I can confirm this. Former Senior Manager from Big Tech Co here (I just resigned 2 weeks ago). When I left, we were in the middle of offshoring all of my groups to Amsterdam. No stock compensation in Europe = cheaper devs. There was no real talk of replacing anyone with AI. We all used copilot and the other LLMs as tools, but you still needed devs who understood the systems and how to debug the generated code.
In Cybersecurity and DevTooling we've moved the entire Engineering and Product function to Israel, India, and Eastern Europe (Czechia, Poland, Romania).
We'll still fund founders in the US, but they still end up hiring in those countries instead because you can pay "Austin in 2010" salaries and get top tier talent.
20 years ago, P/L responsibility would remain in the US, but in the current iteration, even P/L stakeholders are now abroad.
Thirding this, group manager at Microsoft. Throwaway as I post regularly under my professional account.
VPs have been explicit, in writing, that we are shifting heads to lower cost geos.
Hiring has been largely halted in the US for the bulk of non-business-critical roles to shift PCNs overseas, and there have been multiple waves of US focused layoffs to motivate this further.
While offshoring has been a topic for the last 20+ years of my career, this time, since 2022 or so, feels different even vs. prior recessions, and I expect we'll see continuing erosion in the quality of engineering positions and careers.
It’s hard to know if this most recent move will be more permanent. The irony with Amsterdam was that they had a hell of a time hiring. They had to import 80-90% of their labor from Eastern Europe or elsewhere and everyone had visa issues and would take 2-4 months to start. I also think the company will get a rude awakening in a few years when they realize they can’t just fire everyone or do layoffs like they were in the US.
Some of the pessimism comes in that I've seen larger "centers of gravity" being built in these regions with full reporting chains vs. effectively being the offshore wing of another team, as well as commensurately higher levels of product ownership and growth or traction over the last few years.
Additionally, can obviously only speak for myself but I've tended to see more hiring in countries without the strong european worker protections (eastern Europe, Israel, india, asia)
As an American impacted by this, I can at least personally say that if anything the fact that you got a job is one of the few upsides in all this.
I don't begrudge a romanian SWE any more than a US one, we're all just trying to get by here, and the fact that global megacorps can do currency/economy arbitrage that they prevent workers from benefiting from while ensuring they have every advantage is by and large not your fault.
It should have been for us as engineers to organize, unionize, or legislate protections if we didn't want this to happen, and despite advocating this to my peers during the boom years, I was constantly rebuffed.
Obviously I put more on the massive companies with the power to dictate global laws and trade practices gleefully jumping at this, but between that and the responsibility I put on my peers/myself to fight against that, I certainly don't put blame on you.
I don't think you should feel bad. It's a bit like feeling guilty because it's raining where you are while somewhere else in the world people are suffering a famine due to lack of rainfall.
The only difference is that you have zero control over the weather and very nearly zero control over corporate hiring decisions.
The American dev you may have impacted has probably been automating away someone else’s job(s) for years. This is just how business works and I wouldn’t feel bad about it at all. Qualified people will land on their feet.
After the pandemic, P&L leadership functions moved abroad as well.
A lot of mid-level management on visas were laid off during 2020-21 during the depth of COVID, and this had to return.
Now, the SVP for a core Engineering Org or your PM Director owning an entire BU might be in Bangalore, Tel Aviv, or Cluj.
If ICs to mid/upper level leadership are in the foreign office, it doesn't make as much sense to keep hiring domestically for Product or Engineering roles.
This is true but it had not exploded at rates like this until 2022ish. Since 2000 the fed interest rate was effectively 0 until now. This is causing companies to cut every corner they can, which is causing no employment here, and 100% employment abroad.
I think WFH should stand for Where's Fucking Housing because that's like 90% of the "WFH crowd"'s motivation from what I've seen - since companies almost never pay enough to live near enough to their office. If they did, then the price differential between US and overseas would be even worse..
You see, it’s of critical importance that Santa Clara valley retain the character of a quaint mid 1960s town of single level shops and tract houses. Where jimmy can ride his Big Wheel in the Cul De Sac.
As I mentioned in my comment, during previous boom-bust cycle, the leadership that had P/L responsibilities (Engineering Leadership, Group/Directors PM) would remain in the US.
But after the COVID layoffs happened, impacted H1B, EB1/2, and O1 visa holders returned to their home countries, and then got rehired by the same employers but for $60k-130k TC (depending on country).
A lot of mid-late career product and engineering leadership was laid of in 2020-21, and those guys have now founded the new generation of foreign offices.
What gap? People all around the world can speak English, and write code. The US didn't need AI to push all manufacturing to China. You're getting outsourced. This is normally where unions step in, but not in this country.
Expect this cycle to be perm. The infrastructure, education and language barriers are completely gone now. This is my third cycle too, and its different this time.
In 2006 the Indians would randomly cut out, couldn't be on video (phone only) and had major language barriers, and they would join in their evening.
Now in 2024 you're on their schedule. Believe me, those people are not staying up late for your 3pm call. Wake up at 5am every day to keep your job, you have 3-4 hours to work with them.
