Good engineers seem to cost quite a lot everywhere. I have yet to see the mythical $10 per hour amazing engineer from overseas, although I’ve seen several amazing but expensive engineers from overseas. I think the era of wage arbitrage is over. This myth is perhaps perpetuated to scare the talent over here into accepting worse conditions.

Any small gains they can make through arbitrage are eaten by time zone issues, communication issues, legal issues, etc when working across huge distances.

To put some real numbers on it. An average React developer in London would charge around £650/day as a contractor. In a second city like Manchester they would charge say £500/day. In Eastern Europe it would be like £220/day.

Yes there are trade offs, but wage arbitrage hasn’t gone away.

I hear you, and I think there's some truth in what you're saying, and probably the truth is somewhere between our statements, but I suspect it leans closer to my own position (although of course I'd think so...).

I think making an accurate comparison is very complicated, and if we looked at a large number of factors the wage arbitrage advantage would shrink. I think the seeming "wage arbitrage opportunity" is partly due to mis-assessment of the "sameness" of the contractors being compared.

For example, the average software engineer on the US coasts is much more likely than a software engineer in the US midwest to have gone to a top tier university, and although that doesn't guarantee they are better, there may be some advantage. The extra depth of knowledge or extra grit to grind through a slightly harder education might not show up in an interview or even on an average day's work, but might show up sporadically in ways that save or create significant amounts of money.

(To use a more obvious example, if a bootcamp coding school graduate and a graduate from Stanford both pass a coding interview, and both write a similar amount of "similar-seeming" code on an average day, I still suspect that when hard problems arise, or more sophisticated architecture or algorithms are needed, the Stanford or other top-school graduate is going to more reliably solve the problem and in a long-term better way.)

Similarly, they might live in a tech hub where they are constantly learning new technologies, or the general pace of their life and work might be ever so slightly higher. They might spend more of their free time getting better at their profession. Anyway, I won't try to provide an exhaustive list of possible differences, but these are some things I see that aren't usually accounted for.

> these jobs will be moved out to India.

You mean just like the other thousand times people said this over the decades?

A big part of the reason it failed for decades is because of the challenges of remote work. It can be difficult to onboard, you need higher documentation standards, more asynchronous communication processes.

Now many people are gung ho on solving these problems to enable wfh. And I personally view that as indirectly solving a lot of the reasons that international offshoring failed.

Even things like challenges with taxes and local labor laws - there are now brand new companies to address exactly that.

In the end the only barriers will be timezones, and even that the aforementioned async flows seek to address.

People keep saying “they tried outsourcing for decades and it failed, it’s a bluff” as if nothing has changed. Lots of stuff changed like improved video tooling. But perhaps the biggest change by far would be the remote first culture people are trying to build. Pre-Covid, every single FAANG company was office-centric to a degree. Bringing in international teams and integrating them would be effectively impossible. Remote first changes that.

Hacker news has so many wfh zealots you won’t even see much discussion around it since people tire of getting downvoted. But worth noting in my experience talking to IC SWE it’s closer to 70/30 preference for remote but based on online convos you’d think it was 99/1.

I personally quit a FAANG job with FAANG comp precisely because my org went remote first. The culture was alienating, the camaraderie was zero, incident management was a coordination nightmare , documentation for onboarding was a mess, and best of all, all my new teammates were Brazilian but since they were contractors they didn’t do on-call.

Management absolutely plans to replace Americans with much cheaper foreigners but there’s still just so much friction with remote-first. The only reason this big outsourcing push might work this time is because of the number of Americans hellbent on overcoming the challenges of remote work and simplifying their own eventual redundancy.

This is factually wrong. The only barrier isn't 'time zones' and will never be just time zones. It's cultural, environmental, political. The way a US-based team builds a product is different from an outsourced team in India which is different from having an actual office and team in India. Trying to get a team in a whole 'nother part of the world operate on a US time scale is incredibly hard because they are going to have different holidays and time off. You may need a product delivered this week, but your key developer in Ireland is off for a week and they have the federal right to do so.

In the United States we have -zero- mandatory minimum paid vacation or holidays. Your employer could require you to come in and work to push a product out. You cannot do that in most other countries.

Like with these kind of remarks I start to wonder how seriously you're aware of with countries and holidays outside of the US.

Can it be a bit of both? Trying to get a everyone to pull in the same direction when more than half of them are in another time zone is such an uphill battle. Even smaller things like trying to resolve CR feedback in a reasonable amount of time becomes a herculean effort when you only overlap for about an hour each day, and all other communication falls into a "We'll see what they say tomorrow" bucket.

Returning to a team that was all (more or less) in the same time zone has been amazing for my sanity.

People have been saying this and it has been happening; it sounds like you may be unfamiliar with how many jobs are regularly shifted overseas: “Since Trump’s inauguration on 20 January 2017 to 31 July 2020, over 308,000 workers have been certified for trade adjustment assistance benefits.” The history of off-shoring manufacturing is also pretty well known. Articles about the US’ resulting woeful lack of manufacturing capacity are easy to find.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/sep/12/us-corporat...

Edit: spelling

2nd edit: noting these are not tech specific jobs, but the trend is there.

Wonder how many people insisting that software jobs in the US are safe from foreign competition drive Japanese cars, use motherboards and top end CPUs designed and manufactured in Taiwan, use South Korean manufactured DRAM, and use other high tech products pioneered in western countries that are now largely engineered and manufactured outside of the west?

That’s why my wife and I live way below our means. To the point where my wife could just stop working and we’d still be fine (we bank her income and more). If our paychecks got cut in half tomorrow it means we can survive.

I do this as well. It's disturbingly rare.

An employer may prefer to have people in the office, but if they can only hire remote then they may prefer to do it at the offshore rates.

I have been in exactly this situation many times in recent years. My go-to would have been a team of co-located contractors in London. As soon as WFH became the norm, paying 40-60% of the rates in Eastern Europe or cheaper areas of the UK was a no brainer.

... the structural issues the USA and the world faces are probably literally endless, but the free movement of IT work is not one of them.

the claim that it's gonna hurt the US in the long run is almost certainly false, because ironically the long-run US economic and foreign policy goals are constantly hindered by its own protectionist policies.

these policies are the same ones that lead to countless fuckups when it turns out that the US is both "too big to fail", but also still smaller than the world (Puerto Rico, Jones Act, name a more iconic duo; oh right, subsidies forced quasi-monopoly for baby formula and only 3 factories nationwide; oh right, granting WTO MFN status to China without requiring and enforcing reciprocation)

long run America is forced to deal with a lot of unstable allies because they are not integrated economically sufficiently. no shared fate no shared interest, etc.

... of course it's unlikely to "solve" geopolitics in a 7AM HN post, but worrying about offshoring IT jobs is like trying to cordon off the best seats on the deck on the Titanic as the water rises.

At the large company I work at, offshoring jobs to India was announced in December 2021. Same company is now in the process of re-hiring in house because they realized what kind of offshore programmers are willing to work PST hours.

This argument is being repeated in every thread about RTO so let me just copy/paste my reply from before:

Because interview process in bigtech has been subverted by people benefiting from it and who are already skilled in it. I bet absolute majority of people that I worked with and considered them very good couldn't solve knapsack problem on whiteboards in 15 minutes, don't know Z algorithm by heart and won't be able to correctly project Amazon leadership principles with (made up bullshit) examples from their previous jobs.