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Ask Slashdot: Why Are American Tech Workers Paid So Well?
Slashdot reader davidwr is "an American-born, American-educated mid-career IT professional." But he's still curious about why American geeks earn more than their IT counterparts overseas:
If I'm a mid-career programmer looking for a job, why should I expect to be paid a whole lot more than my peer in India when applying for a job that could easily be outsourced to India? If I do get the job, why should I expect to keep it more than a year or two instead of being told "your job is being outsourced" before 2020? Is my American education and 5-25 years of experience in the American workplace really worth it to an employer?
Should we, as an industry, lower our salary expectations -- and that of students entering the field -- to make us more competitive with our peers in India and similar "much cheaper labor than first world" economies? If not, what should we be doing to make ourselves competitive in ways that our peers overseas cannot duplicate?
What's the secret ingredient that justifies those higher salaries? Leave your answers in the comments. Why are American tech workers paid so well?
Should we, as an industry, lower our salary expectations -- and that of students entering the field -- to make us more competitive with our peers in India and similar "much cheaper labor than first world" economies? If not, what should we be doing to make ourselves competitive in ways that our peers overseas cannot duplicate?
What's the secret ingredient that justifies those higher salaries? Leave your answers in the comments. Why are American tech workers paid so well?
Employers wouldn't be paying it if we weren't worth it.
Considering the profits (tech) companies make as a result of our efforts, I'm surprised we aren't paid much, much more.
OK so I don't live close to the bone, but contracting means moving around a bit even within the same sate as contracts change. Renting, cost of living, etc takes my "higher" salary. I could cut out my humble bundles and loot crates, but frankly it's a drop in the bucket compared to general living costs.
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" job that could easily be outsourced to India"
Given the massive failures of companies that have thus far attempted this, it speaks for itself
Obviously this is not applicable to all tech workers, but...
In many cases, there's a fairly substantial difference in expectation of work product, both in terms of quality of work produced, and in ability to execute anything more than rote work. While it's true that those qualities may not matter for those organizations who choose to outsource tech labor, there can be a very quantifiable increase in product quality from workers who are more vested in and capable of producing a higher quality product, which can be translated into demand for higher compensation.
It's kinda the same as the difference between a certified general contractor, and a guy you pick up at Home Depot to do some work for you. You don't expect to pay the general contractor a small amount of cash under the table, and he doesn't have any need to make his rate "competitive", because he'll be able to find people willing to pay for a higher quality of skill, knowledge, and ultimately work product. There's a reason that most tech companies who outsource their high-skill labor to inexpensive countries don't stay competitive long...
That's my experience, anyway.
Sometimes outsourcing to lower cost countries might work, but often it just doesn't work as expected. My employer tried India outsourcing 10 years ago and it was a failure. First, while the direct employment costs are cheaper, there is overhead that is complicated and expensive: protecting intellectual property, management from 12 hours away, project planning, code culture and standards.
IT and software engineering pay well especially in Silicon Valley and other major areas because it's worth it to pay that. Proximity has its own intrinsic value. I work with 50% Indian workers, but they are here in SV and paid well, most 100k+ because that's what the work is worth.
As a guy that owns a small IT security startup and has some developers on contract in India and as many full time North Americans as we can afford right now I would say this:
Creativity. Understanding the why as well as the what (aka seeing the big picture), and a general drive to see the company succeed.
None of my contractors give a shit if my company succeeds beyond their next invoice. None of them really seem to care to understand why we are doing what we are doing, they are only focused on their silo of work. And OMG if you don't give them EXACT to the letter specs, the work wont get done. Likely because of the other two things I mentioned, but also I think it might be a culture thing where they are taught both at home and in school to never question, and just memorize and regurgitate to succeed. Yeah they are kinda like human robots in some cases.
I will always pay more for an innovative self-starter that's in my time zone.
Tech workers who have been in the field for long enough are unable to analyze it like you have. You are detecting a market issue. Partly, wages are sticky. For jobs where this is the problem, you see complaints about outsourcing and H1-Bs. Secondly, the market is actually extremely tight for competent domestic tech workers, and employers are in a constant bidding war for these few folks. This bleeds into the majority of less-than-competent domestic tech folks through a number of mechanisms, including employers lowering the bar on unfilled positions with salary range already set, dumb employers being unable to differentiate between competent and incompetent, etc.
The answer to your question is that it is a temporary distortion. I don't have a crystal ball, so I don't claim to know how it plays out. But these high wages for less than competent domestic tech staff is not sustainable.
I used to work as a DW analyst in a british bank who off-shored the ETL development to Chennai, India. The manager of the ETL team was earning 1/3 of what I was and I wasn't even a senior member of the Analyst team, there is no way to compete with that unless you yourself live in India.
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Some numbers from my personal experience.
1) Salary Growth. In general, the Indian Salaries are increasing by 10%, US Salaries are increasing by 3%.
2) Salary Scalability. In general, Junior staff are about 5 offshore to 1 onshore. Mid level staff are about 3:1. Senior staff are 2:1.
China used to be a good low cost offshore location, however senior staff are now more or less the same cost (assuming remote team management). You offshore to China for reasons *other* than cost reduction. India will ultimately be no different.
Mid to senior engineers will be generally cost neutral within a decade, junior engineers - not so much.
Near-shoring will likely replace the off-shoring - in some cases it already does.
For my dollars, I'd much rather work directly with people who are a committed part of a team. It's tough enough to achieve that with direct hires; I don't think you can do it with outsourcing.
I think part of this relates to the nature of software. People always talk about writing software - but that's the easy part. The hard part is *expanding* and *maintaining* software. And generally speaking people who have a history with the code are going to do a better job of it: faster, and more precise. You can also have a much tighter development loop between developers, testers, and users if you have them all in-house. I used to have my developers spend some time using the tools they built with the people who actually used them for the job (I did this myself as well). You learn practical details that are hard to communicate any other way. And speaking of communication: I had a few outsourced workers (forced on me by upper management) and communication was always inferior.
I'm not saying that there's no use for outsourcing, or that it's always the wrong choice. But my experience is that proximity matters. And history matters. And personal familiarity matters. So one needs to factor all that in when making the choice. And yeah, I think I got about 4x the quality and productivity out of my in-house people as my outsourced people.
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Availability is the biggest issue for most companies I see; the secondary issue is the wage inflation rates, especially in the context of a "cost-center" vs a profit center. If IT wages go up 5-7% per year in recruiting new talent, but an average for the company is only 1.5-2%, IT stands out as high-risk.
Most companies want to retain some level of control, but the value of the service provided doesn't always warrant the cost. There are only so many things that a business can cover as necessary evils that are paid disproportionately for the value they provide (read:lawyers). The key for longevity is providing the value to management (and being able to explain that value convincingly).
North American companies are absolutely idiotic about this. They will happily employ remote employees from India who (obviously) never come into the office, ever for a discount. Typically the quality of work output is low as is the knowledge level. At least that's been my experience.
Yet those jobs aren't offered to Americans, and I don't get why not. If you have low skill with computers, but an aptitude to learn, you could do the same quality of work that's being outsourced for $20 - 30k a year. So why not offer the job over here with the same standards? (100% work from home, no expectations that you'll work any standard hours, ever. And if you get the project done early, enjoy the vacation time.) You would be surprised at how many people would take such a job and find it is enough to keep them going and give them the experience they need to enter the field. Sure, if you live in NYC $20k means you'll be dead inside of 12 weeks, but move to Mississippi and it's enough for a single guy to live frugally for the year while he ups his skills.
In fact, honestly, I don't get why companies don't offer work from home for most tech jobs. You get to pay lower salaries for the same work because people don't have to live in extremely expensive cities and you get to save further on not having to have an office.
The United States is known for the hard work of its people. The rest of the world has criticized the US's lack of work/life balance (many say the US spends too much time working, more than anywhere else.) Assuming this is true, it would be a reason that US workers are worth more - in general harder working people are more productive. I would say this is especially true in Information Technology, particularly software development where the amount of time required to stay current and keep up with changing technology is enormous.
As others have posted, the ultimate answer that the marketplace dictates the value, and the labor market place currently values American tech workers highly.
There is simply a completely different type of employment culture in India than in the US. In the US we are used to interacting with a self-selecting group of immigrants who work really hard and often put up with a lot of stuff under H1 or other visa programs that American citizens wouldn't tolerate from employers.
Back in India though, there is a culture of treating employees like shit, and consequently a culture among employees of working as little as possible. Employers also don't screen candidates well for off-shore call centers and the like because if they are working on a large contract, all the accountability is based on metrics that can be manipulated and the US based business that contracted them probably only cares about reducing their costs.
My Indian and other immigrant coworkers work their asses off. The support teams I deal with in India can't even be bothered to show up to a phone call and are usually incapable of anything more than opening up a ticket with the software/hardware vendor directly.
...and hire all foreign staff. When they eventually leave, hire someone else that wants to learn the code base, waste however long it takes them to learn it, and then say goodbye to them when they too go back to wherever they came from.
Or go ahead and outsource the whole thing to half-way round the world, so's you have to talk to 'em at 2 AM when you're tired as F and get stuff screwed up, or alternatively, they're working at 2 AM when the human being is at his worst and they get stuff all F'd up.
