[HN Gopher] Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent
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Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent
Author : nsm
Score : 205 points
Date : 2021-11-08 16:05 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (devonzuegel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (devonzuegel.com)
| nitwit005 wrote:
| It's hard to take this seriously when it doesn't acknowledge that
| remote work is nothing new, or that people have been making this
| prediction for decades.
| mrtweetyhack wrote:
| well, pay and perks have a lot to do with it too
| foxyv wrote:
| The demand for software developers and experts is a bottomless
| well right now in EVERY country. Hiring everywhere is a
| challenge. The problem is that software development is genuinely
| challenging. Training is a huge problem because programs can't
| keep up with the new technology. In the past 10 years there have
| been 3 separate revolutions in our technology stack and 2 in our
| project management. Everything is moving at a lightning pace.
|
| The US doesn't really have a monopoly on global talent, we just
| pay the most for it wherever and whenever we can get a hold of
| it. We import talent at huge rates and we act as an education and
| training center for the world.
|
| One thing I've seen with remote work is that wages have gone up.
| All of a sudden, developers that were making $60k in some sleepy
| town are getting hired by huge software companies for sometimes
| two to three times as much and they are still making less than
| their in-office counterparts.
| danvonk wrote:
| If it really is a bottomless well everywhere, I must be doing
| something wrong...I just graduated from a well-regarded
| university in Germany with a degree in computer science and to
| be honest, it's not all that easy to get a job.
|
| For example, in London, as someone with no experience, you'll
| probably have to go with a graduate scheme--mostly at tech
| companies and banks. But when you apply, you'll be barraged
| first by cognitive aptitude tests, followed by situational
| judgement tests, then a LeetCode/HackerRank test. Deutsche Bank
| additionally requires you to pre-record answers to interview
| questions that they pose in an e-mail. Perhaps afterwards
| you'll be invited to an on-site interview where you can repeat
| the process.
|
| All of this machinery to filter out candidates doesn't scream
| out that they are that short on candidates.
| initplus wrote:
| There is a shortage of people - with experience. A side
| effect of this is employers are less willing to take on less
| experienced staff as they lack the employees to act as
| mentors.
|
| Getting my first job in tech was the hardest - but since it
| has been smooth sailing as I have a track record of
| experience & war stories to tell.
| moooo99 wrote:
| Interesting, my experience was the exact opposite. I recently
| got my bachelors in business information systems and finding
| a well paid job turned out to be fairly easy (although my
| working student relationship with my current company
| certainly contributed to the easy hiring process). This seems
| to be a fairly common experience, at least among my peers.
| alistairSH wrote:
| It's not just the $60k developer in Sleepville, USA. Salaries
| in Bangalore have literally sky-rocketed.
| anon-686876876 wrote:
| Launching money into space is unlikely to help the situation.
| alistairSH wrote:
| That's about what it feels like dealing with comp over
| there. It's really insane. Great for the locals.
| Frustrating trying to hire and retain them from the US.
| 0xy wrote:
| I don't buy it, US tech salaries continue to skyrocket and we're
| nearly two years into pandemic conditions.
|
| Just over the last 6-9 months, salaries have markedly jumped.
|
| There's still a huge thirst for talent that isn't being quenched,
| and global pools don't help either.
|
| Facebook, Google and others have satellite offices all over to
| soak up talent elsewhere, but they're still ultra competitive in
| the US.
|
| They can pay a senior engineer $350k in the US, or an equivalent
| experience senior engineer $100k in Europe. There is no shift
| occurring though. They're still hiring like crazy everywhere.
|
| There's no place like the US for tech workers. Nowhere even comes
| close, even on a CoL-adjusted basis. European developers get
| screwed. South American developers get screwed. Asian developers
| get screwed. US developers don't get screwed.
| qaq wrote:
| It's not that drastic anymore people getting 350 total comp in
| US would get 200K Euro total comp in say Dublin, Ireland
| e4325f wrote:
| bollocks
| qaq wrote:
| check levels.fyi
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Still, I find the quality of life in Spain preferable. We have
| a government health system paid through taxes, no guns on the
| streets, not much pollution, amazing public transport, 4 weeks
| holidays and good weather. I prefer having those things as a
| safety net instead of having to pay for them myself. I really
| love not needing a car here at all, I haven't driven in years.
|
| I was recently offered a job in silicon valley but despite the
| fact that I would make several times my current wage and the
| language would be better for me (I'm not a native here), I
| wouldn't consider it. Money isn't everything (and silicon
| valley is crazy expensive, it wouldn't amount to that much).
| It's about quality of life for me.
| qaq wrote:
| I think you are really onto something truth is if you have
| 100K remote job in Spain you will hav better lifestyle than
| having 300K job in SV. If I only could convince my wife to
| move :(.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I'm nowhere near 100K in Spain but I wouldn't make 300K in
| that job in SV either :)
|
| I think it would work out worse in SV though in terms of
| spending power. With the exception of tech toys which tend
| to be around the same price everywhere so relatively
| expensive in Spain.
|
| But I'd give up a lot. Being half a world away from family
| and also the other drawbacks I mentioned. No, I'm fine
| here.
| qaq wrote:
| I think with people getting more comfortable with remote
| teams getting a job for US entity from Spain should
| become easier.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| It's possible, but there is the time difference thing,
| especially when it comes to the east coast. We have 6
| hours to the east coast, 9 to the west coast. In Spain
| people like to start and finish late (having dinner at
| 9pm is normal!) but this difference is uncomfortably
| much. It's not really handy if you have to work US time,
| bring your kids to work, have a social life, etc. In my
| current job we're the "inbetweeners" between the India
| and US teams. We keep in touch with both because India
| and the US don't normally collaborate much due to an even
| worse timezone situation.
|
| Also, why would they bother paying US salaries to
| employees stationed in Spain? When I moved here from
| Ireland (also EU) my salary actually went down a bit :)
| And they already scaled me up a lot within my salary
| class, if I had come in here 'off the street' I would
| have made even less. Multinationals already have this
| scenario a lot and they pay local wages.
|
| People are willing to work here for local wages. And
| local conditions are mandatory here if you live here.
| Working for a US company and for US conditions while
| living here will not fly by EU law (the only exception is
| NGOs like the UN).
|
| So I don't think it will change too much to be honest. If
| anything it will provide more downward pressure on US
| salaries than upward pressure on the ones here.
| eb0la wrote:
| Where do you live? If you have kids in Madrid it is almost
| mandatory to have a car.
|
| Imho the best place to live in Spain is in a 'capital de
| provicia': you have all the services the law mandates _but_
| it is not crowded.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I live in Barcelona city but I have no kids. I often see
| whole school classes on the metro though, going on school
| trips. I think the metro is just fine for them.
|
| Also, walking everywhere is really feasible. I stopped
| using the metro for everything due to Corona. Though I
| picked it up again after getting the vaccine, I still
| retained the habit of walking. Barcelona is nice and
| compact, I can walk everywhere within an hour or so. Not
| sure about Madrid, I've only visited.
|
| If I had a car I wouldn't even know where to leave it to be
| honest. In my area there's no parking available except some
| highly expensive garages.
| bwb wrote:
| Why do you think developers are getting screwed in those
| places?
|
| I've worked with tons of developers in South America and they
| were very happy with their life, their benefits, their pay...
|
| Confused on why they are getting "screwed".
| da39a3ee wrote:
| Because they're not receiving the same CoL adjusted
| compensation as Americans. Your attitude sounds a little
| patronizing.
| bwb wrote:
| Sure they are, like I said their pay is perfectly fine and
| kinda blown away you think it isn't. I don't understand
| what the complaint is on pay as they are making great
| money. What is the specific complaint you have or that you
| see?
|
| This is text based comments, inferring attitude is a huge
| black hole of impossibility :)
| 0xy wrote:
| Why is it okay to be paid $100,000 for the exact same job
| as your equivalent counterparts in the US make 3.5x for?
|
| That's millions if you save the majority for retirement.
| It could be the difference between nursing homes and an
| independent travel-filled retirement at a reasonable age.
|
| Of course, I'm not here to make decisions for anyone. And
| people have personal reasons to not pursue immigration,
| that's fine. They're making a steep trade-off, though.
| sbacic wrote:
| > Why is it okay to be paid $100,000 for the exact same
| job as your equivalent counterparts in the US make 3.5x
| for?
|
| I'm not going to say it's okay, but there are a few
| things to keep in mind. The most obvious is that salaries
| are not determined so much by how productive the employee
| is but by the relationship between supply and demand.
|
| But that's not the really interesting part. The
| interesting part is that when you factor in taxes and
| CoL, you might be earning less gross but walking away
| with more money after paying taxes and living costs.
| bwb wrote:
| Yes I would be totally ok with that. Especially if that
| $100k include a real pension when I retire that I can
| depend on, no threat of my kids getting shot at school,
| health insurance that covers me when I get sick without
| having to go into bankruptcy, bike paths over the entire
| country, paternity for when I have a kid, subsidized
| child care for everyone so parents can be more sane, etc
| etc...
|
| You think this is just about talent and it is not. It is
| combination of so many things such as taxes, social care,
| government ideology, culture in that country,
| retirement/pensions, cost of living in that location,
| minimum wage anchoring, how much it costs to dismiss
| someone, etc...
|
| Also, barely anyone in the USA makes 350k, so this entire
| argument is kinda moot. Barely any developers make
| $350,000 so this comparison is just kinda crazy.
|
| Even in the USA average salary is $177k for Senior
| executives:
| https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#salary-
| comp-t...
| da39a3ee wrote:
| In US public tech companies it's standard for half or
| more of the compensation to be made up by equity grants.
| Are you sure your average salary figures are not just
| looking at salary? A salary of $177k would be normal for
| someone making annual total comp of $350k at a FAANG --
| you can see this on levels.fyi.
| bwb wrote:
| True, I am not sure their either how they factor that in.
| On the SO survey they say salary so not sure if this
| combined.
|
| We talk a lot about FANGS here, but way more people work
| for normal companies.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| > They can pay a senior engineer $350k in the US, or an
| equivalent experience senior engineer $100k in Europe.
|
| Why can they do this?
| bwb wrote:
| This is mostly about FANGs and they can do it because they
| make $1m plus in revenue per employee.
|
| These are senior positions so don't think this is normal.
| Average dev salaries are $60k to $150k in USA depending on a
| ton of factors.
|
| The USA also has no social safety net so it's like comparing
| oranges to apples when you look at parts of Asia or Europe :)
| da39a3ee wrote:
| But the FAANGS have offices in Europe and pay those
| employees less, unless I'm mistaken. In which case you
| can't argue that US has FAANGS and others don't.
| bwb wrote:
| Yes, but the job market is different there as are the
| cost structure... it is not an equal comparison.
|
| For example, in the USA you are looking at about 22% for
| taxes on an employees salary that the company pays. In
| Europe that can be as high as 50%.
|
| Just one example...
| pb7 wrote:
| They can do whatever they want. You accuse others of being
| patronizing but your sense of entitlement is polarizing. It
| would do you well to realize that the US pays a lot for
| software engineering as a result of the same societal
| structure, policies, and priorities that cause the problems
| Europeans love picking on (e.g. healthcare, paid time off,
| parental leave, etc).
| ctvo wrote:
| Because the rest of Europe pays 80k.
| bwb wrote:
| Very fair salary, especially when you take into account
| they have real health care, real social safty nets, etc.
| ABeeSea wrote:
| My annual max out of pocket cost for healthcare is
| $5,000. Once I pay the $5k, everything else for free for
| the rest of the year. How is that worth a $100-200K
| salary difference?
| anotherman554 wrote:
| That's not exactly how health insurance works. The
| insurer can always say something the doctor did is not
| covered, or something the doctor says you need is not
| covered. Or that, while a procedure is covered under the
| policy, you aren't sick enough for the insurer to
| consider it medically necessary, even if the doctor
| thinks it is.
| emteycz wrote:
| It's not worth it. They also forget to mention that in
| most EU countries you pay ~30% of your income before
| taxes for healthcare (in addition to taxes). By my
| calculations, average software engineer pays 10x more for
| healthcare in EU than in the USA - _in absolute numbers_.
| 0xy wrote:
| Healthcare isn't really a great argument. Aside from the
| low hanging argument that healthcare is covered or
| subsidized by most tech companies in the US, the cost of
| healthcare pales in comparison to the difference between
| $100k and $350k.
|
| The value of healthcare is not $250,000 per year per
| person. It's not even 1/10th of that.
|
| As for safety nets, that depends on personal risk
| tolerance. As an experienced developer, it's not
| particularly difficult to find work. Even an average one.
|
| We're talking about a massive difference in pay. That
| difference could amount to literally millions of dollars
| in retirement for your family.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| Again, you're patronizing people outside the US telling
| them that they should be happy with lower salary. US tech
| workers have their healthcare paid _in addition to_ their
| high compensation. Someone earning 120k in London might
| earn $350k in the US. It's not up to you to tell the
| little Europeans that they shouldn't want their missing
| $230k because their healthcare and public services make
| up for it.
| bwb wrote:
| I am not patronizing anyone living outside the USA and
| please don't sling around accusations like that.
|
| You are paid based on a mix of skills, taxes, other
| costs, job market, and where you live. Pay is not some
| absolute, it has a lot of factors (many I didn't
| mention). The ultimate question is are you happy with
| your pay and is it fair? Done :)
|
| There isn't some magical number out there and anything
| lower than that means someone isn't being fair to you.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| > I am not patronizing anyone living outside the USA and
| please don't sling around accusations like that.
|
| Funny that my comment was so heavily upvoted. You are
| patronizing people, and I accuse you of it deliberately,
| knowing both that it is an accusation you may not
| welcome, and that it is difficult to infer from text-
| based communication.
|
| I suggest you pause and consider that this is a recurring
| accusation with several upvotes, and that you may not
| realize that you are being patronizing.
| bwb wrote:
| lol, I am not sure what to tell you here, I wish you the
| best of luck :)
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I see many people here comparing US with EU in term of wages. But
| for the comparation to work taxes, healthcare, education, and
| subsidizing several public services like transport or heating
| should be taken into account.
|
| Also, the comparation should take into consideration PPP.
|
| $300 000 pre-taxes in US is not 3x $100 000 after-taxes in EU.
| Especially if you adjust for other factors.
| nly wrote:
| By my estimation, even factoring in the cost of living, medical
| insurance, tax differences etc, people working in the Bay area
| are taking home twice what an equally qualified dev would take
| home in say, London.
|
| If anything the contrast is even more stark across the EU
| oceanplexian wrote:
| I think the "equally qualified" point you're making is highly
| disingenuous.
