Not the original commenter, but this is the situation in Argentina. I would love to do a remote gig and get 100k a year. I am a programmer with over 20 years of experience and I can program professionally in over 10 different programming languages.
It is worth noting that software salaries are artificially inflated HEAVILY due to a general unwillingness or lack of interest in hiring overseas developers.
The second this changes, the bottom drops out of software.
I don't know if it will ever happen that big companies begin openly accepting overseas applicants but if/when it does, you can expect that it wont be for 100k. Suddenly when you consider the entire planet, there's no longer a shortage of developers, and the employer has all the power.
> It is worth noting that software salaries are artificially inflated HEAVILY due to a general unwillingness or lack of interest in hiring overseas developers.
Because it's been tried before and for the most part it was an abysmal failure. I was just starting out doing some basic web freelancing as a teenager in the 2000s and even I got roped in to clean up an outsourced project after being outbid a year earlier by an overseas firm during the first outsourcing wave. Lots of people on HN have horror stories of cleaning up from that era.
We've been here several times before - like literally just this past year of everyone saying "oh but now you have to compete with remote workers everywhere!" Salaries keep rising because software is an arms race. The companies making the most profit will continue to invest in getting the best people and outside of the odd global crisis, the industry will continue to grow as everyone else tries to keep up both in technology and in hiring. All those firms I cleaned up after as a kid are still around today and bigger than ever, yet on this side of the ocean we keep making more and more money.
I think we've got at least a century before software hits the diminishing returns that the industrial revolution did. My local lumberyard is still using DOS machines probably made before I was born.
Overall I agree with you, and my experience has been similar, but I think the comparison with outsourcing is not correct.
I would argue that outsourcing failed primarily due to companies trying to farm out the coding to uninterested entities whose incentives did not align well. Not necessarily because the foreign workers doing the coding were bad.
Back to the guy in Argentina -- I imagine that he/she is actually in a reasonably good position as the amount of remote work increases. Indians not so much, because they are 12.5 hours ahead (of Pacific time). Argentina is only 4 hours ahead, which makes for a lot more overlap.
So I think the field has leveled a little bit in that sense, because if you have a remote developer in another state, they are not very different than one in another country who happens to be in a similar time zone. The other big barrier IMO is communication, so someone in Argentina who is not merely fluent in English but speaks it very clearly could be in a really strong position.
> I would argue that outsourcing failed primarily due to companies trying to farm out the coding to uninterested entities whose incentives did not align well. Not necessarily because the foreign workers doing the coding were bad.
It failed because the intent was to cut costs and they got what they paid for. The successful ones were genuinely trying to expand their engineering talent pool and quickly figured out that the cost savings were a marginal benefit that made up for some of the extra overhead of international accounting and management. Quality engineers are one visa lottery away from Western salaries so the local median salary is often completely disconnected from what a FAANG might pay for a decent engineer, which is a rude awakening for anyone trying to cut costs without destroying the quality of their output. On top of that, the people most likely to make it a smooth transition are also the people most in demand (arms race!) and competition for them helps evaporate any savings for the business.
The guy in Argentina is in a great position to get hired to work remotely for an American company, but I don't seem him as competition regardless of how good he is. It's an arms race so my employer's competitor can't replace their team with Argentinians because that down time will give my employer time to crush them (which we learned in the 2000s). They can hire an extra team of Argentinians on top of their existing head count but if they do that my employer will be pressured to hire a team of Brazilians. Before you know it, both companies are hiring even more local teams to help manage the flow of work between their existing local teams and the outsourced ones.
There's more work and money to pay for it than there are people to do it. Until that changes, we're not the ones competing, the employers are.
There were several chapters in the history of US IT outsourcing. After Perot Systems in the 1980s and Tata/Infosys/etc around 2000, a third era has been underway for the past 5 years or so: extending IT operations to parts of the US and Eastern Europe with much lower labor costs than large US cities, esp. as compared to the US left coast.
This has worked far better than the 'Tata' chapter which exported to very cheap Asia where staff tech skills and the support model were too often haphazard and frequently underperformed. Hiring remote staff in new-growth US cities with lower CoL (e.g. Charlotte NC or Austin TX) has delivered capable staff and nearly synchronous operating hours to the main office. However in the past 2-3 years, IT labor costs have risen greatly in 'secondary' US cities, reducing those savings substantially.
In my experience, remote staff in eastern Europe have skills equal to US folks, but the 5 hour mismatch in daytime hours and their inability to visit US sites where non-IT R&D work is done and data is acquired does hamstring this model.
I wouldn't be surprised if a 4th era of outsourcing arises soon: remote work in small towns across the US and in western Europe. European IT wages often seem to be 50% or more below US large cities. That differential is likely to diminish as remote work increasingly is established as a new norm.