We're worth it 'cuz we're here, and won't necessarily be saying goodbye so's you have to retrain a whole new crew every couple-three years. You won't have to repeat yourself to be understood nor listen very, very closely to understand what we're saying either.
But the American business is always going to go for the short-term gain, so go ahead - the people that would have graduated from American universities with software degrees are also smart enough to realize that you're going to skimp on wages, and make them compete unfairly with the rest of the world, and decide to get into some other line of work that is more steady and maybe doesn't even require all that study. There's lotsa jobs with decent, but not breathtaking pay that don't require accumulating a huge debt - maybe they can be OK with being a welder, or a railroad locomotive engineer, or 1 of a 100 different things to do that can't be outsourced and don't commonly involve a lot of layoffs. Hell, some of those jobs even have unions, something that makes it hard to feel sorry for the uppity software bunch that think they're too good to need a union, in spite of actors and pro sports players using them - but nooooo.... software people are too proud to form a union that would sue the asses off some company like Disney that (illegally) hires 250 software people from overseas to replace 250 of their US Citizen software people simply because the furriners will work for peanuts.
If the furriners are at all better at this than than US citizens, then its probably because the smartest US citizens are too smart to put in that sort of time and expense to compete for a job with a US company that's going to s*** all over them and fire them simply for wanting a salary commensurate with living well in the USA for the efforts required to acquire similar knowledge for other more lucrative careers.
So, suck it up, US industry. You created this situation. Just go ahead and suffer when you can't control your cheap labor because... losing your penny-pinching salary isn't worth enough to do what you want them to if they want to go home and you want 'em to stay. Y'all deserve each other.
Salaries for work done at offices typically reflects the cost of living of the locality in question. This is why salaries are higher in places such as NYC and California than in many other parts of the US. Having said that, the competition for getting hired is also that much higher in those parts. Oh and yes, there's the concern of code quality.
Cost of Living requires it. Businesses pay it because the area's talent has defined the computing era. A random "senior" group (read: just about anyone in SV) knows second-nature Agile, Scrum, code smell, architecture, multiple languages, tools & technologies they've used to build amazing things successfully.
A marketable product idea and a 5 - 20 SV senior engineers will usually have a high % chance of success. Investors know this. No extra layers. Meanwhile patents & novel solutions (thought leadership) emerge automatically.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
As having worked in tech in another country, and moved to the US to work in tech, it's 100% to do with the US understanding the value of the engineers. Among my other expat acquaintances, it's not just my old country, either.
A couple of good engineers can pull off the next google, instagram, Facebook etc. Folks in the US know this and harness that power. Other countries see an computer engineering degree like an accounting degree. Until other countries clue in, the US will continue to be a power house.
I currently supervise a team in Bangalorre, along with a couple of junior developers here in the US. The US developers, though only a year or two out of college, easily outperform even the "mid-level" developers from India. The price our company pays for Indian developers is about 1/3 the cost of US developers, but so far, we have not been able to make the math work. Even 3 Indian devs cannot produce the same quantity and quality of output as a single junior US developer. This is a pattern I've observed numerous times at different companies.
This disparity has not been missed by accounting departments. Bringing offshore tech jobs back to the US has become so commonplace that it has come to be called "reshoring." I don't think US tech salaries are in any kind of jeopardy.
The cost of living is one obvious factor to look at; the cost of living is much lower in many developing countries.
It may make more sense to look at the relative rates of professions within a given country. For example, how much do Indian accountants and cops make compared to Indian coders?
If the ratios are about the same, then the question is not really about IT salaries in the US, but why general salaries and the cost of living is different between countries.
Table-ized A.I.
People care less and less to understand the inner working for any given tech. They just want it to work. That being said you also have to take into account the pillars... Good, fast, and cheap. Pick two. Our industry is very like that of the nursing industry. Yes we get paid, but the conditions are rarely healthy. When you treat peogle like a commodity and pay them to just make the magic boxes work you will get what you pay for.
That's what I was about to say. Arbitrage in labor markets takes a long time to go to the no-arbitrage state. There is friction from Labor Laws, Labor migration rules, other local laws in general (such as data privacy laws, data warehousing laws).
And then there is government interference. The US government for instance, encourages international Phd's and Masters students to find jobs in the US by giving them OPT permits and favoring them for H1B etc.
And then there are managers, who know that if there is no one around to report to them, their job will soon vanish too. So they resist outsourcing of jobs under them by hiring bad people overseas, by showing that the overseas workers can't handle it all (which to some extent is true) etc. All these artificial barriers delay the convergence in labor markets. So ya, you can expect high wages for longer than you think its possible. In the mean time, try to change the rules of the game to stay ahead.
After all, it's even easier to outsource being unproductive.
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More then half of my co-workers have immigrated to the U.S. and obtained citizenship. At the same time, almost every company I've worked for had bad experiences with outsourcing development, inside the U.S. or overseas. This leads me to conclude that it's the process of outsourcing development that is the issue, not that there aren't talented people overseas that can do the job. Companies have figured this out and mostly try to hire Senior Software Developers who live locally because they tend to be the most efficient. Since there is a scarcity of local developers our salaries continue to climb.
Foreign workers may have better technical skills, but they usually lack the quality of ownership of a problem. When the shit hits the fan and things go south, American workers are more likely to take ownership and dig for solutions (foreign workers tend to look for direction).
The Secret ingredient is DON'T just be a technical resource, understand the business, add value at architecture, design and analysis of projects and problems, if you have government customers then things like security clearance and customer knowledge etc. As a purely technical resource you are a commodity item that is readily replaceable, as part of the business you are much more valuable. Their is this myth that still perpetuates that outsourcing to cheap overseas labour means poor quality, that is not the case any longer (at least not if they are hiring well), It is hard or impossible to compete directly on skill/cost as they have such a huge advantage in cost so you have to add value elsewhere that cannot easily be outsourced.
The real answer is you can't be so easily replaced by someone in India:
- You're available. Is the guy in India available to work now? Why do you think he is?
- You have the skills and the experience needed. Why do you think the guy in India does?
- Presumably you have a history of staying at a job more than a year and not demanding large raises ever year to stay. Check out page 12 of this report. India salaries grow at ~12% per year according to this. If the guy in India is really good, he's probably getting better increases than that. That cost advantage gets smaller and smaller.
- Time difference is 12 hours. That's a PITA for everyone.
- Dealing with India rules can be very troublesome.
- Managing a project remotely sucks, and projects have missteps and delays, or they fail.
Also, you don't usually hire the cheapest guy in a skilled position. A company usually has either a specific, important need for a guy, or an understanding of the amount of additional revenue per employee they can expect to earn. It's usually not an amount that makes the salary difference the chief consideration of whom to hire.
Sometimes these things won't be true. Then look for your company to be more likely to hire the Indian guy.
If you want to increase your value, be less replaceable.
I've been in this field since I was old enough to work professionally. One thing I see is a ton of wannabe foreign programmers that read a book and pretend to know everything about programming. A job I had 12 years ago had a director of IT that learned classic ASP and T-SQL on his plane ride over for a job he had just gotten hired for! Most of what you learn as a developer has nothing to do with language or syntax and most foreigners that only work consulting jobs for the US don't realize that. They tend to take directions literally, without the discretion that we in the U.S. tend to have/do. They don't converse, debate, and collaborate. Note that I've both managed and watched people manage outsourced teams. It always ends up in failure. My favorite example is your very own bank. You can always tell those who use foreign outsourced companies vs those who use American talent. The foreign sites are slow, constantly break, and are difficult to use. Note that I'm not attempting to say the U.S. is somehow better, it's just that the developers here actually have to have something more than 2 hours of experience reading a book. We build systems for a living. We don't just follow the instruction manual. If people that worked for those outsourcing companies did the same, they'd catch up...but of course they'd want more money.
Disclaimer: I am a lucky white dude that grew up in the United States and I have worked with a few teams in India and tons of people that moved to here from India and other countries, and I have nothing against them and have several Indian friends. They are just like you and I, they want to work hard to provide for their family and make a better life for themselves. Don't hate the individuals for just trying to work hard and get ahead in life. If you want people to blame and be angry at for job loss, direct your anger at the companies that take advantage of these people. There are tons of IT contracting firms, tons of startups that source talent solely this way, and tons of companies that source talent in varying degrees this way - they all get large numbers of IT workers over here on w2s, pay them horrible wages and make them work long hours in horrible conditions because they know that employees on w2s can't do a single thing about it. Because of the way the w2 is designed, the workers are unable to do anything to fight back - they are not allowed to find another job and they are not allowed to speak up. If they say anything or complain, they will be sent home and replaced with someone that won't speak up, they seriously have zero voice in this country. I love how people like Zuckerberg say there is a talent shortage in this country with the current w2 system and that they need more w2 workers over here. Tech workers are not a commoditized work force of assembly line workers, we are more like an athletic sports league where talent comes in varying degrees. Instead of paying decent wages to attract the top talent that he wants, he wants to get that high class talent at a cheaper price. It is not widely know, but I have worked at a startup that uses a very specific w2 worker formula that is replicated at numerous startups throughout the valley (they had a touch time finding a good systems engineer that fit the mold because the role really isn't taught in the talent pool they pulled from). The engineers were almost all (like between 95-98%) foreign graduate students that just graduated from college and that were hired on with w2s. This pool of workers were highly skilled and extremely hard working, and generally they had zero sense of how much money they should be making and what is standard practice in the industry regarding the number of hours they needed to work and how hard they should work. The owners work them ridiculously hard, 70-80 hour weeks every week, and they made them do things like work 18-20 hour days on a deployment day and require them to be on time in the morning the following day, else they would be yelled at. In this very profitable company, not a single engineer would receive a bonus and almost no employees would receive a raise to their already meager salary. These kids were taken advantage of and they were worked to the bone, and there was not a single thing they could do about it. They couldn't switch companies or complain or else they would have to go home. This is a very common practice, and this is the reason Mark Zuckerberg wants more below market rate employees on w2s. The talent is here, they just don't want to pay full price (and that "full" price isn't even full because of the depressive effect these types of practices have on the market, and don't get me started on other shady practices common in the industry like under the table agreements between companies to not hire talent away from each other). But I digress...
