India is a huge country with a huge population and a rapidly growing economy and a domestic market. Even if it was true a decade or two ago, should we still keep assuming that anything that affects the Indian IT industry is caused solely by the outsourcing industry.

Surely HN can stop having the same conversation every time anything regarding India and IT comes up. A claim like - All engineers/engineering effort/R&D in country X is obviously substandard based on my anecdotal evidence - followed by a discussion treating it as a valid argument.

Indian IT outsourcing has been the vast majority of cash flow into the Indian IT sector, that much is undeniable. There is some actually good Indian IT talent out there and it's picking up steam, but that's not where the money is yet.

And to the western/eruropean markets, Indian IT industry == Indian IT outsourcing industry. And the Indian IT outsourcing industry has developed a very strong negative stigma which I expect will completely kill it over the next ~5 years. Does the 'real' Indian IT industry have enough cash and momentum to survive that? Maybe, I'm not sure. One thing is for certain: all the low skilled IT workers which make up 95%+ of the outsourcing industry, they're all going to be permanently out of those jobs and new jobs like that aren't coming.

And from personal experience with those low skilled indian IT workers, I think it would be a miracle if even 1% of them are able to re-skill for the real engineering work that's now in demand. Not only that, but just the fact that you're in India is a strong signal that that you're terrible, even if you're actually not. I've seen Indian IT workers with CVs 3 times the size of mine and glowing recommendations from past employers, and most of them failed fucking fizzbuzz. After you deal with a dozen people like that, you just start to subconsciously dismiss Indian candidates because chances are, they're gonna be another one of those.

tl;dr: In terms of economics, the Indian IT industry is the outsourcing industry, and that cash well is drying up fast. Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka saw the writing on the wall and bailed on a high note.

As for biases, bias isn't inherently bad. Bias is critical to how neural networks operate in ML. Removing bias is to intentionally discard valuable observational data and harm your rate of success.

Most developers with some seniority who I speak to believe they are an important part of an effective hiring process for developers, and are humble enough to take one. That said, we don't "insult" them with fizz buzz, we have a test that takes some thinking, and allows the best candidates to show off their skills.

A model based on a training set of 12, surely encompasses all biases accurately of a population of 10s of millions.

This is how good talent views any kind of tests. I can't blame them.

There is no other professional industry in the world, where candidates with 6+ years of professional success are asked to sit a god damned test every time they apply for a job. Insulting doesn't even begin to describe the problem with this concept. Don't get me wrong, I understand where the need for testing came from, but that doesn't change the fact that actually good candidates are put off by it and tend to dismiss employers who do it.

It’s very hard to guarantee that every first-round interview includes a seasoned lie-detector. A coding exercise is an imperfect, flawed, sometimes insulting approach that’s better than the alternatives.

When done right, it can be a nice conversation about coding, algorithms, and how to collaborate. And prove that the candidate can code.

Personally, I don’t mind being interviewed with a coding exercise even though I could be many of my interviewers’ parent. I love programming and talking about programming with programmers! And it gives me a chance to interview my potential future collaborators in a setting that’s less structured than a sit-across-the-table Q&A.

In my experience, someone who refuses or takes offense at a well-framed coding exercise is probably not going to be someone you want on your team. By well-framed, I mean introduced in a way that’s not insulting on the face of it, like a multi-hour takehome exercise before even meeting the candidate and talking about the job and why you are interested in them as a candidate. That’s just lazy interviewing and I wouldn’t want to do that either.

> In my experience, someone who refuses or takes offense at a well-framed coding exercise is probably not going to be someone you want on your team.

In my experience those who refuse are the top of the top. We adapted our interview and intake process to accommodate these people (usually with a more stringent and goal oriented probation period), and it was the best thing we did in terms of resourcing. The people we took on through this stream ended up being by far the best performing bang for buck employees. They are opinionated and snobby, but that's a good thing, because they actually care about their respective fields enough to have strong opinions. They don't waste time with tests and coding challenges.

