
Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India - SQL2219
https://www.businessinsider.in/business/news/uber-is-struggling-due-to-covid19-now-it-wants-to-cut-costs-by-shifting-its-engineering-to-india/articleshow/76768028.cms
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mabbo
A better option: shift it's engineering to _everywhere else in America_ , and
go full-remote, but pay less.

Imagine if Uber told it's developers: we're cutting salaries by 40%- but you
are now full-remote, and we want you to live somewhere less expensive than SV.
Spread out across America!

A lot of folks would quit. But some would see the incredible opportunity. In
that situation, I'd move somewhere like Chattanooga TN- average rent at around
$1000/month, vs SF's $3000-5000. Food is cheaper too. And being a city, it's
far less conservative than you'd think (well, okay, it _is_ TN).

They could cut their engineering costs dramatically while improving the
overall lifestyle of their developers.

And given we're soon going to be in a post-pandemic world where tightly-packed
open offices don't exist anymore, they'd probably just be ahead of the rest of
us by a few months if they did it.

~~~
felixarba
This is not as good as it sounds just because it works for you.

People don't love moving, and they usually move for better work opportunities,
not to accomodate a pay cut at their current job. Moving to a lower cost of
living area also means moving to an area with less opportunities, and not to
mention moving away from your social circles and the life you have established
somewhere.

The only way I can see this working if uber started hiring bew remote
engineers in the US, but asking their current ones to move from SF so they can
take a pay cut?

~~~
itake
To add to this when I worked remotely for two years I was always worried that
if I move to a low cost of living city and I lost my job I will be screwed. No
one would hire me at the rate I was paid with the SF company.

~~~
nkingsy
This has happened to me. Ended up working for a very scary company because
they were the only local option that came close to matching my bay area
salary. Moved back to the Bay Area less than a year later.

Lesson learned, I won’t be moving again without a relocation package

~~~
lumost
This has always been my big concern with leaving a major tech city ( even to
go to the suburbs ). your opportunities shrink.

I'd be curious if this will change as more companies offer full-time remote.

~~~
ghaff
Silicon Valley (mostly) is "the suburbs." Although there are more tech jobs in
downtowns than there used to be, in a lot of areas most of the tech jobs are
in suburbs/exurbs.

~~~
lumost
It's a bit different here on the East Coast. While there are plenty of options
in the suburbs - the number within an individuals commuting radius drops.

~~~
ghaff
There are a lot of pretty bad commutes in SV too.

I live (well) outside of Boston. About 20 years ago, there wasn't a single
real tech employer in the city. That's changed primarily with Kendall and the
Seaport. But there's still a huge amount in Metrowest and some in the northern
suburbs going up to southern NH.

I've been lucky that through several jobs I've never had a really bad commute
except into Boston for a time--but I didn't have to do it every day and there
is a commuter rail.

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bgdam
Wow, some rampant generalization in this thread. What most people outside of
India seem to fail to understand is that most of the experience they have had
and stories they've heard of are based off of poorly paid, not very highly
skilled engineers employed at body shop consultancies.

There is also another class of software engineers in India who are as good as
SV engineers who work at companies like Ola, Bookmyshow, PayTM, Flipkart etc.
building quality products at quite a large scale. This is the kind of engineer
who is also hired by FAANG/Microsoft/Uber etc. And these engineers are paid
very well in comparison to the body shop guys.

So when Uber says they might shift engineering to India, that doesn't
automatically mean quality is going to shit.

~~~
anonms-coward
Yup, Flipkart has one of the best mobile websites of any ecommerce app. Far
better than the likes of Walmart and Target.

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exhaze
As someone who worked at Uber from 2014-2018, I'd like to weigh in with some
observations based on my experience.

