Companies have shown again and again they are willing to sacrifice quality if it increases profit. In this case I'm not even sure quality will be sacrificed in most cases because as you said there are tons of great engineers available

Not against outsourcing it’s gotta be a mixed bag. You’ll be extremely slow if you have to wait until tomorrow to get any answers.

The company I work for now has a team in India and the difference in skills is night and day compared to my last job. The turnover is much much less as well. I suspect they pay better and don’t rely on scummy 3rd party “coach you to pass the interview but have no real experience” providers.

Communication was very hard, even when language wasn't a problem.

People afraid to say they didn't understand something and trying to wing it with tragicomical results. People not raising issues until after something exploded not to offend you.

I think outsourcing to Russia has some good potential but the level of English is still nowhere close, even in the new generations. Eastern Europe is more promising but English is a bit hit or miss. I see plenty of outsourcing to Eastern Europe from the UK. Similarly, I see more and more outsourcing to Latin America from the states.

Europe is much closer to the States: if you outsource to the UK or Northern-mid Europe you get English speaking people who will act similarly to US employees. Sure you won't save 11/12 like in India but you will save a good half compared to SF, with the only hassle being the timezone.

I think we haven't seen the last of outsourcing.

I'm from Europe, I've worked for several SF based companies (some hired, some through acquisitions) and can confirm that , despite there are some really, really smart people there are also a lot of people that have no clue what they're talking about, as in most places you have a mix of it. But almost all of them are incredibly arrogant and most have an incredible tendency to take decisions based on what's important for their CV and there career and their podcast and their YouTube channel than for what the company or the problem at hands needs. I'm not sure I'm taking again a job for a west coast based company.

The gap in terms of knowledge and networks is closing with places abroad.

The counterpart of this is that initially, the outsourcing group brings their A-team to bear, in order to win the deal. Those folks are generally as good as the people that they replaced. Six months later, those top operators are shifted to the next deal, and the C-team takes over, and then churn and attrition reduces it to a D or F team in short order.

Rather, I see remote work as a sort of leveling of the playing field. As the location advantage is diminished when it comes to compensation, the pressure starts to gently push everyone’s comp toward the median. Highly paid people might see some downward pressure but the underpaid people will start to see some upward pressure.

Silicon Valley jobs aren’t going away, though. In-person will always be in demand.

I'm not worried about my North American salary getting scooped from Europe. I think there are many factors that go into why there is such a salary difference in the first place anyway. For example, engineering in Germany is much more prized than in Canada so many of the technically gifted Canadians go into software instead. Anyone can read the situation of their local region and sort of self-select into the better professions locally, which makes a bit of a feedback loop.

I'd guess the actual reason that US software developers make more is that it is easier to make lots of money in the US generally, so the profitable companies go there & then the developers make excellent wages due to geographic effects.

Sure I can get someone who will code a basic Spring Boot application in a pinch. But do they have the excellent communication skills, knowledge of build systems, cloud knowledge, understanding of TCP and SSL, HTTP protocol, forwarding and reverse proxies, containerization, unit testing, and version control just to start. This isn't mentioning secure design and the hundreds of other small things they will need to learn and understand.

Then they have to be willing to get up to speed on new libraries and be able to read and understand software. Will they be able to set up remote configuration for our swarm? Will they be able to do the research if they don't know something? Do they have a firm base of computer science knowledge to make that learning stick?

I assumed that they would have hired management that takes labor costs into account.

It is possible they are making a mistake and completely missing a great money saving opportunity, but I would not bet on it.

There very well could be new opportunities for labor arbitrage that can be taken advantage of by many businesses, and if so, it will be evidenced by the success of companies that take advantage of it. But it might take some time.

But it is not a new idea, and is certainly one that has already been tried, and so if certain companies are not taking advantage of lower labor costs elsewhere, then it is prudent to assume there is a good reason.

We live in a different world than a few years ago.

I hope I'm wrong because I'm benefiting from geographical effects and I have no delusions that I'm smarter than almost 6 billion people.

I have always preferred to stay up and wake up late, but never thought of simply working in a different time zone.

Beyond just time zone issues, there are substantial legal, cultural, language and other issues that will prevent this from happening on a wide and sustainable scale.

I have worked with many companies that tried this and failed spectacularly. Examples of problems encountered:

1. Having to explain every little thing that people of the same culture intrinsically know

2. Being slapped with regulations that nobody in the U.S. has even heard of

3. Cultural differences surrounding vacation / other time off

4. Overseas contractors literally copying the company and using their data and using the software they were hired to write to compete against them. I spent four days as an expert witness in a U.S. Federal court case over this one.

I'm less familiar with 4. But seen many cases of data leaks. It's very challenging to figure out the purpose, competing is only one.

It depends. In Switzerland for example salaries as as high as anywhere in the US while the taxes are somewhat lower.

The Bay Area is, similarly, only 2.5% of the US' population.

I wasn’t referring to Bay Area salaries. I was referring to normal US developer salaries, which are still higher than common EU salaries.

My comment was about general hiring, not the outlier edge cases. If you want to pay Bay Area salaries you can obviously compete on compensation with just about anyone, anywhere with very few exceptions.

The draw of hiring remote is that you will get access to great engineers that would otherwise never want to move to the Bay Area. You get to compete for their talent if you're offering full remote, but so do other companies that pay "Bay Area salaries".