|
| Qualified doesn't mean you can churn out so many lines of
| code or have X years of experience at a company or whatever,
| it means you have right kind of experience. To a big company
| like Facebook or Google, someone from SV who has a few years
| in the local industry has more relevant "experience" to the
| position than someone in London with 10 years at a financial
| firm.
| [deleted]
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| They also seem to work very long hours with long commutes and
| get few vacations. When I see that the average cost of a
| house in Cupertino is 2.5 million dollars for example, I
| would imagine most of those Apple engineers live far away.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Never forget that "Free Dinner" is a big "perk" of work in
| FAANG land. I can't comprehend the messed up work life
| balance that makes that make sense
| jmgao wrote:
| Why not? The vast majority of people who ate dinner at
| Google immediately went home afterwards. My daily routine
| was to show up at 11, check email, eat lunch, work until
| 6:30ish, eat dinner, and then go home.
| dboreham wrote:
| It has been a few years since I lived in the South Bay, but
| generally Apple engineers would live somewhere reasonably
| local. A few would choose to commute from Gillroy or Santa
| Cruz for sure, but it's not like there are only
| zillionaires living in Cupertino and Santa Clara. Those are
| pretty mid-range places to live.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Companies pay the prevailing wage in whatever labor market
| they participate in. The prevailing wage in the UK is lower
| than in Silicon Valley, but higher than in, say, Oklahoma
| City.
|
| Not sure why people are still confused about this. But it
| seems many still don't understand it. The funniest thing is
| when people try to concoct some sort of fairness argument to
| explain this, or equally hilarious is when they try to come
| up with a fairness argument to condemn it.
|
| Different markets have different prices due to differences in
| supply and demand in those markets. Want developer salaries
| to be much higher in the UK? Create an environment where a
| bunch of big tech companies all want to massively increase
| hiring there. Salaries will go up. Want developer salaries to
| be lower in Silicon Valley? Get most of the tech companies to
| leave. Salaries will go down.
|
| One can say that _ultimately_ the reason why Silicon Valley
| wages are so high is because there is a productive ecosystem
| that was so beneficial to the creation of tech companies that
| there was an explosion in demand for local tech labor. That
| ecosystem consists of easy access to credit and VC funding,
| existing networks of suppliers and vendors, existing
| mentorship networks for engineers and entrepreneurs, stable
| regulations and enforcement of contracts /property rights,
| together with sufficient local talent to pull off the
| difficult job of company creation.
|
| London didn't have that to the same degree, and so has a
| lower demand for tech labor with correspondingly lower wages.
| torginus wrote:
| I'm not sure what you are claiming. You probably won't get
| $300k in the EU, but if you do, a greater proportion of it will
| go to taxes - the things you get in return, like pensions or
| healthcare aren't as attractive at that income level. While US
| healthcare is very expensive, it's a service, which means it's
| tied to how much you pay, and not defined as a percentage of
| your gross income. If you make that much money, you can easily
| retire early, which wouldn't be possible with government
| pensions.
| disiplus wrote:
| at that pay level in Europe you are almost certainly not
| going to social healthcare because in most of them you will
| not get the same level of service as in private hospital and
| will lose more time. so u usually end up paying the
| healthcare and using it only in extreme circumcises. there is
| Switzerland where that is different.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Also here in Spain, the public healthcare system is just
| fine. I wouldn't use private. Public is good enough.
|
| But it's more about peace of mind. What if I lose that high
| paying job? I'll suddenly be in trouble for medical fees.
| Or income for that matter.
|
| That kind of security is really great to have. I wouldn't
| want to live in a country without it. The US has a kind of
| "every man for himself" attitude. It feels like it stems
| from the 'frontier' mindset. You can climb really high but
| also fall all the way down. And that's fine, to each their
| own. But it's not for me. I'm happy to just have enough to
| live comfortably and have a nice job and not have to worry
| too much. This is also why I'll never be an entrepreneur.
| I'm very happy being a salaried employee with the lower
| income but the rights and stability that come with it.
| golemiprague wrote:
| You are correct about the overall state of mind and
| culture but in practicality poor people in the US also
| have some security networks. There are all kind of
| government and charity based social help, including for
| medication, housing, food and whatnot. You can go to a
| state college for almost free or very cheap education. It
| is not that bad as people might think.
| legulere wrote:
| Im from Germany and was insured privately during my
| childhood and my parents still are. The public healthcare
| system is just as good, you have less stress with doctors
| using you to earn good money but have to wait sometimes
| longer for getting an appointment (which still is pretty
| fast in the international comparison)
| cromka wrote:
| > you have less stress with doctors using you to earn
| good money
|
| This is the most significant and initially intangible
| difference between US and EU healthcare. It takes a while
| to realize that in the US you are a source of money and a
| cost at the same time. At literally every step of the
| treatment process, everyone you meet will make it clear,
| either straight up or through an extreme efficiency,
| dehumanizing the whole process and leaving little room
| for a holistic approach to medicine, which is still
| predominant in the EU. The doctors in latter will
| actually spend time with you and if they figure problem
| is elsewhere, send you off to another specialist. In
| contrast, you and your insurer will be milked no matter
| what in the US.
| cromka wrote:
| > at that pay level in Europe you are almost certainly not
| going to social healthcare
|
| Even if you do, for anything more serious, especially
| emergency, you still use the public health care. And you
| won't get a massive bill because an ambulance brought you
| to an out-of-network hospital.
|
| The private healthcare is for regular outpatient care and,
| as such, substantially cheaper than the cost of insurance
| in US + all of the co-pays, coinsurance and out-of-network
| bills.
|
| Source: EU citizen in the US since 6 years.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Please look up where the US ranks in healthcare quality
| globally before trying to denigrate other countries' health
| services.
|
| (hint: it ain't good)
| [deleted]
| dboreham wrote:
| > a greater proportion of it will go to taxes
|
| Is this true? Taxes in the US are pretty high if you have a
| high income, and remember to include state and local taxes,
| and property taxes.
|
| > the things you get in return, like pensions or healthcare
| aren't as attractive at that income level
|
| Perhaps, but it's also attractive that _other_ _people_ get
| those benefits because ultimately the level of stress
| everyone else is under has an effect on your quality of life,
| one way or another.
| bagacrap wrote:
| I've looked into this and it seems the biggest difference
| is where the brackets are. They're much higher in the US,
| even if the marginal tax rate for high earners in
| California is not much lower than Germany.
| zz865 wrote:
| Also quality of life in Europe is much higher. US everything is
| bigger, but Europe wins for Food quality, cleanliness, crime &
| safety, holidays, design.
| dboreham wrote:
| Especially when you consider bacon.
| istorical wrote:
| This kind of comparison makes no sense because whether
| quality of life is better in US or Europe depends on the US
| city/state vs European city/country you are comparing in
| each, as well as whether you're comparing someone of lower,
| lower middle, upper middle, or upper class.
|
| US upper class in a wealthy area is very different from US
| lower middle class in another. And the same goes for Europe.
| erect_hacker wrote:
| > US upper class in a wealthy area is very different from
| US lower middle class in another. And the same goes for
| Europe.
|
| congrats, you managed to miss the point entirely.
| yosito wrote:
| Does the US have a monopoly on global talent that I'm unaware of?
| austincheney wrote:
| That would depend upon the definition of talent. My long mega
| corporate experience has taught me there isn't any practical
| different between CS graduates (bachelors level only) from the
| US and India once they enter the real world. It is generally
| Java focused with some C++ thrown in and for everything else
| that isn't Java or C++ you make it look like Java as much as
| possible.
|
| I have also noticed many generalized similarities between self-
| taught developers from the US and India in how they proceed
| against a problem as well. The CS educated developers are
| convention focused in that there is a certain way to solve
| problems regardless of the problem while the self taught
| developers tend to focus more on the goal, the solution.
| dboreham wrote:
| Something to note is that the US culture in general seems to
| value technical expertise higher than some other cultures. For
| example, it's been a common experience for me to have Doctors
| and Dentists quiz me about my work and make statements that
| they wish they could have followed a similar career path. I
| doubt that would ever happen in England.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Apparently we are just that awesome.
| 0xfaded wrote:
| The US seems to have a monopoly on the ability to pay top
| talent (at least in the west).
|
| At the high end of the talent pool, I don't think opening up is
| going to have a significant impact. We're mostly already
| internationally mobile or can demand competitive salaries, and
| a new supply of mid-tier talent will only create more capital-
| deploying opportunities.
|
| I'm a computer vision person with a good grasp on 3d geometry,
| SLAM, linear algebra, statistics, filtering, etc.
|
| We've had budget and I've been trying to hire another me for at
| least half a year with no luck (western Europe). Thousands of
| applicants and the couple of interesting candidates were
| snapped up before we could move (and likely for more than we
| could pay).
|
| I'm about to leave and go on the job market, and I have no
| concerns whatsoever about landing a high paying job. It also
| helps that I have ties to the bay area and am more than willing
| to go back.
| cudgy wrote:
| Other than the 3D skills, these are mostly run of the mill
| skills for a mathematics major. Why not train a decent math
| major in the 3D skills?
|
| Now the company is losing you and they have lost 6 months of
| time to train a new employee. Many companies are short-
| sighted and unwilling to accept candidates that don't match
| exact specifications to their own detriment.
| pi7h3n wrote:
| FAANGs retain a lot of this talent I guess
| greenhatman wrote:
| As someone working remotely, I'd be hard pressed to work for a
| non-US company, because other places in my experience don't pay
| as well.
| presentation wrote:
| US definitely pays a lot higher than other markets, and that
| definitely talks.
| machiaweliczny wrote:
| As long as noone else is able/willing to match pay - kinda. In
| Poland for example normal pay is $5K but for US startups you
| can get $10K. Only TikTok or Switzerland has offers in this
| range.
| qaq wrote:
| Ireland aside from usual suspects Stripe, Workday and a bunch
| of others you can get 200K total comp
| tester34 wrote:
| $5K is normal pay in Poland? that's around 9 minimal wages
| Lorean1 wrote:
| They mean a developer's pay. Yes, the disproportion between
| the IT and other areas is significant.
| krzyk wrote:
| normal (probably average) senior developer pay in capital
| (Warsaw) to be more precise.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Monopoly is an exaggeration, but the US does still attract a
| staggeringly disproportionate fraction of developers from all
| over the world.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Crypto has blown this up already. Teams are almost always
| decentralised.
| locallost wrote:
| The author focuses on physical presence in a country, but as she
| points out, immigrants flocked to the US because it's an economic
| powerhouse. This will not change, and for all intents and
| purposes the talent will still be in the US, since their work
| will be in the US. If anything, it will make it even stronger,
| since most of the interesting things in e.g. tech are done there,
| and there is now less of a barrier to get the talent. Big fish
| will eat the small fish, you can see this clearly in e.g. the EU,
| where "talent" from smaller poorer countries goes to richer
| countries massively, since there are effectively no borders or
| barriers.
|
| So they might not be there physically, but this is not really a
| big concern if you're a US company. It might be different for the
| country as a whole though.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| I've seen what it requires for an individual to be in a country
| other than the USA and the US-based company not wanting to treat
| them as an employee due to the paperwork. That generally means
| they need to be an independent contractor so individual needs to
| set up a company in their own country and deal with all the
| issues associated with that and the tax implications. Most
| smaller companies won't deal with foreign employees and leave it
| all up to the individual, if those companies are will to do it as
| all.
| londons_explore wrote:
| There are plenty of labor sourcing companies who will happily
| do all the paperwork (and take on the legal risk) for you to
| hire someone in a foreign country, but in fact you pay the
| labor company some fixed hourly rate, and they hire the worker
| as an employee.
|
| It's a good model, because then when the laws of the foreign
| country change to say "Women's average salaries must match
| mens" or "Workers shall be paid 2x rate on religious holidays"
| or "Employers shall pay extra tax for hiring people over the
| age of 62 years old"... All those cases can be dealt with by
| the foreign company who knows the local laws and customs.
| LurkingPenguin wrote:
| > All those cases can be dealt with by the foreign company
| who knows the local laws and customs.
|
| I haven't seen it mentioned here but while in many cases you
| can as an employer outsource payroll and labor law
| compliance, you can never completely shed the potential
| liabilities that come with employing someone and this can get
| complicated when your workforce is based in different
| countries.
|
| There are a lot of things that can go wrong. Your
| payroll/compliance vendor could screw the pooch. Your
| foreign-based employee could do something negligent or
| malicious that leaves you in a legal bind where your costs of
| protecting your interests skyrocket. And your employment of
| an individual in certain countries could subject you to laws
| and taxes you never even knew about.
|
| Of course, a growing number of companies do employ remote
| workers around the world but it's really not as simple as "I
| can hire anyone in _any_ country as long as they are talented
| ". The world simply isn't that flat.
| londons_explore wrote:
| In my model, you aren't hiring the worker. You are _buying_
| whatever code they write.
|
| The local firm is the one who technically employs the
| worker and takes on all these risks.
|
| At any point, you can stop buying more code, and the local
| firm will have to face the consequences.
| LurkingPenguin wrote:
| You're referring to what's called an "employer of record"
| (EOR) and this isn't as straightforward or risk-free as
| you think it is.
|
| First, there are some countries in which the law would
| consider your business to be the employer of a worker
| even if the worker was hired by an EOR. And others place
| limits on EOR relationships, such as the length of time a
| worker can be continuously employed by an EOR.
|
| Second, an individual you employ through an EOR can still
| take actions that potentially expose your business to
| risk. Think data breaches, intellectual property theft,
| etc. In many legal matters, since you are not the
| employer, you would not even have the ability to take
| direct action against the worker and would instead have
| to have the EOR act on your behalf, which is of course
| another source of counterparty risk.
|
| Finally, your relationship with the EOR is not a one-way
| street as you seem to think ("the local firm will have to
| face the consequences"). Under any EOR contract, your
| business has obligations to the EOR as well and a
| reputable EOR is actually probably far more likely than
| an average employee to go after you in your home country
| if you breach the contract.
|
| As an expat who has done business in numerous countries,
| I offer the following blanket advice: never do business
| (in any shape or form) in a country where you're not
| capable of and prepared to get your hands dirty locally
| (with the legal system, etc.).
| ladyattis wrote:
| I don't know if this is possible considering many of the big SV
| companies demand their talent to be on-site. Even Amazon which
| has become a cornerstone of cloud hosting is basically stuck with
| on-site/office attendance policies. So, I really don't see remote
| work being the silver bullet to kill the on-site/office beast.
