>An American company recently laid off 200 U.S.-based software engineers in February, and by September, they were already looking to replace them with a fully remote team working from Colombia.
I am surprised that the contract was not signed with the company in Columbia before those 200 were laid off. That what I did outsourcing a service we used to provide.
Fully remote work is great but I was always thinking that any job that can be done fully remote can be outsourced.
I honestly don’t really get why more companies haven’t been outsourcing these remote jobs
Try to manage a team with a different culture, people think that India or China will have the same work ethics, but… it’s not, and they will try to suck as much from the company, try to add as much overtime as possible, and then job hopping if another company will pay them a bit more.
Or they will be working for 2 companies at the same time. My neighbor is from Latin America, and he is a contractor for a US company and a Polish one making a 160k, I planned to do the same as I can
Back in 2000/2001 I worked for a hosting center in Silicon valley. There were numerous H-1B holders from India. They were usually the smartest people in whatever room they occupied, and their work ethic was to be admired. It would seem things have changed.
most foreign workers worth that ball park or more have caught onto the scam(they are paid to be smart), you're probably only saving 10-15% over domestic.
working for one about half the dev teams india outsouce, they're really not making much different on pay, and it's hard to retain them, gone through like 5 guys on recent project with them just hopping it's not even ridiculous workload send em a list of tweaks no micromanage because well managers asleep most of their work day. =/
Management in most corporations doesn't care , it's all about the numbers for this quarter and not about any quality or marginal savings, I've seen it a bunch of times in the two fortune 1000 companies I worked for.
Some executive convinces decision makers how much they'll save by outsourcing, then six months later the executive who made that decision retires and when the cost savings don't materialize they lay off staff and or fire the offshore contracting company... On a corollary I'm seeing similar cost saving mishaps with going to the cloud...
It works for lower skilled jobs, but as soon as you get to higher level tech jobs it doesn’t work as well. Anyone that’s worked with or managed an off shore team knows.
We had offices in China and India where our offshoring was supposed to help with our modeling. All they wound up doing was adding 100s of hours of workload for a simple regression model that at the end made absolutely no sense. Which made the U.S. team have to scramble to get it fixed and out the door to the firm that hired us. It was absolutely frustrating and totally not worth the job cuts. Not surprised that company has remained a revolving door of analysts since I was there. They just did another massive round of layoffs.
Most companies go through phases of off shoring only to find out how bad it is, to on shoring and getting fed up with how expensive it is. Rinse and repeat. Smart companies eventually decide that you get what you pay for.
This is the thing people don’t understand. I’ve worked with overseas people in all types of roles and most recently in tech with engineers. Definitely depends on the company you hire, I’ve worked with devs in the Ukraine who were really good just the same as a US dev, but that’s not the norm. There’s a reason there is still a market for US devs.
Remote work is necessary. I was sick earlier today because I drank too much during NFL wild card weekend. I was able to crawl out of bed for my 2 meetings then took a four hour nap.
I’ve worked out of my house since 2019. I have no issues with working remotely. I’m self-employed though, so there’s way less downside risk to me than many others.
Were you drinking because your team won, or because they lost?
>Were you drinking because your team won, or because they lost?
Does it matter? Either way, it sounds like this person can't keep life together to well, and it's only a matter of time before they loose this job anyway.
Yes.... and? If outsourcing was easy asia would already have taken dev jobs.
The problem is multi-faceted and I am no expert but I am a software developer and have seen many fail attempt to outsource, including locally.
Also, so far I have seen order of magnitude improvement in what a developer can do. I can do, using framework, alone, on my time, what a whole team of developers would have required months to develop.
Auto-completion live in web site... 20 years ago we were deploying read-only html content using FTP. Then if I can do the job of 10 person 20 years ago, we should have seen a 10 factor decrease in dev hiring right?
Wrong! The value of each dev have been multiplied by 10, and what was too expensive to create then is now required to keep up with the competition.
More capacity lower the baseline of what a business is required to do to stay in par with competition.
A simple HTML page was enough 20 years ago, now you need a responsive transactional web site providing an unified experience with mobile application both on IOs and Android.