In addition to quality of work, there is the communication issue. I think it can be a big factor that plays into quality of work also, but yea people don't ever really focus on it or talk about it much, but communication inside of engineering and communication between engineering and other departments is a really big pain point that gets really stressed when outsourcing. Sure there is a ton of simple tech work that can be outsourced, but anything that involves working with other teams in the company can be really tough to outsource. Not exactly office space type "I'm
20+ year embedded veteran here: I think this depends where in the US you are. Maybe on the west coast. But in the south east salaries are very low. I just spent the last 6 months building a manufacturing test system. I did the hardware design & assembly, the software, installation, all of it. I got paid $6,000. I was told I had to be competitive with the Chinese offers.
Because American geeks do the needful.
I expect my employees to not only be responsible for their product, but accountable for the quality of it. Maintaining data integrity and security is worth paying for. Also, it directly translates into revenue for the company. Like a chef, use cheap ingredients and have a cheap (low quality) product... nobody will come back to your restaurant.
Just like Swiss watchmakers or German car manufacturers. When there is Indian Google, Chinese Apple or Vietnamese Facebook, their engineers will be paid well too.
Only they need to make equivalent technological breakthroughs for future technologies, not copy actual Google, Apple or Facebook. And, a country that wants to create their own Silicon Valley may discover that involves things they are not gang ho about. Like intellectual freedom and startups with unhealthy work hours that hurt diversity. This is hard to find simultaneously outside US.
Well, IT workers might be paid more than developers because they need to be in closer proximity to the clients for many of the IT tasks. But developers are generally paid much less than equally-intelligent and equally-educated professionals in legal and medical fields. Despite all the fear, Indian post-secondary education is not as good as US private university education when it comes to either applied math or CS. There is a lot of factors which cause this, not the least of it is that the best students from India come to the US for their university studies. But this is just one of many factors which influence this. What drives the wages lower is that there is a constant churn in development just like there is physical production. Some of the work simply requires citizenship or ability to impose legal requirements (which can be expected to be followed by US residents), or something similar. Any work which cannot be justified in this manner has already gone to India. Inability to hold people accountable to what they produce does carry a price with it. In many instances, that price is the difference in labor cost. Whatever arbitrage opportunities existed in the labor market, they have already been taken advantage of and, therefore, have diminished to virtually nothing. There are other factors. You might as well ask why Australia ever beats India in cricket given that India adds an Australia-size population every year. If building something in India were as simple as building it in the US, India would simply be a wealthier country than the US and the difference in labor cost would be absent. Wealth doesn't come from money. It comes from being able to buy something useful with the money you have.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
My workplace is dabbling a bit with outsourcing aswell. It's a scalability attempt, we simply cannot find enough people to keep doing what were doing with the amount of work we are expected to do in the future. We make marketing websites and apps for a wide range of inhouse products. One department is outsourcing to India, they keep doing what we have always done, just with more hands and more management. Another department is changing the techstack, trying to scale differently, make the tech require fewer hands, use the same content across devices, componentify code. Essentially move our approach to a more stabile platform that enabled configuration. Not sure which is going to "win" but i know our colleagues in the other department would rather come work with what we are doing, rather than micromanage the indian teams.
Here it goes: "An old man is lying on a bed in his room. It's year 1917, the Socialist revolution is in full swing. His grandson runs excitedly into the room and proclaims: "The Bolsheviks are winning, there won't be any rich people anymore!" To which his grandfather replies: "Weird, back in our day we revolted so that there wouldn't be any poor people, not to get rid of the rich".
Which is a long way of suggesting: maybe a better question to ask is why the non-US programmers are paid so poorly. TBH I don't think US programmers are that well paid, outside of relatively few outliers. They tend to live in the areas with some of the highest cost of living in the world. That's out of necessity: all the high paying jobs are there. I'd say a good fraction of US high tech professionals is what real middle class is supposed to look like. Not rich, but with a roof over their head and non-zero savings. I don't consider that a privilege. I consider that a bare minimum.
Although I don't think it was the intention of the OP, I think this whole question is effectively trolling the community. There are too many different opinions and perspectives on the issue of outsourcing to get a meaningful answer.
A. I can rig your entire building for gigabit wired and wireless transfer speeds. T568B all day.
B. I can configure your stuff from MPLS to ASA to software-defined stacks.
C. I can get on-site when your remote access inevitably fails, assuming you're not stupid enough to rely upon cloud-only solutions.
D. I actually speak and understand English.
E. I have other skills that your company might want, and I am asked about quite often (Doorbell job after wiring up their patch panels? $40/hr.)
F. I possess got over two decades of experience.
G. My warranties and guarantees on my work actually mean something.
H. I don't read off a fucking script, nor do I ever need to.
I. And the list goes on.....
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Recently i was talking to a chinese gamer friend on teamspeak and we where joking about how much one could make goldfarming. Turns out he was dissatisfied of his wage of about $300 US a week working in a resturant. Thats not that far off what an American worker could expect. He was studying to work in IT, and told me his friends in IT are making just north of $1K a week, again not quite as much as an American worker, but still in the vicinity of "Western Wages".
Turns out in China people are worried about jobs going offshore to India, the Phillipines and increasingly to Africa.
We really need to figure out how to get off this train, globalism is all very well, but the race to lower costs is just going to lead to work going to the very lowest bidder while us in the west face the complicated question of what the hell do we do with highly educated masses of unemployed.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Probably all correct, but there is also the difference that someone at the seat of the company can do some things better than someone telecommuting. Such as attending meetings where some things happen on paper, checking out hardware problems in jobs that include such tasks...
H1Bs may erode that difference though because they are also local.
C - the footgun of programming languages
in my experience indian developers just have zero common sense. They have to be told everything. Five times. That's why you'll never see an Indian apple, google, nintendo etc. You can't replace quality, common sense, nous etc with just cheap, stupid brute force.
I'd like to add that there are plenty other cheap countries besides India and China. i'm talking about countries where communication barrier simply doesn't exist. Yes, those countries are much smaller in terms of population, both compared to the USA and the giants that are IN and CN, and that's why most people aren't even aware of them, but they exist.
Now, large companies are increasingly hiring people from these countries, and the findings are that people hired there would work almost as cheap as people from IN and CN, but their performance is close to their American counterparts. USA companies hire locally (no H1Bs ow W2s), everyone's happy.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
If we had the same free college education, we could probably afford to work for Indian wages as well. Unfortunately, we have student loans to pay off.
Letting people with skills and degrees, developed through government investment turn around and compete with people who have had to shoulder almost the entire expense of that same education out of pocket, then compete on a level playing field isn't free-market capitalism: it's called "dumping" and it's an anti-competitive practice.
How many great software products have you seen being invented and created in India ? Is the number around null ? Or is it a large NULL ?
There are many reasons why Indians are not really a threat, and it is not only the language problem. It is their culture. Been in a startup in Bangledesh for 3 months, most employees from Indian universities. They work very hierachical, and not independent. It is almost impossible to make an employee choose between a blue and a red ball, we want hios managers approval first. I could not get my employees to to code things using stuff not part of their curriculum. I had to train them in those chapters in their book from university that was not part of their university education. Their attitude is, that it is better do make nothing than to make a mistake. They don't know the word no. They can't say they can't do it, but would rather delay forever.
Now I am in a large company, and the code quality we get out of India, no matter what huge front company we use, is nowhere as good as an average local person with a bachelor in CS can deliver. Their missing ability to think and read documentation, and explore is a killer.
The big threat comes from christian countries, countries with our culture. The threat comes from eastern europe and south america. They think more or less the same way. They can work independent. If they don't get an answer, they will decide on a direction to go. Even if they go the wrong direction, it is stillbetter than looking out the windows until the boss comes around.
And one important fact that you forget is, that brain workers, including IT developers, has a salary way above average salary in whatever country they are from. Personally, I would say it takes 3-5 average indians to be as efficient as an average westerner. that is $10.000-$15.000/month. So there is not good economi in using indian developers if they are available locally.