| It'll be a generational change and not simply a change due to one
| pandemic.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| Other than the classic issues like time zones etc. there are some
| weird rules and regulations regarding worker insurance. A buddy
| of mine used to get into flak for being outside the US for too
| long even though he was in sales and always exceeded his quotas.
| This was the case all before Covid and apparently the rules have
| still not changed for them.
| jorblumesea wrote:
| All you need to do is work with a remote or offsite team once to
| disabuse you of this idea. It is extremely hard to make remote
| work...work. Also, cost savings are often negated by having to
| set up parallel structures in X or Y country. Suddenly your
| cheaper dev costs are being eaten by legal, finance and HR.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| The last time the US outsourced its manufacturing jobs to the
| cheapest rest of the world, it wasnt exactly a disaster.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| In the short term, I think it's going to be a lot harder than
| this article lets on, but long term, it is abundantly clear:
| cushy developer jobs in the US are on borrowed time. Salaries may
| continue to go up for a little while longer, but they _will_ fall
| to reflect the rest of the world catching up with the US. And
| that 's a scary prospect for those under 35 now. And I don't
| think there's a way out of it. We embrace remote, but at the cost
| of demise.
| AlexAltea wrote:
| I disagree, I don't see how the supply/demand ratio of talent
| will significantly change by remote work.
|
| Companies will pick from a larger pool of people. People will
| pick from a larger pool of companies.
| dragonelite wrote:
| There is quiet some supply but the demand is in capable and a
| bit more senior people, I'm told. But hey if it means with
| remote work US tech company can fish for Dutch talent and
| raise the average pay here in the Netherlands I'm all for it.
|
| Already had a talk with friends about it, before the pandemic
| remote gig work was hard where we live, but now that working
| from home is more accepted. It should be a lot more
| attractive for urban companies to hire remote workers in the
| rural parts.
| zthrowaway wrote:
| This is a good point, the ratio increases both ways.
| blensor wrote:
| Except that developers from countries that earn on average
| less than their US counterparts have an incentive to work for
| a US company remotely but a developer from the US does not
| have many incentives to work for less for a company abroad
| flatiron wrote:
| The politicians will fight back with work visas and limits
| etc. protecting domestic work forces _should_ be a primary
| concern for politicians.
| root_axis wrote:
| Visas and similar restrictions are not a factor for
| remote work.
| Cyberdogs7 wrote:
| Yes, they are. Having an LLC based in Texas, trying to
| hiring a remote employee in NYC. I have to comply with
| all local NYC laws and taxes. Luckily it's a developer.
| If it was a sales person, it could make the whole company
| liable for income tax in New York state.
|
| Even worse when you talk international. An Amazon USA
| based employee is forbidden from working remotely in
| India, because of all the legal issues it would cause for
| Amazon USA.
|
| It's a very complicated issue, in which each individual
| government is fighting to get a slice of the tax pie.
| Reference article: https://therealdeal.com/2021/05/07/ny-
| tax-officials-crack-do...
| emteycz wrote:
| Why don't you hire them as a contractor?
| Cyberdogs7 wrote:
| Not everyone wants to work as a contractor. It also
| limits the amount of control you have over their output.
| It also is not a complete failsafe, as the state can say
| you treated them like an employee, thus they are an
| employee.
| root_axis wrote:
| What does any of that have to do with visas?
| satyrnein wrote:
| Advancing the interests of all citizens, not just
| protecting the outsized benefits of one group, should be
| the primary concern for politicians. Think of how much
| boring process automation software could be written for
| so many businesses, if development were cheaper.
| allturtles wrote:
| This was the logic used for outsourcing manufacturing.
| Now we American consumers can get as many low-quality
| plastic toys as we want at bargain basement prices and
| throw away perfectly functional electronic devices every
| few years in order to get newer, shiner ones. The cost
| was cutting a swath of destruction across hundreds of
| formerly vibrant towns across the middle of the country,
| which are now home mainly to hopelessness and drug
| addiction. I'm not sure the trade-off was worth it.
| AlexAltea wrote:
| There's many other companies abroad capable of offering
| compensations that can compete with the US.
|
| Anecdotal, but plenty of contacts who would have never
| accepted an on-site position in UAE, Hong Kong, Germany
| (for reasons ranging from personal, political, or just
| sheer affordability), and are now contracting as
| individuals at companies based in such regions, for
| substantially above the Bay Area average for their
| experience.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > cushy developer jobs in the US are on borrowed time
|
| Maybe. But I've been hearing that since the early 90's.
| hwers wrote:
| For americans this sounds like horror but for the international
| perspective this sounds wonderful (and a fair readjustment for
| work that we always felt was no different than our american
| counterparts). Just pointing out the semi obvious thing that
| the majority who reads this will see it as fantastic news.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Yep. Every time I see a US-focused article complaining about
| pay adjustments when people move to new regions to work
| remotely I just wonder where everybody has been for all these
| years where their coworkers in London or Vancouver are
| getting paid 50% of their wage for the same work.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Keep in mind SV is full of immigrants....
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I don't see how that is relevant.
| zthrowaway wrote:
| Is there any extra cost to hiring non-American workers though?
| I do wonder if we'll have some politicians who will try to make
| it harder for companies to just shortcut to cheap labor and try
| to never use American workers. But I also see foreign workers
| at my shop demanding what we make and getting it, which I think
| is great and I hope that trend holds. Then there's no cheap
| labor alternative and comes down to merit.
|
| However... when you mix in the politics of Diversity and
| Inclusion that is sweeping our industry right now, it will be
| more enticing and possible to hire someone who isn't an evil
| white person.
| flatiron wrote:
| I think the whole "evil white person" demeans the effort to
| be inclusive. Nobody is saying white men are evil when they
| hire a diverse candidate. They are just valuing having a
| diverse workplace over traditionally looked at traits.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| The Internet is global, and there's been nothing stopping
| someone in India, for example, from starting the next Facebook.
| Ironically, if the world was catching up to the US then it
| wouldn't be US companies doing the hiring, making the whole
| thing a moot point.
| satyrnein wrote:
| For some people, the solution may be the management track. If
| developer salaries fall, there will be more developers hired,
| who will need managers. US candidates (for now) will have the
| advantage there.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| This is overly cynical and alarmist. Outsourcing has been a
| thing for a long time and its results have also been known for
| a long time.
|
| Companies, for lack of a better term, have "fucked around and
| found out" by not going (relatively) local and depending on
| offshoring (even nearshoring) to their ultimate detriment. This
| isn't to say that companies that are remote (as in
| geographically) don't now have a bigger pool but large and high
| functioning tech companies are not going to all of a sudden
| abandon home-grown talent for offshoring.
| cromka wrote:
| > Outsourcing
|
| This isn't outsourcing, this is hiring to work for the
| company's own teams based in the US.
|
| > offshoring
|
| This isn't offshoring in traditional terms, the projects stay
| in the US and are managed from there, with team members from
| all over the place.
| dominotw wrote:
| I've been hearing a version of this since the early 2000's,
| always with a PS "this time its going to happen for real guys"
| .
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > Salaries may continue to go up for a little while longer, but
| they _will_ fall to reflect the rest of the world catching up
| with the US.
|
| This has never happened in US history. The upward trend has
| stopped. Employment outside the US has grown much faster. Other
| countries have caught up. But wages in large sectors haven't
| gone down in any sector I'm aware of. And MAGMA all have over
| 100,000 software engineer employees and make huge profits on
| them. Google makes over a million dollars per software
| engineer. There's a lot of room for wages to go _up_.
| polycaster wrote:
| From my personal experience I think that the most challenging
| factor with outsourcing is in fact the time zone.
|
| Being situated in Germany I see many webdev jobs being outsourced
| about 1 hour to the east and about all the way down to South
| Africa and Mauritius (,,Cyber Island").
|
| This are the projects that work like normal. Then of course the
| vast majority is outsourced to contractors in India or China -
| but frankly communication in these projects has always been a
| bummer.
|
| But then again, it's just my own bubble and probably depends
| heavily on the type of work and the frequency of communication
| involved.
| ndm000 wrote:
| The North American equivalent is Latin America. I'm in
| consulting, and every new project has some set of near shore
| resources billed much lower than their North American
| counterparts. In most cases the only discernible difference is
| proficiency in English.
| curryst wrote:
| My experience has been different. Ive found it difficult to
| find senior people. Junior and mid level people abound, but
| there are precious few qualified seniors.
|
| I think it's the nature of the market. There isn't as much
| demand to outsource senior roles, so the market just doesn't
| produce a lot of them.
| ndm000 wrote:
| I've seen this trend as well. There's this interesting
| double trend of upward costs on senior resources and
| downward costs on junior resources.
| eb0la wrote:
| I remember after "corralito" a lot of US companies started
| opening their CoE (center of excelence) in Argentina because
| wages were really low, and they could hire easily.
|
| I heard (not sure if it is true) people wanted to be paid in
| USD because car loans were denominated in dollars rather than
| pesos.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >I heard (not sure if it is true) people wanted to be paid
| in USD because car loans were denominated in dollars rather
| than pesos.
|
| Wikipedia says that 60% of bank loans in neighboring
| Uruguay are in US dollars, so I am not surprised to hear
| that about Argentina, a country that has for years had an
| unofficial "blue dollar" exchange rate with the US$
| (<https://www.coha.org/blue-dollar-black-market-the-
| illegal-ex...>) that is very, very different from the
| official one.
| FirstLvR wrote:
| you're right about the time zone and the language barrier... am
| from Chile and working for foreign projects is always a
| headache
| avereveard wrote:
| Remote work come with sinchronization and communication costs,
| international remote work even more so.
|
| it's not a given that an entirely remote workforce is more cost
| effective than a partial remote workforce - outsourcing has been
| there for decades after all, and it hasn't been an existential
| threat to local jobs - remote worker lack the middleman costs but
| also the organizational support and work structure.
| AmericanBlarney wrote:
| Ehhh... Have been hearing some variation of this for 20 years.
| Canada and Singapore already have some tech presence (Singapore
| is huge for banking), so I don't think those are a particularly
| bold prediction.
|
| I would love for the Caribbean to become a thing but it seems
| less likely given the issues with governmental stability and
| severe weather.
|
| Just observing the companies I've worked for, I've also seen it's
| much easier to get hired for an on-prem job and transition to
| remote after proving your capabilities than to get hired fully
| remote from the start (minus the past 18 months). I wouldn't be
| entirely surprised if the result is many current U.S. residents
| moving to those destinations, moreso than locals being hired
| remotely.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I mean, maybe?
|
| We had an offshore subsidiary in India. The problems with it were
| LEGION.
|
| 1. The key issue was overall quality. I'm sure it's possible to
| get good code out of an offshore team, but we couldn't. Their
| contributions to our code base comprise the lion's share of the
| technical debt we're carrying.
|
| 2. Time. Working asynchronously is really, really hard, even
| without any other issues floating around. I wouldn't want to work
| async with the best devs I've ever known, let alone a "regular"
| dev.
|
| 3. Culture. Local cultural differences can KILL developmental
| communication. If the local customs discourage saying "no, I
| don't understand" or "no, we can't do it that way" or whatever,
| then you end up with bad code and a worse product even if you get
| anything at all out of it. (I have my biases here, but I'm trying
| to frame this as a mismatch of expectations and not, as some
| might, an example one way being Good and the other Bad.)
|
| I _might_ be willing to work with proven, reliable, highly
| communicative resources at a 6 hour offset, but a new hire on the
| other side of the planet working local hours? No way.
| Uptrenda wrote:
| I feel like when it comes to remote work the great divider will
| be 'cost of living' versus attained wages (and not 'talent.') As
| in: suppose I live in India where the cost of living is low. Due
| to wage arbitrage I can satisfy my cost of living quite easily by
| taking on low skilled software contracts. In this position, I am
| happy to take on the work because it more than covers my basic
| needs. On the other hand, if I want to take on more skilled work
| I'll have to specialize.
|
| Specialization means spending even more time to learn skills at
| the expense of earning money. So it costs money to specialise.
| And in poorer countries where the population is high, the
| competition for jobs will be high, and the less money there will
| be left over to invest in specialization. So by virtue of being
| born in a poorer country one is less well-off when it comes to
| specialization.
|
| The West won't be at risk of 'losing' jobs to remote work because
| we're not competing for the same jobs. Specialization will set
| the bar for hiring as it always has done, and the same scarce
| pool of talent will have to be used to fill these jobs. There
| will be a greater number of choices for specialized engineers to
| fill-- and it will mean more local jobs get filled by a more
| diverse pool of candidates. Looking at just local jobs would seem
| to imply that we're worse off, but not when you compare the
| number of new jobs that will be open to qualified engineers as a
| whole.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| This is a good point but from what I understand about the tech
| ecosystem in India and China - they are both producing so many
| engineers that some are bound to specialize.
|
| And they are. You will find amazing cloud provider specialists
| in those countries these days.
| zcw100 wrote:
| Much ado about nothing. Developer jobs have been able to be
| outsourced and work remote for a couple of decades. If it was
| going to go that way it would have long ago. The rest of the
| world might be catching up to the remote work game but software
| development has been there, done that. If anything we've already
| experienced a pullback where outsourced developer jobs have been
| pulled back when they experienced the problems with it.
| kelnos wrote:
| Agreed. The "worst" I see happening is some US tech jobs will
| go to Canada, since the time zones are "compatible" and culture
| is similar. People from Central and South America will get in
| the game somewhat as well, but I still think cultural and
| language barriers cause enough problems that there's still a
| bit of a moat.
|
| We've already been offshoring to Asia and Eastern Europe for
| decades now, and even though we _should_ have a good handle on
| what does and doesn 't work by now, I still see companies
| making the same mistakes, and either having to pull back, or
| just fail and be too blinded by hubris to figure out why.
| jsjsbdkj wrote:
| As someone from a second-tier Canadian city that had
| relatively few tech employers, this has definitely been a
| boon. Previously there was one game in town, and they
| attracted talent with a fancy office and above-market
| salaries for the region. I left after a couple years and
| joined a bay area startup remotely for a ~30% pay raise, and
| several of my former coworkers have as well. The company in
| question is suffering from a brain drain as old-time
| employees leave for greener pastures, and they struggle to
| attract international talent - because they didn't have much
| cross-polination with other tech companies in the past,
| there's a ton of NIH built by very smart new grads with no
| real world experience, and experienced engineers tend to take
| off once they realize the extent of the problems.
| LegitShady wrote:
| All the qualified Canadians move to the USA for USA incomes.
| Canada is going to be an immigration station for people
| companies want to bring in but can't get US visas for. Its
| already a thing.