Those who are opinionated and snobby, even if they are the best preforming, may not be the best fit in many environments. A not insignificant portion of a senior developer's time can be spent mentoring people - and the snobby person may not be the best choice for that.

If the goal is to hire a team of one - great. If the goal is to hire into a team of half a dozen in what would be termed an enterprise development - the refusal to take a programming test may and work with the process rather than rebel against it may act as a strong indication that the person isn't going to be a good fit.

But is it because it is hard to fake knowledge in other industries or is it because it is easy to find out programmer is faking?

If there's so many programmers who can't do fizbuz, are there as many managers, doctors, lawyers, etc who can't do basic stuff despite perfect CV?

Yeah, there are. Plenty of garbage doctors and lawyers out there who are allowed to continue practicing.

Here's why testing for developers exists:

1: They are incredibly important to business revenue. In a modern business, if a manager underperforms, nothing much happens. If your development team underperforms, you lose millions. So you try to get the best development team you can.

2: There's no meaningful standardized testing. A Lawyer passes the bar exam, a doctor has to pass board certification, while any idiot from backwater India can call themselves a software engineer. But its important to note that neither the bar exam nor board certification tell you anything about how good that person is in their field, they just say they meet the bare minimum requirements. In the case of IT, the bare minimum requirements happen to be much lower than what most employers hope to attract, so they resort to doing testing themselves. It's not a terrible approach, but it does discourage top talent from applying.

3: Skill disparity. There aren't many '10x' lawyers or doctors or managers out there, but there are plenty of such developers. This is partially related to my 2nd point but mostly just a consequence of software engineering being a creative task rather than a learned flowchart like law and medicine. As an employer, you want to come up with some signal to find the high performers.

I think the tests are annoying too. Still is ultimately called work for a reason, we show up to get things done that are challenging, sometimes unpleasant and often necessary.

As a developer who hires other developers, I don't place the value in testing on what a developer can code, but how quickly they can learn and how well they can solve problems and communicate - testing can help shed a light on non technical strengths or shortcomings.

A good test focuses as much on higher level analysis as coding. The majority of new developers with a few years of skills may not have developed quickly enough in this regards yet.

And turn it the other way around what if a potential employee insisted on employers doing a test.

Imaginin interviewing at uber and asking

"So MR Manger" what's the difference between a worker and an employee :-)

Or asking a series of q on the companies anti discrimination bullying discipline or grievance procedures.

Knowing a little more than non-technical employers doesn't place an inexperienced developer in a position of expertise, only knowing a little more than the guy testing them.

If you are referring to non technical folks not being skilled at hiring for technical positions, I agree to the point that this is a common challenge where non tech people are put in charge of digital transformation, among other things.

Even highly competent and technical teams can struggle with testing incoming hires we.

An interesting idea is contemplating if tech people will be able to learn and transform business skills easier than non techs business folks might be able to learn tech. If this was attractive to tech folks, the hiring tests would include more business problem oriented questions than fizzing and buzzing. It's still a little surprising how few developers can do this in any country, so it might remain an inconvenient test and filter for a while yet.

And yet business people don't get any tests. No one else on the entire planet gets tests for almost every role opportunity they want to explore. So why do developers have to?

Actually, I can answer that. The answer is because the overwhelming majority of a modern company's productivity is up to the performance of the developers. The business guys get away with under-performing because their underprformance is not a significant factor on the bottom line.

The commonplace testing of developers has nothing to do with ratios of good to bad developers, or the relative ease of assessing developer skill compared to other professions. It has everything to do with the fact that developers drive the lions share of modern business value so they've been singled out for shitty treatment with testing and kaggle competitions and similar garbage. I really hope to see a software engineering union rise in the next few years which cracks down on this and empowers developers to negotiate relative to their actual value in modern business.

People like you aren't needed in the world of high tech. Your role is redundant.