Outsourcing of jobs is mostly operations, where it is accepted that the level will be much worse at half the cost. And partly development because you can't get the skills locally. Operations today is waiting for the server to burn and then piss on it. Nothing proactively, except from scheduled reboots. So whatever is outsourced to india is not the same thing as the comanies used to get. They get less $ for $. They could save more money by deciding on the same service level with inhouse staff, and fire 90% of IT operations staff, and use external consultant when things are bad. They would even get a better service from that solution. Outsourcing to india is the new black. Everybody does it, nobody is happy, but because everybody does it, it must be the best.
The top US universities produced the best students for decades. The US gov and mil looked after the best with funding.
The US private sector enjoyed contracts.
The US gov pushed for the world to accept US standards and tech as part of free trade deals.
So all that creating for a global economy, funding and skill kept other nations locked out and US products as the only option.
Other nations never had that free flowing cash for science, students, the mil. To them it was limited hard currency, a loan or US charity to only buy a US product.
Their best had to be careful with funds or could only get so much out of education, the private sector or their mil.
The US also enjoyed freedom, freedom of speech, freedom to study, read. Its students had a well funded creative and smart side other nations lacked due to wars, poverty, faith, cults or type of gov.
That all worked well for decades. The changes now are a global workforce and a lack of visa tests.
US universities are no longer getting the best wealthy students, giving loans to the best middle class and testing for free access to the gifted poor.
With ever more university students with average ability taking up limited places or been granted limited places for non academic reasons a change will result.
The few really bright and gifted graduates will command the ability to select work they want. With the rest of their fellow students been well below average they have some option in who to work for and will accept a great offer.
The secret is:
The very best US graduates come with security clearances, trust and the ability to attract gov and mil funding. They have been the best in the world for decades.
But with changes to education, a flood of average students been passed now seeking the same granted access to work only the best will command good wages.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The difference in cost of living between my country's capital and New York is not that big.
Consumer prices are 1.5 times higher in New York; restaurant prices are 1.7 times higher in NY; Groceries prices are 2 times higher in NY.
Indeed, rent is much higher in NY (7 times higher) but that's an average and can vary greatly (Central Park view apartments cost a LOT more than periphery places).
In order to keep the same standard of life from my city (considering my current salary here), I need to make 4500 dollars a month as a specialist in NY. The average salary for my specialization in NY is a little bit over 7K dollars a month and could go as high as 11K dollars a month.
Here in my city I make 7.5 dollars an hour, working late shift (because most my customers are from the States). In NY I would make an average of 43.75 dollars an hour (accounting for salary ranges), that's almost 6 times higher than here, and in order to maintain the same living standard I would only have to earn 3.75 times as much.
The difference, mathematically speaking, is overhead. by moving to NY, with average salary, my standard of life would greatly improve. So there's your cost calculation right there.
Source: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of...
Feel free to compare any USA city with Bucharest and you'll see that the cost of living difference isn't that great.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Did that guy ever actually try to work together with Indians? There are culture and quality differences that are so vast, that companies even source-in again after less than favourable results of the outsourcing.
Wow, just wow. You haven't been down a darker nastier hole than dealing with an Indian IT company. Employees rotate like there are revolving doors installed in every cubical. No matter how good their English, there is a communication's barrier. Contracts are pretty much brought out on a daily basis. Procedure overwhelms any project; yet the procedure simply protects them while providing no value, but then they bill the shit out of you for that time.
Then there is this strange touchiness about any perceived insult. You say something doesn't work and they will either pretend they didn't hear you, or they will list off the resumes of all those involved. "Mamdoop, graduated top of his class, in a program that only accepts 100 students from over 1 million applicants. Are you saying that you know C++ better than he?" To which I reply, the program is crashing, it is crashing because he didn't do any tests at all and any client ID over 100 will crash the software.
Boom contract time: "Your sample set of clients only had 100 clients." This ignores the fact that the contract also stipulated that there will be 100,000-500,000 clients.
And it just goes on and on and on. Then after you finish successfully managing to sue them in an American court, you see that they are using your company name for a positive reference.
Then there is the endless changing of the contract. Somehow the monthly billing of $40,000 goes up to $45,000 and the extra is for "administrative excesses" and you say no, but it takes months for them to remove it, and as the end comes closer it goes up and up and up with subtle threats about the software ever being delivered if it doesn't get paid.
The best is when one of your own employees turns out to be related to the company in India that got the contract in the first place. You are never able to prove that something scummy happened but your employee gets wildly upset when the contract is canceled with extreme prejudice. Like holy shit losing his mind upset.
Somehow they have created a facade of competence without actually creating the competence. A simple test is how many companies in India are actually making viable software products for themselves. Not the government, not for others, but an Indian Facebook. I don't think that it is possible. I suspect that there are all kinds of Vapourware companies, as they would have that nailed down cold; but a company that does something cool, has lots of customers, makes lots of real money, and doesn't have a government department firehosing money into it.
Without that excellence, why would we go there again? This is why Western Programmers make the big bucks; they deliver what was wanted.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Being able to effortlessly speak, read and write american (as opposed to the language used in England) at a high level, to know the culture, to have the nuances of intonation, politeness, expectations, professionalism and body language counts for 40 - 50 points on your IQ.
It is not enough to have been on a 6-month language course and to be able to ask for (and understand) directions to the bathroom. You have to be able to read and write complex, technical, documents. You also have to be able to demonstrate the social skills (what about them cowboys?) to mingle with your colleagues. You have to be able to ask for explanations and understand them.
Being a good coder, tester, designer or integration specialist isn't enough. To earn the rates that american IT workers command, you have to blend in and pay back the confidence that your employer places in your soft skills.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Cog making is fine and good anywhere, but, honestly, many bosses want to be able to hold someone's feet to the fire. Someone in the room. Someone in the room with people in their room. If you have a product that requires specific communication and intense deadlines, being able to look someone in the eye is most of the justification for a premium. Managers don't get paid for results — they get paid for the appearance of results. They justify your expense to justify their own expense.
Hey, *someone* has to provide the answers for all those barely understandable urgent questions on stackoverflow and mailing lists.
Post subject is the words you must utter for the Herd to have a vague inkling about what you are saying.
Dying empires always choose diversity which produces worse not better results, but enables them to import cheaper labor to their countries and, trading on the good name of those countries, to sell it at a higher rate.
It is how professional organizations make their money. If you are the client of a top firm, you expect that experienced personnel will be handling your case, but in reality it will be tackled by their newest low-level hires but billed as if top performers were doing it.
In the same way, companies in the US and EU use outsourcing to make profit. They get a name for providing a good product or service here, then take on tons of new business and hire it out to cheaper labor pools, with the excuse that their existing staff are "supervising" the process.
At this point, it is clear that both the US and EU are in terminal decline and so you are correct: we will not "wake up." You only get a society full of special snowflakes when it is oversold because it has lost what made it great in the first place.
Alternative Right.
>Because people tend to refuse jobs that pay them less than cost of living.
That's not really true.
The other half is fixing cut 'n' paste code written by supposed "experts."
Alternative Right.
It's completely anecdotal, but I am often very well paid for programming tasks. Several times I have had to resolve issues with code from Russia and India. And I dealt long ago with code from Japan. In each case it is easy to see the style that matched the source country. Japan was very linear. Modules thousands of lines long. Functions hundreds of lines long. Russia was very well structured but lots of edge case issues, lots of dead code. India, cut and past heaven. In a project with nearly forty view controllers over half of them had about fifty shared lines. About thirty of those easily moved into a parent class, and twenty or so moved to the networking layer. The networking layer itself had twenty or so methods that were duplicates save a couple bits that became a dictionary of parameters. In each case after refactoring the lines of code were significantly reduced, save the Russian code which we actually modified after refactoring to handle edge cases. No one did extensive parameter checking. No one had unit tests for functions. No one looked at security as a concern.
I was actually told that I was as productive as four Indian programmers. I also had a cost of three times what they paid the somewhat premium Indian outsourcing company (not the Indian programmer, his company's fees) ...
You can get outsourced code written cheaply. You get what you pay for. And you may be getting a lot less. The Indian firm I replaced counted all the cut and paste lines of code in their monthly productivity reports. The actual new lines was significantly less.
Want quality outsourced code, I can help you set something up in Ukraine. With American design and project control and leadership. It won't beat the low end Indian, Chinese, Estonia, Poland, or Russian outsource prices, but will be a better value. And the code repository sits in the US. I can also arrange guaranteed US based development teams. Oh, and we do forensic software and hardware pre-discovery research.
"Why Are American Tech Workers Paid So Well?"
First thing, this is a subjective question, so I could compare it to anyone / anything including because he is under 30's, geeky, looks smart or people suck at computers / buggy software.
But if your question is why American Tech Workers get paid so well 'compare to' offshore Tech Workers, then that's a specific question that can be answered with specific explanations.
The reason for that is due to supply and demand. There are employers that demand for higher paid competence American Tech Workers, who know they will ensure company productivity and security is at prior. Also, there are demand for just some cheap random Tech Workers to fill holes. Part of the reason for those cheap demand is Tech Workers to some employers are like wizard / doctor, where those employers never understand exactly what they are doing (black magic or potion making?) Those employers are also short sighted, that can only learn after a terrible breach and they do not value/hire higher paid competence American Tech Workers.
