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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
That would certainly make the union workers more attractive given the average consultant’s experience, teaching ability, and understanding of the business.
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.
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.
I can explain why Twitter languishes. Other than the obvious troll hole he’s turned it into, it also doesn’t fit the brand he worked so hard to build around himself in the 2000s and early 20teens.
What he’s doing with Twitter and all his culture war nonsense is beneath him. Or at least it’s beneath the character he created that people compared to Tony Stark.
People who want to work on spaceships do not want to go help him stan for a guy called "catturd2."
I mean yeah its true. In fact I recall going to DEFCON this past Aug and they had a handful of Starlink engineers there. I tried to get them to discuss that whole Twitter saga, they absolutely were adamant that they did not care one bit. They really emphasized how they are doing cutting edge work at starlink and it definitely showed in the town down equipment that they brought to demonstrate. Tesla/Spacex get so many applicants thats its insane.
This leads me to want the OEMs to succeed, we desperately need a counterbalance to Musk because just shaming his employees won't change a goddamn thing but if there was another place where A players can be embraced well that would put a massive chink in the Musk armor. Hell I remember there were a whole group of furry employees at Tesla as well. Tesla has also participated multiple times in pride parades. I wonder where they are now...
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.
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.
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.
Jack Welch died before getting outsourced after driving GE into the ground, and there are lots of folks like him still alive, empowered, and with that belief system. These are the folks controls are needed against.
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.
> but you do long-term damage to the economy, and the people are better off with free, open markets long term.
The evidence does not show the American worker being better off after these policies you support were enacted and have had decades to run. Free trade is great for shareholders and some consumer cohorts who get excess utility, but terrible for workers. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
> 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.
You're almost certainly correct in the sense that the people of the entire system will be better off, but your own domestic market could suffer at the gain of the other market where the business is now being outsourced to.
A good example of this might be tech in the EU. The EU basically has no major tech companies because we "import" all our tech services the US (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc). It's great for us in the sense that we didn't have to pay anyone to build amazing online services like Facebook, Google, etc – it's just free stuff we get here from the US. But who benefits the most from this arrangement, is the US or the EU? I'd argue that the EU allowing the US to provide all of our major tech services has been great for US growth, but it's stagnated the EU economy in recent years as we've had no real reason to build 21st century companies here. The free stuff we get from the US actually comes at a cost for us even if overall the economy as a whole (EU + US) is better off for it.
Similarly, imagine an extreme scenario where US companies outsource all work to low-cost labour countries (I know this is impossible, but assume the US is 100% service sector jobs which could be outsourced). Would this hypothetical scenario be good for the US economy? It might be good for companies registered in the US because now they can provide their services to markets they serve for a fraction of the cost, and it would be great for those low-cost labour countries getting all this foreign work, but it would be awful for the actual US economy that's allowing this to happen in the pursuit of efficient markets.
So yeah, you might be growing the whole pie at a faster rate, but it's possible mass outsourcing doesn't help grow your share of the pie. And like with manufacturing, you also need to consider how you'll lose technical competency within your domestic market over time if you outsource too much, and this will likely lead to the country you out sourced to eventually out competing you in your own industries. We see this today in China.
If you want to cripple tech innovation in the US, outsource all your software engineers so there's no one in the US with the skills or resources to start the next Google or Facebook.
> and the people are better off with free, open markets long term.
The theory only says that all the people globally will be better off. It does not say anything about citizens of a specific country that is applying protectionism. They may be better off for it, they may be worse - it depends on the particulars and, as most economic interventions, can only really be judged post-factum.
Do people forget that a 40 hour work week exists because of unions? Did we forget that having weekends off and holidays off was not a thing until unions? Did we also forget that children were put to work at a young age until unions?
"and the people are better off with free, open markets long term."
Eh, maybe not. It depends on the demand and availability of skill/labor. If you have a high percentage of low skill labor and you can outsource low skill labor to cheaper markets, then what are the current low skill citizens going to do? Surely the rust belt is not better off now than when coal and steel (and other manufacturing) were still a domestic thing. Maybe other areas of the county faired better, but with median wages dropping over the past 50 years, it doesn't seem like a strong case.
> 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".
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.
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.
Basically anything tech-adjacent - product, "business analysts," management. Maybe something like tech writing but there are going to a lot of decent devs who make terrible tech writers so that's much more on an individual basis. And then there's the devs who still code but that's not their focus - SDET, devrel, that sort of thing.
Devrel would actually probably be the easiest thing to get into with a few years' foresight. Building a following on YouTube, Twitch, Twitter/X, etc. will make it infinitely easier to land that first devrel role.
You bringing up teaching is a good point - I'm not sure about where I currently live but where I used to live you could get a substitute teaching cert basically by just passing the background check and having a college degree. It was pretty easy to get an add-on certification as well to teach your subject or closely related ones. I can't say what it's like everywhere though, and to be honest most of the people I know who have teaching degrees have left or wished they could. But if you can get a job and can deal with the bullshit you're basically set from a put-food-on-the-table standpoint.
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
There's gotta be something between Satya and "C-tier code out of rural India".
There are of course lots of bad coders in India, but there are also many really good ones. And whereas in the past they had to emigrate to US or Europe to fully make use of their talents, nowadays some(many?) choose to remain in India and work remotely. It's silly to dismiss and underestimate their skills.
As far your experience with developers that follow the specs literally, in an almost maliciously compliant way,
that might be learned behavior from working on projects where the tasks are spec-ed and estimated and any attempts at going above and beyond ultimately result in late delivery and punishment, so developers quickly learn to only do the bare minimum of what is described. Granted your examples are extreme and pathological, so maybe you just had the misfortune of working with really bad people.
Additionally, unless you pick the developers yourself, you're at the mercy of the agencies who assemble those offshore teams, and often the economics are such that it doesn't incentivize them to hire the best people available. From my experience, many good developers find work on their own, outside of an agency, contracting directly with the remote company.
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.
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.