1). While Uber has been very Bay Area-heavy, it has had a distributed
engineering team for many of its core operations for a very long time. For
example, many of its core infrastructure was built in Europe. Cross-timezone
collaboration hasn't been the smoothest, but of all the large "FANGish" tech
companies, Uber actually has the most experience with non-HQ teams building
business-critical systems. Even companies seen as very progressive in terms of
eng culture, like Stripe, seem to keep the core business close to HQ (this is
my subjective observation, and I'd love to proven wrong here, because I think
Stripe, as a whole, is awesome).

2). India is a country with many people and many engineers. If there's one
strong believe I can state in this post, it's that there are many incredibly
talented engineers who are living in India and are choosing to stay there.
Uber has experience in building engineering teams outside of HQ. It's not a
sure thing, but I think they can do it.

Happy to answer any other questions or comments.

(I guess as a disclaimer, I have zero financial stake in Uber, but I have some
friends who still work at Uber, so that may or may not influence my opinion)

~~~
cworth
> of all the large "FANGish" tech companies, Uber actually has the most
> experience with non-HQ teams building business-critical systems.

Tangential, but the core product of AWS, EC2, was developed in South Africa
and (largely) continues to be today.

~~~
slenk
Huh, I didn't know that.

Although I would argue that S3 is the core product

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KingOfCoders
The challenge with outsourcing is management overhead and turn around times.
Biggest mistake I see my customers make is outsource and not control the
quality of the engineers.

Inhouse they have a sophisticated and long recruiting process. When
outsourcing they take the first they get (and as a new customer, be assured,
you do not get the best engineers but you need to fight to get them).

~~~
wobbly_bush
> The challenge with outsourcing

This article is not talking about outsourcing but offshoring. Uber still has
total control on the people, the project and rewarding the right behavior. It
will just happen in India instead of the US.

~~~
KingOfCoders
Working for a very large tech company as a technical manager with lots of
offshoring to India and outsourcing to East-Europe and the Middle-East it
didn't feel there was a difference between how outsourcing and offshoring
worked regarding engineer quality or turn around times.

But you are right.

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foepys
How does the SV crowd here see this? Considering that even entry web devs with
only bootcamp experience often enough make >$100,000, outsourcing to India is
a good idea, economically speaking.

Could a successful outsourcing project by Uber threaten all SV tech jobs?

~~~
katbyte
No. To get the same amount of quality in india you’ll be paying roughly the
same - and then have cultural and timezone barriers.

~~~
joefourier
What about moving to Europe? Salaries in the UK, Ireland, Germany and the
Netherlands are much lower than in the US, and even lower in Central/Eastern
Europe. While the timezone barrier is still there (although lower than India),
the work culture is basically the same as in the United States (except with
more work-life balance).

Actually, why not Canada? Salaries are again much lower than Silicon Valley,
the timezone is the same, the language is the same (except in Quebec), and it
would be great to stop Canadian software engineers from moving to the US in
droves due to lack of opportunities at home.

~~~
thrawa934234
The difference b/w salaries in EU/E.Asia and India are not that large for
FAANG-like companies IMO. It's likely the case that Uber will allow its Indian
employees to relocate back to India, in light of both Covid and the new visa
restrictions.

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softwaredoug
Isn’t this a dupe from a few days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23713291](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23713291)

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ageofwant
Well this has worked great for Boeing, a once great American engineering
company.

On the other hand India has an excellent education system and highly skilled
engineers, and any capital flow away from the five big cities in the world
that sinks the vast majority of it can only be a good thing.

~~~
_tw9j
> India has an excellent education system

Explain in which way is it excellent?

Which part do you think Indian education system does well relatively?

~~~
bhaavan
A significant portion of the current SV crowd on H1b, is a product of the
indian education system.

~~~
_tw9j
> A significant portion of the current SV crowd on H1b, is a product of the
> indian education system.

Could you be more elaborate?

I can see that statement meaning wildly different things on HN and it doesn't
answer my question.

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breitling
Shift innovation to India?

