> It does go against the notion that lower cost of labor places are safer from cuts, though.
Interesting, people were talking about remote work meaning that companies will now pay less due to a global talent pool, but it might just go to show that workers are not all fungible with other workers in different countries. It rings of the same fears as outsourcing a few decades ago.
People vastly underestimated the effect the timezone difference would have. Years ago I worked closely with a team in India, and I will never do a job that requires that again. The engineers were fine, but the timezone difference made things hellish for everyone - someone was either staying super late or getting up super early (time difference was 11.5 hours). I contrast that with a team I work with now from South America - they're also high quality developers, but, importantly, the time difference is only a couple hours so nobody has to sacrifice their personal lives.
indian developers are extraordinarily talented. it's just more convenient to give up on them in one go. good luck to github for hiring in india again in the future. very short-sighted
Anecdotally, from at least 2005 to 2015, every single India-based team had negative productivity output across the 5 SoCal companies I worked for, as an engineer. At 4 of the companies, the India teams were liquidated during my tenure. In 2 cases, one or two top performers were cherry picked out and brought to the US on work visas. These individuals each became US citizens, in time. They are awesome and they are still good friends of mine.
Anecdotally, the us teams I have worked with are surprisingly bureaucratic and super bloated. The reason they were NOT liquidated was because they controlled the purse strings.
Precisely. Especially in India - which is almost as large a time zone offset as you can have. Furthermore, India pays competitively enough that you’re not saving that much money for top talent as compared to e.g Eastern Europe. When I ran engineering teams, the language/dialect barrier between our US mothership and India was much much wider than South American and European devs, even though India is technically the largest English-speaking country in the world.
It makes perfect sense: the "natural" lines would give India two time zones; combining them into one half-hour time zone gives the whole country the same time.
It did cause problems with the early Bell Labs Unix releases, which didn't contemplate that a time zone might not be a whole number of hours away from Greenwich.
Surely India as a large federal nation would be OK with two time zones! It makes about as much sense as China having one time zone for its sixty degrees of longitude.
You don't have to adjust the clocks though, you can adjust business hours instead. Just look at Spain, which shares the same timezone as Poland: they simply wake up/go to bed later on the clock, but not with regard to the sun.
Spain is a good example of a politically-motivated time zone. Prior to Franco putting the country in CET to be in line with Axis powers, it was in GMT, which makes a lot more natural sense.
> they simply wake up/go to bed later on the clock, but not with regard to the sun.
This defeats the purpose of having time zones at all. People generally prefer the sun near overhead at noon; otherwise we would all just set our clocks to UTC no matter where we are. It would certainly make programmers' lives easier ;-)
The offset between local noon and time-zone noon is never that large, nowhere near what it's like in China, and it actually puts the center of the country closer to solar time. So it seems a reasonable thing to do, better than having the TZ line right in the middle where the railroads will keep crossing it.
> Furthermore, India pays competitively enough that you’re not saving that much money for top talent as compared to e.g Eastern Europe
According to levels they're probably making 15-20% the equivalent salary of github employees with similar YoE in the U.S. But you're right, eastern europeans probably have similar wages.
Until ~2010, Belarus was until someone went all-in with Moscow.
Ukraine is (and still will be) an excellent outsourcing opportunity. Personally, I find it very easy to understand Slavic-speaking English as a secondary language speakers.
In general, there can be word use, humor, and cultural media reference difficulties, so it's important to always use very plain and direct language to avoid misunderstandings. To further comprehension and understanding, it's beneficial to say the same thing again in different words and ask for their understanding of details in yet other words.
PS: Early/mid 2022, I bought items on Etsy postmarked from Kyiv. Somehow, sellers forwarded parcels to Germany and Turkey and then to the US between shellings, missile attacks, and columns of Russian armor advancing.
The hardest time I’ve had communicating at work has been with native English speakers from India. They have such a strong accent and such different idioms. Same to some extent with Singlish.
The problem is they really are speaking perfectly legal English, with grammar better than mine, but it’s a different dialect. Not true of ESL Indians.
Native English speakers make up 0.02% of India's population. I've worked in tech for a decade and have met exactly zero native English speakers in India. I honestly have no idea what you're talking about.
I’ve spent long enough in the industry that I am relatively comfortable with many of the accents, I would love a class to exist that teaches non-Indians the dialect.
I think after about a year in tech consulting I developed a pretty robust ability to understand accents that most Americans have trouble with. Chinese, Russian, Indian, Nigerian, you name it. I guess if someone wants to practice they could listen to Kitboga or something.