A software developers union would be interesting. Accreditation from testing to be in a professional body will still have people who can hide among the work of others, but much less so. Also a challenge for a tech union would be the rapid changing nature of software development compared to other unionized industries to maintain a baseline. Not the first time it's been thought about.

Non tech positions are even harder to test for at hiring. Especially since so many hr, accounting jobs themselves are requiring increased digital transformation skills of knowing how to select and implement business systems.

Tech hiring interviews were designed largely by tech people.

The real hilarious part is seeing a non tech hr person try to buy a hr software system and implement it. Being the subject matter expert no longer means an ability implement and roll out programs as it used to - its a growing issue that requires people who can understand and work with detail.

Working with details requires an ability to care about the plight of others, organizations and their processes to prove to lower the suffering of people at the hands of their employment environments.

Perhaps if you were actually more experienced, you wouldn't stoop to the ultimate irony of dismissing every point I made by attacking my tone. I stand by what I said, people like you are redundant in modern tech. I think when you tell yourself you're more experienced than me, you're conflating that with you being older and 'wiser' and less confrontational because your testosterone levels have dropped. The tech industry assigns a negative value to age and wisdom, sorry.

Attitude carries one past those with just skill and knowledge.

Learning to channel energy instead of raging at others is the ultimate productivity.

Unions don't really want to get involved with being the accrediting body to many conflicts of interests.

Your right though that untrained people should not really be doing interviews let alone designing them.

Though I would agree that asking we have a business problem how would you solve or improve on what we do now is a much better q to ask.

Alternative version:

Interviewer: Are there any tables you construct in spare time and expose for public use?

Carpenter: huh?!

Interviewer: To proceed we will need you to construct a chair for us, for free.

Carpenter: [starts throwing chairs]

The analogy isn’t right because you’d need a similar carpentry task that takes 30 minutes like fizzbuzz (that should really take 5 minutes). It would be like asking a carpenter to put together their workstation from a disorganized shop. A pretty reasonable request.

Lots of people complain about this approach, but it is confusing as not a single good programmer has ever been bothered by coding screens. Who are these people who get upset? And where are their GitHub portfolios? Are there that many bullshitters who aren’t confortable enough in their skills to spend less than an hour on coding problems as part of an interview?

Good tests are not tests of any specific knowledge. They test reasoning and communication skills in a programming context.

As per slide 2, IT outsourcing still is the largest contributor to the IT industry. It is not a subset. As per this report at least. I couldn't find any other credible sources.

"All engineers/engineering effort/R&D in country X is obviously substandard" This is obviously a very biased statement that suffers from the 'some/all' fallacy based on anecdotal evidences. Unfortunately the world works this way. What the majority sees and believes is what trumps, regardless of the truth.

Many of those low-level jobs can be automated, while the high-level ones can't. As the cost of even low-level outsourced jobs goes up, and the cost of automation goes down, it's normal that lots of the most automated jobs get cut. Jobs of which India has a very high relative proportion, not because there aren't high-level programmers there, but because India has the strongest IT outsourcing industry in the World.

I head an engineering team from India and our team is local talent for a firm which is outside India. We believe we do some serious engineering.

There is this west fixation that serious engineering can't be done outside. I am not saying it isn't true on most cases but assuming they only can do is so demeaning. I get asked a lot - so who does the heavy lifting?. Nothing gives more satisfaction than to say - we do the engineering and it gets maintained by westerners in our organization.

Most large tech companies have engineering centers in India doing real work and there are quite a few Indian expats here doing serious engineering work.

I think the reputation you describe comes specifically from the low-cost IT outsourcing firms. My personal experience reflects this. I've managed and worked with large teams in India that did great work. My experiences with outsourcing firms haven't been as good.

The pervasive idea that westerners do seem to have, speaking from personal experience, is a bias against "cheap foreign labor." The actual problem is of course any company which poorly manages its external teams, and especially those companies which go for the lowest bidder, and then place that poorly equipped team in their Tier 1 customer support hotlines. I think this is very much a real problem, but the discussion surrounding it often invites offensive language, passionate nationalism, and stirs emotions in a way that distracts from the root of the problem.

