The remote-work revolution has led some U.S. technology companies, from startups to Coinbase and Shopify, to seek new hires in Latin America -- where they can find qualified people in roughly the same time zone who'll work for much lower pay.
techies finally going thru their own "deindustrialization"
Idk, I think it's more that imperialism suppresses non amerikkkan tech workers' pay.
Been hearing for longer than my career that offshoring was going to reduce tech pay, including a manager tell me how many devs he could hire in India for my salary, but none of that's come to pass. The same manager said some incredibly racist shit about American devs getting paid for creativity. Dude was first generation American too ffs.
Hell the pandemic and instant proliferation of remote work was supposed to do the same for people in tech hubs, but the opposite happened. It's cause porky pays for superficial journalism like this to suppress wages.
I work in tech and have worked with offshore developers on a few projects. The quality of their code has been all over the field, from a clusterfuck of indecipherable spaghetti code to good well-structured quality code. A reason for some of the code being low quality could be that these developers are doing piecework and need to rush through projects to make a salary, without having the thing to do quality work. The big detriment to using offshore devs is not the quality of their work. You see crappy code from western devs as well. The big problem is the friction in communication that comes from the language barrier and from being in different time zones.
Big reason for poor quality code from offshoring is brain drain. Historically, the best engineers in India got poached to work in the West for higher wages, so those offshoring companies were stuck with a less talented pool to begin with, then add in the fact that they are competing on cost (I.e. rushing jobs) and you get that result.
This is changing as people in countries like India, Russia, China, the Philippines, etc. are more likely to go home after a short stay making $$$ in the West, or they're just less likely to come to the US in the first place because quality of life in the Global South has gotten better and better in the past 10-15 years while it's stagnated in the US while the gap in wages gets smaller and smaller.
Eventually, US companies won't even be able to exploit global South labor via offshoring, and then they will be in big trouble because no one wants to move to Stanky Yankee land, and no one here knows how to do anything.
I’m back in school with a bunch of Indian dudes, and communication is 100% a thing. It sucks that it is, what should be nothing more than benign social friction with immigrants feels different in a hostile society.
The one guy I’ve been talking to seems pretty cool, but I’ll get these texts from him occasionally that are a bit rough, it really seems like the language barrier does not help our interactions lol
Not that it’s super bad or anything, it’s just that we have frequent, minor misunderstandings and sometimes need several back-and-fourths getting on the same page
Totally cool and normal… for cool and normal people. But when all that yappin takes place on the company dime :porky-scared-flipped:
technically its happening but it's not due to offshoring, but due to onshoring. Boise, austin, Denver have seen record in-migration the past two years, and tech salaries have been rising accordingly. Meanwhile they declined in sf and new york for the first time by 1.1 pct
They are two halves to the same coin. The US limits economic opportunities of non-americans simply because they are foreign. It's protectionism of american salaries and it's incredibly racist, xenophobic, and nationalistic.
Journalism like this does little to suppress wages. Ultimately, companies just won't hire people if they can't find someone for the right price. There's no such thing as a "critical" employee, especially in engineering.
Wages in the tech sector will decline over time as the sector becomes more commodified and matures. Tech workers make a lot of money because the odds of them hitting a moonshot idea are so high, because there's still a lot of wins/higher than average profits. So it makes sense to pay Software engineers lots so that they potentially give your company that idea, or least don't go to a competitor, or start a their own company. Basically it's a bribe to prevent you from attempting a start-up.
Once all the unicorn profit potential dries up, or Amazon Web Services coats too much and web apps can't make as much profit, tech wages will come down to the level of other engineers, and eventually might even get lower because of how many people have flooded CS degrees chasing money.
Imperialism is simply a way for these companies to squeeze extra profit out of the same effort (because they can exploit offshore workers harder), but it doesn't really have an effect on domestic wages because those offshore workers aren't doing "potential moonshot" work. If your job is directly threatened by offshoring, it's threatened more so by automation.
Idk, I think it's more that imperialism suppresses non amerikkkan tech workers' pay.
Been hearing for longer than my career that offshoring was going to reduce tech pay, including a manager tell me how many devs he could hire in India for my salary, but none of that's come to pass. The same manager said some incredibly racist shit about American devs getting paid for creativity. Dude was first generation American too ffs.
Hell the pandemic and instant proliferation of remote work was supposed to do the same for people in tech hubs, but the opposite happened. It's cause porky pays for superficial journalism like this to suppress wages.
I work in tech and have worked with offshore developers on a few projects. The quality of their code has been all over the field, from a clusterfuck of indecipherable spaghetti code to good well-structured quality code. A reason for some of the code being low quality could be that these developers are doing piecework and need to rush through projects to make a salary, without having the thing to do quality work. The big detriment to using offshore devs is not the quality of their work. You see crappy code from western devs as well. The big problem is the friction in communication that comes from the language barrier and from being in different time zones.
Do I ever.
Yeah, I look in the mirror
Big reason for poor quality code from offshoring is brain drain. Historically, the best engineers in India got poached to work in the West for higher wages, so those offshoring companies were stuck with a less talented pool to begin with, then add in the fact that they are competing on cost (I.e. rushing jobs) and you get that result.
This is changing as people in countries like India, Russia, China, the Philippines, etc. are more likely to go home after a short stay making $$$ in the West, or they're just less likely to come to the US in the first place because quality of life in the Global South has gotten better and better in the past 10-15 years while it's stagnated in the US while the gap in wages gets smaller and smaller.
Eventually, US companies won't even be able to exploit global South labor via offshoring, and then they will be in big trouble because no one wants to move to Stanky Yankee land, and no one here knows how to do anything.
deleted by creator
I’m back in school with a bunch of Indian dudes, and communication is 100% a thing. It sucks that it is, what should be nothing more than benign social friction with immigrants feels different in a hostile society.
The one guy I’ve been talking to seems pretty cool, but I’ll get these texts from him occasionally that are a bit rough, it really seems like the language barrier does not help our interactions lol
Not that it’s super bad or anything, it’s just that we have frequent, minor misunderstandings and sometimes need several back-and-fourths getting on the same page
Totally cool and normal… for cool and normal people. But when all that yappin takes place on the company dime :porky-scared-flipped:
technically its happening but it's not due to offshoring, but due to onshoring. Boise, austin, Denver have seen record in-migration the past two years, and tech salaries have been rising accordingly. Meanwhile they declined in sf and new york for the first time by 1.1 pct
They are two halves to the same coin. The US limits economic opportunities of non-americans simply because they are foreign. It's protectionism of american salaries and it's incredibly racist, xenophobic, and nationalistic.
Journalism like this does little to suppress wages. Ultimately, companies just won't hire people if they can't find someone for the right price. There's no such thing as a "critical" employee, especially in engineering.
Wages in the tech sector will decline over time as the sector becomes more commodified and matures. Tech workers make a lot of money because the odds of them hitting a moonshot idea are so high, because there's still a lot of wins/higher than average profits. So it makes sense to pay Software engineers lots so that they potentially give your company that idea, or least don't go to a competitor, or start a their own company. Basically it's a bribe to prevent you from attempting a start-up.
Once all the unicorn profit potential dries up, or Amazon Web Services coats too much and web apps can't make as much profit, tech wages will come down to the level of other engineers, and eventually might even get lower because of how many people have flooded CS degrees chasing money.
Imperialism is simply a way for these companies to squeeze extra profit out of the same effort (because they can exploit offshore workers harder), but it doesn't really have an effect on domestic wages because those offshore workers aren't doing "potential moonshot" work. If your job is directly threatened by offshoring, it's threatened more so by automation.