Disney famously did this, I think it was tech support for their Florida parks.

You can call me bigoted or racist, I don't care. The fact is with moving technical roles to India quality plummets. But I can totally see how in some beancounter's narrow mind this makes perfect sense.

Cut salaries 90% and quality will drop. It's a false economy however you slice it or wherever the replacements are based. It never works.

Every company thinks that they're going to hack the system. They think that they'll be the first American company to ever outsource and get the best developers. But all of the best developers are happily working for local companies, and they don't want to have to deal with an American boss.

> all of the best developers ...

... have already left the country.

It's a joke, but not really.

In this case its Munich I think based on previous comments. Also, in India things depend on who you hire and how much you're willing to pay (like everywhere else). If you pay a salary you expect in rural Alabama in the Bay Area for a tech job you'll attract shitty devs as well.

You comment isn't wrong. I've observed the same thing but only when things get outsourced to low cost consulting shops. If Google pays decently in India (which I think they do), they'll get much better devs. There's a pretty strong start-up ecosystem and dev culture but as with everything you need to pay good $$ - as in not 10% of bay area pay but closer to 60-70% of it to attract top talent.

General formula that majority of big tech MAG7 companies apply when it comes to India is "3 times HC than Bay area". If you see pay data for these companies, that seems to be correct with salaries in Bangalore to be 1/3 of salaries in Bay area.

That's not bigoted or racist. There are two forces when it comes to pricing labor:

1. The forces that dictate the lowest price.

2. The forces that dictate the highest price.

These are completely orthogonal to each other.

Lowest price is based on cost of living, you can hire the cheapest person as long as you pay them enough for them to keep on eating. That's it. Notably this lower-end is going to have a lot of variance based on location.

Highest price is based on how much value a worker creates for a business, the highest price that you can pay that worker is somewhere that leaves the business with a margin profit. Of course it is in the businesses best interest to increase the margin for themselves, but as talent becomes harder to find, fat margins become less of a necessity and more of a nice-to-have. The job needs to get done or their golden-egg machine will die.

So!

You go to the lowest price at a another country, that's what you get in quality. Execs think that people are replaceable so they believe that the average X is the same here as it is anywhere else, the only difference to them is cost.

So yeah. You are not racist for pointing out that quality suffers due to cost cutting through offshoring. The lower cost-of-living countries (such as India) still have top tier talent, but that talent is priced similarly across the world, they are smart and they price themselves according to the value they bring.

very nice reply. Along these lines, one problem many founders face is when professional management (new investors, board members) focus mono-maniacally on repeatability, unit economics, and generally ultimate fungible staffing. One way this is achieved (sometimes even deliberately) is to buy the cheapest, most easily replaceable inputs and do anything necessary to make the new configuration work. Staffing is a key tactic come hell or high water. This can cause obvious cultural issues.

> The fact is with moving technical roles to India quality plummets.

Of course your assessment of those who can literally steal your job from under you is fair and unbiased

>When Google did its massive 12k person layoff they moved a lot of those roles to places like India.

But remember, everyone has to be 'in office' for collaboration! /s