There are software engineers all over the world getting paid much less than the US. I feel like tech companies would have done it by now to save money and still have quality work. Why havent they? What's the roadblock? P.S. I know many companies have offices overseas, but I am wondering why they don't hire only from the cheaper areas. Why hire someone expensive like me when you can get it done with someone making half?
They do, it just hasn’t hit you yet thank goodness. Also, in “overseas” they don’t work like 2 weeks a month all things considered. I have counterparts in India and there’s a holiday every other day. Although they make less, they effectively work less too
I think India is always used when talking about cheap software developers, but I don't think that's true anymore. But there are other countries. Like Eastern Europe, middle east, other parts of Asia, even Africa and south America I get that they do, but I'm surprised it's so little and they I'm not noticing the move.
I work with teams in Prague and Russia. Same deal. Holidays frequently, bad deadline motivation. Can’t beat the American work ethic
Because of time zone. Good luck on working across geography when important decision makers are in US.
What about Canada then? Same timezone, much cheaper. Also, even in the US itself there are multiple timezones and cheaper places to hire developers.
Yes Vancouver which is in same time zone as California usually has dev teams but because of lack of enough talent the eng teams are still small. Remote work will be popular after covid but it will be a hybrid model where teams are in same time zone for a country. Imp project will still be here in US and expensive support work goes to cheaper countries
What about Canada UK Singapore and Japan? The salaries are significantly less, while the quality of work should be similar to that in US
Many have tried and failed epically. It requires specific management skills to pull it off. Communication and trusts also play big factors, too.
There are lots of people hired abroad. But you generally want to keep the core business close to you and under control and just outsource less critical sides of the business. There are reasons why this is so, things like time zone, work culture, language barriers. But also you want to keep a close connection between the engineering and high level management to keep the business running so your top engineers need to be close to HQ.
Time zone, language barrier, employment laws
Cause they’re bad especially in India
There had been some success in eastern europe where time zones overlap with the east coast and UK in other companies that I have worked. And this year’s wfh has been an experiment to determine what type of roles need to be in-person full time, in person part-time and can be just effective if done remotely. The fully remote roles will likely be outsourced overtime. Offices will reserve full time seats for those who are expected in person fulltime, then a bunch of hot seats at a reduced ratio for those who only need to be in part time.
They do. It will increase over time, but I think the biggest thing is keeping core business, patents and secrets within the US. Timezone or talent is BS, 9h difference between EU and West Coast is easy to handle as someone who have been working remotely for the team in the US.
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Besides managers wanting to keep everyone under close watch, I think the other reason is legal. You can't enforce US laws abroad.
What do you mean by managers? And what are the US laws that a company would want to keep enforced on employees? IP stuff?
Yep, management wants to keep people near, so that they can check on people to see if they are working and not goofing around. And about laws, there are local laws which are softer than US laws, some others are harder. For example, labor laws are very restrictive in many places, requiring rigid work hours and paid overtime, time off, medical leaves. There are different holidays. You cannot be forced to work on the employer schedule. So many things that it does make any sense. Even hiring within the country is complicated because of local state and city laws. The US legal structure was great for farming in the 1700s, horrible for the global tech industry of the 2000s.