Absolutely, that's what I'm trying to say - that they have accents, and we have accents, and they're different. I sure as shit don't speak the Queen's English, which is etymologically closer to what they speak
The impact of the timezone difference was greatly underestimated by people. During my prior experience working closely with a team in India, I realized that I would never take up a job that demands it again. Although the engineers were competent, the +10 hour time difference caused inconvenience to everyone for sure. Either someone had to work very early or very late... everyday
I'm not privy to anything special here, but I do get the impression that (intuitively) it's easier to target layoffs in areas with weaker employee protection laws. In most EU countries, it's pretty hard to make these kinds of redundancies without going through a slow and expensive process, as well as paying severance.
Are you implying that employee protection laws are weak in India? They are not. I have multiple, first hand experiences where it was very difficult to layoff underperforming staff. It is much easier to layoff in US and UK. (Continental Europe is a mixed bag.)
IT and biotech industries are typically exempted from many employment laws. VC-subsidised, chronically unprofitable companies have laid off tens of thousands of people in the past few months.
I doubt they axed an entire team for monetary reasons alone. They could have axed 1/10th the employees in the bay area and probably covered the entire India roster (financial cost wise).
Senior-level engineers in India, of the caliber that GitHub would hire, easily clear USD 100k+/year. It's not as expensive as Bay Area talent but not cheap either.
We just haven’t done a great job of building awareness for all of our different locations, but you can find them on our location directory here: https://levels.fyi/locations
Wouldn't these protective laws help promote outsourcing tho? Less headache, not to mention wages
Similar to that in finance, where big corporations have the luxury to establish entities in tax heavens and avoid paying large sums while still operating just fine
This is generally true. The same laws that make employees harder to be fired also means companies are more reluctant to hire them, since the cost of making a bad hire is that much higher. France is famous for having more than double the number of companies with exactly 49 employees than exactly 50 employees, and you can guess the reason why.
That is also why France has a high level of labor productivity. The least productive workers never get hired at all because no employer wants to take a chance on them. In highly regulated labor markets it's particularly tough for marginalized youths to get started and work their way out of the underclass.
> it's particularly tough for marginalized youths to get started and work their way out of the underclass.
Yes, this is the point I always want to emphasize. Policies like this always favor those already inside (the existing workers being protected by tough-to-fire laws) at the expense of those looking inside from the outside (the newly-grads and members of marginalized groups trying to get started). I similarly disfavor minimum wage laws.
I am trying to understand this more. Why would a minimum wage law be unfriendly to a specific class of workers? Doesn't that just establish a right for the worker and an obligation for the employer to meet.
What about pay transparency rules for job postings (that are mandatory in some jurisdictions)? In principle, I feel they help the job seeker although corporations get away with specifying a wide range. At least, it establishes the start of the salary negotiation.
Some workers aren't worth paying minimum wage. They stay unemployed because no employer will pay more than they're worth. If we set the minimum wage at $15 / hour then what do we do with people whose labor is only worth $14 / hour?
Transparency rules are fine and don't inhibit employment.
I appreciate the counter viewpoint; Thank you. I had not considered that.
> Some workers aren't worth paying minimum wage
I don't necessarily agree with the statement above. If a worker is not qualified for the job, don't hire them. Just as we would not hire someone who is say at 2x the compensation budget for a role.
I do agree with the issue of what we do as a society with people who don't meet that threshold minimum wage and are unemployed. That number is never going to be zero, but it is not 30-40% either (US context). So, it probably requires targeted policy solutions like unemployment benefits, universal basic income, social safety net etc.,
Your solution seems to be doing away with the minimum wage to provide them employability at some wage level. That is interesting. I feel that has the unintended consequence of suppressing wages for the larger percentage of employable new workforce (recent grads etc.,)
The other commenter already made the point that not all work has an economic value higher than the legally-mandated floor of wages, which I'll take as axiomatically true and won't explore further.
The more interesting follow-on point, however, is that people have to start somewhere, and effects compound over time. Someone fresh out of high school or college is, generally speaking, useless at any given job on day one. Most job training happens on the job, even for people with college degrees. A new employee is a double cost to the employer until they reach proficiency; they have to be paid wages, and they take time away from somebody else who has to train them.
And through that path someone learns not only the job-specific skill, but also the general skill of being a productive member of the workforce: discipline, time management, grit, people skills. Over time this learning compounds, and they move up in income.