I can't think of any way to combat it other than to come up with counter examples that paint the high quality teams in a good light, so that's what I'll continue to do. If a team does good work and I'm impressed by them, you bet my family and friends hear about it! It's not much of course, but I find it more constructive to focus on the positives and the potential solutions, rather than to concentrate on the negatives.

I don't think thats the point he's trying to make. The Indian IT industry was designed and built for a certain type of labor/outsourcing market. It will take serious investment and attitude shift internally for local startups to grow and retain talent. Much of that talent that is able to perform the serious engineering you describe continually leave the country for the U.S. and other markets.

I was talking about this outright dismissal without any ground.

> Indian IT industry was designed and built for a certain type of labor/outsourcing market.

Indian IT industry got shaped by the demand. You wanted cheaper options and you got provided one.

> It will take serious investment and attitude shift internally for local startups to grow and retain talent.

Pay good and you will retain talent.

> Much of that talent that is able to perform the serious engineering you describe continually leave the country for the U.S. and other markets.

Please speak for yourself. The west fixation does not apply to all folks. We get to do awesome engineering work here so don't have to be in a foreign land to do so. With remote teams coming into the picture having a preset notion that a team has to be local is an outdated mindset. And also - we can afford couple of maids in a decent paying job and have a better lifestyle here than the west can afford.

Which is nothing to be proud of, the maids are affordable because lot of poor people did not have the same privileges like you had.

The rich or upper middle class kids while growing up see that they and their parents can order the maids to do almost anything and so when the kids grow up they see the maids as a class of people who are not equal to them.

It becomes a status issue as well if you say you dont have maids then your affluent peers will think you are weird or that you cant even afford a maid.

Bulk of you post is true. But lets give west the credit where they deserve. Most of us can't afford maids. May be you can. Even if we did, its more like jugaad. People in west don't need maids because they don't need maids to sweep the floor, they don't have 1 kg of road dust coming in from dug up roads unrepaired for years. Their homes are designed to make vaccum cleaners easily usable. They have cheap dishwashers, microwave ovens, washing machines and dryers.

You move to west your standard of living by default sees an upgrade at 0 cost. Roads, infrastructure, schooling, economic opportunity etc etc.

Now, of course these household servants perform valuable labour here. But where I'm from, a technologically advanced country- we've largely obviated household help. We have central HVAC, automatic dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, Amazon Echo, Nest, etc etc. There is no need for full-time maids, you see.

I'm sorry if this sounds smug, but it's true. Indians reminding westerners that they have maids is something that makes us smile knowingly. Residual colonialism in the 21st century doesn't impress us.

Excuse me - we have gadgets here and at an affordable cost too. Some people do make conscious decision to avoid automation so we can employ and help others. We have a thought process here to buy from shops near by(albeit little costlier) instead of amazon'g the whole requirement so we can help people near by. Western lifestyle is not a definite one as an ideal one. Please understand that we can enjoy our lifestyle without any gripe. Why is it so hard to swallow?.

In my case - my mom is a cancer patient. I don't know whether i could afford a house nurse and cook in the west from a decent paying job. We got some positives too - that is what i stated.

You are making a virtue out of this. This is really like the British saying they ruling over us was good for us because of english, railways and parks. So they were screwing us for our own good.

Most of these maids, work on hourly basis on slave wages. And are generally treated badly. There are even spaces in Restaurants where they have to sit outside while their masters indulge in fine dining. And other times most people give away old throw worthy food to them. There is no 'help' going on here.

>>We have a thought process here to buy from shops near by(albeit little costlier) instead of amazon'g the whole requirement so we can help people near by.

Kirana shops near my home are shutting down like no tomorrow after GST, and a DMart opened near by. Indians are known to think through their wallets.