| bregma wrote:
| Like in America, few Canadians are ever going to move more
| than 50 km from where they were born and raised. Your
| precious jobs are still safe for the right kinds of people.
| ozim wrote:
| Language and cultural barriers are not a problem if you hire
| people to directly work in the team.
|
| They are not problem if you do hiring directly and select
| right people.
|
| Biggest problem is that companies want to hire bunch of worm
| bodies and dump trash tasks on them.
|
| Managers expect that they will be able to throw vague
| requirements and bunch of people who are not part of their
| company will figure out what to do. What is especially funny
| that bad things happen even with people inside companies when
| manager tries to just throw vague requirements at dev team.
|
| It is also problem with big "software houses" where you hire
| bunch of people - nowadays people have good internet at homes
| are much more conscious and one can hire specialists directly
| from other country and skip BS providers.
| learc83 wrote:
| >They are not problem if you do hiring directly and select
| right people.
|
| Hiring directly in other countries is difficult for all but
| the biggest companies (who probably already have offices in
| those countries and have been hiring in those countries for
| years).
| lamontcg wrote:
| time zones are probably the biggest issue i see coming up.
|
| as someone in PST/PDT with a sleep disorder, its pretty easy
| to work with east coast people. i've had a boss in the UK
| before and it worked because he was okay with ending his day
| with a 6pm meeting his time. but working with people on india
| time is going to be a mess one way or the other.
| ozim wrote:
| That was couple of decades of Cognizant or Infosys and likes of
| them getting contracts and selling their services from their
| offices.
|
| Now it is the time to build real distributed teams where it is
| easier to hire a person from other part of the globe to be part
| of your team.
|
| Working directly with them and not hiring bunch of warm bodies
| to dump trash tasks on them.
| siva7 wrote:
| This. Especially with promotions and management jobs, those
| will be passed to the buddy's in the office and not that remote
| worker. I've seen that happen multiple times even though the
| remote worker was more skilled and experienced. Sure, there are
| exceptions but human nature won't change in that regard.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| This implicitly assumes companies have acted rationally as a
| whole. It took a pandemic to get the majority of software dev
| to have a taste of remote work more than 1 day a week.
| Meanwhile we still have companies who burned their hands on
| outsourcing to the lowest bidder possible proclaiming remote
| work as a whole doesn't work. We have companies doing the bare
| minimum to accommodate remote work point out one deficiency,
| then proceed to say "look, see? Remote work doesn't work for
| us!".
|
| I'm skeptical given there's this entire content called "Europe"
| with tons of English speakers, even native speakers, living
| largely in a 9-5 culture with plenty of skilled, educated
| developers willing to work unconventional hours and the US has
| barely tapped into that workforce yet. Given there are many
| legal issues and gates, but it's not like the US and Canada are
| the only places with skilled developers.
| tshaddox wrote:
| The key difference is that a significant number of high-earning
| software developers employed by U.S. companies are already
| working remotely, and many of those are working remotely
| _indefinitely_.
| deckard1 wrote:
| yep. A place I worked at was doing the outsourcing thing back
| in 2010. They had almost immediate regret when they realized
| the skills of the developers did not meet their expectations
| and local law prevented the company from firing them without, I
| believe, 3 documented warnings and attempts to correct
| performance.
|
| That's also the dirty little secret of digital nomad workers,
| that those of us that worked remote long before the pandemic
| already understood: these workers don't follow the law. How
| many of these people are _correctly_ paying and filing their
| taxes for each country (or US state!) they work in? Probably
| close to zero.
|
| Another place I worked had a policy you could best describe as
| "don't ask, don't tell." They didn't want to know if you were
| working from the beach in Thailand. As far as they were
| concerned, you were still in the US state that your forms say
| you are in.
|
| The legal framework as well as benefits plans have _a lot_ of
| catching up to do before some new distributed dawn occurs.
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| It wont, US tech companies are making money hand over fist - they
| want more people to make them more money, they don't need slower
| communication for less money.
| rwaksmunski wrote:
| I'm earning 6 figures in central Europe working remotely for the
| Americans. Local corporations can't match that let alone beat it.
| I'm cheaper than U.S. resources, yet a lot more experienced and
| productive. I'm happy and the employer is really, really happy.
| If anything remote work solidified US strong hold on IT talent,
| not broke it.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Not if jobs in the US keep paying as they have been. If you can
| work remotely then the US makes most sense from an income
| perspective.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I've heard that overwhelming majority of US companies pay
| adjusted salary to remote workers depending on their location.
| quantified wrote:
| There's two directions to it. I've read crowing articles via HN
| about how it opens the US up to hiring from the world, it also
| opens up the world to hiring from the rest of the world and from
| the US.
|
| It's not just "outsourcing" that's gone remote, it's key players
| and teams. That's a big difference from earlier waves.
|
| The ability to pay and live appropriately will be the chief
| determinator. US companies might pay better on average, but we
| may start seeing larger and brighter sparks elsewhere in the
| world.
| thrower123 wrote:
| People underestimate the overhead and difficulties that make
| companies reluctant to hire in different countries.
|
| Companies don't even really want to deal with different
| employment regulations and tax policies across different US
| states.
| aborsy wrote:
| But other countries don't want to pay.
|
| EU, for instance, might be paying even less than developing
| countries (but mostly due to social charges, which may not apply
| to overseas workers?).
| eb0la wrote:
| I don't believe the US has a monopoly on talent.
|
| The US has a monopoly on being able to go to market.
|
| US corporations are extremely efficient getting funds, putting
| that capital to work, and deliver a product people want to buy.
|
| Historically they got that advantage because (among other
| factors) their internal market is HUGE, and successful US
| products were also appealing in other countries.
|
| As I said there are other factors as well (regulations, overseas
| taxation, and exports to name a few).
| dragonelite wrote:
| Its a winner takes all and the winners have been decided 20
| years ago here in the west. You need something like what China
| did with a closed off garden where their own thousand flowers
| can bloom and grow strong enough to compete on the global
| market.
| Siira wrote:
| China has a huge internal economy. You won't be able to
| replicate that in many a country. At all. You'll end up with
| useless, expensive, outmoded products that seem to only ever
| get worse. (Speaking from personal experience.)
| formerly_proven wrote:
| The EU has a similarly sized internal market, but it's
| consistently self-sabotaging on many levels (EU, countries,
| state, local) so does not realize a lot of the benefits it
| could get.
| pi7h3n wrote:
| Self-sabotaging in what ways?
| MaKey wrote:
| The newest example would be Europe's Digital Services Act.
| Here is an article by Cory Doctorow about it:
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/10/europes-digital-
| servic...
| PeterisP wrote:
| The differences in languages, culture, and legal aspects mean
| that at least for consumer-oriented startups EU is very much
| not a single market yet. There has been a lot of progress
| over the last decade or two, but when starting a company you
| still pretty much start with the market of a single country
| and have to do a bunch of work, adjustments and local hiring
| to expand to a neighboring EU country.
| DevKoala wrote:
| I have been hiring from overseas for a while; great talent at
| awesome rates. As a CS student in the USA, I would assume I am
| competing against the rest of the world right now.
| lmarcos wrote:
| As a developer working in Europe, I would love to work for an
| American company and make 30 to 50% more. But, it's difficult:
|
| - I don't really want to adapt myself to their timezone. Perhaps
| 1 or 2 or hours of shift from my tz, but not more
|
| - I don't want to work as a contractor. I want to be an employee
|
| - I want at least 28 business days of vacation per year
|
| - I do 9 to 5. No more, no less. I'm not in my 20s anymore
|
| Because of the reasons above I don't even care looking for remote
| positions in American companies (which are scarce already).
| wesnerm2 wrote:
| You should not make any assumptions about work in the US.
| There's many American software companies that are able to
| fulfill your requirements.
|
| In many tech companies, you have "unlimited" vacation. You can
| probably take more vacation that you already get in Europe.
| This is true of my company, mParticle.
|
| I can work 9-to-5 as an employee. That is the culture of the
| company that I work for.
|
| People can choose to work remotely or in an office.
| randcraw wrote:
| 28 business days of vacation per year? More than 5 weeks? I
| know of no company in America that offers that, not even
| informally.
|
| Few US companies offer most of the benefits Europeans expect,
| from free/cheap health care to child care to generous
| maternity/paternity leave to low tuition to job security to
| strictly enforced equal opportunity.
|
| Combine all of those into one employer in the US? That
| unicorn doesn't exist. However such beasts live all over
| Europe. But they just don't pay US wages, perhaps for obvious
| reasons.
|
| What's more, as soon as US companies hire remotely en masse
| in Europe, regulators there will surely demand the same
| benefits & protections for their people from remote
| employers. This will erase the economic advantages of
| outsourcing there unless wages paid there are substantially
| lower than in the US.
| distances wrote:
| > What's more, as soon as US companies hire remotely en
| masse in Europe, regulators there will surely demand the
| same benefits & protections for their people from remote
| employers.
|
| If US company doesn't have a local office in that European
| country they can't anyway offer a normal employment
| contract, that has never been possible. Social security,
| healthcare, pension needs to be paid. So either the
| employee is a freelancer, or company has an office in the
| same country to pay the employer's dues.
|
| This applies to intra-EU work too, someone living in
| Germany can't accept a regular employment position in a
| Spanish company remotely.
| moooo99 wrote:
| > Social security, healthcare, pension needs to be paid.
| So either the employee is a freelancer, or company has an
| office in the same country to pay the employer's dues.
|
| This is important!
|
| The labor market in most EU countries is very strictly
| regulated, mostly to the benefit of the employees. If the
| company you try to work for does not have a branch in
| your country (chances are, they don't) then there is a
| huge bureaucratic burden and sometimes even a legal grey
| area.
|
| Speaking from a German perspective, its barely worth it
| to try to apply for a remote position at Facebook (at
| least based on the salaries I've found). As a contractor
| you'd have to battle a huge administrative effort in
| terms of social security and healthcare, not to mention
| that everything is more expensive as a freelancer since
| there is no employer contribution to your healthcare
| payments. In the end you may end up with slightly more
| money in the bank, but with fewer employee protections
| and a huge administrative burden. So I'd really question
| if it's really worth it.
|
| However, Germany is actually a market with decently high
| salaries for the IT sector, unlike some other countries
| like Italy. So I could imagine that there is significant
| demand from other EU countries
| distances wrote:
| > Speaking from a German perspective, its barely worth it
| to try to apply for a remote position at [..] As a
| contractor
|
| You have to deal with more paperwork, but in my
| experience it definitely is worth the trouble to become
| an independent contractor in Germany -- also if you work
| only for local companies. Generally with local work you
| can expect to earn at least double as a freelancer,
| though I'm sure there are some niches that pay well also
| for regular employment positions.
| mmalachowski wrote:
| By "vacation" you mean fully paid days ? Unlimited?
| svachalek wrote:
| "Unlimited" in quotes. Sometimes better called "unmetered".
| That is, you are not granted days of vacation, nor does
| taking a day off get deducted from any limit. But obviously
| if you're not showing up to work often enough, you will
| lose your job.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I'd much rather have a set amount and feel good using it
| than worrying if I have exceeded my limit of socially
| acceptable days off.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > You can probably take more vacation that you already get in
| Europe.
|
| I've always heard that places like this tend to pressure you
| into not taking many days or taking a more "normal" amount.
|
| I just started a job with unlimited vacation, so I'll have to
| see how it goes. I think best case is I can have more shorter
| stints through the year.
| scrumbledober wrote:
| my company offers unlimited PTO, then also makes us take at
| least one day per month, then also has a $2000 travel
| stipend to encourage us to use PTO. on top of that it is a
| very 9-5 oriented culture. They do exist, and this is at a
| Series A startup.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| I don't understand the 28-day requirement since most vacation
| balances are divisible by 5 (5 days in a work-week). Are you
| counting holidays or are you getting that number from somewhere
| else?
| lmarcos wrote:
| It's just what I have at the moment. 30 business days is also
| common.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Where in Europe? Rich Europe or poor Europe?
| foobarian wrote:
| As far as the TZ issue, I just wanted to mention that it is
| possible a company could really appreciate having you stay on
| your normal schedule if you have an operational role, because
| it helps extend coverage and saves US based folks from shifting
| their schedules.
| lmarcos wrote:
| That's actually a good point! I could put that on my CV :D
| Sohakes wrote:
| It's happening on Brazil I think. It's very hard to hire for
| brazilian companies since people can earn an extraordinary salary
| by working remote. Our timezone is also pretty close to the US
| east coast, and still not that far from SV.
| dboreham wrote:
| Also Argentina. I've worked with several very talented
| developers remote from Argentina. UTC-3.
| SnowProblem wrote:
| +1 for Argentina. There's an argument from the book _Germs,
| Guns, Steel_ that in the past civilizations flourished most
| where geography allowed for trade to happen at roughly the
| same latitude, where all the same crops would grow and could
| spread - for example, Europe and the fertile crescent, which
| is in contrast to the Americas and Africa. Now there seems to
| be a opposite effect happening along longitudes around remote
| work because of time zones, and I would expect South America,
| despite the lower % of English speakers, to be at least as
| big of a receiver of SV benefits as Europe in the short term
| and probably bigger over the long term.
| brianmcc wrote:
| I am sceptical. Reminds me of the predictions 20 years ago that
| outsourcing/offshoring would eliminate hands-on developer jobs in
| US/UK and other "expensive" countries.
|
| Timezones, language factors, cultural factors, retention and
| exclusivity challenges plus basic logistics stuff like payroll
| and taxes all matter a lot. None of that's insurmountable but it
| takes a level of effort that can be very high.
|
| And I say this as someone who quite likes working remotely.
|
| I just don't see it disrupting the world in the extreme way it is
| sometimes portrayed.
| zz865 wrote:
| > Reminds me of the predictions 20 years ago that
| outsourcing/offshoring would eliminate hands-on developer jobs
| in US/UK and other "expensive" countries.
|
| Well in the corporate world offshoring really is everywhere.
| Even Goldman Sach's, #2 office for engineers in is Bangalore.
| brianmcc wrote:
| Sure but my main point is that hands-on tech jobs in NY, SF,
| London, etc, remain plentiful.
| brundolf wrote:
| Large corps have an economy of scale with this stuff. The
| smaller the company, the bigger a barrier it is
| monkeybutton wrote:
| Maybe they've always existed and I'm only noticing now
| because of remote working but there's a whole industry of
| companies that provide HR and IT (helpdesk level) services
| for smaller, distributed companies so you don't have to
| take on that additional overhead yourself. I think there's
| definitely potential for the corporate equivalent of
| geeksquad in the remote working future.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Once you're big enough to have incurred the extra overhead
| of having satellite offices in very different timezones
| adding more of them doesn't really add much more overhead.