Outsourcing to India and elsewhere was really popular a couple of years ago, but I notice a lot of companies have been insourcing their software development recently. Software itself is not bound by location, but working together on complex software is easier when you sit close together than when half of the team is on the other side of the globe. You introduce a lot of communication overhead into your process. When it's developed in-house, you've got more control over the details, the planning and the quality. People on the other side of the world may be cheaper by the hour, but ultimately, you don't need hours, you need software that solves your problem.
Because almost everyone who uses a computer has no fucking idea what they 're doing. Monitors are just big Pavlovian response trainers for them, and the first time they don't get a treat when the bell rings, they have no idea WTF is happening. There is literally nothing so simple that otherwise intelligent and useful people can't turn into autistic kindergartners when it involves a computer.
The biggest hurdle in any IT situation which involves an end user, which is most of them, is getting them to explain what they want. I have a really hard time with it in person, able to witness hand motions and pointing, understanding local idioms, and comfortable with the culturally assigned meaning of various intonations. The guys in india might figure it out too, I'm sure they're not dumb, but it'll take longer. And sometimes they wont.
Also, "institutional knowledge" is a big thing. Someone who has been supporting the same users for a while is way more effective then someone who has to jump in fresh at each interaction. Knowing the specific quirks of whatever setup the company is using is a big advantage to solving problems quickly, and planning for changes realistically.
Lost hours of productivity, and just as bad, a culture of "shadow" IT, are hard to quantify. But they're real, and they're expensive. That's why someone who has a clue what they're doing, and can talk to people, is worth more than a random worker on the other side of the world.
Plus, who has skin in the game? Is the outsourced worker going to get fired if he fucks something up? Is he going to care if he does, or are you just one of 100 clients? The guy where you are his sole source of income and is responsible directly to you, is less likely to play fast and lose with those ineffable things like "security" and "confidentiality".
Indians are cheaper because the quality of their work is "cheaper". Indians are basically humanoid robots, which do very well "A" as long as you only ask them "A". The moment you deviate slightly from "A", like in an actual program, they start being confused and they can't figure out what to do. The only indians that have an actual brain are already in more civilized countries that don't crap in the streets. What remains in India are under-performing mediocre individuals that will soon be replaced by AI (and they already have, as most of their tasks can be automated by writing scripts).
The workers in India may be earning good wages for the local market. Problem is that the company is allowed to get workers from one economical area to do work in another completely different area. Selling products cheap products for high prices is OK. However in such a case the company simply makes money on the differences between currency buying powers. Nothing to do with sellsman ship or optimisation. A monkey can do it.
It's cheaper for a two big reasons:
1. India's Rupee is considered less valuable than the USD because the USD is the world reserve currency amongst other currency manipulative tactics.
2. India neglects basic protections we take for granted in the US. No unemployment insurance, crappy schools, and a lack of a requirement to pay for "pensions". Hence it is more "expensive" to pay a US worker.
American companies want to pay workers Indian salaries with a massive currency disparity while not bothering to pay for the things that make America great such as a highly educated work force, paved streets, social welfare, food/drug safety, and other items.
Around the year 2000, Indian developers could expect about 1 lakh/year income for each year of experience they held, with a significant number of said developers having 5 or fewer years of experience - except, of course, when being shopped as H1-Bs to US employers wanting 10 years experience in Oracle 11 in the year 2000.
That's roughly one eighth the pay rate for an equivalently-experienced US developer. Under $10,000 a year in most cases.
Try living as a professional in the USA on under $10K/year, even 17 years ago.
So how did they do it?
Simple. In India, home air conditioning is a luxury, not the essential that Southern locales in the USA consider it to be. Firstly, because the equipment itself is no cheaper over there than in the US, secondly, because residential electrical service back then was extremely unreliable.
And not just air conditioning. Refrigerators were the "in" thing for the up-and-coming. Look at an Indian cookbook sometime. Most everything in it is either something you'd eat immediately or something that doesn't perish if not refrigerated. Ghee, for example, removes the components of butter than go rancid.
Electricity was so unreliable that the tech employers would maintain their own private power plants.
Another thing that tech companies over there would do is run transportation for their employees. This actually was done in my town back in the 1960s, but not any more. Indian tech employees are far less likely to own a car.
Then there's food. Indian diets are much less meat-heavy and frequently vegetarian. Rice and dal cost a lot less than hamburger and steak.
And don't forget social nets. The Indian social net is you die in the streets. You can have a free college education, but you have to pay for all the schooling that gets you there yourself.
Last, but not least, it's a veritable Libertarian paradise as far as regulations go. Not that everything's unregulated, but for a fee, it often can be. No pesky pollution regulations, little oversight to make sure that the food isn't contaminated, toxic fumes wafting from the nearby Union Carbide plant, stuff like that.
India has advanced considerably in the last 20 years, but it's still a lot cheaper to live there than it is in the USA. As long as you're willing to make some concessions.
Actually, since Indian developers aren't stupid, whatever you may think of their work as coolie labor, they've pushed up salaries considerably. Still much less than US levels, but significantly. So their side of the coin has been "why should we be paid so little when other countries pay so much? Should we as an industry raise our salary expectations?"
Should we, as an industry, lower our salary expectations -- and that of students entering the field -- to make us more competitive with our peers in India and similar "much cheaper labor than first world" economies? If not, what should we be doing to make ourselves competitive in ways that our peers overseas cannot duplicate?
Looking big picture the only reason anyone is paid a lot for a job comes down to supply and demand. If you need a technical specialist and there aren't a lot of them in the markets available to you then you are going to have to pay a lot for them. That's why professional baseball players can make millions while school teachers sometimes struggle to make ends meet. It has nothing to do with the relative importance of the jobs and everything to do with the availability of adequate talent. There simply aren't a lot of people who can actually hit a major league fastball and so the talent pool is small and the wages are high. Same thing with engineering and other technical talent. There is a limited supply of qualified engineers able to do many of the tech jobs necessary in this country who are also able to be physically located where they are needed.
You only get paid a lot for one of two reasons. You are either doing something important that few others are able to do OR you are doing something necessary that few others want to do. If you can effectively do your job remotely from your co-workers then you should be concerned about competition from overseas. Similarly if what your company is doing can be replicated somewhere with lower labor costs you should similarly be concerned. And of course there is the issue of companies bringing in lower priced talent from other labor markets like with H1B visas. In time I'd expect to see something of a reversion to the mean for wages of US based technical talent just like for most other jobs with abnormally high wages. There are plenty of folks in China and India and elsewhere who are equally smart as US engineers and there are more of them. In time I would expect this to increase the supply of talent in the work pool and wages to decrease correspondingly.
So when you need to be able to pay 20 grand after taxes to live near where you work just for the basics, you start to get annoyed that someone living in a cesspool thousands of miles away for pennies on the dollar is arrogant about stealing your job.
The arrogance is all here in the US. We act like we are entitled to earn the highest wages in the world as if it is some sort of divine right. In reality we've had a good run and many have forgotten that we only got those high wages because we out competed everyone else. If we are idle and complacent then wages in the US will fall back towards the mean as surely as gravity. There are lots of smart folks in China and India and elsewhere and there are more of them. China has 4 people for every one in the US and India is the same. All other things being equal China and India should be able to generate the most technical talent just by sheer weight of numbers.
One thing people in the US tend to forget is that the USA was one of the few countries that didn't have to rebuild from scratch after WWII. We got a 30 year head start on the rest of the world because we were protected by two oceans and didn't have all our infrastructure destroyed in the fighting. Now that the rest of the world has rebuilt we've had to compete on a more equal footing and the results haven't always been favorable.
The short answer: Karl Marx was right. We live in a late stage capitalistic society and economic activity is organized so that profit is disproportionately channeled to the rich. The rich don't actually earn the money as much as they take it from everyone else. It's kind of like the mafia system, where everyone has to kick money up to the level above them for the privilege of having income.
Given that, consider what it means when a US person looses their job to an offshore worker or a 1HB worker. It's not like the cost of anything goes down as a result, so what happens instead is the execs have an even larger slice of the pie. Right now the best way to become really rich in the US is to eliminate the jobs of US workers. As others have already pointed out, somewhere along the line this will no longer be the case because all the wealth will be concentrated in the hands of the richest, and the rest of the country will be just like the average worker in the third world.
It's important to realize that the US is not doing this alone. Since the end of the Cold War the US, China and Russia are all on the path to oligarchy. They started at different places, and the societal organizations are different, but all three countries are going in the same direction. In some ways it is easier for this to happen in China and Russia because they have never had much of a middle class, but in the US the disruption is more visible because it takes two or three generations to transfer the wealth of the middle class to the oligarchs.
Note to Libertards: I never said that Marx was right about everything, just that he was right about how capitalism ultimately produces a system where the few become extremely rich and everyone else has nothing.
Why is Snark Required?
1) Any project completely outsourced is doomed to failure. Even if you write the most precise specifications, the output will be low quality and likely not meet the specifications. You need to have internal resources that can work with the outsourced resources to make sure they are making good coding and technology choices and then implementing it correctly. Hence higher wages here for the more qualified internal resources.
2) Don't ignore the IP protection angle. If you offshore, make sure that the offshore entity is incorporated here in the US so you can go after them legally if one of their resources walks off with your code. India isn't as bad as China, but then again no one is as bad as China with IP protection. So you pay a premium for onshore resources because you have the full weight of the US legal system to go after them if they take off with your code.
