For all the pro-WFH/fully remote developers on HN who live in North America, you're going to be in for a surprise when your company decides to replace you with someone living in another country. Why hire you when the company can hire someone who costs 1/5 of you and is willing to work harder without complaining? Both of you are remote anyway. So what if the new hire works at night and sleeps during the day?
For all pro-WFH/fully remote developers living in North America, you should be cheering for return to office mandates. It'll probably save your career long-term.
I live in Canada and most skilled developers self-sort into the American market as it's a 2x salary differential.
Important roles at multinationals are therefore hired in the USA. Even though all countries are officially "equal" in the eyes of a multinational, with salary based on market conditions/cost of living, in practice developers at the same job level have very different impacts. This has been true for decades.
I don't think this dynamic will change even in a WFH/remote environment because it's a great excuse for companies to reward engineers differently based on impact while still preserving job title equality.
It's similar to manufacturing in Germany. Salaries are higher so it naturally attracts talent. You can get things cheaper abroad, and many do, but if you want it done right...
Canadians self-sort into the US because of money. If they could earn the same amount working from Canada, almost none would pack up their lives and move to a new country.
I don't think it's this simple. Maybe it would be for larger corporations that would rather hire more cheap staff than fewer quality staff. You shouldn't have this issue if the company values the experience the staff has instead of just looking at them as an expense.
I've been working fully remote for 10 years and the company hires people from almost anywhere in the world. They'd get to pick the best candidate regardless of their location. Pay is also not based on where you're living but on the role and your experience.
So bizarre to hear stuff like this said as if it's a future hypothetical.
Outsourcing dev work to India because it's "cheaper" has already maximally happened since decades ago.
So if your theory was correct there'd be almost no western developers by now. And yet there they are, making half a million a year working for big tech in California.
The only way your position can pass even a basic sense check is that you mean you think these companies are paying 5x just to see their devs in person?
A (large) fraction of software development is outsourced to India for years if not decades but it jumped with the end of ZIRP. Outsourcing has downsides but the difference of salaries is also a part of the equation.
It'll be interesting to see the affect of AI on this. My guess is it'll actually reverse the pattern somewhat since the amount of manual work is reduced and thereby the premium on fast and clearly-understood comms has increased.
Hard to predict. In the areas I know well LLM don’t improve my productivity that much but they allow me to do something in areas I don’t know well e.g. write code in an unfamiliar language (likely bad code but sometimes that better than nothing). So maybe juniors + LLM will replace middle level developers.
Job market is better for seniors right now but that’s mostly because employers can sometimes hire a senior for money they would pay to a junior during late COVID boom.
Every software job I’ve had for over a decade has had at least one employee on the team working in a different office or from home. Frequently different time zones. This was already a reality and as the other guy in the thread said, we’ve already seen maximal outsourcing.
>So what if the guy works night and sleep days
is what you said in another comment and it has a lot to do with working with others to the point where I see remote jobs specify what time zones you can live in so that you have overlap with the rest of the team. Everyone whose worked with coworkers on a completely different shift than you knows how often simple tasks turn into 3 days events simply from the cycle of
Send request -> clarifying question is sent back -> send clarification taking an entire 24 hours for each step to resolve
Nope, this is a well known pattern. Western startup, grows, matures, MBAs take over, all they can do is look at cost numbers because they can't value anything, so send all the jobs to lowest bidder overseas, look at this sudden jump in profits! Surely we now all deserve fat bonuses. Get those bonuses, quietly move on to other jobs, company enters descent phase, new startups have since started eating into their markets, they've no way to respond because they're corpse-companies, slowly get consolidated and cannibalized and Toys-R-Us-d into the ground.
Whether you work from home or not does not change the fact that the work can be done remotely. You think your boss values the watercooler chitchat so much they would really pass on hiring someone at 1/5 of your salary working harder than you?
The return to office mandates were mostly a power play and a cost saving measure.
Why does Google hire anyone anywhere for half of their positions, when they could just literally not hire anyone and get the same amount of production code without wasting everyone’s time? It is absolutely not as simple as you seem to believe.
I also have been saying this and was shocked to see that US developers demanded WFH instead of actively trying to stop it becoming a thing. I was trying to understand what makes them believe that their company will pay them 5 to 10 times more money to sit in front of a computer somewhere outside the company rather than someone who is in the other side of the world.
USA based ones have some advantages, like the timezone and the familiarity to the culture but both of these things are actually fixable and when fixed it saves a lot of money. I came to conclusion that US based developers must be thinking that they are better than everyone and that's why they are being paid these salaries.
The space I work in, which I don’t plan to leave, is hardware/software/embedded. I am hybrid, and sometimes I go in twice a month. When trying to integrate hardware into a system over a software interface (CAN, various serial, i2c, eth, etc) I am on-site daily.
Then integrating a whole subsystem into the actual product, same deal. I spend as much time holding a wrench or a meter as I do writing code.
This is very hard to outsource.
I skipped the whole webdev movement. Closest I got was using Wt (C++) to make an engineering interface for a system once, so non-engineers could actuate relays and devices.
I do think I’m better than most people at this. I don’t think it can be outsourced, and I am not concerned.
People can argue about the latest js framework or how amazing rust is for the next 15 years, at which point I plan on retiring.
This type of work is largely recession-proof and offshoring-proof.
If it can be done more cheaply then some competitor will do it and kill your business that doesn’t. Either find another competitive edge (be better or convince somehow the customers that you deserve the premium you ask for), or do what Trump does, introduce tarrifs for imports and cutoff the more more efficient companies from reaching the local market. And of course pay the price for it.