>>Please understand that we can enjoy our lifestyle without any gripe. Why is it so hard to swallow?.

There is a big difference between getting seasoned or at best indifferent to problems, than having no problems.

>>In my case - my mom is a cancer patient. I don't know whether i could afford a house nurse and cook in the west from a decent paying job.

I hope she recovers soon. Yours is a different situation and I understand, most of us(Including me) have many reasons(in my case, old parents) to not move to the west. But I imagine if I was there my life would be way better.

Employing someone full time to clean and maintain house isn't really uplifting anyone in a societal sense. Option 1: 30 families eschew automation and hire a full-time maid. Option 2: 30 families own a vacuum cleaner and a dishwasher and hire a cleaner once every other week for 3 hours to maintain their house. The latter is what happens in western communities and it results in 29 more productive workers looking for gainful employment in the workforce. If you don't see why that is an uplifting thing for society, you should take a good hard look at your understanding of economics.

As for your anecdote of the family member with cancer, house nurses are indeed common and affordable in western societies, we generally call this service "hospice." And while I may not employ a cook, there are 150 restaurants in my city that will deliver meals to my doorstep within 30 minutes.

In fact, a lot of people will instantly regard those with maids as "probably assholes" in the US.

The quotes text was an observation without any judgement.

The rest of the post addresses how the Indian it industry started to boom and why they're losing so many jobs so quickly. Still no dismissal.

It's not that Indian doesn't have talent. It's just that it's not smart to outsource your main competency. So they're not doing that.

There was no "serious engineering" going on at any of the large Indian firms I dealt with. Boutique, for sure serious work.

I am not contesting that you do serious engineering, but just stating your beliefs is moot.

>> There is this west fixation that serious engineering can't be done outside.

I guess this is just anecdotal and to counter with some more anecdotal experience, I (and a few I know) have been reached out from the west, seeking our engineering skills in the niche we operate. So what do we do know? Start believing the other way round, that serious engineering can't be done in the west!!!

>> we do the engineering and it gets maintained by westerners in our organization.

Don't you think you are believing just like the western engineers you were blaming?

We've adapted as a community to have a skillset and evangelize stacks that at minimum compliments off shore if not replaces them.

Simply put, after all the basic Dev and ops jobs left, we moved up the value chain.

It's a cycle and the off shoring firms will move up the value chain and US devs will further specialize in to ML, AI, speech, Big Data/Data Science, etc. Those areas are quickly being commoditized by the cloud providers, so they're within reach of most US developers. Furthermore, off shoring firms will likely be content to provide the cheaper, lower level rungs of the value chain.

Everything points to gaining breadth in order to "move up the value chain".

"US devs will further specialize in to ML, AI, speech, Big Data/Data Science"

In line with the previous statement, you mean increase their breadth, not specialize, right?

"Those areas are quickly being commoditized by the cloud providers, so they're within reach of most US developers."

What makes these areas more accessible to US developers than offshore?

For the last bit, I tried to hint at that in my original comment. People who achieve that breadth outside the US can normally negotiate directly with employers in the US. This can give them more money and gives the company a more stable resource. The bulk hires from Infosys, Tata, etc. don't have this luxury.

For US employees, there's both the drive to keep ahead of offshoring and the fact that so many US employers will invest in their employees. This class of offshoring companies that are suffering don't do that.

Which is another point: These are not intended to be generalizations of all offshore teams and offshoring companies. The more breadth and automation an offshore company leverages, the more resilient they are.

I don't doubt that Infosys and Tata will survive, but the sheer scale of their employment numbers is going to take a permanent hit and stateside devs are again going to need to become even more jack-of-all-trades with more than one specialization to stay ahead.

Behold, the birth of the TT skillset. /s

And yes, the code that one finds after the eventual disaster when something goes wrong is staggering.

