There are also legal and tax considerations to using a foreign programmer over a local one. Pretty quickly, many companies will discover the pitfalls to outsourcing.

Among the big consequences: you lose R&D tax credits. The language and skill barrier is also pretty big; most companies that outsource end up spending so much money on QC that they barely save anything at all.

It's theoretically possible to find good programmers in the Philippines as opposed to locally. But seeing as how finding local programmers is still not a solved issue, expanding the job pool to include the entire world isn't going to make that task any easier.

It’s pretty bold to assume that local devs are that much better. The high paid SV companies might do better than most at attracting talent, but the average developer team in the US is pretty terrible. I’ve worked in many organisations as a contractor, and the number of completely brain dead software engineers who do little more than fill seats and collect checks is astonishing. An average developer from Manila would struggle to do worse.

> But seeing as how finding local programmers is still not a solved issue

They've made it pretty clear that they won't be looking for local programers. They're looking domestically. Presumably, the same processes used to hire remote domestic programmers will be equally applicable for most remote non-domestic workers too.

> you lose R&D tax credits

Aren't those negligible compared to the salary gap?

> Pretty quickly, many companies will discover the pitfalls to outsourcing.

Probably true, however by then they will already have made the decision and it will be priced in to the company’s stock. The System is replete with the consequences of bad short-term decisions that have become more or less locked in.

$200k vs $<20k. It’s an extremely large gap to be filled. Surely the people who spend their days looking at numbers on spreadsheets will see this gap and try to take as much advantage of it as they possibly can, and surely the market will reward the massive cuts in operating costs.

They could do outsourcing today, yesterday, and 10 years ago just as well. Nothing changed, structurally or technologically (covid is neither), for outsourcing to work better now than it used to be so far.

There will always be companies who need to learn on their own how $20K developers are different from $200K developers and what investing in either means 10 years down the road.

By the way, good developers with good English and good communication skills can easily earn MUCH more than $20K even today by working remotely. Already today in most countries there are almost no barriers to earning multiples of their national averages other than one's own skills and attitude. And yet dev salaries in America are as high as ever.

The industry seems to be growing faster than the labour force even despite globalization, and I don't think that trend will reverse anytime soon. We're still shoving software into more places, industries, and processes, and making it all more complicated.

You forget about the culture, work culture, mentality and education in those countries. I don't see a reason why should I make less for the same job just because I'm from a different country. What if you are a digital nomad? In the end it should be more about who YOU are, not what country you are from. I see a big difference between people from different countries even if the education level and years of experience seem to be the same. You will see difference in education even between cities.

Knowing that the market is getting even more global it only encourages me to ask for more money, not less.

countries? the gap between living in village in Poland and having major city 160km away where salaries are x4 and more for people with same xp[0] is already sad (and motivating) enough :P

[0] measured in years of xp.

Which salaries are that different in Poland rural vs major cities?

Up here in Lithuania, in IT, it's not uncommon to live (relatively) bumfucknowhere, work remotely and drive in once or twice a week.

Oh, I just realized that I've probably expressed myself kinda poorly because now it sounds as if that gap was a result of "location adjustments"

I meant that "location adjustment" just increases the gap to the already existing gap made of "attractive place(big city) - bigger companies - bigger salaries" factor.

>Up here in Lithuania, in IT, it's not uncommon to live (relatively) bumfucknowhere, work remotely and drive in once or twice a week.

I'm not exactly aware of how common it is here

It's very common among people working remotely through various consultancies for Roche.

During my time there a typical project would have 30-40% of the personell living either in a small town or in the middle of nowhere.

Why, because it's super cheap?

And how long is the commute into the city?

I think this is how it's going to be in America soon.

Assuming it's similar as in Lithuania - price is one of main points. You get a sweet house with a reasonable lot instead of a tiny flat. Likely better access to nature, more calm environment etc. If you're fine with a run down house and want to fix it up yourself, it's easy to buy a liveable house with a garden and whatnot in bumfucknowhere for really cheap. Cheap as in less than a year's salary of a programmer in a city.

Commute varies a lot depending on specific location. Want to live in a village in a national park? You're looking into at least a good hour off-peak to two hours including city traffic. Random small town? May be an hour, may be two. If you want to stick close to your parents and they happen to live deep in backcountry... You may be looking into 3-4h one way depending on which city the company is located in.

Damn 3-4 hours would prob be too much. Maybe you go to the city for a week at a time for work.

1-2hrs is reasonable for a shoot into the city.

I think this will become very popular.

Judging how overrepresented are fathers of 4+ there I think it's mainly because the cost of real estate.

Timezone and language skills my dude. If you are in the same timezone then it becomes much easier.

There are millions of south Asians who’d be happy to work any hour of the day you ask them to.

Your work product will definitely suffer if you are trying to maintain a sleep/wake schedule significantly different from your family and friends. I've seen this happen directly, and it's really bad.

Not to mention what a creepy and unnatural work culture that would be back in the home base location.

