For last 40 years, computer tech enjoyed unprecedented growth, which brought lot of goodness and riches around the world, especially northern america. Due to strong demand for decades, the educational system and funding system has now figured out how to meet current and future need of coding labor at lower spend. It's not current government but more of a general wave to ride globalization to scale. Northern America no longer requires large development hubs, just controlling centers. The side effects are already being seen on temp worker programs. If people think those jobs are going to be taken by resident non-aliens, it's not going to happen. Overall tech blue collar is under attack. Next 10 years, there will be rapid decline in northern American blue collar tech worker TC and worldwide normalization of tech labor wages. It was done on industrial manufacturing few decades ago, and it will be repeated to meet digitization scale world wide. What would you do if scenario I am painting becomes true. I just hired a very sharp programmer at 18$ per hour(includes middle man) in Eastern Europe. He can solve leetcode hard, works 12 hours a day, speaks English and knows all silicon valley software gadgets. Beats the ivy league undergrad Caucasian American, international master's candidate from South East Asia from tier-1 colleges (2) and experienced Chinese valley worker. It's coming.... PS: this is a scenario, happy to be proven wrong but this is how I see it. Healthy debate/scrutiny is welcome.
Cool story
You can still do that in India, same price. Its been happening since last20 years
Quality of India based Indian programmers is not that high. They are too demanding and their QoS varies a lot. Even NIT/IIT bunch these days too lazy to keep up with demands of the west.
Globalization & automation were primary reasons for decline in industrial labor pool. Software industry has seen globalization for the last decade & yet here we are today. The fact that more Eastern Europeans add to this global pool & dilute TC is an overstatement. More demand is created everyday (due to automation) than supply. As for your example, its only a matter of time before that 18$ hour engineer realizes they are grossly underpaid
It's the push and pull model. Traditionally valley had 1:10 ratio of venture fund to established companies investing in R&D which is declining. The stock market boom is hiding that fact in plain sight. VC funds have started diversifying in 10 years and the established firms are doing that more aggressively to keep up with wall street expectations. The shifts are slow but happening. There won't be any venue for the Eastern European candidate to make more and chances are, there will be local competition to drive that number down.
Companies are still investing. Its the VC funding that has bridged the gap. Overall more funding is flowing into tech.
u trippin bruh
Nope, it's a scenario and likely one from my point of view.
Fundamentally what you are saying is true. Tech job TCs are deviation from mean and over period of time it has to go back to mean. Only gotcha is I think tech is just getting started and everything we touch need to get digitalized. We are very far from that utopia. So I say we have quite a bit of runway left.
I agree with this
Precisely, during 3rd industrial revolution, in order to achieve massive scale the cost of labor had to come down. Scale requires low COGS. Coding is already becoming commodity and wages would decline.
Go do AI dude. Surely only smartest people in US can do
Demand is still going up faster than supply. High quality eastern European programmers are not new. It will take 50 years for this to play out, although I do agree it is likely.
The supply of those people is very limited.
Can you substaintiate this ? Demand for what ? I am talking blue collar tech jobs, which is coding without any domain requirements.
I agree with op here, I recently read that now new hires do not require any degree to get in so, most of the hiring is from coding boot camps and community colleges. It’s a win - win situation for companies either way.
You are correct if you look at basic coding where the programmer is just turning requirements into code. As a product manager I have been making the case for some time that the engineers that want to just be order takers and not contribute to the larger creative process will be commoditized. If I have to go through the trouble of writing requirements for everything I am essential pseudo coding the thing and the programmer is just translating that into code and at that point it doesn’t matter if you are in India or the US and I am going to pick the lowest cost option. However if you look at top performing engineers (notice I didn’t say programmers) they work to understand the business and the problems that the team needs to solve and fully engage in the creative process. This cannot easily be outsource and in my opinion is what is required if you want to continue to demand a premium as an engineer. TLDR if all you do is translate requirements into code prepare to take a pay cut. If you want to avoid that level up and find a job or position that allows you to not just be a programmer but an engineer who understand the business and is expert at solving customer problems.
I agree. The commanding center is going to remain in America. All other nations would try and build competency centers like that. On a given project one needs very few such engineers though , rest is commodity. Giving manufacturing analogy, for every 50-100 operator you have line supervisor and process eingineer who got bigger picture in that room,rest are aiding cookie cutting.
Would these be “Solutions Engineer” and “Solution Architect”? The hybrid of tech and business?
And people told me I was crazy when I said tc would go down if we keep teaching everyone to code!
Do those people not understand supply and demand?