| AmericanBlarney wrote:
| Worked in tech at a large financial - while it may be second
| largest by headcount, I would guess perhaps not by total
| number of MDs/Partners? In my experience at a similar
| company, the off-shore offices were not viewed as being
| innovative or producing the same level of value per-person.
| There were a lot of junior/mid-level people there, but the
| projects were typically being driven from the US/UK. How does
| that stack up with GS?
| presentation wrote:
| I think it disrupts it in corners. I'm fully embracing it in
| the company I'm building, and several of my tech-startup-
| running friends are too, though I know plenty of people who
| aren't.
| alistairSH wrote:
| How are you dealing with local tax and labor laws?
|
| My employer (mid-sized international software company)
| recently posted a revised work/travel/location policy.
| Basically, for anything over a month, we are only allowed to
| work in a locale where the company has an existing presence,
| and we have to notify the company in advance so they can plan
| payroll accordingly. I believe (thought not 100% sure) this
| is because they effectively transfer us to the local entity
| for the duration of the travel.
| sparsely wrote:
| The payroll, taxes, and labour laws are a big barrier at the
| moment. Even if you are happy hiring someone as an independent
| contractor to simplify the first two, how do you know that you
| aren't breaking local laws, e.g. about disguised employment?
| You still have to be familiar with local laws and regulations.
|
| It seems like something that an intermediary could help with,
| and a few do exist, although they are pricey.
|
| Simplification of regulations into a standard framework
| (without weakening them) would be a huge win here but I can't
| imagine that happening anytime soon, even in the EU, as labour
| laws are so sensitive.
| initplus wrote:
| If you can outcompete local rates by 30%+, why would your
| employees complain about disguised employment?
|
| Labour laws generally come into play when professions are
| poorly compensated or mistreated - pampered tech contractors
| being paid far above local market rate don't really fall into
| that category.
| brianmcc wrote:
| The "independent contractor" bit of parent's post is what's
| relevant here.
|
| In the UK the Government has clamped down on freelancing by
| saying, simplified grossly, if you look and act like an
| employee, but claim to be an independent contractor using
| alternative and often more favourable remuneration
| strategies, then you'll be firmly disagreed with and
| instead you'll be considered an employee.
|
| The Govt considers this "disguised employment", not the
| freelancer.
|
| More on this: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/understanding-
| off-payroll-workin...
|
| But it's the key point parent is making - _you need to know
| about this stuff_ for bringing in freelance talent in /from
| the UK. Not least because as a hirer/commissioning party
| the UK Govt will come after you if you have got it wrong!
| rolisz wrote:
| In Romania ar least, the equivalent of the IRS doesn't like
| the disguised employment, because it leads to much lower
| taxes (8% vs 35%). There are around 7 criteria which are
| used to determine if a relationship is of employment or
| not. If they say you fulfil enough of those criteria, even
| if your contract is a freelance contract, you/the employer
| will have to pay the extra taxes.
| erect_hacker wrote:
| why? remote teams are already a thing...
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Those middle-man companies charge extraordinary margins. I
| don't know whether that is warranted. But you could pay
| $150/hr and get $15hr developer. Something's wrong with that
| math. I think that's because of lack of competition,
| basically they charge as much as possible and pay as little
| as possible, because they can.
| floxy wrote:
| Sounds like an opportunity for a tax-middle-man-as-a-
| service to disrupt that industry. The uber of outsourcing.
| I honestly don't know if this is a tongue-in-cheek reply or
| not.
| ebiester wrote:
| These are called PEOs, or Professional Employment
| Organizations.
|
| It is closer to 30% overhead, but much of that is based
| in providing benefits to the employee outside the country
| of origin. The cost is also relative to the country.
|
| I suggest that it would be a WeWork/Regus situation.
| Nothing about WeWork was revolutionary - but if someone
| had enough buzz and funding they might be able to take
| over and expand the market.
| bluedino wrote:
| >> outsourcing/offshoring would eliminate hands-on developer
| jobs in US/UK and other "expensive" countries
|
| Remember companies like EDS? During the 80's and 90's all the
| development and support for the 'big' companies in the USA was
| done by companies like EDS. They employed hundreds of thousands
| of people. Then in 2000's they started going to India etc.
| kelnos wrote:
| And yet there's still no shortage of developer jobs in the
| US.
|
| In any case, did EDS succeed? I had forgotten about them
| until your mention. Just because they offshored to India, it
| doesn't mean it worked and their business is flourishing.
|
| I think the model has changed, at any rate. Companies like
| EDS are mostly obsolete. Sure, professional/technical
| services companies are still around in the form of IBM and
| their ilk, but they're not even remotely the dominant way of
| doing things.
| bluedino wrote:
| >> Companies like EDS are mostly obsolete.
|
| How so?
|
| They were bought and sold a few times and sort of exist as
| DXC right now. They claim to have 134,000 employees, I get
| approached by their recruiters a couple times a year.
| brianmcc wrote:
| Oh totally. But hands-on tech jobs in the USA aren't
| eliminated, the sector is buoyant!
|
| Colleagues in India feel like colleagues not "replacements"
| these days.
| villasv wrote:
| I see the opposite happening. Strong currency and remote work
| further aggravates brain drain. 2 years of COVID has already
| impacted terribly the tech startup ecosystem in Brazil. Well, at
| least in terms of talent. At least, VC money is even more
| abundant now if you're raising in dollars.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Except a lot of places are "going back to work" and let's be
| honest, timezones aren't and probably will never be an easy
| problem to solve.
| drstewart wrote:
| Not to mention navigation employment laws and regulations. One
| country is hard enough, let alone doing it worldwide
| itsArtur wrote:
| I think it's getting better - a number of countries worldwide
| (such as Portugal or UAE) are making it easier and easier for
| people to work remotely as "contractors". While not perfect,
| it's definitely a good solution for highly skilled workers
| who have a strong negotiating position and can ask for all
| the benefits their country's labour law would otherwise
| assure.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| There are startups aiming at solving this problem, like
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deel_(company)
| guidovranken wrote:
| With regards to timezones, there are a bunch of software
| companies which are completely remote and global which operate
| fine. If employees have a fair amount of autonomy and/or work
| with their local teams, and have sync calls during mutually
| suitable time slots, there is no real impediment to operating a
| functional company.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The "flexible" approach does work, but tends to be quite a
| drain on workers lives. Theres always someone somewhere who
| has to wake up at 2am for the weekly 'sync' meeting, or who
| doesn't see their children after school because their
| calendar is clogged with 1:1 meetings with all their USA
| reports most evenings.
| bwb wrote:
| Especially around development (on time zones), you have to
| actively factor in teams and makeup as well as what they are
| working on to get it working right...
| bamboozled wrote:
| I'm struggling with American "superiors" who won't have a
| meeting in any time that isn't perfect for them.
|
| If it's not between 9:00-17:00, sorry, bad luck for everyone
| else.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| Sounds reasonable to me, if the HQ is in the US.
|
| Or are you saying that you're entitled to that block of
| local time for some reason?
| bwb wrote:
| Ya, poor leadership if they are not willing to use global
| teams and then lead them through example.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Reminds me a of a quote from "The Last Dance" [1]:
|
| "If you ask all my teammates... 'The one thing about
| Michael Jordan was he never asked me to do anything that
| he didn't f*%king do.'"
|
| [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8420184/
| wolverine876 wrote:
| The software development job market doesn't even encompass large
| parts of the _US_ labor market, such as women, black and brown
| minorities, and poor communities. It 's not suddenly going to
| open to the entire world.
|
| The education system and opportunities in the latter create very
| little chance that those kids will grow up to work for Google.
| I've had CS teachers in the magnet schools - these classes should
| be the top CS high school students in the district - ask me to
| donate old broken computers to work on. When the pandemic started
| and home schooling became a need, I read that some poor districts
| discovered that 50% of their students lacked a computer at home -
| their only Internet connection was via phone. I've had employers
| tell me that (a few) kids didn't know how to use a full-sized
| keyboard. Think how far that is from becoming a developer; think
| of the vision required and the obstacles they would have to
| overcome.
|
| You need more than an Internet connection to have an opportunity
| to become a software developer, or for any job.
|
| (Writing that makes me think: A development environment designed
| for beginning developers using phones might give some of these
| people one piece of the puzzle. Vim isn't so great on a phone.)
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Except:
|
| - no country pay like the US. Worked for silicon valley companies
| remotely, and made twice the money I made in France, while being
| 3 times cheaper than local competition.
|
| - no country have the volume of hi-level coding gig job offers
| the US has.
|
| - few countries even have has many interesting projects. If you
| want to code in Haskell or Lisp in Europe, good luck.
|
| - the USA don't care about your diploma, only what you can do.
| You will be limited in opportunities and earnings depending of
| your background in many countries.
|
| - talent attract talent. It's better to work with companies
| already full of good devs, the colleagues are coolers, the
| projects are more interesting and the infra will be better.
| Inertia is in favor of the USA.
|
| So no, it will break no monopoly. If anything, it will make it
| easier to work FOR the US.
| simonh wrote:
| facebook is hiring 10,000 developers in the EU to build the
| Metaverse.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/facebook-plans-hire-10000...
|
| My daughter is looking to go into software engineering and I
| was explaining to her that most of the high paying jobs are in
| the US and there's a big brain drain out of Europe (we're
| Brits). Not to dissuade her, but that she might consider that
| as an option on graduation. I was speculating why FAANG don't
| hire more developers in Europe to take advantage of the pay
| difference, and then the above story broke literally the next
| day.
| angrais wrote:
| There's also some very high paying software engineering roles
| in the UK, such as machine learning engineers. Of course, the
| salary varies from the north to the south quite a bit.
|
| Nevertheless, you can get 100k just out of uni in an ML role!
| Especially if it's following a PhD.
| filoleg wrote:
| >There's also some very high paying software engineering
| roles in the UK, such as machine learning engineers.
|
| >Nevertheless, you can get 100k just out of uni in an ML
| role! Especially if it's following a PhD.
|
| I wouldn't call that "very high paying" at all compared to
| the US ones. $100k is way less than what a non-ML undergrad
| dev gets at an entry level FAANG position in the US. And
| yes, even for remote positions (within the US specifically
| and, to a degree, Canada; felt the need to clarify, because
| FAANG positions outside of the US/Canada pay much less,
| despite still being usually noticeably higher than local
| alternatives), so no need to go the "but living in Bay Area
| is extremely expensive".
|
| But for an ML role that requires a PhD? $100k in the US for
| that would be laughable. Not trying to stir anything up or
| argue, but I do recommend doing a bit more research on the
| topic, especially if you are trying to help a future
| college student make a decision on a degree/career path. A
| good starting point would be checking levels.fyi, which
| seems to be by far the most accurate resource on tech
| salaries from my experience, despite sometimes showing a
| few random datapoints that are a bit off (mostly due to
| some people not entering their stock grants or annual
| bonuses properly and not accounting properly for vesting)
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| That's pretty big news indeed, but I'll wait until it
| happens. For now it's just a plan, and I've heard so many
| plans.
| Animats wrote:
| Probably mostly censors. Roblox has about 4000 censors,
| outsourced to low-wage countries.
| thriftwy wrote:
| They do hire in Europe but pick expensive locales such as
| Switzerland, London or Dublin. I can't stop wondering why not
| open shop in Italy or Spain - wages may be much lower with
| way higher life quality.
| simonh wrote:
| Are there a big enough talent pool of highly skilled and
| experienced developers in Italy or Spain? It's a chicken
| and egg problem, you need to go where there's already a
| market for these skills.
| thriftwy wrote:
| They could tap into infinite supply of developers from
| Romania, Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Russia...
|
| Who would move just for the privilege of living in
| literally sea side resort.
|
| I also think that some developers from Nordic countries
| will consider, and the rest of Europeans who would like
| the opportunity working at FAANG.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| We've tried hiring in these locations (Italy and Spain)
| with some success, but it's pretty tough because the talent
| pool is so small. At some point, you weigh whether the
| lower cost of the salary is worth the extra time/effort
| spent adding headcount. Which is funny because we have no
| shortage of Italian and Spanish devs applying for our
| expensive European city offices. I don't know European
| urban dynamics that well, but it certainly seems to me, off
| the cuff at least, that Europeans want to live in high COL
| European cities as much as Americans want to live in high
| COL American cities.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >We've tried hiring in these locations (Italy and Spain)
| with some success, but it's pretty tough because the
| talent pool is so small.
|
| Is it a question of language skills, technical skills, or
| both?
| PeterisP wrote:
| > If anything, it will make it easier to work FOR the US.
|
| So that's kind of the point - those remote workers for US
| companies will do their daily spending, house construction, etc
| and pay their taxes outside of USA, boosting the economy and
| creating the demand for non-developer jobs there instead of
| USA.
| oblio wrote:
| Yeah, but that's a bit like trickle down economics. It's
| literal trickling, it's not a deluge.
|
| In these cases the top jobs will still tend to stay in the
| home country. So the most successful of these companies will
| be able to hire more top level folks and most of these will
| be in the home country.
| deanCommie wrote:
| > "If you want to code in Haskell or Lisp in Europe, good
| luck."
|
| Sidebar: I don't want to work with any Engineer for whom the
| programming language plays any role in their choice of career.
|
| I want to work with engineers that want to build solutions for
| customer problems, solving complicated technical challenges
| using the best tool for the job. Sometimes that tool is Haskell
| or Lisp, or Erlang. Sometimes it isn't.
|
| I also want to work with engineers that recognize that they can
| do more as part of a team than lone-wolfing everything
| themselves. That also means that sometimes the best tool for
| the TEAM is not the best tool for them individually.
| evancox100 wrote:
| The point isn't that existing companies in the US or wherever
| will lose talent, but that the existing companies might retain
| or even gain talent, and that the workers will reside in
| locales other than the US. Your points seem to be in favor of
| the author's argument that the importance of physically
| residing in the US will decrease, and that there is an
| opportunity for other locales/governments to attract remote
| workers.
| adventured wrote:
| The parent's premise is that it will make the US more
| powerful economically and make its tech companies more
| dominant. Which is exactly what it will do.
|
| The local tech labor supply will go to work for US
| corporations, which pay better than most everyone else. That
| will cement the US hegemony globally in tech (the sole major
| exception being domestic China, and to a far lesser extent
| domestic Russia). The US tech juggernaut will buy up the
| world's talent without having to plant expensive offices
| everywhere; that will occupy the talent pool and reduce
| competition to US tech.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| It goes both ways: local talent will learn from the biggest
| companies in the world without having to leave, meaning
| their know how can be turned to local entities as well.