3) I have observed some offshore resources in India nearly as good as internal resources. But we've always paid top dollar for offshore resources. So you definitely get what you pay for and if you go cheap expect poor quality.
4) US workers do indeed work harder than anyone else. India, every two weeks it seems there's some other national or local holiday they are taking off. And, oh, don't forget that some form of the flu or typhoid is going around so don't be surprised when a resource loses 1-4 weeks to recover from some virus. In China they have the Chinese New Year where they take off for 3 weeks every year. And nothing happens for three weeks. No e-mail, No shipping in/out of China(and this goes for Taiwan too). And up to half your staff doesn't return after it's over.
5) The US has a culture that fosters creativity. Cultures that promote conformity do not foster creativity.
At the end of the day offshoring/outsourcing is a force multiplier. A good mix of internal and external resources is the key to successful projects. So there will likely less stateside tech jobs with more outsourced but those that are left here will likely be paid higher wages. They are worth the higher wages as they are critical to the success of your projects.
Virtually every sector is pays better, not just in the US but in the First World in general.
It is far more expensive to live here, reason number 1.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I work with Indian developers every single day. Some of the Indian developers are in India and some are in the US. Generally the very cheap developers/QA Indian professionals aren't very skilled and talented and often impede progress. Generally the talented Indian developers/QA get/demand raises and eventually earn as much as their American counterparts.
I work with American developers every day. Generally the very cheap developers/QA professionals aren't very skilled and talented and often impede progress. Generally the talented developers/QA get/demand raises and eventually earn as much as their talented Indian counterparts.
You can find American developers that will work for minimum wage, you really can, just put an advert somewhere. You will get what you pay for, you might find a trainable gem, but as soon as that gem matures into a skilled and talented developer that gem will demand more money. Indian developers are no different.
I know a brilliant American developer here in Atlanta that just got a raise from $9 per hour to $11 per hour. He is great at MySQL, Mongo, PHP, Node, Angular 1, and Angular 2 - full stack. The dude is a straight up genius. He was hired for small contracting company in is Junior year of high school and now he is Freshman in college. You better believe that lots of recruiters are watching and waiting for the moment when they can place somewhere for $25 an hour....
The difference is that American companies want to hire cheap developers from India not from the US. So more Indian junior developers mature into talented developers and fewer young Americans developer mature into talented developers; but once anyone (Indian or American) prove themselves to be good they bolt for greener pastures... well unless they are bound via something like H1B... but that's a different conversations.
So the question implied that you can get highly talented, highly skilled, well trained, highly motivated... developers from overseas for cheap; that's is not that case. It is true that you can get cheap developers from overseas and you can get cheap developers in the US.
Why do you think that Globalization is unavoidable?
Globalization is a terrible thing. In the long run, it is good for company owners who are willing to move around to find the lowest wages available to get even richer, but it will destroy entire countries.
Free trade is an evil concept designed to make the rich richer.
Consider this.
Take Germany as an example. Germany has an excellent social system. Assuming you have paid into the system, you will be taken care of. You will never be homeless or go without the basics. Sure, it may not be perfect, but at least you stay alive in your old age and can visit the doctor when needed.
Naturally this results in a high tax rate middle and upper class workers and a higher cost of living, though things like food are not allowed to rise too high.
How is it fair or reasonable to allow Indian goods and services free market access when Indians have no social system in place at all? It would be impossible to compete against them for price. Meaning that the businesses and workers supporting the system go under and the system becomes insolvent. For countries to allow and encourage this is insane. It is cutting off the hand that feeds them.
There will always be some group of people who can be taken advantage of in order to bring down the price of goods. People need to think about the real costs though.
Personally, I do my best to shop locally when possible.
Your question could be better asked this way: If China and India are so cheap, and talent readily available, why haven't all IT jobs simply been outsourced to China and India?
That does not appear to be happening - frankly the reverse is happening. The US appears to be drawing much talent from those areas with programs like the H1B visa.
Why would a top-tier IT worker want to pack their bags and head to the US? Simply put, the US is a more attractive place. Thinks like excellent schools, good roads bridges, decent electrical grid, police, fire, and the worlds biggest military for protection make the US a decent place to live and raise a family.
Companies and workers WANT to operate here in the US. If they didn't - the H1B visa wouldn't exist.
The reasons they want to operate here cost money - and that means corporations and individuals alike must pay the tax bill to fund those things.
TL;DR: The US is nice and costs money to keep nice - therefore salaries must be higher to pay for that.
Yeah, my dad told me almost 20 years about about parts outsourcing to China. When they got the parts back the tolerance was not tight enough for the application (aviation), so they told China it didn't meet the spec. China said they would need to by the equipment to produce parts to that specification. Factoring in the cost of the new equipment, it would have been cheaper for my dad's company to buy the part in the US. Outsourcing is only cheaper when the outsource country is providing products and services in a cheaper way.
> Value sets the cap. If the person doing the job creates $1M in value for the company, then that position is worth $1M
That's called "demand".
> But if 1M people could do that job
That's called "supply".
So paraphrasing your post:
It's not supply and demand, it's demand and supply.
> there are billions of people that would work as a CEO for $20M a year
There's about one person available who has experience as CEO of a large car marker and did so succesfully. The supply side is people who are willing and able (ie qualified and available), not people who are willing but unable (unqualified).
No one has touched on the fact that many of us are working at least 10 hour days, have to be on call ALL the time and vacations are pretty much meaningless because we have to "be around - just in case" - and have to take at least a couple of calls during our so-called vacation.
I want out of my current job so bad - but there's nothing out there. I'll take a pay cut so I can have a life and have time to get exercise and play the guitar again. And see my family sometimes - I think I still have one. I think I have kids - I don't know. I remember going to the hospital with the wife and feeding babies and now there are these teenagers running around.
The song "Cats in the Cradle" - Harry Chapin makes me cry.
I know doctors who work less - and make 3 times as much as I do.
Yeah, my dad told me almost 20 years about about parts outsourcing to China. When they got the parts back the tolerance was not tight enough for the application (aviation), so they told China it didn't meet the spec. China said they would need to by the equipment to produce parts to that specification. Factoring in the cost of the new equipment, it would have been cheaper for my dad's company to buy the part in the US.
and let me guess how your story ended: Your dads company bought someone at the FAA to increase the allowed tolerances for those parts enough that the cheaper parts from china were good enough.
bickerdyke
You made a good point.
> but it hardly explains the idea of American exceptionalism in the 20th century.
American Exceptionalism does NOT mean "America is better." Somewhat the opposite, in fact. If the US government and the govetnment Spain both spy on their citizens, the US has failed to live up to it's responsibilities, while Spain has not necessarily failed, according to American Exceptionalism. AE says that due to certain historical facts, the US has responsibilities that other nations don't have.
Most states are also nations, the borders of France (the state) define the area controlled by the French people, the ( ~ ethnic) nation. American Exceptionalism is the historical fact that the US is a state (country) founded not based on a nation (ethnic group), but rather on a set of ideals; and that fact creates different responsibilities. Japan (the state) is basically the area controlled by ethnic Japanese, so they would be expected to preserve and defend Japanese culture. Germany is the area controlled by Germans, so they would be expected to preserve and protect German culture. The US is not a state, not an ethnic group; it was explicitly founded on the ideals that each person is endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, etc. The US claims to be "the brightest beacon of freedom", therefore the US should be expected to defend and preserve freedom and liberty. Spain wasn't founded as a bold experiment in individual freedom, so they have no special responsibility to do that- Spain is supposed to be Spanish, that's all. The US government, being founded for a particular purpose, has a special responsibility to honor that purpose. When we fail to preserve and protect freedom, we fail at our national identity, at our national purpose. That's American Exceptionalism.
Try it with Palo Alto California. Or Atherton. Or Mountain View, Milpitas, Fremont, San Jose ...
Even people from the most expensive places on the East Cost (NOT New York City) are shocked at the jump in cost of living when they move to Silicon Valley.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What makes US talent in demand? The largest market is in the US and India/China has poor infrastructure for delivering services to the US. Another huge factor is experience. I've worked with a lot of H1B workers over the years as companies pretend there is a shortage here and bring them in, then dump qualified US workers when they are up to speed. That is how it has to be done. Most of the talent coming from India is not educated and trained in the same manner and they aren't immersed in technology their entire lives in the way US workers are.
It is like taking high school graduates right out of school and putting them into the jobs and the success rates are comparable. Some of those H1B visa workers work out, learn on the job, and stay here and once they finish that term and go permanent they command salaries that are just as high as US workers. The downside of course is that an indian accent is still tough for most US workers to parse on the phone and there seem to be some challenges I've observed but can't explain with reading comprehension. For instance, we have a script that runs some tests and if it has already been run it indicates that prevalidation failed but with a reason of "This script has already been run, and does not need to be run again."
If you want to have a similar pool of US workers, encourage high school to have advanced placement curriculum and take students on apprenticeships right out of high school.
I would be interesting to compare the salaries of CEOs of banks and industries that actually produce something of value in Germany and here in the US. Here money is sucked out of our economy by banks and hedge funds and shipped to offshore accounts leaving our society with less capital to run on.