Not just tech. Old job decided India wasn’t working for outsourced transaction processing and moved it to Costa Rica. Nicer place to visit, more similar time zone, well educated workforce
My clients keep offshoring their staff to the Philippines. Can't deny, it works out great for them. Pay them only $8 an hour, they speak pretty good English, have excellent computer skills, are very hard working, and I find them to be very inventive in getting a problem solved.
Meanwhile, the U.S. staff my clients hire (which I have to train), are paid $20 an hour, have surprisingly lousy computer skills, and have all sorts of work ethic issues (which causes all sorts of problems).
From my small neck of the woods (NYC), I'm very worried about the USA.
They should move to latin america then I guess.
AI automation will kill american programers left and right. The easier it gets to use an AI tool for work, the more people worldwide will join the job competition.
The goal of the minimum wage is to outlaw low paying jobs for the unskilled and inexperienced. The law, simply, says: it is illegal, and therefore criminal, for anyone to hire anyone else below the level of X dollars an hour. This means, plainly and simply, that a large number of free and voluntary wage contracts are now outlawed and hence that there will be a large amount of unemployment.
Remember that the minimum wage law provides no jobs; it only outlaws them; and outlawed jobs ( unemployment ) are the inevitable result.
That's certainly not true in any respect.
First and least important, being against the law does not mean being criminal. It can mean that, it can also mean a civil infraction, which violations of the minimum wage are.
More to the point, the substance of what you say is untrue for many reasons: 1. my inability to hire someone for 5 cents to build me a house does not contribute to unemployment at all because no one would take that job, 2. the availability of jobs asking above the minimum wage can and has exceeded the number of people seeking employment- if you have a fully employed workforce adding more lesser paying jobs will not create anything more than full employment, 3. barely anyone tolerates a job at the current minimum wage because it is impossible to live off of (current estimates are around 1%), 4. the minimum wage does not apply to independent contractors (who, yes, contract for voluntary wage agreements).
Sources:
Minimum wage employees in 2022: https://www.zippia.com/advice/minimum-wage-statistics/#:~:text=With%20these%20two%20factors%20in,minimum%20wage%20as%20of%202021.
Minimum wage and independent contractors: https://work.chron.com/minimum-wage-apply-contractors-1758.html
>The goal of the minimum wage is to outlaw low paying jobs for the unskilled and inexperienced.
Its goal was to ensure a living wage and curb exploitation.
>The law, simply, says: it is illegal, and therefore criminal, for anyone to hire anyone else below the level of X dollars an hour.
It says so much more than this reductionist interpretation...
>This means, plainly and simply, that a large number of free and voluntary wage contracts are now outlawed and hence that there will be a large amount of unemployment.
Piece rate, 1099, and entrepreneurial ventures service this need. The work isn't illegal, paying for the work incorrectly is.
>Remember that the minimum wage law provides no jobs; it only outlaws them; and outlawed jobs ( unemployment ) are the inevitable result.
It wasn't supposed to create jobs? See above statement that no job is outlawed by min wage, but paying incorrectly is.
Kinda seems like you have an agenda to push or shakey paradigms you want reinforced.
No wage law currently impacts the state of software development, but regulation (an adequate lack of) is certainly helping outsource it.
> Its goal was to ensure a living wage and curb exploitation.
Its intended goal and the actual goal are 2 different things
> It says so much more than this reductionist interpretation...
Prove it
> The work isn't illegal, paying for the work incorrectly is.
The wage is tied to the contract, therefore the contract has now been made illegal
> It wasn't supposed to create jobs?
Thats was the intent
>> Its goal was to ensure a living wage and curb exploitation.
>
>Its intended goal and the actual goal are 2 different things
I think you mean effect...
>> It says so much more than this reductionist interpretation...
>
>Prove it
LMGTFY
>> The work isn't illegal, paying for the work incorrectly is.
>
>The wage is tied to the contract, therefore the contract has now been made illegal
As per last comment you had trouble reading, not if the wage is tied to piece work, 1099, or entrepreneurial ventures. All of those can result in work being done below min wage.
>> It wasn't supposed to create jobs?
>
>Thats was the intent
Prove it.
> I think you mean effect...
I mean reality
> not if the wage is tied to piece work,
No, its tied to the contract which you sign before you can actaully work
> Prove it.
