As an American also living in Europe, I think this is a highly naive view. American media pushes American values, and American values are hardly equivalent to technological development itself.
Instead, I’d say we’re at the very beginning of a massive global backlash against American values propagated by technology. Expect it to continually ramp up as media-creation technology spreads. China is just the beginning.
Removing geography from the hiring equation is going to fuck American tech workers. Once you’ve gone digital, there’s no (on paper) difference between a programmer in the Philippines or in Iowa except the one in Iowa is much more expensive.
There are also legal and tax considerations to using a foreign programmer over a local one. Pretty quickly, many companies will discover the pitfalls to outsourcing.
Among the big consequences: you lose R&D tax credits. The language and skill barrier is also pretty big; most companies that outsource end up spending so much money on QC that they barely save anything at all.
It's theoretically possible to find good programmers in the Philippines as opposed to locally. But seeing as how finding local programmers is still not a solved issue, expanding the job pool to include the entire world isn't going to make that task any easier.
It’s pretty bold to assume that local devs are that much better. The high paid SV companies might do better than most at attracting talent, but the average developer team in the US is pretty terrible. I’ve worked in many organisations as a contractor, and the number of completely brain dead software engineers who do little more than fill seats and collect checks is astonishing. An average developer from Manila would struggle to do worse.
> But seeing as how finding local programmers is still not a solved issue
They've made it pretty clear that they won't be looking for local programers. They're looking domestically. Presumably, the same processes used to hire remote domestic programmers will be equally applicable for most remote non-domestic workers too.
> Pretty quickly, many companies will discover the pitfalls to outsourcing.
Probably true, however by then they will already have made the decision and it will be priced in to the company’s stock. The System is replete with the consequences of bad short-term decisions that have become more or less locked in.
$200k vs $<20k. It’s an extremely large gap to be filled. Surely the people who spend their days looking at numbers on spreadsheets will see this gap and try to take as much advantage of it as they possibly can, and surely the market will reward the massive cuts in operating costs.
They could do outsourcing today, yesterday, and 10 years ago just as well. Nothing changed, structurally or technologically (covid is neither), for outsourcing to work better now than it used to be so far.
There will always be companies who need to learn on their own how $20K developers are different from $200K developers and what investing in either means 10 years down the road.
By the way, good developers with good English and good communication skills can easily earn MUCH more than $20K even today by working remotely. Already today in most countries there are almost no barriers to earning multiples of their national averages other than one's own skills and attitude. And yet dev salaries in America are as high as ever.
The industry seems to be growing faster than the labour force even despite globalization, and I don't think that trend will reverse anytime soon. We're still shoving software into more places, industries, and processes, and making it all more complicated.
You forget about the culture, work culture, mentality and education in those countries. I don't see a reason why should I make less for the same job just because I'm from a different country. What if you are a digital nomad? In the end it should be more about who YOU are, not what country you are from. I see a big difference between people from different countries even if the education level and years of experience seem to be the same. You will see difference in education even between cities.
Knowing that the market is getting even more global it only encourages me to ask for more money, not less.
countries? the gap between living in village in Poland and having major city 160km away where salaries are x4 and more for people with same xp[0] is already sad (and motivating) enough :P
Oh, I just realized that I've probably expressed myself kinda poorly because now it sounds as if that gap was a result of "location adjustments"
I meant that "location adjustment" just increases the gap to the already existing gap made of "attractive place(big city) - bigger companies - bigger salaries" factor.
>Up here in Lithuania, in IT, it's not uncommon to live (relatively) bumfucknowhere, work remotely and drive in once or twice a week.
Assuming it's similar as in Lithuania - price is one of main points. You get a sweet house with a reasonable lot instead of a tiny flat. Likely better access to nature, more calm environment etc. If you're fine with a run down house and want to fix it up yourself, it's easy to buy a liveable house with a garden and whatnot in bumfucknowhere for really cheap. Cheap as in less than a year's salary of a programmer in a city.
Commute varies a lot depending on specific location. Want to live in a village in a national park? You're looking into at least a good hour off-peak to two hours including city traffic. Random small town? May be an hour, may be two. If you want to stick close to your parents and they happen to live deep in backcountry... You may be looking into 3-4h one way depending on which city the company is located in.
Your work product will definitely suffer if you are trying to maintain a sleep/wake schedule significantly different from your family and friends. I've seen this happen directly, and it's really bad.