I think it's great for software engineers everywhere, but not great for the Bay Area itself since the incentive to move there becomes lower (salary is not the only reason people move to the Bay Area, but it's definitely a big pull). Although if you live there that means less pressure on real estate ;)

So while you'll definitely be paying less if you don't have dependents, if you have kids and are earning "normal" money (e.g. 50-100k CHF gross/year), your total tax-like expenses would be similar to most of the Western world.

But marginal taxes *are* way lower than most other countries. E.g. if you're earning 200k CHF gross/year, your marginal tax rate (in Zurich) would be something like 23%.

EDIT: I'm a Swiss software engineer if that wasn't clear. I don't make that much though unfortunately :)

Most of the jobs are "normal bay area" salaries, but cost of living in Switzerland is as high or worse as San Fransisco, roughly.

For a more meaningful view of the Swiss market (there's almost only Google on this site for Switzerland), I would have a look at https://swissdevjobs.ch/. There's not a lot above 150k.

I work in a unicorn company based in California Bay Area that has dev teams in Europe (Netherlands, Lithuania), India and Brazil (probably other locations as well). IME, this is how it works: we pay higher than local salaries, but they're not as high compared to Bay Area (think location-based salary adjustments). This doesn't really put meaningful upward pressure on average companies to catch up because salaries are often tied to what they're able to pay based on what market they serve (local city vs Europe vs global).

My understanding is that with Bay Area salaries come Bay Area interview bars, and that this bar is very high compared to your local dev shop. Not many can pass these interviews (the failure rate is high even in Bay Area). IIRC from my interviewer stats, the vast majority of candidates didn't even get through the screener round and less than a fifth were offered positions (I have in the range of 100s of interviews under my belt). And we only recruit fluent english-speaking candidates, which shrinks the pool significantly.

Timezone differences are a big deal, even if the employees in far-away timezones form full-on teams. Communication is slow and inconvenient, and sync meetings at 9PM/7AM get old pretty fast. Typically there must be some sort of clear cut advantage to outsourcing that offsets the timezone issue (e.g. my understanding is that our India team is there because network conditions there are impossible to replicate in US and reliability despite wild variations in coverage is important for us).

And if you think being highly qualified is a high importance criteria, consider that in our Covid-related round of layoffs, a number of european teams got sacked. And these folks were no slackers, they're seriously some of the brightest folks I've seen.

In short, high pay European jobs do exist, but they're not common, they are hard to land and they are hard to keep.

And this fact that the site is down PERFECTLY highlights the [insert derogatory adjective here] of some development and design mindsets floating around in SV. Rather than having some content laoded by an HTTP server, we send over a javascript framework that then PULLS the content and lays it out, and we show a LOADING SCREEN in the meantime. It's using the web server and browser to completely reinvent the webserver and browser, for no gain and an inarguably worse user experience.

The fact that part of the throbber image is the "object not found" placeholder from browsers is so perfect for the site that the irony is absolutely self-recursive.

Any knowledge worker job that doesn't need to be done in person can be outsourced to the billions of people in the rest of the world. Radiologist, Accounting, Law, Animation, etc.

What is the value of a U.S. Hacker News moderator in the valley, for example, over a smart Croatian or Latin American person who will work for a fraction of the price?

Many peoples advantage is geography and connections, not talent or skill, which there is no shortage of amongst billions of people.

The ultimate result in my opinion, when no job is safe from outsourcing, is going to be the decline of wages and the middle class in America.

This result has been evidenced already over the past 5 decades or so.

Are there any websites that specifically cater to advertising these kinds of positions?

As someone in London currently working at a FAANG it's becoming clear that the only way I can hope even to match my current salary is to A) get hired by another FAANG or B) get hired remotely by a US-based company.

If there is an option C) that I haven't thought about, please do share :)

If you really are interested in planning your post-FAANG path with an eye towards the total comp I would suggest networking into fintechs. The better dev jobs are not always advertised, so who you know can help get you in the door before the job is ever posted.

As for fintech, I have had an internship that has put me off them. But maybe it was just a bad place and I shouldn't write them off completely.

What was it? Sounds like a horrible experience. I wouldn't know what to do if they decided they don't need Java/Spring codemonkeys anymore.

The software industry is seeing the same thing as what happened to factory industries. First the specialities that are least challenging to manage offshore, then eating the rest of the profession, leaving some niche I suppose like we still produce certain type of clothes, furniture and electronics in the well developed countries.

I've lived in several countries where outsourcing is common, it's always the same schema. Flocks of non very competent wanna be tech riches launch businesses of hiring cheaper labour with the promise to deliver quality projects. In the end it's a mess of a code base, but client see the bill as more digestive than hiring a team of people with all the tax and high social benefits to pay without any guarantee that anything will work in the end.

I don't know how the outsourcing hype will end given the difficulty to streamline software development. There is little cultural/message loss when sewing t-shirt with a logo and well defined patterns on them, all designed by an artist and industrialists in Paris or Milan. The translation of digital application which spans across multiple type of devices, on terminals and multiple servers, constantly evolving to quickly adapt to business needs is another story. But hey maybe we will rather have somewhat satisfying software made abroad for cheap and guaranteed further unemployment locally than pay what is worth and have products well fit for purposes.

Edit: typos

Maybe the laws need to be updated. Nobody anticipated remote work when the laws on visas/green cards were written. It seems like an exploit that you don't need any to work for an American company potentially taking the spot of an American worker. American taxes aren't even withheld in this case apparently.

If they make laws in the US to make it harder to have remote workers to protect local people then the companies will use an existing foreign office or open a shell office some place where laws are friendlier and hire from there.