500k Total Comp. Nice 200k TC for a quality Senior here for a normal place of living. I’ve worked at one such firm but something of a unicorn.

Finally, VC world where the rules don’t matter and the points are made up… or something like it. Compensation is ludicrous and often detached from real-world value provided.

I know this is neither exhaustive scientific, but rather to play with the idea that there are different patterns of compensation than the 5 hours of work and 500k of compensation I see some thinking is both reasonable and deserved (trolling?)

[gabrieledarrigo]

> Many may forget, or not have been there, but 10-15 years ago tech jobs were notorious for ridiculous workloads/long hours.

And I can't understand sorry, why should we go back to this scenario, exactly?

[epolanski]

The implication isn't that we should, rather that IT sector is reverting to some saner curve of compensation vs skills and effort.

It will still be insanely cushier and well paid than other jobs.

[000ooo000]

The comment didn't say that

[coolThingsFirst]

Takes a low IQ person to accept ridiculous workload for kinda ok money

[pc86]

Only when there are better options available in the same industry. Nobody is getting a CS degree from a good school then switching to nursing because they can make the same money with better hours (or better money with the same hours).

The gravy train might be ending, I just wish it would end with the jobs that actually do nothing (product) rather than engineering first, but oh well.

[rrr_oh_man]

Ouch :) I felt that

[Andrex]

No offense, I'm curious: do you happen to be younger than 30?

[coolThingsFirst]

No lol, why would anyone work crazy hours for not an impressive salary?

[Andrex]

Off the top of my head:

- They're a founder

- They're a spouse of a founder

- They're a friend of the founder

- The worker is unskilled and needs to work crazy hours to break even

- They believe in the company and have equity

- The vertical is more politically compatible than alternatives

- The vertical punishes newbies before the career starts paying off (lawyers, doctors, academia)

- The work is interesting/fun on its own (in these cases, the type of work would never be paid well -- teaching, charity work, homemaking, niche tech, etc.)

- The worker is being compensated in other, non-monetary ways (aside from equity)

- The job is poorly paid locally but well-compensated elsewhere, and moving/remote work is not possible

Are such people idiots? Maybe.

That said, people who place money above all other factors trend closer to the "idiot" line, in my book. YMMV.

If you require the literal best pay possible, you'll be job-searching forever. Some people do not have that luxury.

[epolanski]

You take what you can find and negotiate.

[justinzollars]

I was on a 24 hour on call for months, a two man team, managing Chick-fil-A's Doordash, UberEats and GH Go integrations for thousands of stores. It was literally insane. I survived this recession - but I was way way way overworked. The balance has definitely tipped towards the employer.

[wizerdrobe]

Sorry to hear that!

I had some clowns reach out to me for the same job it sounds like, promising that I could absolutely move up to employment with Chic-fil-a after my contract was up…

As if I haven’t heard that story before.

[notherhacker]

Who was the company? I've accepted a job via Experient Group with the Chic-fil-a RIOT team and their relationship with Chic seems odd, trying to sniff it out. I am in a position to walk away.

[notherhacker]

Who was the company? I've accepted a job via Experient Group with the Chic-fil-a RIOT team and their relationship with Chic seems odd, trying to sniff it out. I am in a position to walk away.

[justinzollars]

This was a good position to get me through the tech recession. I was able to continue working on Go, and the system was interesting. But it wasn't an easy job by any means. I ended up going back to startups where I have more ownership.

[coolThingsFirst]

Is this based on Elon’s idea of trimming the fat?

Id like to believe it isnt but its a copycat industry.

[wyclif]

It's not as if Elon invented the idea. Every successfully entrepreneur who went on to found a large company has done it in one form or another. Maybe it didn't take the form of layoffs, but cost-cutting is a natural behaviour when the soft money disappears. Happened in 2008 as well.

[paxys]

Those are two parts of the same problem. If a company is doing layoffs and refusing to hire more who is going to take on the work burden? Obviously existing employees.

[benterix]

> Those are two parts of the same problem. If a company is doing layoffs . . .

Sometimes, yes, but not always - if the load is high enough, employees are overworked even if headcount increases.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

I also am getting multiple reports of fake job ads posted to show health in the market but internally those jobs are understood to never be filled.

[FrustratedMonky]

And - somehow when things slip, the customer is pissed, it's your fault.

[cdeutsch]

You just have to be more hardcore

joking