Honestly the biggest issue is time difference. If US corpos were strategic they would have invested in Latin America and build huge talent pools there.
Same time zone, same culture same holidays, same language with big portion of the US population.
Last go around my client used Brazil. Worked for a while until there was a major system outage and it turned out they didn't have the skill set to actually solve any problems.
The gap between experience, domain knowledge, and legacy knowledge. If you've ever worked in a large org that has been running for a few years these can be significant gaps and they are usually filled by having access to someone in the office to answer questions.
Work ethic and trust culture are big ones as well. Though admittedly some leaders love the "yes boss" vibe of overseas devs, even if they are lying to your face.
This will still fail I think, for the same reason contracting did.
The churn is real and any offshoring hotbed ends up with a lot of competing between big companies for talent which then drives the prices up and motivates people to jump companies more.
The issues we saw were more about quality. I know churn is bad for that, but I think the problem was more related to lack of oversight and vetting. This might improve that, but I'd probably bet against it.
The difference is that they no longer are "outsourced" sweatshops. They are just entire divisions/departments of companies with full reporting chains. Effectively interchangeable with a US remote WFH employee/department.
I've been employing eastern European IT folks since the early 00's as I've founded/worked for remote only companies since the late 90's. We were ahead of the game here, and anyone we hired was not treated like a sweatshop worker. They were hired and promoted like any hire we made in the US and were simply called an employee. The talent level was same or better than the US talent level for 1/10th of the cost, especially at the mid-tier/career level.
The largest issue was timezones, but if you needed to staff a 24x7 highly skilled ops team - this was one effective way to get a great head start doing so. Plus it was relatively easy getting folks to work odd hours if you were paying double local salaries.
Since the pandemic things have entirely shifted. It used to be large companies/enterprises would offshore to sweatshop style outsourcing companies. They had a hard time competing with us since the work and responsibility simply did not attract the best candidates. We could hire directly out of local university pipelines and be extremely picky in only taking the top 1% of candidates due to this. After the pandemic this totally changed to these large companies now competing on salary at levels we no longer found competitive. We simply no longer enjoy the strategic advantage of having an untapped low-cost highly skilled labor pool in these areas any longer. Large companies have more or less adopted our model.
It's now not uncommon to have entire teams headed up by a highly competent senior VP or C level local leader who reports directly to US upper level management. They are included in all business decisions as anyone in the US would be at their level, and performance is similar to any US team.
I have always (and even written a few times on HN about the subject) thought highly compensated US engineers were being exceedingly short-sighted in their demands for WFO since this was always going to be the outcome in the end. Once you can hire someone in the midwest US, it's not really a huge leap to realizing you can do the same 2500 miles away in a low cost country. There are still tons of labor arbitrage opportunities left in the world and the story that there is no local technical talent in these places is utterly false. It's always been a management problem.
Over time it will even out - and it has quite a bit. Salaries are now maybe 1/3 to 1/2 US salaries at the same talent level, so it still has a long way to go in my opinion. You are only seeing the start of many companies building up long-term strategic plans in these regions - these things take years to decades to be fully realized.
Most US WFH engineers will be competing on salary/skillsets in a world market within their lifetimes regardless of cost of living differences. The writing is on the wall, and I personally believe the die has been cast at this point.
Well, in that case U.S. Engineers should cheer for a weaker dollar, since it would bring the U.S. salaries more in line with the salaries in the rest of the world without affecting local dynamics as much (and still allowing people to afford their mortgages) :)
> They are replacing US jobs with jobs in Poland. I experienced this first hand.
Like, only now?! This had been the case my entire career to the point I got fed up of rat race to the delight of foreign superior, became cynical and unemployable. It's not ey-ay, nor outsourcing, it's the economay. We have a crisis, sir.
This was totally predictable. If your job can be shipped to Kansas from SV because it is cheaper, it won't be too long before it is shipped to Canada which cheaper than Kansas and then to Colombia.
But HN is still embracing remote work. I hope those in the US/Western Europe wake up soon otherwise all the coding jobs will go the way of manufacturing jobs very soon - either done by robots or done by cheaper labor in Asia or Africa or LatAm.
I haven’t experienced it, yet, but for my company it might be one of two ways it becomes profitable. The other way is to lay everyone off AND offshore work only when the lone remainer needs help.
If Putin gets what he really wants that is going to work out as great as it did for all the companies outsourcing to Ukraine.
Putin is covertly manipulating Poland with the same games as he did with Ukraine. And now it appears increasingly likely he has the right guy in the white house to take what he wants.
Some big companies already moved when war started. I know one major bank moved cca 1,500 IT & support jobs (as in the people doing them, often with families) to Prague, I think mostly from Kyiv.
Great place for talent, pretty horrible for salaries and its going to get worse (from employer's perspective just to be clear, all the power to you guys there... I've lived 5 years in that city and if you are into European cities and city life in general and don't mind having mountains far this one is nice).
Ukrainian companies can just move to Poland. There's a lot of Ukrainian IT workers here already, and since long before the war started. Putin isn't manipulating Poland, and a full-scale invasion isn't "games". What is this nonsense.