|
| For the pay, eventually it settles down as more and more
| companies try to see what they can get away with. US
| companies won't be paying boatloads of money eternally
| (they were already resorting to offshoring to skimp) and
| local companies will have to align to get people to work
| for them.
| echelon wrote:
| > it will make the US more powerful economically and make
| its tech companies more dominant. Which is exactly what it
| will do.
|
| Why wouldn't other nations react accordingly? What power
| does the US have to stop this?
|
| 1) Other nations increasingly have a large supply of high-
| skill talent.
|
| 2) Other nations will use capital and subsidies to launch
| their own tech firms employing their own workers. There are
| startup accelerators spinning up all over Europe and Asia
| to capture, retain, and reward domestic talent. They see
| how the game is played now.
|
| 3) Other nations will create more regulations that limit
| how much US tech companies can participate in their economy
| and monopolize their citizens as consumers. This is already
| happening with major international antitrust rulings
| hitting Google, Apple, and Facebook. This is the nail in
| the coffin. They will foster and protect their own industry
| at the expense of the US.
|
| There are many more international tech companies
| participating at the global stage these days. Atlasssian,
| JetBrains, Spotify, SoftBank, TSM, ASML, miHoYo... Not to
| mention all of the Chinese tech companies popping up. Epic
| Games is 50% owned by Tencent.
|
| This trend will continue. The US only has 300M people, and
| it's not growing with the same significant postwar
| tailwinds it once had. It can't keep the wealth and talent
| monopoly forever. Just look at how much the middle and
| lower classes are hurting as a symptom of this global
| rebalancing.
|
| You can also look to other industries. Automotive,
| aerospace, etc. The US isn't peerless anymore.
|
| Not saying this is good or bad, but it's definitely
| happening.
| wins32767 wrote:
| Engineers alone don't make a great tech company. Because
| there is a global engineering shortage but not a global
| sales, marketing, product management, UX, etc. shortage
| all of the knowledge on how to do those functions
| effectively won't spread as quickly (if at all) and will
| have to be learned locally.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| The US has the tech companies MASSIVE wealth to stop
| this. It is all well and good to subsidize local tech
| companies, but for a majority of junior/senior devs you
| can't compete with $250K/yr in pay from FAANG companies
| whose stock won't stop rising and whose name on resume
| basically sets you up for life (exaggerating, but its not
| that far from the truth for a non-US and even US
| developers)
|
| Your third point doesn't make any sense to me as no
| country will restrict their own citizens from working for
| a foreign company...earning massively higher salaries
| than local jobs (more money earned locally is more money
| spent locally... all metrics that nations care about will
| go up). Monopolizing your citizen's attention !=
| monopolizing their talent.
|
| Every company you just mentioned added up doesn't even
| equal or come close to Google's market capitalization
| (Atlassian, 150B, Spotify, 55B, TSM, 550B, ASML 350B,
| JetBrains, private, but some say 7B?, Epic Games, 30B)
| and of note, TSM and ASML draw much of their valuation
| from hardware than software.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> no country will restrict their own citizens from
| working for a foreign company_
|
| This might surprise you, but some countries manage to
| achieve something like that. In Austria for example, if
| you go freelance (self employed) you'll actually end up
| paying more tax than being a FTE (which has already one
| of this highest taxes in the EU) while losing all the
| benefits of being a FTE like PTO, overtime and such.
|
| So yeah, turns out high taxes are a pretty strong
| deterrent.
| oblio wrote:
| > In Austria for example, if you go freelance (self
| employed) you'll actually end up paying more tax than
| being a FTE (which has already one of this highest taxes
| in the EU) while losing all the benefits of being a FTE
| like PTO, overtime and such.
|
| This is the case everywhere in Europe. I don't know if
| it's a literal policy meant to discourage this or it's
| just that freelancers are easy political targets since
| they tend to be disorganized/disunited.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> This is the case everywhere in Europe._
|
| It definitely isn't. In most of Eastern Europe,
| freelancers pay peanuts in taxes. Which is why there tech
| sectors boomed so much in the last couple of decades to
| the point devs in Poland or Romania can take home more
| than their counterparts from richer countries like
| Austria. Granted, they also get no benefits, but when you
| take home several times the average national pay, you can
| actually afford to buy a decent house and maybe fund your
| own early retirement if you're good at investments.
|
| _> I don't know if it's a literal policy meant to
| discourage this or it's just that freelancers are easy
| political targets since they tend to be
| disorganized/disunited._
|
| I think it's a bit of both. Trying to force your local
| talent who's education was taxpayer funded to only work
| for and support local business, instead of helping build
| another nation's champions (remote brain drain). A short
| sighted move in my opinion which just suppress wages and
| produces no local champions thanks to shit wages and a
| lack of opportunities.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| > the importance of physically residing in the US will
| decrease, and that there is an opportunity for other
| locales/governments to attract remote workers.
|
| COVID really did changed everything, and proved working from
| home not only works well, but more importantly to CFOs, made
| it significantly cheaper by literally outsourcing real estate
| costs to employees.
|
| The past few months have been interesting. I've been
| contacted by so many recruiters the past year not from my
| state or even country that it's wild, and all for remote
| jobs. Compare that to the past few years where the
| conversation ends abruptly as soon as I mentioned that i
| would not be relocating.
| neom wrote:
| I'm on the business side of the house, we keep waiting for
| rent to drop so we can find more space for growth, and it's
| not dropping because folks in real estate think there will
| be a rebound. As soon as I try to get into a negotiation,
| it's almost like they're MORE sticky on the price than they
| used to be, I guess because everyone is looking for a deal.
| I don't know what will happen but it makes no sense for me
| to pay premium for space when we can just hire people
| remote, and landlords are still not negotiating in a lot of
| markets (SF and NYC aside) exacerbating the business side
| of the house want to push hard into remote.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Must be the area you're in. In Melbourne, office real
| estate is practically on life support and they'll happily
| discount
| JanisL wrote:
| Melbourne Australia is in the third year of population
| decline now. I know on top of this population shift that
| a huge number of the major employers have shifted towards
| much more work from home arrangements due to the pandemic
| and due to the the 263 days of lockdowns that were
| imposed I think many of these changes will last for
| longer than in places that were less disrupted. That said
| I still think commercial real estate prices here are
| artificially high/in a bubble because of the high number
| of vacancies even if there's already been a pullback in
| prices. Just structurally speaking the demand side for
| commercial real estate here has substantially fallen, but
| I'm not sure the same can be said for other parts of the
| world right now. I'd be curious to know more about what's
| happening in other locations as I feel like Melbourne is
| a bit of an outlier in many regards.
| thriftwy wrote:
| USA is super expensive. Yes you can get a large paycheck, wait
| until you see house prices.
|
| Also current situation does not inspire confidence in somebody
| who may be identified as white male.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| If you want to be located in a place which pays relatively
| high in Europe, housing prices are adequate. 10-15 years ago
| it would be possible to have disproportionally large salary
| in eastern places like Prague, but that's history now.
|
| Even if it still costs less than SF, your paycheck now looks
| adequate. Covid era raised prices everywhere.
| thriftwy wrote:
| It's possible to work remotely in post-covid era, which
| allows living in nicer, cheaper locales. No longer it is
| necessary to move where jobs are.
| [deleted]
| sophacles wrote:
| Imagine being so bad at your chosen career, a career so in
| demand that there are serious efforts to expand the talent
| pool to a wider variety of people, that you are afraid that
| those efforts will cost you your job.
| standardUser wrote:
| White males are one of the highest paid demographic groups in
| the US and always have been.
| postsantum wrote:
| It seems white americans are far behind many asian ethnic
| groups
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_
| U...
| heavyset_go wrote:
| That's because US immigration policy selects for
| immigrants with significant wealth or specialized
| educations and experience. Our policy specifically
| selects for high earners and the already wealthy.
|
| You can see this effect clearly from your own source,
| where Australian Americans and South African Americans
| both have higher median incomes than almost all Asian
| American households, as well as white Americans. Same
| thing goes for Pakistani, Iranian, Lebonese and Austrian
| Americans compared to other groups in the US.
| postsantum wrote:
| Yes, I understand that might be a factor. However, this
| still invalidates the point that whites are the most
| privileged group. If we take second/third-generation
| indians, they, on average, would be wealthier than most
| whites. Does this mean they are more privileged? I think
| yes
| standardUser wrote:
| "However, this still invalidates the point that whites
| are the most privileged group."
|
| No one made that point. And yes, it's true, if you look
| at certain much smaller demographic groups you can find
| groups that are somewhat more economically advantaged
| than white men.
| postsantum wrote:
| The only alternative explanation of such wealth
| difference is that these "white males" are objectively
| better at it. That's why I mentioned privileges
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| House prices where? We got our house for 345k and I earn
| 100k+ in North Carolina. Not everyone needs to live in
| California.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| It's really expensive, yes. But honestly, another significant
| part of it is that the way of life of some americans is
| crazy.
|
| I'm considered a spender among my peers, and even I am amazed
| when I discuss with american friends, watching the money they
| throw away.
|
| Most of them have huge food budget: they never cook and eat
| outside all the time. They have so many recurring payments
| for so many services. They spend tons money to refund a
| student load for a degree they never finished, or a mortage
| on a car or credit cards fees. Cigarets, alcohol, weed, then
| various kinds of meds.
|
| Some of them have several generations of console, one PC, and
| changed their phone every 2 years for the last decade.
|
| When I visited the USA with my father (he worked for an
| airline), we always ended the trip with flipping through
| garbages in nice neighbourhoods. Once we found a printer.
| Another time we found a tennis racket.
|
| So when they tell me they are having a hard time with money,
| it's not easy to be compassionate.
|
| I know there are people working 3 jobs, living paycheck to
| paycheck and eating junk food to survive. But they are not
| coders in the valley.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| House prices are often even higher in Europe, relative to
| wages. Check prices in London or Paris to see: you get
| smaller apartments, smaller houses on smaller lots than in
| US, and you'll pay larger percentage of your paycheck for
| them.
| downut wrote:
| I looked into Paris and the 19th looks very reasonably
| priced and apex civilized to me. (I've walked all over it.)
| A two bedroom for say EUR2000-2500/m with easy access to
| the Metro. Am I wrong? I was surprised when I looked at the
| prices, maybe my sources are inaccurate. But then I
| discovered Montpellier :-), half as expensive.
|
| I've lived in Atlanta, Phoenix and SF/MV/Santa Clara, and
| no, none of those come close to the quality of life for the
| money. For reference I live in a 2300ft^2 house in the
| country, and it was great for raising a family, but now I'd
| rather rejoin civilization. So I'm aware of the tradeoffs.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Average household income in Paris is 36k EUR. 2000-2500
| EUR/mo is insanely expensive. For comparison, in
| Sunnyvale, CA, median rent for 2 bedroom is $3k, but
| median household income is $130k.
|
| Seriously, if you think housing is expensive relative to
| incomes in Bay Area, or NYC, it will seem like a bargain
| compared to London or Paris.
| downut wrote:
| Why would I work for 36k? This discussion is about remote
| work. I'm not worried about making 3x that.
|
| As I mentioned, I've lived in Mountain View and Santa
| Clara. Sunnyvale is in the middle. I'm a cyclist and
| loved to climb up the various two lane grades and over
| the top to the coast and back. I visited MV and San Jose
| last spring. And SF. It was much more interesting in the
| '90s. Now the South Bay is just another dead US suburb.
|
| I wouldn't live there again for $500k/year.
|
| We haven't even discussed why most families move to the
| suburbs: children. We have done the two commute raising a
| child in the Bay Area. We evacuated when the school
| logistics became visible, and in hindsight, rightly so.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Ah ah ah, EUR2000-2500/m in France is crazy expensive.
|
| In Nice, I would pay 1100EUR/m for the same thing, and
| that's also considered an expensive city.
|
| In my current country side town, I pay the ridiculously
| low price of 300EUR/m for a 3 bedrooms flat. Now that's
| the lower end of the spectrum, because it's a very poor
| deep country side village.
|
| But yeah, some devs start their career at 2400EUR a month
| as a salary :)
| tshaddox wrote:
| Aren't the things you listed precisely the things that article
| is saying will change? The point of the article is that
| countries with favorable time zones for U.S. business hours can
| implement policies to attract immigrants to come and work
| remotely for U.S. companies.
| twox2 wrote:
| On the topic of diploma - I get the sense this is not exactly
| true for FAANG
| a_t48 wrote:
| No diploma here - still have recruiters from at least 3 of
| the 5 messaging me.
|
| Edit: downvoters, care to explain a little? Why would they
| waste their time on me if they weren't interested in me
| working there?
| twox2 wrote:
| Do you / have you ever worked at one?
| tazjin wrote:
| I used to work at Google/DeepMind and don't remember
| anyone even asking about it during the original interview
| process. (I did not go to uni)
| pocket_cheese wrote:
| I have worked for FAANG without a diploma. While it is
| rare, you can definitely do it if you grind enough leet
| code :D
| a_t48 wrote:
| I've interviewed at Google twice - passed once, declined
| continuing the process due to not being super interested
| in the product. I've declined interviewing at
| Facebook/Amazon. I haven't talked with Netflix nor Apple.
| I have not worked for one, but have never gotten any
| indication that the lack of diploma would be a problem. I
| gather that a decade of professional experience makes the
| lack of diploma irrelevant.
|
| As best as I can tell the only time it has hurt me is
| when I tried to emigrate out of the US and was unable to
| as some countries require a degree to get a work visa,
| even with a job offer.
| twox2 wrote:
| My anecdotal data is that I went really far in the
| process with a FAANG, got a verbal offer, and it was
| rescinded (never got the official offer). I always
| suspected it was due to lack of a degree.
|
| And no one explicitly ever asked, but they did ask for a
| rather detailed work/education history, and I never
| claimed to have one.
|
| I really suspect that they SAY they don't care if you
| have a degree or not, but at the end of the day I think
| they do.
| a_t48 wrote:
| I would lean towards the position being filled by a
| better candidate or the team having a hiring freeze. Who
| can say, though? That's a large waste of everyone's time
| and the company's money.
| twox2 wrote:
| Perhaps! I can only speculate since I wasn't given any
| concrete feedback.
| filoleg wrote:
| >My anecdotal data is that I went really far in the
| process with a FAANG, got a verbal offer, and it was
| rescinded (never got the official offer). I always
| suspected it was due to lack of a degree.
