[moneywoes]

> Outsourcing comes and goes in waves. Good talent in India and the Philippines tend to work for FAANG companies, often at very comparable salaries to the west.

In those locations?

Based on sheer CS grad numbers why wouldn't companies just shift their r& operations there then?

[supriyo-biswas]

> Based on sheer CS grad numbers why wouldn't companies just shift their r& operations there then?

There are lots of CS grads, yes. But most colleges out there are mostly degree mills, and this carries on to the workplace, where your average software engineer or engineering manager has very little understanding of what they’re actually doing (this[1] article was posted on HN, which will tell you the quality of engineering in India).

For anything slightly complicated, companies seem to be only interested in hiring from the best colleges and pay out of their nose in the process. A friend of a friend does some hardware work at a FAANG, and gets paid at almost that level.

[1] https://eaton-works.com/2025/10/28/tata-motors-hack/

[zachlatta]

Conversation about outsourcing aside, it isn’t fair to pick one example and generalize to say an entire country’s talent pool is poor.

The US has the best engineering talent pool in the world and you can find dozens of examples at major companies as bad (or worse) than the one you linked.

[decimalenough]

The FAANG I work for is trying to do just that. But while new grads are indeed a dime a dozen, you can't staff an R&D with only new grads, and finding and retaining skilled seniors is so tough that it has resorted to offering US-based Indians packages with US level comp to entice them to move back for a few years to bootstrap teams.