I have worked for giant global conglomerates and small startups, and I can tell you in my experience, that 11+ hour time difference matters. As we work as an industry to get away from 6 month release cycles to 1 week sprints or whatever you want to label "continuous delivery" that 9-13 hour time difference between US markets and "outsource" markets starts to really hurt.
Back when there was a 6 month release cycle, you could lose 1 day to communication lag and it would be no big deal... now that amounts to losing 20% of your dev time.
Modern software is expected to add features or fix bugs quickly (days not weeks). In my experience Javascript developers and fickle customers will all quit if you don't rewrite your front-end every 6 weeks (hopefully we are at peak javascript right now, but who knows, maybe once every javascript developer has had a chance to figure out that React/Angular/Bootstrap/Knockout all suck, they will stop seeing the grass is greener on the other side and just pick something). You can't do any of that with a time and culture gap.
The culture gap is significant too. Everybody in the US sees some of the same ads, some of the same "viral" apps, memes, etc. They share the same slang and vocabulary, that kind of stuff is important in software development, and it can't be exported, no matter how hard we try. When you have ONE developer that can talk to your sales/marketing/client relations teams, your product quality goes way up... when you have a whole team of them, you can knock it out of the park. When you have to hire 5 Business Analysts just to write documents that will always be wrong, in order to get any work out of your geographically diverse team, you lose that magic.
If I'm a mid-career programmer looking for a job, why should I expect to be paid a whole lot more than my peer in India when applying for a job that could easily be outsourced to India?
Because your standard and cost of living is quite a bit higher. Why do people in New York City get paid so much more than people in Bartlett, Nebraska? Same reason!
This question really displays a serf mentality. It assumes that this is your employer's world and you just get to live in it. Why should only your employer's needs be considered when discussing salary? Aren't there two parties in this negotiation? Further, getting back to standard of living, do you want to live in India? Or would you rather live in the United States? If it's the latter, why on Earth would you want to lower your own wages and therefore your quality of life? Because it benefits your employer? Have some self respect. Or, congratulations on reducing yourself to a line item on an ROI analysis.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Most IT employees are paid what may be higher than average, but is really not so astounding. In 2000, I made $40K ($56K adj. for inflation). Today, I make $86K. Yes, that's double in 15 years. But let's recognize a few facts.
1) That was my first year in IT.
2) That was 15-20 years ago
3) I have to commute a 100+ miles a day for that salary, if I worked locally my salary would be around $50K. ($10K increase in salary is ridiculous for 15+ years of inflation and far greater skillset)
4) Cost of living has skyrocketed. My insurance costs are now about 10x more.
***
Our nation was founded with tariffs. And we need to re-instate them. Free trade should only be with nations that offer a similar level of liberty and standards of living.
If you give a detailed and precise specification to an overseas vendor, they will dutifully create what you asked for. But if you say to them that you want to build X, that they need to work out the details, and make it look cool, you get garbage.
If you think you can accomplish your project with remote workers, you probably have a ton of experience managing projects and lots of technical expertise, or you found an amazing agency that charges a lot through word of mouth.
Technology can usually make you money if you invest in it. It you treat it like a commodity that you should hunt for bargains on, you're shooting your own business in the foot.
Neither were India nor China..
China was absolutely devastated by Japan. India was a part of the British Empire at the time and suffered accordingly. There was a huge famine in India during WWII which killed about 3 million people.
It only really affected Europe and northern Africa, and several island nations in the pacific.
WWII devastated infrastructure around the entire western pacific rim. Japan, Korea, China, Vietnam, Philipines, Burma, etc. Of course Europe was hugely damaged as well. India wasn't a big player in the world economy at the time and didn't get investment because the British Empire was falling apart.
You're probably right about the advantage over western Europe, Russia (USSR), and Japan, but it hardly explains the idea of American exceptionalism in the 20th century.
Sure it does. Those were the areas with the highest levels of industry prior to the war. When a war knocks out virtually all of your closest competitors, it's pretty easy to get ahead for a while. Furthermore the US actually made a lot of money rebuilding those parts of the world and providing necessary services.
W2's ? Really ? Your credibility took a big hit .... :(
Almost all successful software dev isn't about algorithms; it's business process engineering. If you don't understand how the business works now and how it needs to work in the future, your software will fail no matter how fast or cheap it's made.
Obviously business process design requires domain expertise but it really lives or dies on the presence of *outstanding* communication skills. If the actors don't exchange *all* the essential requirements and business dependencies, the deliverable will hit the wrong target. And the cost of failure is a lot higher than the savings from outsourcing.
This essential exchange of info is hampered badly by domain inexperience, distance, and latency between provider and consumer. Not only do comm skills enable focus on the desired goals, but also on the (many) unspoken needs and dependencies that often decide whether a deliverable actually plugs the big holes in the business' ship or the water pours through at will. I think US businesses have only discovered this recently (in the past decade) after many 'projects thrown over the ocean' have come back to haunt them as zombie projects (half dead creatures that suck the life out of you but somehow can't be killed). Until this need can be addressed internationally, the value of oursourcing forever will be limited.
Really?
Okay, I'll offer you $10 a year with no benefits to do all my Cisco work for me...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
You fucking assholes. You want to know why there are no womyn-born-womyn in tech? YOU WANT TO FUCKING KNOW WHY?!!
GO FUCK YOURSELF.
Sorry, but most domestic tech talent is not competent
They're more competent than the offshore folks.
Perhaps you might want to train them instead of complaining about alleged incompetence.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Yeah, my dad told me almost 20 years about about parts outsourcing to China. When they got the parts back the tolerance was not tight enough for the application (aviation), so they told China it didn't meet the spec. China said they would need to by the equipment to produce parts to that specification. Factoring in the cost of the new equipment, it would have been cheaper for my dad's company to buy the part in the US.
and let me guess how your story ended: Your dads company bought someone at the FAA to increase the allowed tolerances for those parts enough that the cheaper parts from china were good enough.
I think they ended up paying China for the more expensive parts for some contract reason, not really sure. This was in equipment that wouldn't just act up over time but would fail to run in manufacturing tests if the parts were not precise enough.
In India, there are only a handful of 'tech' cities - Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Gurgaon, Noida (last 2 both part of Delhi NCR) - and all of them are very expensive. One can't get a tech job sitting in places like Ahmedabad or Jaipur.
In the US, while you do have New York and the Bay Area, there are a lot of cities that do have tech industries and companies, and where people can affordably live and work. Like Charlotte, Atlanta, Dallas, Austin, Denver, Los Angeles, Seattle.
However, fact remains that the exchange rate sucks up any advantage there is to work in the US, despite it being more affordable
Just like people here - particularly non Americans - refer to us as USians, they might as well rename American English to USish
Funny how how US corporations want to import workers from India that has one of the lowest educational standards. If it's a matter of an educated workforce, you'd think they would target Germany. Obviously it's about money.
Funny how CEO salaries aren't involved in this discussion.
(1) There remains a culture of "high techism" in the U.S. by which all things electronic are seen as important, professional, and premium. This is buttressed by the fact that many of our thought and industry leaders are associated with high-tech and Silicon Valley. So in the absence of other forces there remains a presumption that a coder is by nature an "elite" person and deserves respect and pay in kind.
(2) There remain significant cultural differences between U.S. employers and qualified workers from beyond U.S. culture that are taking time to overcome. The greatest of these are qualitative, i.e. how to balance the productivity/high-quality equation. Overseas workers are more often accustomed to working toward the "productivity" end of the equation, while U.S. workers understand that inside the U.S. employers are often looking for "high-quality" and "creativity." There is an argument often made around here that non-U.S. workers are inherently lower-quality and less creative, but from what I've seen this is bunk. There is just a cognitive hump to overcome for non-U.S. workers—perhaps a bit more learning and a shift in expectations about what leads to firing vs. promotion in this marketplace.
(3) Cost of living is higher in the U.S., particularly in the areas where high-tech is centered. So there is a commensurate increase across the board in salaries and salary expectations for these areas, not just in tech.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
> My most memorable snip of code from the Indian team was a line of perl
That reminds me of a line I fixed the other day:
my $time = `date "+%s"`
Uhm, did you mean?:
my $time = time();
This was written by a senior architect, formerly director of engineering. he's actually a good software architect, but a terrible coder.
are we gonna raise the water for all the boats, or remove the water altogether?
glad I am close to retirement, the race to the bottom is getting old.
Why does Amazon always pay people thousands of dollars to move into a very expensive area, and then pay them above market rate? (I don't work for Amazon, but it makes the point.) Because labor costs aren't a big deal when you are so well automated.
As long as the revenue per employee is so high... It makes much more sense to pay 200k to bring in 1,000k than to pay 50k to bring in 500k. You make 800k vs. 450k. Paying someone 0 isn't even worth it, because of management overhead. Dealing with people is hard. You deal with computers when you can. No matter how cheap that pay gets, as long as the difference in revenue is greater than the pay difference, it is a no-brainer.
This is why people who know how to automate solutions get paid so much. It isn't about productivity of coding. It is about business-level productivity. The relevant cost is not the cost of labor, but the ability to scale vs. the overhead of managing product and scale, which spreads that cost out until it is almost nothing.