My anecdote for this is... I worked at a retail company implementing a new point of sales system. For a year before and the first year I was there (different team) there was an Indian "sales engineer" team that the vendor brought in. They weren't able to get the system working and integrated with the existing devices (it has to work with this receipt printer, this mag strip reader, this magnetic ink reader... these are the types of sales that we offer that aren't part of the core system, all rounding of pennies must be in the favor of the customer (1000 pennies in the favor of 1000 customers costs less than one complaint), etc...).

When milestones were missed, rather than revising the estimates, for it, the sales engineering team brought in more people. Aside from this courting Brooks's law, it again increased billable hours.

Aside from not getting it working, when management canned that approach all of the institutional knowledge of how it did work up to that point was lost. The documentation that was provided was worthless (but they billed their time to create it).

Several months later, the project was started up again - this time with a fully in house team. About two months in to the year long deadline (and for us it was a deadline - not just a milestone), we commented to management that we were going to need help getting this running - there was too much to do and not enough time. Within a month we got some consultants from intertech ( https://www.intertech.com ). And while there was some ramp up time with that code base, they were helping and contributing within two weeks.

Once the system was on track for the rollout, a large phase 2 project was given to them - returns. The business logic behind returns wasn't simple (do you credit the money back to a card? what if the card is a visa gift card? cash? store credit? restocking fees (none if the item is in stock, some if the item has been discontinued), taxes (purchased in state A, returned at another store in state B), etc...). The backend system chosen to handle this was drools.

Now, a outsourcing company here has two choices they can make. They can either try to make something that only they know how to modify and keep milking the project with billable hours until its replaced by another company... or they can try to transfer that information to the client (with training sessions (billable hours) and good documentation (billable hours)).

For the in house people who were going to be maintaining the system, we got excellent training and documentation. If they got up and left the next day, we'd be able to maintain it with only a minor hiccup. The cost to maintain it with a few in house developers was going to be less than keeping consultants on all the time.

The moral here is that it wasn't so much the "we can provide a solution" that won over the project but also the "we have demonstrated our competence in the first phase and can furthermore provide training to you that will decrease the maintenance costs over the lifetime of the project." Even with the increase of initial billable time - it was going to be cheaper.

The value was not only in the demonstrated competence working with the in house team (rather than trying to do it all), but in providing all of the associated support structures and soft things that management can see as improving the value of the service beyond lines of code written.

Let's say you have a restaurant or something. Before, you had to hire somebody to host/design your website. Now, Google/SquareSpace/Wix will do that for you. A lot of these sites also have payment options built in.

Sure, those sites you make automatically won't be so flashy as a personalized one. But, realistically, if you're a business, what you need is the location, hours, maybe a picture, and a list of what you're selling. That's something all these automated website generators provide.

You can of course pay for SEO, but that's my whole point. At some point, you're not willing to pay $50(USD) an hour to get the last few percent of profit, especially if your gross income is fairly small.

Also, I believe unless you set the robots.txt file, most sites are crawlable, and SEO, like I said, is not really important for smaller businesses. Mostly they are existing customers who want to find out hours of operation and maybe any daily specials you might have, not somebody who stumbles across your site organically.

One major UK site made a simple mistake with the canonical tag on one of 12 websites cost them over £500,000 in lost traffic in lest than a week.

If you start making a lot of money, you'll have enough to hire high priced consultants. If you're just starting up and concentrating on your actual busines, not IT, you shouldn't be worried about the best web framework.

Also, for businesses just starting up, you just need simple HTML. The only information you need to expose are hours of operation, address, and a list of services/goods with prices. Everything else can come later, when you're getting enough business to justify it.

My main point is that small webdevs are going to start getting starved for work. They're getting replaced by generated HTML which do a good enough job for free.

Indian outsourcing firms were not that cheap to begin with. Their target market were companies that will choose to outsource even when net monetary benefit does not exceed say 15%.

Now Russian outsourcing companies pop here and there, billing US companies not 85% of the US market rate, but 50% or less.