|
| If your lack of degree was a dealbreaker, they wouldn't
| go with the interview process to completion. It makes
| zero sense to waste time and resources on a candidate
| that you already determined you aren't going to hire. My
| team had to interview 50+ people just to fill a couple of
| positions, and every interview is taking away from
| precious time that could have been spent working on the
| product. Wasting our time interviewing someone we won't
| hire due to a lack of degree makes no sense.
|
| Not only it would be wasting our own time, we would also
| be wasting the candidate's time, and all of it for
| exactly zero gain. There is no grand conspiracy where
| FAANG companies interview candidates with no degrees all
| the way till the end, and then drop them due to the lack
| of degree, it is just illogical all around.
|
| Basically, if you got an interview, and especially if you
| got to the onsite rounds, nothing that is on your resume
| can disqualify you at this point.
| twox2 wrote:
| I appreciated your comment. I want to believe what you
| are saying... but at the end of the day none of the
| people that I interviewed with were the final deciding
| factor in whether I was offered the role or not. This was
| decided by a hiring committee. I might be giving away
| which company this was at this point, I don't know if
| this is how it's done at other large companies.
|
| The thing is, I was asked to provide certain details
| after my interview process, like an extremely detailed
| chronology of my education and work history, explain
| every single gap greater than 3 weeks, etc. etc.
|
| The fact that this all happened after I rocked my
| interviews (which was the feedback provided via the
| recruiter) tells me that yes, it's possible that they
| wasted everyone's time to interview me and potentially
| disqualified me on some kind of technicality.
|
| It was an odd experience altogether. I was even invited
| to spend an afternoon with someone on the team after
| getting the verbal Ok. Either way, it was interesting
| experience, but pretty unpleasant through and through. In
| hindsight, I'm quite glad I didn't get the job, but in
| principal I didn't like the way the process went.
| filoleg wrote:
| > I might be giving away which company this was at this
| point, I don't know if this is how it's done at other
| large companies.
|
| Yes, you are, it sounds like Google, and I had the same
| experience with them, except I had a degree.
|
| > I rocked my interviews (which was the feedback provided
| via the recruiter)
|
| A lot of times, recruiters aren't at liberty to provide
| truthful and direct feedback. Also, you might have done
| well overall, but one of the interviewers tanked you. It
| all depends. You might have gotten a good signal (but not
| strong on all of them, just "good enough") from all your
| interviews except one, and on that one you got a strongly
| negative one. Hiring committee looks at this combination
| of signals and decides "no". This is really common.
|
| Hiring a bad candidate and having to fire them later is
| extremely expensive, so the interview process prioritizes
| decreasing false positives rather than false negatives.
| Which means that unless they are absolutely certain you
| are a good fit, it is a pass. But I can pretty much
| guarantee you that if you got to onsites and then later
| got declined by the hiring committee, it wasn't your lack
| of degree that got you passed over.
| zsmi wrote:
| Was it in California and what year was it? It's well
| known in the valley recruiters from various companies put
| the kibosh on many offers to prevent talent from moving
| around. There were some big lawsuits on it.
| filoleg wrote:
| I am working at one now (kind of, since MSFT doesn't
| really make it into the abbreviation), and one of the
| brightest senior engineers on my team had no degree
| whatsoever, just a high-school diploma (using past tense,
| because he left for another company a couple of years
| ago). I also have a bunch of friends who currently work
| Google (some from college, some former colleagues) and a
| few at FB, and all of them know at least one coworker
| without a college degree.
|
| And when our team was recruiting experienced candidates
| (5-10 years or more), at no point we ever cared about
| their degree or lack thereof (aside from some specialized
| research positions that typically require graduate
| degrees). For entry level though, yeah, if you are in
| your early 20s without much industry experience, it is
| gonna be much tougher to get hired without a degree.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| It's getting harder. I have a friend who worked at MSFT
| out of high school >10 years ago, and was told several
| years in that he could never be promoted beyond his
| current level without a degree. Decided to take a couple
| years off to get a degree in something random (theology)
| and when he applied for his old job, now +BA, was told he
| needed a CS degree to be qualified for it.
| filoleg wrote:
| Was your friend in engineering? And what kind of level
| was your friend shooting for? Because yeah, if you are
| shooting for a director or a partner level position, you
| better have a degree. But for a regular senior engineer
| position? Not at all.
|
| Also, i don't know when your friend tried to get re-hired
| and at which level. The whole "we don't care as much
| about degrees anymore" is a fairly recent thing, I would
| say 5 or so years. And of course, if your friend only
| worked at MSFT for a few years, then left to do school,
| and then tried to come back, they would be probably still
| shooting for a close-to-entry level position, not a
| senior. And entry-level without a degree or something
| else to compensate for it is going to be really tough.
| Normally it is compensated by either years of experience
| or something else (side projects, major open-source
| contribs, etc.), hence why I never saw someone without a
| degree at entry-level, but plenty who are senior
| engineers.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| It's not like the USA wants to pay more. If they can get away
| with paying less for the work, they will.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| Right by they do pay more. A lot more
| Gene5ive wrote:
| Yeah, I've heard about a classist element in Europe that might
| make the path I took unlikely. I dropped out of college, toiled
| in the service industry for 10 years, got sick of it, went to
| code school, got a tech job and 6 years later earn $130k. Still
| no degree. Is it true you can't do that there or is that just a
| stereotype?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I started a conversation with a visiting EU PhD and asked
| about programming languages. In a very good smelling way, he
| avoided the question. Apparently it is "blue collar" work to
| do actual programming? This one PhD did zero actual
| programming, apparently.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Apparently it is "blue collar" work to do actual
| programming?
|
| Let's not build up cultural myths from a passing
| conversation. Of course there are PhDs in Europe who code
| and code very well. There are also ones who don't. Was the
| PhD even in a Computer Science related field?
|
| And not to offend you, but many people have better things
| to do than talk about programing languages. Maybe the
| visiting PhD had more interesting topics on their mind?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| transportation modelling, IIR.. he was from Spain
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| A surprising amount of math/science/engineering types
| still seem to consider actually programming their models
| and and such to be the grunt work, sometimes even handed
| off to someone else. Seems like a terribly inefficient
| way to work.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| It's slowly changing, but yeah, coding is not considered a
| high status job here.
|
| Now, it's better though, it's not considered a low status
| job anymore :)
| filoleg wrote:
| No joke. I lived in the US for a while, but I am from
| Eastern Europe, and so are my parents. Back in high
| school about a decade ago, I decided that I want to do
| either an engineering degree or a CS degree. I got a
| reaction from my parents that was the opposite of what
| most of my US peers would have expected to get.
|
| Even my parents, who are neither doctors or lawyers
| themselves, considered engineering/CS to be a grunt and
| pretty much blue-collar work (not that there is anything
| wrong with blue collar work at all, but I was not going
| to pick that fight with my parents at the time when I
| lived with them). And even now, once they know how much
| software devs can actually get paid in the US, the only
| thing that's changed is that they stopped pestering me
| about it. But I definitely took a note of how when the
| conversations with their friends or other relatives go,
| my parents try to avoid bringing up what I studied or
| what I do as my career (aside from namedropping the
| company names, apparently). All while also letting me
| know every single time how awesome their friends' son is,
| because he is a doctor or a lawyer. /rantover
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| You can, but in France you would have to go freelance, as I
| did.
|
| There would be no way to charge what I make if I were an
| employee. In fact, most companies would not give me the level
| of responsability I had as a junior freelance, even today.
|
| And yet, it's better in IT than in any other field. You
| already make more money, and the requirements are relaxed
| compared to other sectors.
|
| I some countries, like the UK (well, brexited now), it can be
| better. But you'll also most likely be working for a bank.
| simonh wrote:
| True, that. You can make good money as a dev in finance
| here in London. Not as much as in the US, but better than
| most of Europe.
| yobbo wrote:
| Your example is unlikely in Europe, but the importance of the
| degree depends on the type of company. For banks or older
| industrial companies, a degree is mandatory.
| Contacts/networks also play a part and can compensate weaker
| degrees.
| varjag wrote:
| Europe is very diverse in customs and practices. In certain
| European countries credentialism is not really that big of a
| deal. In some others it's really uptight.
| trutannus wrote:
| From what I can tell, in Germany at least, the requirement
| for a lot of dev jobs tends to be "a degree and experience"
| or "software specific degree and an internship". If you have
| a science degree of some sort, and a few years of industry
| experience, then you should be good. Your situation might be
| tricky.
| Bayart wrote:
| I've walked a fairly similar path as you did (to an extent, I
| did get into code and systems as a teenager, but I've got
| little to no formal engineering education and drifted away
| from code for a decade) and getting decent opportunities is
| nearly impossible unless you're in Paris and pretty good at
| networking. Most of the work available is menial, with little
| prospects and pays the median salary (which is trash by EU
| standards, much less US).
| mgh2 wrote:
| Isn't that what the article implies? Talent will be more
| distributed, but working for US companies.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| > the USA don't care about your diploma, only what you can do
|
| That's a total bullshit, unfortunately. Everything else is
| correct.
| jaegerpicker wrote:
| Now a days, it's very much true. I've worked for FAANG
| companies, a number of mid-major sized tech/internet
| companies, have had a engineering job for 20+ years, been a
| CTO and co-founded a VC backed company. All without any
| degree, in fact in the 20+ years in the field I've never once
| been out of work. Early in my career I was rejected a couple
| of times for lack of degree but I can't even remember the
| last time I was asked about a degree. I know a number of
| other long term successful non-degree engineers also. So
| unless you have solid data to back that up, I'd agree
| strongly for it not being bullshit. The only tech field that
| I can see that argument for is higher level Data Scientists
| and that's clearly becoming less and less of a requirement
| also.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| I have successfully went through a chain of technical
| interviews, but wasn't hired to Facebook because HR
| realized I have no degree. So our experience is really
| different.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I work in a big tech company and you have to be
| extraordinary to get hired without a degree as an entry
| level dev. 10+ years experience and it won't matter so
| much, no.
| bduerst wrote:
| That's the point though - in lieu of some outstanding
| success and track record that makes you an extreme outlier,
| a degree is pretty much required.
| exdsq wrote:
| These are all subjective. I worked on Haskell, without a
| degree, on interesting problems for an NY salary remotely out
| of my bedroom in Oxford. I have since moved to the Bay Area and
| am working for an Eastern European country while earning a Bay
| Area rate.
| whateveracct wrote:
| For something like Haskell, you can definitely negotiate that
| kind of thing if you have some experience. Those skills are
| highly coveted and valued if you know your worth imo.
| filoleg wrote:
| >I have since moved to the Bay Area and am working for an
| Eastern European country while earning a Bay Area rate.
|
| If I understood it correctly, you physically live in Bay Area
| while working remotely for a company located in Eastern
| Europe, and you are earning Bay Area rates? This seems like
| the complete inverse of the situation I usually hear of
| (working for a Bay Area company remotely in a cheaper area
| and earning Bay Area rates).
|
| Out of pure curiosity, do you mind sharing the name of that
| Eastern European company? Totally understandable if you
| aren't willing to do so, but I have a feeling that there is
| probably literally 1 or 2 companies tops that would be
| willing to do that, so it isn't really an option for almost
| anyone. The first two that popped into my mind were Yandex
| and, to a much lesser degree, VK.
| smsm42 wrote:
| Yandex Labs is a San Francisco company. Technically owned
| by Yandex, but otherwise not much difference from any other
| Bay Area company.
| filoleg wrote:
| Wow, I actually had no idea that Yandex had any presence
| in the US. Sounds like a pretty interesting setup they
| got this way, I will have to check it out.
| exdsq wrote:
| You understand correctly! It's a crypto startup but I don't
| really want to have my account be to obviously mine. It
| isn't amazing bay area rates, but it's six figures.
| filoleg wrote:
| No need to reveal the exact company name, your
| clarification was more than enough to address my
| curiosity in regards to the situation. I really
| appreciate you giving just enough info, without
| compromising your own privacy, especially since it sounds
| like it is a small startup.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| For me it was just enough information to make me more
| curious about what type of crypto company. I work for one
| too, but not on the fun web3 side of things.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Jetbrains?
| jhgb wrote:
| > If you want to code in Haskell or Lisp in Europe, good luck.
|
| Uhh... https://trustica.cz/category/tech/racket/
| curiousgal wrote:
| Heck, even Ocaml!
|
| https://www.lexifi.com/
| Bayart wrote:
| I checked them out and they're unsupringly French. As a
| point of pride, Ocaml is pretty in universities here. For
| some reason, the computer scientists here are weirdly
| obsessed with functionalism and formalism.
| bwb wrote:
| I find this a bit far fetched, with as many problems as the USA
| has it still has a solid reputation as a place you can come and
| make a new life with low corruption, a justice system, free
| speech, affordability, and on the local/state level a
| government/bureaucracy that still works.
|
| Same goes for Germany and countries that provide a high quality
| of life for their people.
|
| I understand the idea, but there is a reason people want to leave
| places that are "broken".
| werdnapk wrote:
| Not sure how the rest of the world still views the USA, but as
| a Canadian the states no longer has a solid reputation for any
| of those things. The sad thing is that most Americans still
| believe they're #1 at almost everything.
| bwb wrote:
| Canadians who read the news and keep abreast of such things
| would have a bad view of things (as they should). But, the
| reality is the USA still has all these things even if cracks
| are appearing. Don't let the hype cycle and media's focus on
| the bad lose sight of the big picture. I wouldn't expect many
| Canadians are immigrating anyway as you are in the top 10
| well governed countries globally.
|
| Agreed, America's biggest problem is that 40% of Americans
| believe they are #1 at everything :). We should be stealing
| ideas left and right from other countries and instead we are
| stagnating under the belief that only we know how to do
| things.
| Oddskar wrote:
| I think you overestimate the reputation of the US and
| underestimate how much it has rapidly declined the last
| decades.
|
| I also think you underestimate how much effort it takes to
| really start over and become properly integrated in a new
| country. It is a _very_ enticing prospect for many to side-step
| this issue entirely and still get an almost unfathomable salary
| for some countries.
| bwb wrote:
| I've personally been remote since 1999 and run teams from
| around the world since then. The largest was a company I grew
| to ~130+ people over 18 countries. I know you are
| underestimating the rep of the USA outside of politics and
| the dysfunction :)
|
| Remote is a great opportunity and one I've used at every
| company I've built. But, the thing that draws global talent
| is money, and American companies have all the money. If
| anything this is going to hurt local companies who can't
| compete for top talent hiring out of the USA :)
|
| I will note, i think Canada is doing a great job of being
| pro-immigrant in a way the USA can't and American companies
| are opening lots of offices and hiring there.
