Uber is on top of a death spiral with covid, the kill lift strategy by being unprofitable not working, softbank...

From the engineering point of view Uber is done. The self driving automation is probably not possible in the next x years. It has a working successful product probably too many developers now working on non-core projects.

Moving it to India they can keep the same numbers employed reduce costs and probably throw away things created there anyways.

My guess is a key lean operations team will remain in sf. Ensuring the system runs and is updated. Self driving research can be done India.. UI screens will be local.

>Self driving research can be done India..

Or just not done. There's no reason for Uber to be working on self-driving at this point. Door to door fully autonomous driving in relatively dense areas--i.e. where it makes sense for Uber to operate--is decades away. Autonomous highway driving--which will probably arrive earlier (maybe much earlier)--does absolutely nothing for a would-be automated taxi service.

Good for India if it works out, I guess.

But it feels - to my uninformed biased mind - like more of Uber flailing around while slowly failing.

> Could a successful outsourcing project by Uber threaten all SV tech jobs?

No.

It could be part of some downward pressure at worst.

Outsourcing to India has gone on for 2-3 decades. It's not some new disruptive thing.

> Outsourcing to India has gone on for 2-3 decades. It's not some new disruptive thing.

I guess what's different here is that Uber is a proper tech company and knows how to identify good engineers to hire. The same cannot be said of non-tech companies that have outsourced to consultancies like Infosys and Wipro.

And I don’t think that makes a difference. All FAANG companies (which I’d say can also identify good engineers) already have engineering offices in India.

The results that Uber gets will depend on exactly how they execute. If they're serious about their goal to "shift engineering innovation to India", then it might be different from what the FAANGs have done.

In my experience working with the India team at (one of) the FAANGs, it seemed like they were offloading the work that people didn't want to do in SV to the Hyderabad office (e.g. testing, maintenance of legacy systems).

But it could also be the case that there are innovative things being built in these India offices that people just assume were built in the US.

So are Google, Microsoft, Amazon and many other companies that have large offices in India.

This isn't a new thing. This is just a common strategy that many companies take once they are large enough to be able to handle the extra overhead of working across a 12 hour time difference.

No. To get the same amount of quality in india you’ll be paying roughly the same - and then have cultural and timezone barriers.

I think you are pretty wrong on that mark. I know fairly good devs in India who can't get a job because most pays so bad that they end up either switching the field or moving to somewhere abroad. Sometimes, they just wander around like ghosts on family money. Unlike US, it's not uncommon to spend your whole life with your parents/joint family.

To get a good job in India, you will need more than skills - connections and a limited edition degree.

What about moving to Europe? Salaries in the UK, Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands are much lower than in the US, and even lower in Central/Eastern Europe. While the timezone barrier is still there (although lower than India), the work culture is basically the same as in the United States (except with more work-life balance).

Actually, why not Canada? Salaries are again much lower than Silicon Valley, the timezone is the same, the language is the same (except in Quebec), and it would be great to stop Canadian software engineers from moving to the US in droves due to lack of opportunities at home.

The difference b/w salaries in EU/E.Asia and India are not that large for FAANG-like companies IMO. It's likely the case that Uber will allow its Indian employees to relocate back to India, in light of both Covid and the new visa restrictions.

They already do what you're saying, by some extent (maybe not Canada right now, and of course, finding English-speaking developers in Quebec is a non-issue)

Not true at all (I have team members in India). It is not even close to "roughly the same". For a decent engineer with 2-5 years of experience, you would pay anywhere from 8K-20K USD PER YEAR. That's average. Sometimes even lower than the 8K and sometimes higher than the 20K.

Indian engineers making more than 20k-25K USD Per Year are considered top talent in most companies across India. Are there engineers making more ? Yes absolutely. Are they a minority ? Yes, absolutely.

I don't think it's fair to assume the quality of Indian workers is worse. They are paid less purely because of cost of living and locational differences. Uber is smart enough to know this and it's the exact reason they will end up paying less for similar quality.

Also, in every company there are jobs that are trivial and jobs that require talent. I assume the more trivial jobs like bug fixing will be outsourced, while the rest of the engineers are kept for product design.

> They are paid less purely because of cost of living and locational differences.

Cost of living is a red herring. No one’s going to pay me more if I live in Manhattan rather than the suburbs of Boise if they can avoid it. It’s all about the locational differences. If there’s a thick, liquid market for the product you’re selling, your labour, you’ll get a good price for it. If there isn’t employers have substantially more power to set wages. A lot of the reason engineers in SV get paid more is that they’re just better but the engineers in Boulder are pretty great too and fewer of them are getting those wages, even fewer in Boise. All about the competition for talent.

It's all interrelated though. If Silicon Valley CoL were more along the lines of the many Tier 2 areas where there is a lot of tech of various kinds, the big SV employers wouldn't have to pay as big a premium to get people to relocate. They'd still pay a premium to get the talent they want, but they wouldn't have to also basically cover the difference in housing costs needed.

But it's complicated. For that matter, you could argue that the perks of Bay Area weather and great number of employment options should make the Bay Area attractive even if the salaries weren't great relative to CoL. But there's enough competition among large employers who generate enough value per employee that they can afford to offer top-shelf salaries so they do so to entice the people they want.

To the last point, I don't expect dramatic short term changes. But to the degree that things tilt more in the direction of remote work and small distributed offices, I expect some equalization of salaries at least within the US.

> paying roughly the same

Any references for that?

Indians are not stupid. They understand market dynamics as well as anyone. At best you will get a 5% markdown, and instant flight once a 4% markdown opportunity comes up. This is not enough to cover for the many downsides to outsourcing.

Where are these boot camp web dev jobs starting out at $100K? If such jobs are plentiful, wouldn’t they be in area where the cost of living is so high that it would be better to live in a lower cost of living area with a lower salary?

People are downvoting the other response, but it's absolutely correct. You can't hire 1:1 between the US and India and get the same quality for less money. You can try, but it won't end well.