Have they seen India's track record on tech innovation? The education system
there does not produce very innovative people or engineers. However they are
great at following exact instructions so I'm sure that part of engineering
team will do well

~~~
iamstupidsimple
They produce plenty of competent engineers, but my layman's interpretation is
the problem of capital being concentrated in Silicon Valley, so there's little
chance for tech entrepreneurs to flourish within India itself.

~~~
breitling
No doubt they produce many great engineers, my argument is that they are not
necessarily innovative (having studied in the same system, I've seen it first
hand)

~~~
harpratap
Innovation is a result of many factors, keeps changing with time. The Japanese
were the top innovators for many decades, not so much anymore.

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thomk
If I were Lyft I would fairly quickly start plastering "Build in America"
everywhere. If it isn't true, I would make it true.

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anonms-coward
I think we might see more instances of this happening, not less. The thing is
SF salaries are very high compared to just anywhere else in the world. There
are many reasons for that (high rent, high concentration of talent), but I
doubt these justify paying 300k when Uber can pay 80k to an engineer in India.
To people saying the difference in salary is not large, it absolutely is
large, and they can check
[https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Uber/Google](https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Uber/Google)
for some data points. Not to mention this is just salary, cost of employment
will include more things like real estate costs, health insurance, all of
which will make this even bigger.

Also, India has good enough engineering talent that product quality shouldn't
be an issue given good technical leadership. If companies can hire people
straight out of bootcamps for entry level jobs, they can sure get better value
by hiring someone having a very good CSE education at much lower cost. Even
the vast majority of work at FAANGs doesn't require a Dave Cutler or Jeff
Dean. For example, majority of engineers at Google are not working on Search,
Colossus,BigTable,Spanner,Borg or the most important technologies. Most
engineers just need to know how to use BigTable/Spanner, and that is much
easier than designing them.

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ingend88
India is well suited for building and supporting applications like this since
it has an extremely good talent pool that can manage and deploy solutions.
Uber app in itself is not that difficult to operate and hence I strongly
believe this is the right thing for shareholders.

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elicox
First we move the factories to others countries and now we are moving the
brains. If this extend, this will be the end of middle class in west society.

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tijuco2
I was a Uber driver for two years and year after year they keep saying they
are struggling. I really don't get it. On a ride where passenger pays 20
bucks, they usually keep something like 8 dollars. How can it not be
profitable? The computational and human resource necessary to make a ride
happen can't be that high. Maybe they should fire their CTO and CFO.

~~~
playeren
It's the growth that costs money.

Operational costs have only recently become a concern, after becoming publicly
traded.

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ulfw
What big thing do they still have to develop in their core app? They don’t to
send self-driving etc to India.

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temporarysdwvit
How is code quality control in India?

~~~
yesplorer
No, it's cheaper because of huge difference in cost of living.

$10,000/month may not go far in SV, but in parts of India, you can live like a
king, literally, with servants and such.

Rent for a studio apartment in India will cost less than $200. I'm not
kidding. But a similar space in SV can cost 10 times more of that.

~~~
anonms-coward
I think you replied to the wrong comment.

~~~
temporarysdwvit
No, it’s the right one, I removed controversial sentence

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interdrift
What a huge mistake in my opinion if that goes through. Everyone who worked
with indian companies should keep an eye on what's going on. Far too much more
damage can be done!

~~~
anonms-coward
I think you are comparing it to the wrong scenario. Hiring for your own
company(Uber in this case) is far different than outsourcing to an Indian
company like Infosys and TCS. Microsoft already has a huge presence in India,
and so does Amazon. I have interacted with engineers in FAANG in both India
and the west coast, and there is no huge quality difference in people on the
same job levels.

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ravenstine
Wouldn't it only be fair for us to be handing more jobs to those with greater
need in countries like India? Share the wealth, right?

~~~
bluedevil2k
Fair to whom? The investors who are now taking on a greater project risk? The
SV developers who would be losing out on jobs?