Not to mention what a creepy and unnatural work culture that would be back in the home base location.
“Hey everyone, let me introduce you to the wholesale replacement technology staff we obviously hired just to pay them way unfairly less and fire all your friends who did a good job. It may be night time every time you see them on the video call but don’t worry. As you capitalize on a near indentured servant relationship with them so we can pay them less than their worth purely because of geopolitical arbitrage, they’ve generously agreed to never read their kids bedtime stories or sleep at the same time their spouses do, as they live out a stereotype hellscape of Western arrogance where they are happy to be worker ants endlessly reciting Bill Gates’ “flipping burgers is opportunity” speech in their heads.”
> The United States trains the best computer graduates ― by far: We find that CS seniors in the United States substantially outperform seniors in China, India, and Russia. The average computer science student in the United States ranks higher than about 80 percent of students tested in China, India, and Russia. Seniors in elite institutions in the United States similarly outperform seniors in elite institutions in China, India, and Russia by approximately 0.85 Standard Deviations (SDs). Importantly, the skills advantage of the United States is not because it has a large proportion of high-scoring international students.
There's some solid programming talent in Vietnam, they constantly amaze me with their skills and will work for a few hundred a week before they get poached by the states.
I've seen kids straight out of highschool who can write solid stuff and know git back to front compared to some lad with an Ivy league bachelor's who is basically clueless, needing his hand held for months and yet demanding 8x the wage.
I treat everyone who only has a degree and no real world skills with a lot of suspicion. There's plenty of ridiculously good hires out there.
Mostly agreed. A bigger difference might be that American companies do a decent job overall of training their 'apprentice programmers' (that's what fresh grads mostly are).
It's important to highlight that the more significant variable here is probably the quality/prestige of universities within the U.S., which in turn then attracts the best talent and students around the world, rather than the other way around.
I think you may be misunderstanding my point. My comment is meant to highlight the fact that the quality / prestige of universities in the US consequently attract the smartest / most talented students by virtue of being the most highly ranked in the world.
This study looks highly flawed. They gave ets tests to random (categorized) people in the three countries. So far so ok (although the question is always what does the test measure, I mean what e.g. recursion is not big in china, because it is not used in production etc). But for the US the take ets data instead of testing people for this study. So it seems they compare it with people who took this exam for other reasons (and probably studied/prepaeed for this exam!); or maybe I understand this wrongly
You could flip the question around & say, “The fact companies like this, which are mostly rational companies that have ample time & resources to research contracting or outsourcing as alternatives, and yet are choosing not to must mean the economic value of contracting and outsourcing is less than relocating long-term salaried employees.”
In other words the question is, “Given that contracting and outsourcing are deemed to be worse options by rational actors, what reasons make this true?”
The conditions are different now. Infrastructure is better, foreign workers are better trained, American company culture is different (ceos of Microsoft and Google both Indian), and the possibility of American workers creating political friction is becoming non-negligible.
Unless the workers in the Philippines are willing to work US work hours, they aren’t the same. As someone who has managed teams in India, overnight delays in feedback can easily stretch weeklong epics across months. You just can’t rapidly iterate with timezone latency like that.
If your tasks are so well defined that a single feature request ticket can be fulfilled and satisfied on the first try, that’s cool but you’re likely not actually doing anything challenging and you’ve probably already outsourced to India.
I did quite a bit of work little overlap. Me in Europe with clients in Japan or US west coast. Meetings on few overlapping hours and pretty much around-the-clock work was pretty good. Lots of time for deep work on both ends. If one side needs something, the other side can prepare it while former sleeps.
Maybe my clients and I got lucky because little hands-on management was required and specs were quite lax? But at least in some cases it works just fine.
Or you can consider the reverse, it is not American tech workers who are overpaid, but remote workers who are actually underpaid. Would it be so bad if $T companies could not discriminate remote workers?
I disagree. It's going to be a net positive because it will make the stock market go up (thanks to lower production costs) and will ensure that our investments can maintain their dominant positions which will benefit everyone and will create more jobs.
I don't think this is going to happen. Good developers all over the world know their price, demand it and get what they want because there's just so few of them.
Applying the current exchange rate and American standards regarding time off I'm currently making, as a front-end dev with 8 years under his belt, $60k+ before taxes in Poland, and I'm far from the highest earner among my peers.