| Oddskar wrote:
| > I know you are underestimating the rep of the USA outside
| of politics and the dysfunction
|
| I don't really understand. Why would I disregard "the
| dysfunction"? That's very much at the core of what shapes
| the rest of the worlds perception of the US.
|
| Agree on the second point though. It does (potentially)
| globalise the job market quite a bit.
| bwb wrote:
| Tons of people want to move to the USA for nature,
| stability, pay, freedom of expression, freedom of
| speech/religion/life, low corruption, house prices are
| low compared to many many places, mixing pot,
| opportunity, american dream etc...
|
| The power of the American narrative is huge.
|
| I know so many devs in Brazil who want to live to USA or
| Germany, as well as many other places. Those places have
| problems at a much higher level than our current stuff.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >Tons of people want to move to the USA for nature,
| stability, pay, freedom of expression, freedom of
| speech/religion/life, low corruption, house prices are
| low compared to many many places, mixing pot,
| opportunity, american dream etc...
|
| High level of crime, too much politics, education too
| expensive, healthcare too expensive, no public pension
| funds.
| bwb wrote:
| Totally agreed with you :)
|
| But the key point being narrative around the American
| dream, freedom of religion/expression, and all the other
| things I mentioned. Moving to a new place and taking a
| risk is a feeling based decision. Sure we might dress it
| up with some logic, but at the end of the day the USA has
| soft power in spades.
| Oddskar wrote:
| It has _relative_ soft power. The reason you hear lots of
| Brazilian devs wanting to move is due to the tremendous
| problems Brazil is facing. Not all countries have
| problems to this extent.
|
| From a EU-centric perspective the soft power the US have
| is not that strong.
| bwb wrote:
| I totally agree with you. I live in Europe.
|
| But, globally brand America's brand is quite strong
| still. And that is my point, don't forget how powerful
| that brand has been for the last 100 years. It doesn't
| disappear overnight.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| And I think you overestimate how much things have rapidly
| declined. Is the US's heyday in the past? Of course. It _is_
| on a decline. But if your entire lens of what is happening in
| the country is news channels and the Internet, you need a
| reality check. As Dave Chappelle said, Twitter is not a real
| place.
| erect_hacker wrote:
| this is a terrible take. why comment at all?
| Oddskar wrote:
| > But if your entire lens of what is happening in the
| country is news channels and the Internet, you need a
| reality check.
|
| Not sure what your point is. How do you think people shape
| their opinions and perceptions on things if not via media
| and the internet?
|
| What would this "reality check" consist of? I would move to
| the US for a number of years just so I can determine
| whether I want to move there? Should I read the collected
| works of David Foster Wallace?
|
| It's perception we're talking about here. It doesn't have
| to be rational nor accurate.
| [deleted]
| ctvo wrote:
| > I think you overestimate the reputation of the US and
| underestimate how much it has rapidly declined the last
| decades.
|
| How has it rapidly declined? Please list the ways. I don't
| necessarily disagree, but I am curious.
| jleyank wrote:
| Behaviour of the conservative side of the country has been
| grim the last 10+ years, unless you're white. Overall, the
| country is right-centre as compared to the western world.
| Politics is constant yet government is in gridlock. Health
| care is costly and intermittent being tied to employment.
| Social cohesion and support isn't particularly good. But
| there's money to be had if you don't mind the cost.
| randcraw wrote:
| These are the biggest universities in America today. None
| of them existed 50 years ago. They are the future of
| college education in America.
|
| #1 Western Governors University (WGU) North Carolina
| 121,437
|
| #2 Southern New Hampshire University New Hampshire 104,068
|
| #3 Grand Canyon University Arizona 90,253
|
| #4 Liberty University Virginia 79,152
|
| #5 Ivy Tech Community College - Central Indiana Indiana
| 72,006
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| Don't think the article is arguing that 'broken' countries are
| poised to benefit here? They specifically say "political and
| monetary stability". The US does not have a monopoly on that
| worldwide. In terms of affordability - the US is one of the
| least affordable places - do you have any idea what an entry-
| level SE salary can get you in other countries?
| bwb wrote:
| Agreed, but if you read down the list the author notes in
| that list Panama, Croatia, which while beautiful and stable
| in some ways... are also knows for corruption and other
| issues.
|
| The USA is very affordable if you look outside of SF/NY and
| compare it to Western Europe (esp with tech pay). What are
| you comparing it too?
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| It's certainly affordable with tech pay - but... that's the
| point of the article isn't it? Tech pay is sky high because
| US is overvaluing US talent. Most millennials in the US
| cannot afford to buy a home here.
|
| Agreed Panama is a bad example, but not Croatia - it's
| politically stable, and I don't believe many people leave
| because of corruption.
| pbaka wrote:
| > Agreed Panama is a bad example, but not Croatia - it's
| politically stable, and I don't believe many people leave
| because of corruption.
|
| They just announced the results of the census in Croatia
| this week. It lost a fifth of its population last 20
| years. And oh yes, they do, throughout the whole of the
| Balkans. It's as much a reason to leave for most as the
| money.
|
| They all believe "the West" is well regulated everywhere,
| everything is clean, corruption doesn't exist, justice
| will be fair, they will see no discrimination, bosses
| will follow the law, etc. It's soft-power working
| wonders.
| bwb wrote:
| I am not sure the US is overvaluing US talent, I am
| undecided there...
|
| The average salary of a millenial is $47k a year, average
| millennial household makes $71k. The average mortgage
| payment in the USA is $1,487 ($18k over a year). So 25%
| to 38% of salary right? I think I did that right but feel
| free to clarify. Seems doable right?
|
| I think the USA is a mess, especially for millennials but
| when you look at the housing market in Europe for average
| salaries we are doing really well overall:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/237529/price-to-
| income-r...
|
| Very few people immigrate from anywhere. It is very hard.
| I don't think people leave because of corruption, my
| point being they have higher levels than the USA:
| https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2020/index/nzl
| valzam wrote:
| I think it's really difficult to compare all of these
| statistics. Take Germany:
|
| It is very normal to rent your whole life, especially in
| big cities. Renter laws are very strong. House ownership
| is higher in rich, rural parts of the country (think
| south of Munich), so this skews the average house price.
| Also the quality floor is much higher than in the US,
| pushing up average prices. $20k trailer park homes simply
| do not exist in Germany.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| > Tech pay is sky high because US is overvaluing US
| talent
|
| This statement feels like it requires a lot of
| justification. I work for a large company, we are happy
| to hire out of Europe, SA, or anywhere else so long as
| they can work on their team's time zone. We are willing
| to beat basically any offer you'd imagine getting in
| those areas and hiring is still _hard_ , qualified and
| experienced people are a rarity.
|
| When thinking about "overvaluing talent" it's worth
| remembering that just 5 years ago the big tech companies
| actively conspired to keep pay down because margins on
| developers making 120-150k were just insanely high[0].
|
| [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/0
| 1/16/37...
| presentation wrote:
| As an American who lives abroad, I specifically chose to leave
| because it's a place riddled with corruption, has a rigged
| justice system, whose political climate stifles free speech, is
| totally unaffordable in any of the urban centers, and has a
| depressingly incompetent bureaucracy on the local/state level
| (I'm looking at you, San Francisco...).
| cromka wrote:
| > low corruption
|
| I'm sorry, what? Ask anyone in NYC what they think of the
| corruption. Ask them if they feel that the taxes they pay are
| put to a good use. Ask what they think of MTA, of the unions,
| of the mafia connections.
|
| And ask any expat what they think of lobbying, a.k.a. legal
| corruption.
| bwb wrote:
| Compare corruption in NYC to India or Thailand or Romania :)
|
| A waist high pile of poop is much different from one the size
| of a skyscraper. I am not saying it doesn't have aspects of
| corruption, but it is low and solid resources on the local
| and national level to constantly investigate and make cases.
|
| Legalizing corruption through lobbying is a good move. There
| are other options but better than keeping it underground.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >Compare corruption in NYC to India or Thailand or Romania
| :)
|
| Corruption in Romania and other Eastern European countries
| is more generalized in the sense that there is more small
| corruption. Corruption cases in US are more serious.
| bwb wrote:
| proof? data?
|
| Not backed up by a lot of companies/orgs/data...
| https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2020/index/rou
| https://risk-indexes.com/global-corruption-index/
| https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/corruption-
| index
| matsuokk wrote:
| I love paying taxes in NYC. I estimate NYC taxpayers saved me
| ~$100K in medical bills when I unexpectedly needed surgery
| and qualified for low-income Medicare coverage. I love that
| I'm again a heavy contributor to that system and happily so.
| And I love watching bike lanes built left and right, I love
| the city buying up empty lots to build parks, I love the
| Marathon, the "5 Boro" bike tour, the incredible (and heavily
| subsidized) ferry service, the public school free lunch
| programs, the vaccine outreach campaigns, the reliable snow
| removal, and the wonderful collection of libraries and
| museums and public spaces that are free and open to me. I
| love that the city cuts long-term lease deals with multi-
| tenant property owners to guarantee supply of low-income
| housing. A bunch of my friends grew up in that kind of
| housing and some of my sweetest neighbors live there now. I
| think MTA is one of the very BEST features of this or any
| world-class city -- trains run all night! And it makes me
| super happy whenever I'm going somewhere at 5am and the train
| is packed with workers in steel-toed boots and jackets with
| local union patches commuting to the job site. I think my
| taxes are spent well enough -- I know this because I love
| living here and have never given a serious thought to leaving
| for tax avoidance or whatever other fake drama is being
| projected onto this city from afar.
| readams wrote:
| I personally find it strange how gleeful lots of US developers
| have been about remote work. It means our US salaries are going
| to be untenable and we'll be paid like the rest of the world. Why
| pay a Silicon Valley salary when it's remote anyway and 1/4 the
| price to get someone from elsewhere?
| jaegerpicker wrote:
| Because that is absolutely unlikely in the extreme. I've worked
| with and lead teams of outsourced non-US developers. It very
| often (not always but much more often) ends unfavorably
| compared to local-ish remote teams or local in office teams.
| Language barriers, culture barriers, infrastructure issues
| (quality of internet/phone, regional software restrictions,
| export restrictions, contract work vs regular employees,
| etc....) are too much to over come in the majority of cases.
|
| Software teams are almost always better run with small groups
| of highly skilled developers that can and want to work closely
| together. Think special ops vs regular infantry platoon.
| Outside of FaaNG not many companies are working on projects
| that require a large number of devs.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| We went through that with outsourcing already. There is
| something about businesses and their communications - don't
| listen to what they say they need - that is really what they
| want and are whining for. Instead look at their actions - they
| take measures to fufill their actual needs.
|
| We keep on seeing that scaremongering about "you taking
| advantage of remote work will be bad for your job oooooo!" but
| that doesn't make any sense. You forgoing its benefits won't
| make it not happen any more than riding a horse will stop
| people from using cars. Besides if they can why the hell aren't
| they already? The capability has long been there and they don't
| so much outsource to same order of magnitude.
|
| Given immigration to the US for work and it implies the other
| way around - they need to pay US level salaries to get the high
| quality employees with any level of remote reliability
| (recruiting is a rather messy and slapdash endeavor at best for
| judging and obtaining quality).
| initplus wrote:
| Modern remote hiring is very different to the offshoring of
| old. Hiring individual skilled developers remote is very
| different from outsourcing an entire project to a consulting
| shop in India.
|
| Modern offshoring is a very different experience, and likely
| will have downward pressure on US wages.
| lancemurdock wrote:
| don't underestimate some of the problems the author listed
| here. Language barriers & timezone challenges will cause the
| roadmap to move so much slower that you've lost gains on saving
| that 3/4 price.
| analognoise wrote:
| Good luck convincing people who "can do" the work to take
| 1/4th.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Yeah There's better jobs then programing for 50k a year. Why
| would I keep doing this then. I'll work a ski lift or
| something
| speby wrote:
| No no no no. Let's go down the list, shall we. Remember, COVID or
| not, remote work trend accelerating or not, things have not
| changed as much as they seem:
|
| * People STILL want to migrate to the US and it will remain one
| of the top choices. People move her for economic/job
| opportunities, sure, but that's not all. * Outsourcing (or hiring
| remote teams in remote offices), as well as setting up remote and
| international offices has been going on for .... I can't even
| remember. 100 years? This was already happening and will keep
| happening. * Timezones are a physical problem and cannot be
| fixed. Sorry. Remote work or not, people don't want to work at 1
| AM so they can talk to another team half-way around the world at
| 7 AM. This was true yesterday and it will remain true today. *
| Culture issues will remain. True yesterday. True today. *
| Language issues will remain. True yesterday. True today. * US
| will continue to remain a country people WANT to live in and stay
| in once they are here. Remote work will certainly allow _some_
| people to move abroad and continue working because that 's
| something they really want. But the data definitely doesn't
| suggest some sea change here. True yesterday. Remains largely
| true today.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| I think the realization people had through the pandemic is that
| a very large part of the western world is equally livable.
| Apart from economic opportunity, what else is there on US soil
| that makes it comparably preferable? And i think you re
| forgetting that the US has been outsourcing its manufacturing
| to china for decades, and china is , what 15 hours difference?
| Most of work is asynchronous
|
| I think the US has nothing to fear from remote work -- they
| will outsource even more work and again benefit from the
| arbitrage. But it is true that it will diminish their talent
| advantage, and that will be good for them.
| torginus wrote:
| This is a bit off topic, but wrt working for an US company - US
| programming salaries are weird - it used to be a decade ago, that
| programming salaries were roughly in line with other domains in
| engineering, while most places required a STEM degree as well,
| meaning both engineering and CS employed roughly the same talent
| pool at similar wages. Imo, this estimation still holds in the
| rest of the world, but CS salaries in the US have skyrocketed,
| while companies opened up to the idea of hiring any enterprising
| leetcoder.
| [deleted]
| an9n wrote:
| I'll happily relocate from the UK to a country that isn't sliding
| towards tyranny. Are there any left???
| warkdarrior wrote:
| North Korea is not sliding towards tyranny.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Remote work favors efficient performers on their own to-do lists.
| In the short term, it will can be super productive
|
| Remote work does not work when part of the job is helping others,
| learning from others. Figuring out things.
| Asooka wrote:
| I have no trouble helping and communicating with people
| remotely. Some days most of my time is spent helping others and
| it's a lot easier over the internet, since I can switch between
| people rapidly and have several conversations going at once.
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