“Hey everyone, let me introduce you to the wholesale replacement technology staff we obviously hired just to pay them way unfairly less and fire all your friends who did a good job. It may be night time every time you see them on the video call but don’t worry. As you capitalize on a near indentured servant relationship with them so we can pay them less than their worth purely because of geopolitical arbitrage, they’ve generously agreed to never read their kids bedtime stories or sleep at the same time their spouses do, as they live out a stereotype hellscape of Western arrogance where they are happy to be worker ants endlessly reciting Bill Gates’ “flipping burgers is opportunity” speech in their heads.”

True, but how many of them are good programmers? The US is just better at producing them than other places.

https://blogs.worldbank.org/education/who-trains-best-comput...

> The United States trains the best computer graduates ― by far: We find that CS seniors in the United States substantially outperform seniors in China, India, and Russia. The average computer science student in the United States ranks higher than about 80 percent of students tested in China, India, and Russia. Seniors in elite institutions in the United States similarly outperform seniors in elite institutions in China, India, and Russia by approximately 0.85 Standard Deviations (SDs). Importantly, the skills advantage of the United States is not because it has a large proportion of high-scoring international students.

There's some solid programming talent in Vietnam, they constantly amaze me with their skills and will work for a few hundred a week before they get poached by the states.

I've seen kids straight out of highschool who can write solid stuff and know git back to front compared to some lad with an Ivy league bachelor's who is basically clueless, needing his hand held for months and yet demanding 8x the wage.

I treat everyone who only has a degree and no real world skills with a lot of suspicion. There's plenty of ridiculously good hires out there.

Mostly agreed. A bigger difference might be that American companies do a decent job overall of training their 'apprentice programmers' (that's what fresh grads mostly are).

They basically did a computerized quiz? While I might agree with conclusions I might suspect the methodology.

It's important to highlight that the more significant variable here is probably the quality/prestige of universities within the U.S., which in turn then attracts the best talent and students around the world, rather than the other way around.

> Importantly, the skills advantage of the United States is not because it has a large proportion of high-scoring international students.

I think you may be misunderstanding my point. My comment is meant to highlight the fact that the quality / prestige of universities in the US consequently attract the smartest / most talented students by virtue of being the most highly ranked in the world.

This study looks highly flawed. They gave ets tests to random (categorized) people in the three countries. So far so ok (although the question is always what does the test measure, I mean what e.g. recursion is not big in china, because it is not used in production etc). But for the US the take ets data instead of testing people for this study. So it seems they compare it with people who took this exam for other reasons (and probably studied/prepaeed for this exam!); or maybe I understand this wrongly

The US is the best of these four. There are other countries, too.

Why wouldn't those companies use contract labor right now? There's nothing stopping them.

You could flip the question around & say, “The fact companies like this, which are mostly rational companies that have ample time & resources to research contracting or outsourcing as alternatives, and yet are choosing not to must mean the economic value of contracting and outsourcing is less than relocating long-term salaried employees.”

In other words the question is, “Given that contracting and outsourcing are deemed to be worse options by rational actors, what reasons make this true?”

Outsourcing failed 20 years ago and it will fail now for the same reasons it did then.

The conditions are different now. Infrastructure is better, foreign workers are better trained, American company culture is different (ceos of Microsoft and Google both Indian), and the possibility of American workers creating political friction is becoming non-negligible.

Unless the workers in the Philippines are willing to work US work hours, they aren’t the same. As someone who has managed teams in India, overnight delays in feedback can easily stretch weeklong epics across months. You just can’t rapidly iterate with timezone latency like that.

If your tasks are so well defined that a single feature request ticket can be fulfilled and satisfied on the first try, that’s cool but you’re likely not actually doing anything challenging and you’ve probably already outsourced to India.

I did quite a bit of work little overlap. Me in Europe with clients in Japan or US west coast. Meetings on few overlapping hours and pretty much around-the-clock work was pretty good. Lots of time for deep work on both ends. If one side needs something, the other side can prepare it while former sleeps.

Maybe my clients and I got lucky because little hands-on management was required and specs were quite lax? But at least in some cases it works just fine.

Or you can consider the reverse, it is not American tech workers who are overpaid, but remote workers who are actually underpaid. Would it be so bad if $T companies could not discriminate remote workers?

https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w...

I disagree. It's going to be a net positive because it will make the stock market go up (thanks to lower production costs) and will ensure that our investments can maintain their dominant positions which will benefit everyone and will create more jobs.

I don't think this is going to happen. Good developers all over the world know their price, demand it and get what they want because there's just so few of them.

Applying the current exchange rate and American standards regarding time off I'm currently making, as a front-end dev with 8 years under his belt, $60k+ before taxes in Poland, and I'm far from the highest earner among my peers.

Sure it's considerably less than the median US wage in this field, but still it's not like we're orders of magnitude away from you guys.

And note that Poland is a very popular destination for outsourcing.

You'd hope the Iowan is more productive.

If they are equally productive, then surely they deserve equal pay.