Sure it's considerably less than the median US wage in this field, but still it's not like we're orders of magnitude away from you guys.
And note that Poland is a very popular destination for outsourcing.
I think you overestimate the degree to which Americans would care. In order to move Americans you’d need to propagandize through media, but all current media has a vested interest in perpetuating the military industrial complex.
Any attempt to withdraw and dismantle the MIC would lead to thousands of sad stories of the people hurt by its loss. Workers in the weapons factories, rebel groups we’ve propped up, entire economies who depend on the subsidies, etc. the final result would be apathy and finally more of the same. The only thing America can do is continue down the path it’s set for itself, and the only thing intelligent people can do is remove themselves from it to the extent that they can, wait for it to finally devour itself, and hope it doesn’t destroy the rest of the world in its death throes.
All it would take is for Americans to be exposed to the facts of their victims. The magnitude of the crimes against humanity being committed by the US' War Coalition is SO HUGE that its no wonder that American media is falling over itself to suppress any reporting on the ground from these wars.
But, Americans, the rest of the world IS watching, and we DO know the facts - we aren't cowardly shielding our eyes from the 37 million war refugees created so that America has someone to drop bombs on. The burning piles of rubble are NOT going away just because American media is ignoring it at the behest of their intelligence community masters.
The leaks will continue, and the hubris that seizes any solution-making will be eroded.
The question is about an ordinary meaning of "harm".
If you want to push back at that meaning on a technicality, is there anything called harm that is not, ultimately, dependent on how a mind engages with it?
Introduce income tax. Use the tax money to build infrastructure that allows for concentrated mega growth which kills off traditional economies and destroys thousands of years of crafting knowledge, and then introduce increasingly severe policies in order to manage the unexpected side-effects. The new policies create more side-effects and lead to more policies. Repeat Until you have so many laws and taxes are so high that the majority of people can’t compete in the economy because they can’t afford lawyers to navigate the law in the way the entrenched can, so they either start living off the government, or if their mental state didn’t survive the humiliating degradation of the whole process, they live on the street. New policies are introduced etc...
The situation can’t continue. How does it end?
> The new policies create more side-effects...Repeat Until ... the majority of people can’t compete in the economy ... they either start living off the government, or ...they live on the street. New policies are introduced ..
Sorry if I perceived incorrectly, but you are making it sound as if economic system before income tax was all hunky dory and people lived satisfying comfortable lives. From what it seems, system before income tax had much worse lives (on average) than the system after income tax.
So can you please clarify if you indeed claim that pre-income tax economic system was superior? If so, any citations?
This is an excellent comment. Thinking about laws or policies as dynamic processes with various feedback loops and side-effects offers a better model than the usual static approach. Side-effects are critical, so critical that they often often work against the intended goal. Yet side-effects are almost never mentioned when people advocate for a certain policy.
How does it end? Probably with brittle systems that are unable to survive exogenous shocks.
I think this concept could lend to a pretty interesting and unique game. The engine would be a city simulation, the more realistic and complex the better. However rather than build directly, the player would enact policies (laws + regulations) for the city and see how things evolve.
I would play that. Your comment makes me wonder why policy simulators don't already exist, or maybe they do and I am unaware of them. Such a simulator would have to be able to handle the "cobra effect" which could be quite a challenge.
The Cobra effect, by the way, is a great illustration of the problem with static thinking. Problem: too many cobras, Solution: pay a bounty for them, Unintended side-effect: people raise cobras for the bounty so now there are even more cobras.
1) It will take away the only social outlet many people have. Someone may reply that work was never the appropriate place for that anyways but the real world has never worked that way. Humans have always combined work and social life since the beginning of time. And there won’t be some spontaneous rise in people joining social clubs or anything like that. It will only result in further isolation, further mental problems, further strange behaviors.
2) This will make hiring even more parameterized. Employers will count even more on pieces of paper and LinkedIn connections to gauge whether or not to hire someone. No ability to gauge someone’s presence.
3) This further enables corporations to have no concern for geography. No skin in the game. No loyalty to a place. No loyalty to people. You are now competing with people who are willing to work for a fraction of the price you do, and on paper you both have the same credentials.
sounds like what is already happening in europe where a lot more people worked remotely in tech, due to the lack of local tech. People adapt, and learn to socialize off-office. Limiting oneself to the office was always unhealthy anyway