The way that a minimum wage that is too high is unfriendly to the already-underserved is precisely because they miss out on that critical experience. Sure, it might seem exploitative at first glance if a local burger joint hires a kid right out of high school and pays them $5 an hour, and doubly so if the kid is from a disadvantaged class. But the fact is that they will learn from this experience (and crucially, more than just about flipping burgers) and level up and move on. The rich kid gets to skip this step and go right into a job that pays $30 an hour, because they have the unpaid internships and the social connections and everything else that makes them more prepared; that is, they have already leveled up to a degree.
Proponents of a higher minimum wage imply a picture where the people getting paid minimum or near-minimum wages are stuck there for life, perhaps for generations. Actual data shows otherwise; only a third of people born to parents in the bottom quintile of incomes remain in that same bottom quintile in their own adulthood. And on the other side, only a third of people born in the top quintile remain there. Under some analyses, the only group that stagnated were the beneficiaries of greatly increased government benefits borne of the Great Society programs in the 60s. Those people were disincentivized from working and therefore never up-skilled.
A higher minimum wage has a similar effect: it will necessarily mean fewer young people join the workforce earlier on in their lives, and again, because their experiences compound, will mean that over their lifetimes they will be worse off.
I have no strong feelings about salary transparency laws, but am generally in favor.
If you make your high-cost employees much more productive with AI, you may not need to reduce per-headcount cost so much anymore. The cultural and language benefits start to dominate the calculation.
That said, India will only grow in importance, so I wouldn't be surprised if the team was reinstated in a few years
This, AI more directly competes with service outsourcing than anything else.
AI isn't reliable. But is your outsourced team any better?
Outsourcing is cheap, but AI is 100 times cheaper.
Communicating with AI, via prompt engineering, is easier than setting up cross-cultural + timezone communications.
India really depends on service outsourcing. So I'm curious regarding how it'll be impacted by AI. That being said, nothing stopping the Indians themselves using the AIs and reinventing their companies.
> make your high-cost employees much more productive with AI
Might happen soon, might not. AI has so far proven astounding for problems to which solutions are robust to small perturbations -- natural language, visual art -- but code is different.
Disagree. The overwhelming amount of software being written is almost entirely plagiarizable from stack overflow or GitHub. It will need to be slightly reworked, but that’s it. The real trick is figuring out how to ask your copilot for the bite-sized pieces one at a time.
> The real trick is figuring out how to ask your copilot for the bite-sized pieces one at a time.
We agree on that. Breaking the problem into bite sized pieces is the really hard problem. I can't explain my codebase to the AI. I have to figure out what to change myself. If I can offload syntactical stuff to an AI, great, that'll save me 10% of my time. Nothing to sneeze at, but nothing that will make my job disappear either.
I think the first casualties of ChatGPT for developers are going to be offshore teams. These teams get given small, discrete programming tasks. They are also often teams with very high turnover. This means that tasks need to be heavily specified and managed. I think it's a small step from this to just getting a LLM to do the work.
I also think that this could potentially be a huge disruptor for India as a whole and that there could well be some very big lawsuits coming brought by Indian companies who have lost millions (Billions?) to a machine trained on a largely open source codebase.
This sort of thing makes me reconsider whether I should be putting any code up on github or answering anything on stackoverflow - why would I do this, if my code is harvested and used against me?
for every US HN commenter talking about their "awful experience" with Indian teams let me talk about my awesome professors from IIT who came to America to work in Math/CS education. Or about the great Indian people I met online working on open source projects on github. Or about the skilled Indian immigrants who work where I work. Or the immigrant Indian doctors who saved my family members life in the hospital.
Sadly, India's "body shop" tech sub-sector (aka WITCH [0]) has an outsize effect on the perception of India's professional sector as a whole. Working for (and with) these companies is truly a miserable experience. It's a shame that people make hasty generalization about entire countries and blame workers for the behavior of these companies.
What towns in South America have a concentration of software developers? Might target my real estate purchases there
I’m finding that there's a lot more focus on timezone quality of life for US centric organizations, and that includes getting rid of their teams in Asia now and avoiding that
Re-Discovering South America over and over again for similar help and cost
Having worked with developers in both India and Argentina, given the choice I would choose the guys from Buenos Aires every time. It's not just the time zone, the cultural gap is so much smaller.
I worked with some guys in Brazil - I'd say Sao Paolo because AWS have a region based there but I know none of them were from Sao Paolo (but they were all on the coast).
Interesting, people were talking about remote work meaning that companies will now pay less due to a global talent pool, but it might just go to show that workers are not all fungible with other workers in different countries. It rings of the same fears as outsourcing a few decades ago.