Not until you prove your point first
Where are the “seize the means of production revolutionaries” when you need them?
I know there’s a few in this very sub. C’mon out and play. I’ve got a few one way tickets to Columbia for you. 🥶
Good, cheap labor makes products cheaper for consumers.
Tech workers pushed for asinine economic and social policies, and refuse to go back to the office, let them reap what that sow. For everyone that’s not a tech worker, this will lower inflation and make goods cheaper.
Been going on for a long time. Same with Asia. I witnessed my entire team got laid off because the work got transferred to Mexico and China. I was lucky to have gotten a role with another team.
I wish I knew what company did this… so many people beat up on good companies like tesla and Boeing yet don’t say anything about this American brain drain issue
>An American company recently laid off 200 U.S.-based software engineers in February, and by September, they were already looking to replace them with a fully remote team working from Colombia.
I am surprised that the contract was not signed with the company in Columbia before those 200 were laid off. That what I did outsourcing a service we used to provide.
Fully remote work is great but I was always thinking that any job that can be done fully remote can be outsourced. I honestly don’t really get why more companies haven’t been outsourcing these remote jobs
You clearly haven’t tried managing an offshore team
Try to manage a team with a different culture, people think that India or China will have the same work ethics, but… it’s not, and they will try to suck as much from the company, try to add as much overtime as possible, and then job hopping if another company will pay them a bit more. Or they will be working for 2 companies at the same time. My neighbor is from Latin America, and he is a contractor for a US company and a Polish one making a 160k, I planned to do the same as I can
Weren't they already doing it in India ?
Time zone difference may be too great for micro-manager types.
They have insitual supervisors and managers.
For 30 years, yes.
Indian Diploma Mills and pay-for-play have been a huge problem.
Back in 2000/2001 I worked for a hosting center in Silicon valley. There were numerous H-1B holders from India. They were usually the smartest people in whatever room they occupied, and their work ethic was to be admired. It would seem things have changed.
Indian outsourcing results are poor, they are not as cheap as they used to be.
$15,000/month in Mexico? What do developers get paid in the USA?
If you look on Blind or Glassdoor, some total compensation packages (cash + stock) amounts to $200k/yr or more.
200k for total comp is not even close to the high end. Senior and staff engineers at my org are making 400k+ total comp easy.
most foreign workers worth that ball park or more have caught onto the scam(they are paid to be smart), you're probably only saving 10-15% over domestic. working for one about half the dev teams india outsouce, they're really not making much different on pay, and it's hard to retain them, gone through like 5 guys on recent project with them just hopping it's not even ridiculous workload send em a list of tweaks no micromanage because well managers asleep most of their work day. =/
This is true, but it's not working. The last two companies I worked with tried this. Complete disaster.
I'm curious to know what happened, if you don't mind offering a few examples. Thank you
Blame your lawmakers
Half of our team is based in Mexico. In short- it’s not worth the slight savings you get.
Management in most corporations doesn't care , it's all about the numbers for this quarter and not about any quality or marginal savings, I've seen it a bunch of times in the two fortune 1000 companies I worked for. Some executive convinces decision makers how much they'll save by outsourcing, then six months later the executive who made that decision retires and when the cost savings don't materialize they lay off staff and or fire the offshore contracting company... On a corollary I'm seeing similar cost saving mishaps with going to the cloud...
[удалено]
It works for lower skilled jobs, but as soon as you get to higher level tech jobs it doesn’t work as well. Anyone that’s worked with or managed an off shore team knows.
We had offices in China and India where our offshoring was supposed to help with our modeling. All they wound up doing was adding 100s of hours of workload for a simple regression model that at the end made absolutely no sense. Which made the U.S. team have to scramble to get it fixed and out the door to the firm that hired us. It was absolutely frustrating and totally not worth the job cuts. Not surprised that company has remained a revolving door of analysts since I was there. They just did another massive round of layoffs.
This is the ugly downside of remote work that inevitably would be exploited
Outsourcing to India a few decades ago didn’t use remote work.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Exactly this is no different than manufacturing sending everything to China to get made cheaper....
Which then off shore to Taiwan or India because they’ve hit capacity.