This is why professional services is dying. Throwing people at the problem is a waste of everyone's time. Everything has to be able to work self-service, and at unlimited scale. Everyone doing that is making a ton of money.
I get job candidates that want more than 100k because they are programmers, but they have never automated a thing in their life. They come in after being in several failed startups, complaining about a lack of business plan. I wouldn't even pay them 0 because they bring failure. They don't even know how to do basic sysadmin stuff.
That is why devops is a thing now. The ops part makes the money. The dev is just a means to that end.
I don't believe that we will ever run out of "jobs". Even today, we are nearly fully automated in our survival needs. Even in the 1920s, philosophers were talking about forcing people to only work part time days because automation reduced the need to work to survive, and we are far more productive now than then. But nearly everything is about increased luxury and entertainment, even today. People will keep paying for that forever, even when they don't have to worry about survival.
The only economic issue is that the income inequality is so great that consumers can barely afford to pay for their consumption tech, and can't afford to risk the development of their production capacity. I think nearly everyone should be both consumers and producers. We don't really *need* capitalism or communism or socialism. We just need whatever system we use to share consumption with production. Let's face it. The only productivity issue we face today is environmental issues. We need to go clean, and incentivize that fast. That's it. The rest is just annoying foreign policy stuff that will be resolved when we can share consumption in a clean way, and no one will be incentivized to be violent anymore, even with silly religion memes.
# make clean sig
English is India's primary language. The only "textbook" education they get to speak it is the same that Americans and British students get: proper grammar and sentence structure, vocabulary and spelling, etc. They all learn to speak English as children because that's what everyone speaks over there.
Hell, my English professor in college was Indian.
The only difference between their English and ours are the accent (which is something fierce), and colloquialisms and slang and such.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
The answer to this is obvious: the cost of living in the US is enormously higher than India so in absolute terms our wages must be higher than someone in India. The better question is why must tech workers in the US be paid so much better, relatively, than other professions. The answer is supply and demand. Very few Americans seem to be willing or able to handle technical careers, both as a matter of poor education and as a matter of selection amongst those that have the education. It's a little misleading, since there are technically qualified people in the country unable to work in their field due to the presence of better qualified, lower wage applicants from abroad. We probably don't even KNOW the size of our workforce since we've created a culture of disposable people.
This is also true in India, we're getting the very cream of the crop from overseas. Their crop happens to be 3-4 times larger than ours, but they're making more than their non-tech peers, relatively, in India. If they come here for a few years, make american dollars but manage not to spend too much, they will have substantial money back home when their indenture ends. If they can manage that, it's tough and sometimes painful to do in Si Valley.
The real question is why do we still bring indentured servants from Asia like we did in the 1800s to build railroads, and send them back when we're done? Never mind the ethics, why are we trying to self-destruct ourselves like this? If supply is genuinely too low, such that no qualified applicants can actually be found, why do we not bring these people over in a more responsible fashion: by letting them compete on wages based on the same supply and demand, and then retaining them once we've invested in their training and upkeep. Why not have their families which no doubt have far better views on the value of education, come over and show our schools what proper students look like, and raise the bar for our own failing middle class? Why not attempt to fix our culture of poor education and low technological excellence at the source, and give those with the right brains a field to strive for, rather than avoid?
I do not encourage my children to go in to tech, if they really want to I will warn them that it's a do or die field, you are the top 10% or you are going to be unemployed for some fraction of your life. I encourage them to enter fields that are more difficult to outsource or more highly valued locally and stretch my budget to buy their way in to some areas that are largely exclusive by wealth rather than excellence, which is increasingly where reliable jobs still exist here.
In the US, you can't get an advanced computing degree for $1000. And we don't live on $500 a year.
There. Answered.
Now go move to India and stop whining about us cutting H1-B visas.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Under no circumstances do you ever lower your salary expectations. If the industry or position you are qualified for or seeking changes with regard to the typical salary paid, either be a Hero and be worth more, or change occupations.
I learned over 30 years ago, while struggling to pay my way through University, how to stop earning near-minimum wage jobs. Stop looking for them, and don't accept any.
And, as if by Magic, I started earning higher salaries. Work was no easier and no harder to find. When I retired I was amongst the highest paid in my profession in Canada.
What exactly do you think that economic term, "supply and demand", means that's in some way different from what you described? It sure sounds to me like you could have copy-pasted your post from Economics 101, page 3 "Supply and Demand".
Ps a timely analogy for "a billion people would be willing to be CEO" is the CEO of the United States. Sure many, many people would be *willing to be president. Yet it seems we're unable to find even one who is qualified for the job and willing to apply (run). The supply of *suitable* applicants is approximately zero.
I'm WILLING to be a world-class pianist, but because I'm not ABLE to, I'm not part of the supply of world-class pianists.
If American workers make a lot more than other workers, that is a good thing. Stop trying to level the playing field at the expense of the the American economy.
I click to read these comments and ad pops up, Boomsourcing shows ad, “Cost-effective Outsourced Scaling. Get pricing!” I did a screen snapshot to save with my other stuff like article about Putin sets effort to bolster Russian air forces and to the side, “Meet Russian Beauties!”
mfwright@batnet.com
I had a coworker here in the states for a few years, who then had to go back to living in China at his wife's insistence. The difference in work from him was quite stark between the two locations. In our office, in-person, he was the guy I trusted most to handle the complexity of our core business and was toward the top of the team in output. He was a younger guy, and his coding style was a bit odd, but he was coachable and a hard worker.
Once he went back to China, he tried to switch up his working hours to be online at least part of the day when we were, but I could never tell when he was working. There were also some general issues with having internet access to some of the communication tools we used; he only ever made it onto Google Hangouts a couple times and so he would just not be involved in our morning scrums. We'd assign him tickets, and he'd do them, but being out of the office and out of the loop, he'd implement them in ways which were less extensible, or didn't make sense given some initiatives with our product. I also got the feeling that if he wasn't assigned any work, he just wouldn't work, instead of looking for ways to be useful or do traditional slacktime activities. And then the was the whole issue that if anything was a fire, even when it was related to his code, we just didn't have the time to wait for him to be online to fix it.
I'm not clear on any of the salary details; if he was paid the same for remote work that he was here in the office. He did get cut in the next round of layoffs (a year or so later), because he had become expendable. I like the guy, but I agreed with the company's thinking on that one.
The U.S. seems like an insane place to work. 80 hour weeks and hardly any paid leave seems common. Maybe I just work in a different culture though - wages are lower and people are out the door at 5:00.
What do I do? System architecture. Networking and security. No one in this house can touch me on that.
But does anyone appreciate that? While you were busy minoring in gender studies and singing a capella at Sarah Lawrence, I was gaining root access to NSA servers. I was one click away from starting a second Iranian revolution.
I prevent cross-site scripting, I monitor for DDoS attacks, emergency database rollbacks, and faulty transaction handlings. The Internet heard of it? Transfers half a petabyte of data every minute. Do you have any idea how that happens? All those YouPorn ones and zeroes streaming directly to your shitty, little smart phone day after day? Every dipshit who shits his pants if he can't get the new dubstep Skrillex remix in under 12 seconds? It's not magic, it's talent and sweat. People like me, ensuring your packets get delivered, un-sniffed. So what do I do? I make sure that one bad config on one key component doesn't bankrupt the entire fucking company. That's what the fuck I do.
http://siliconvalleyism.com/si...
or drink the Forbes koolaid and pretend any reduction in costs = good, and be the first against the wall when the revolution comes dirty fuckers.
> When people at a sporting event chant U.S.A.U.S.A.U.S.A. that's just hubris.
Perhaps sometimes it is. It's interesting you say "at a sporting event." You may have noticed at a sporting event they also yell "Go Jaguars!", knowing quite well that their Jaguars are 2-6, tied for worst team in the league. Is that hubris, or perhaps something else?
This sort of question brings up a lot of what is wrong with the market. With a few notable exceptions, we seem to be in a world where the idea is to make people as poor as we possibly can. the concept of a wealthy elite, and everyone else working impoverished. That only works as long as people are willing to have a smaller and smaller ruling class, because when 99.9 percent of everyone is broke, you go after the money of those who still have it. Fine young cannibals.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
> That's called "demand".
> No, that's value. "demand" is the number of positions available.
So you think that how much someone values, or desires, a thing, is not part of demand? Oxford Reference says:
Demand: The desire and ability to acquire a good or service.
Yep, how much it is desired (valued) is the first Oxford definition of "demand". HOWEVER, you're not AS mistaken as Oxford suggests. Demand is a curve, with TWO axes. The first axis is the one Oxford highlights - the value (the price someone is willing to pay); the second axis is the quantity they'll buy at that price (the axis you're thinking of).
The demand for CEOs is two-dimensional, how many will be hired at which price point:
> $10 million: 6
$5-$10 million: 150
$1 - $ 5 million: 2500
$1 million: 25,000
Obviously , because we're hacking into the payroll department...
Curso NR 10 online curso NR 10 curso NR 10 online
Uh, no.
Naive bean-counters and CEOs may think that, but writing code is not like making t-shirts.
I'm guessing they probably wouldn't like being called "naive". Would "unsophisticated" be better? "Under-knowledgeable"?
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
The simplest answer is that American tech workers have a better union.