There was lot of fluff that was hired during those outsourcing boom years and obviously they need to let go off the less talented but it’s not right to color everybody with the same brush.

This might be true for some teams, but in general the IT market in India probably has a similar skill distribution to the IT market in the US; such that the top 15% of the market is the most talented, and the rest is by definition less so. In the US, the top 15% of the market is in Silicon Valley, so if you consider India as a whole, it will not be as talented on average as Silicon Valley.

As with any anecdotal evidence, people have widely varying experiences. When I was working as a freelance web developer (2010-2014) at mid-market firms, I had universally bad experiences with Indian teams.

Wait. What? Sure, there's a concentration of talent in SV, but to simply say that the top 15% of all U.S. IT talent is there is pretty myopic.

I get your point overall (though I am not saying I agree). But, had to point out that you tossed out your belief as a "stat", as if it were some well-established fact.

Likewise, with your (admittedly) anecdotal observations on Indian teams. Pretty broad generalizations you seem to operate on.

We're entitled to our opinions, but what's ironic is that a worldview that rests on sweeping generalizations about groups of people is actually self-limiting.

If you are in a competitive economic space, you will even have sufficient motivation to learn.

If these Indian teams are equally as talented then where are all of the innovations created by these Indians?

In fact, C++ devs from that region are the secret sauce to a lot of large codebases I've seen.

I've noticed this as well. Very strange that it is so "poor" but so talented. I guess that probably won't last.

If you really get that much, you've got it better than all western Europe, except London and Zurich.

i think it's all connected you'll find.

A couple of times, even though that team does not have an officially important role, you would see stalls on major decisions until the remote team had a chance to weigh in.

A senior dev can make 80k USD in India (before taxes) working for American, non IT services companies

After a couple of more years working remote, I may just go work for another lab again because its not too hard to find very interesting work, but the pay sucks (for non-degreed folks).

I didn't take it, because I was getting way more in London at the time.

Holland also has Mortgage interest relief so you could rent your UK property out and buy a property in Holland with some nice tax breaks

(There are some tax breaks you (or your clients!) can get for investing in IT, though.)

Samsung is a big hardware company, I'm not sure what they would have in software job but why not.

GitLab is a fully remote company, they don't recruit anywhere specifically. Their full disclosure on their (low) salaries and losing customer data is certainly driving away the senior folks I know.

Game companies are the shithole of the industry, the worst conditions and pays, worse than Indian sweet shops and failed SV startups. There is no sane job or career to be made there.

Back to the point. You're going to work in a consulting shop, soon enough.

See https://magento.com/news-room/press-releases/digital-commerc...

They're not a WordPress plugin, and they are a large company.

I don't mean to be rude, but I don't think you know what you're talking about.

The companies you quote are not better than a middle grade outsourcing company in these regards, so they're not stealing their talents. If they are the best companies you could think of, that explains why you can find decent developers in the local outsourcing firms.

The only limitation these firms face in growing faster is getting their hands on talent.

Do you mean that as in "move" or as in "work long hours"?

Google has at least offices in Germany, too.

Google has offices in almost every countries but they are administrative offices with almost no employees. If you're a tech worker, you can only be in one of the very few tech locations.

But you are right, that those are not big major tech offices like the three mentioned. So most engineers in Europe would still be working out of London, Zurich or Dublin.

Relocating means leaving uncles aunts, cousins, mom, dad, grandma, etc. And any friends you have.

I've had to explain to many recruiters that leaving all my friends and family and my community as a whole is just not an option.

Changing country is changing everything.

Having said that, the old Soviet / Eastern Bloc countries are very sharp. They were of course on the other side of the Cold War, which is what birthed most of our modern technology.

What do you mean?

If you are not accustomed to it, it can be a shock, but it certainly can lead to finding the best solution.

I grew up in a weird household, with half my family with strong Irish accents and the other with strong NYC accents. When I moved away from New York, almost nobody could understand me at all for a few weeks. A few teachers thought I was a non-native speaker.