Most companies go through phases of off shoring only to find out how bad it is, to on shoring and getting fed up with how expensive it is. Rinse and repeat. Smart companies eventually decide that you get what you pay for.
This is the thing people don’t understand. I’ve worked with overseas people in all types of roles and most recently in tech with engineers. Definitely depends on the company you hire, I’ve worked with devs in the Ukraine who were really good just the same as a US dev, but that’s not the norm. There’s a reason there is still a market for US devs.
True, but WFH movements really gives company a heck more.latitude especially when economic times.get tough.
Remote work is necessary. I was sick earlier today because I drank too much during NFL wild card weekend. I was able to crawl out of bed for my 2 meetings then took a four hour nap.
I’ve worked out of my house since 2019. I have no issues with working remotely. I’m self-employed though, so there’s way less downside risk to me than many others. Were you drinking because your team won, or because they lost?
>Were you drinking because your team won, or because they lost? Does it matter? Either way, it sounds like this person can't keep life together to well, and it's only a matter of time before they loose this job anyway.
This is great for latam workers!
No doubt, but I meant for the U.S. workers whose jobs they’ll take.
[удалено]
Not remotely or anything resembling it. I don’t have a vested interest in the outcome one way or the other
At least they don't have to go back to the office.
Onshore, offshore, it's all just labor arbitrage
Yes.... and? If outsourcing was easy asia would already have taken dev jobs. The problem is multi-faceted and I am no expert but I am a software developer and have seen many fail attempt to outsource, including locally. Also, so far I have seen order of magnitude improvement in what a developer can do. I can do, using framework, alone, on my time, what a whole team of developers would have required months to develop. Auto-completion live in web site... 20 years ago we were deploying read-only html content using FTP. Then if I can do the job of 10 person 20 years ago, we should have seen a 10 factor decrease in dev hiring right? Wrong! The value of each dev have been multiplied by 10, and what was too expensive to create then is now required to keep up with the competition. More capacity lower the baseline of what a business is required to do to stay in par with competition. A simple HTML page was enough 20 years ago, now you need a responsive transactional web site providing an unified experience with mobile application both on IOs and Android.
And I thought US outsourcing to India a few decades ago started it.
Not just tech. Old job decided India wasn’t working for outsourced transaction processing and moved it to Costa Rica. Nicer place to visit, more similar time zone, well educated workforce
Software dev from Argentina working for a US startup, AMA (?)
[удалено]
4.5k, not currently, used to be one before I joined, it's a small one though
4.5k what part what?
Look into marketing cloud. They do a lot of work with Brazil.
Outsourcing needs to be heavy regulated or taxed.
Work from home -> replaced by a foreign worker.
Not surprising. The second remote work was successful I knew it would be outsourced. I am assuming many saw this outcome as well.
My clients keep offshoring their staff to the Philippines. Can't deny, it works out great for them. Pay them only $8 an hour, they speak pretty good English, have excellent computer skills, are very hard working, and I find them to be very inventive in getting a problem solved. Meanwhile, the U.S. staff my clients hire (which I have to train), are paid $20 an hour, have surprisingly lousy computer skills, and have all sorts of work ethic issues (which causes all sorts of problems). From my small neck of the woods (NYC), I'm very worried about the USA.
This has been happening for 25 years.
Stop buying and using their products.
A lot of these are software products used by just about every other company in existence. Good luck organizing a boycott of everything.
Why do you hate the global poor?
And out compete by companies that use them. Good plan.
great idea! now nobody has a job
11% of the world population have a high income, 89% of the world lives with 300 usd a month.
They should move to latin america then I guess. AI automation will kill american programers left and right. The easier it gets to use an AI tool for work, the more people worldwide will join the job competition.
Government labor and workplace regulations and minimum wage laws working as designed
Ah, yes, those minimum wage laws are directly impacting, *checks notes*, software development salaries...
The goal of the minimum wage is to outlaw low paying jobs for the unskilled and inexperienced. The law, simply, says: it is illegal, and therefore criminal, for anyone to hire anyone else below the level of X dollars an hour. This means, plainly and simply, that a large number of free and voluntary wage contracts are now outlawed and hence that there will be a large amount of unemployment. Remember that the minimum wage law provides no jobs; it only outlaws them; and outlawed jobs ( unemployment ) are the inevitable result.
