[AlotOfReading]

You don't need 300k FAANG workers to make competent and reliable software. Companies in China and Japan manage just fine and half the tier 1s actually writing anything are outsourcing it to places where 300k USD is unthinkable.

It's more important to start with an organization that cares about quality in the first place.

[nebula8804]

Who in Japan is good at this? I can only imagine the R&D division at maybe Playstation and thats it.

China has so many people that EE and CS are a dime a dozen, thats why they have a competitive market thats low cost. People are in a jungle trying to survive.

[0]: https://youtu.be/ljOoGyCso8s?t=101

The video is (Supposedly) EEs doing customer support roles thus allowing Cheap PCB for hobbyists, the equivalent in the US does not exist.

Side Note: I hear this is also why SASS never really took off in China. Why pay someone else for software when you can get a dozen people to make your own cheaper.

[Voultapher]

One of the best engineers I know works for [1] Woven by Toyota, Inc. They do care about getting software right, arguably more so than the german automotive sector. Don't get me wrong they all want good software, but wanting good software and putting the right systems in place while resisting the urge to chase the next hype wave are quite two different things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woven_by_Toyota,_Inc.

[constantcrying]

>They do care about getting software right, arguably more so than the german automotive sector.

How so? All 3 major German Car Groups have invested substantially into software. VW Group set up an entire company with the core goal of allowing different operating practices for software development, which doesn't sound too dissimilar to Woven, at least in its goals.

[Fade_Dance]

VW had CARIAD, but it was a massive failure, and they moved on in spirit:

"Instead of developing software for cars independently, Cariad will act as a coordinator for externally developed technologies – primarily software from Rivian and Xpeng."

[AlotOfReading]

Most Japanese companies doing firmware are happily working like it's still the 90s. Nikon and Omron are examples. Sure, they don't have working networking, but some would say that's a good thing in automotive software.

By all accounts, rakuten is dealing with absolute horror shows of internal codebases, but they're generally competent at delivering reliable software without a lot of surprises in my experience.

[labcomputer]

Yes, but you do need a few really good senior people. If your salary table has a hard cap at 150k (and no equity to make up for it), you can’t hire those people.

You also have a hard time hiring good mid-levels because you can’t possibly pay them as much as the top people, right? You also have the problem that some of your SWEs might make more than their managers, and that’s just unconscionable.

So what do you do? Have a “secret bonus” program that even most people in HR don’t know about? Hiring becomes tricky: Better make sure you don’t have a live one on the line when the only HR with need-to-know is on vacation.

[AlotOfReading]

One of the points I'm trying to communicate is that there are skilled people in most parts of the world. They're less common outside SV, but that doesn't matter unless you're trying to hire at big tech campus scale. So you focus your much smaller efforts on recruiting those people with a good environment, give them the tools to produce work they're proud of. If you pay what they'll be happy with, it's almost always going to be vastly less than big tech pays.

That even works in the bay area, which is how places like Oxide keep fantastically skilled people despite paying below market rate.

Is it the easiest way to hire? No, but I never said it was.