Are the bigger tech companies outsourcing?
I guess not really outsourcing, but trying to shift development out of America and into cheaper countries and get rid of positions in America or other expensive countries. Anytime someone leaves one of the software teams and we try to get a backfill management just says "we can get an entire team in India for that one American salary". It's getting to the point that in a year or two there's hardly going to be anyone left in the same office that all the product team is in. Are bigger tech companies experiencing the same phenomenon or is this only happening with slower growth smaller tech companies? I can see expanding to other locations because you just can't find the talent where you are, but for us this is never the case, it's solely about dollars and cents, which seems crazy considering developers are the ones bringing so much value to the business.
Yes
Entire team in India for that 1 American salary? You need some fact check son. Tech companies in India pay anything between $45k to $65k to SDE2. An SDM would make 1.5x of that. So every 1 US SDE you can hire 3 SDE in India. Not exactly an entire team.
My team has had just 3 sdes at some points :(
Yeah, I find that hard to believe as well, not to mention the efficiency loss that you have by people waiting 2 days for a communication cycle to complete. It's hard to argue too much with your manager though when they're the ones who are actually paying everybody.
If by outsourcing you mean ordering their business cards from Vistaprint, no. Otherwise, yes.
You actually know where your business cards come from? Impressive. Still might come from us though depending on who you use.
Definitely not. We have a lot of the opposite, actually. Lots of talent coming here FROM those cheaper salary countries, often as an internal transfer, even.
You also forgot the fact that they are experienced amazon employees and not fresh hires
No, that's exactly my point. OP says outsourcing is happening to save money. If Amazon wanted to do this, they wouldn't move people doing some work so that person can make 3x doing similar work.
Only in dying companies that put cost cutting before quality.
I agree to disagree, just because it’s going out of America does not mean the quality is any lower. Countries like China India Korea .... , education is so competitive. You get to be the top creamy layer to even study a degree you like. That’s the reason you see many Asians in tech industries.
I don't think that OpenTable is saying the quality is lower in those countries, I think he/she is saying if the reason you're going to those countries is to save money you're doing it for the wrong reason.
Only non tech companies outsource their tech and IT departments because they don't care a shit about tech. Tech companies only outsource support engineers and customer service roles because they need representatives who speak local languages. Core development still happens in the US.
It actually started with tech support and IT, then an executive thought "hmmmm, if we can do that..." Just wanted to make sure that if I went to Microsoft, Amazon, etc I wouldn't deal with the same bs.
It's the same reason why most of the stuff you buy is made in China
All public companies are optimizing for profit. If it means outsourcing then that's what's going to happen. Those of us in dev are too cocky to realize it but we are often viewed as a cost center not a value creator.
This is true at a lot of companies. All it would take is the wrong CFO at a FAANG, and I think someday the same could happen there too.
Actually most public companies don't optimize for profit, they optimized for growth and revenue. Now profitable revenue is a way to pay for growth, but profit really isn't the goal, that's why most publicly traded companies don't pay a dividend.
Welcome to the 1990s! The times they are a changing. I can feel it blowing in the wind.
Yes they are!
They restructured the sales team I was on at Oracle in 2017 and sent 1/2 the department overseas for cheaper labor.