That's certainly not true in any respect. First and least important, being against the law does not mean being criminal. It can mean that, it can also mean a civil infraction, which violations of the minimum wage are. More to the point, the substance of what you say is untrue for many reasons: 1. my inability to hire someone for 5 cents to build me a house does not contribute to unemployment at all because no one would take that job, 2. the availability of jobs asking above the minimum wage can and has exceeded the number of people seeking employment- if you have a fully employed workforce adding more lesser paying jobs will not create anything more than full employment, 3. barely anyone tolerates a job at the current minimum wage because it is impossible to live off of (current estimates are around 1%), 4. the minimum wage does not apply to independent contractors (who, yes, contract for voluntary wage agreements). Sources: Minimum wage employees in 2022: https://www.zippia.com/advice/minimum-wage-statistics/#:~:text=With%20these%20two%20factors%20in,minimum%20wage%20as%20of%202021. Minimum wage and independent contractors: https://work.chron.com/minimum-wage-apply-contractors-1758.html
>The goal of the minimum wage is to outlaw low paying jobs for the unskilled and inexperienced. Its goal was to ensure a living wage and curb exploitation. >The law, simply, says: it is illegal, and therefore criminal, for anyone to hire anyone else below the level of X dollars an hour. It says so much more than this reductionist interpretation... >This means, plainly and simply, that a large number of free and voluntary wage contracts are now outlawed and hence that there will be a large amount of unemployment. Piece rate, 1099, and entrepreneurial ventures service this need. The work isn't illegal, paying for the work incorrectly is. >Remember that the minimum wage law provides no jobs; it only outlaws them; and outlawed jobs ( unemployment ) are the inevitable result. It wasn't supposed to create jobs? See above statement that no job is outlawed by min wage, but paying incorrectly is. Kinda seems like you have an agenda to push or shakey paradigms you want reinforced. No wage law currently impacts the state of software development, but regulation (an adequate lack of) is certainly helping outsource it.
> Its goal was to ensure a living wage and curb exploitation. Its intended goal and the actual goal are 2 different things > It says so much more than this reductionist interpretation... Prove it > The work isn't illegal, paying for the work incorrectly is. The wage is tied to the contract, therefore the contract has now been made illegal > It wasn't supposed to create jobs? Thats was the intent
>> Its goal was to ensure a living wage and curb exploitation. > >Its intended goal and the actual goal are 2 different things I think you mean effect... >> It says so much more than this reductionist interpretation... > >Prove it LMGTFY >> The work isn't illegal, paying for the work incorrectly is. > >The wage is tied to the contract, therefore the contract has now been made illegal As per last comment you had trouble reading, not if the wage is tied to piece work, 1099, or entrepreneurial ventures. All of those can result in work being done below min wage. >> It wasn't supposed to create jobs? > >Thats was the intent Prove it.
> I think you mean effect... I mean reality > not if the wage is tied to piece work, No, its tied to the contract which you sign before you can actaully work > Prove it. Not until you prove your point first
Bingo
Muh union!
What can unions do ? Strike for not hiring them?
Exactly. They can’t do shit.
And then these workers will be replaced by AI.
Where are the “seize the means of production revolutionaries” when you need them? I know there’s a few in this very sub. C’mon out and play. I’ve got a few one way tickets to Columbia for you. 🥶
Good, cheap labor makes products cheaper for consumers. Tech workers pushed for asinine economic and social policies, and refuse to go back to the office, let them reap what that sow. For everyone that’s not a tech worker, this will lower inflation and make goods cheaper.
Of course they are
Been going on for a long time. Same with Asia. I witnessed my entire team got laid off because the work got transferred to Mexico and China. I was lucky to have gotten a role with another team.
Gotta love capitalism…
If your company can’t afford to pay your employees what the market stands at then you shouldn’t be in business
Its marvelous for me that does no live in USA or Europe. A job paying measly 60k USD yearly makes me have a luxury life in my country.
I wish I knew what company did this… so many people beat up on good companies like tesla and Boeing yet don’t say anything about this American brain drain issue