While I was working in my previous job for some clients in USA, I regularly had meetings starting from 6PM up to 10PM local time. I'm from Bulgaria. We have 7 hours difference with east coast. I had so much compensation hours/overtime that I was earning 20-25% more on top of my salary(outside of office hours are payed with multipliers) and had extra vacation days. Nowadays I'm not so inclined to make this much overtime, however I'm OK working with shifted office hours.
I'm in regular calls from the East coast US to central Europe so, usually, a six hour difference. That feels about the limit to me before things get more difficult, people need to work outside of normal business hours, etc.
You can do bigger differences and many of us do on occasion. But on a multiple times a week basis, both 5am calls and 11pm calls get old.
Yup, and it's worse if you're on the US west coast, where it becomes 9 hours (10 to eastern Europe), and then any synchronous meeting means one party gets up early or the other stays late.
My intuition is that a max of 3 or 4 time zones is the sweet spot, but it's cool to hear that you've had success up to 6.
The team I'm on have our calls with the Czech Republic at 9am or 10am. And we have calls with the UK in earlyish business hours to noon as well. They may end up working a bit later with action items from meetings but generally seems to work pretty well.
I think a presence in the same legal system is also a barrier. If you open a branch office and hire and manage them seriously, you can find a sharp team, but this isn’t all that cheap. If you try to write a small check to some contracting company with no reputation, they will deliver “tested” tarballs that are littered with syntax errors because they know suing them isn’t really feasible.
I recall this period as well (early to mid 2000s) and the fears of overseas workers led me to change my college major at the time. There was also still a big hangover effect from the 2000 dot com bubble. I remember seeing low developer salaries and, although I at least somewhat enjoyed coding and tinkering around with technical things, there were other pursuits I enjoyed more. I kind of regret not sticking with computer science but my career has turned out fairly well (although I think I would have optimized my income faster if I had stayed a computer science major).
I've been thru off-shorting with India, China, Russia...
I'm sorta wondering what country would be next. It has to have a large enough labor pool to fill the positions, and still be cheap enough to at least look good on paper..
My guess is most likely Africa, though I think somewhere in Central or South America would have a very strong advantage due to the narrower time offset.
at least here in Germany the biggest companies like to expand into Eastern Europe (think Slovakia, Hungary, also Russia), where these IT experts help in the German projects. They even get many of those people to learn German! The price pressure doesn't really stop there because while at first Slovakia was the way to go, now Hungary is xx% cheaper.. and so on and so on...
I'm located in Colombia, and all my developers friends/acquaintances that speak English are already working for US companies. Some of them earning 100k+, but most of them earning about 50-70k.
I'd say there is not a general unwillingness to hire overseas developers, on the contrary, if more people could speak english in south america US companies would be more than happy to hire even more here.
There is a shortage in english speaking developers globally, but not a shortage on companies' interest in hiring anywhere
I agree 100%. Aside from time differences, the biggest problem we have with remote teams in faraway places is communication. We have really sharp folks in our Hyderabad office, but some of them really struggle to communicate clearly, and a poor Zoom connection doesn't help at all. That would be my one piece of advice to someone outside the US who wants some of that sweet, sweet income we have grown accustomed to. Being a good coder is fine, but not really distinctive. Work hard on speaking English as clearly as possible. It absolutely will give you a competitive advantage.
South America is an interesting one for a lot of US companies because the timezones line up much better with US-local folks than in any other continents.
There are still other substantial collaboration challenges, but if more places move to be truly remote-first, those places will necessarily have solutions for that anyway.
If I start another company I’d really like to hire a competent offshore team in south or Central America but I have a lot of trouble getting there from here. If I wanted to hire a team in Israel, Pakistan or India, I could do it immediately, because I have trusted friends who can hook me up with people that they themselves trust plus or minus some skeeviness that I know how to manage. For south-of-us I have no connections and basically no way to start.
Agreed. I am a product manager for a startup software acquired from Brazil. Nearly all engineering sit in Brazil (or some squads in India). I am the EU based PM that has to deal with the timezone issues and requirements- do I like it? Not really, but it is existing and the company might hire a an architect or tech lead on europe, the rest will remain outsourced. Generally speaking some of the developpers speak good English and so with Jira and Figma it works.
I could get a 60k USD a year remote thing but I would be out of the system (I mean, now I am an Argentinian employee with all the rights it entails). For 60k, it is not worth it. For 100k it would be worth to solve all the issues associated with getting money from abroad (maybe make a corporation somewhere?). Anyway, I am listening to 100k+ offers.
You can live in a flat in the best parts of major cities comfortably, you could hire one or maybe even two FT employees to help you to cook, clean the house, take care of kids, etc. If you don't like the city life, you could also rent a small "mansion" in the suburbs (but then you'd suffer a bit with the internet connection, fiber only goes to major cities)
You could dine out at nice restaurants every weekend and travel around by plane every time there is a holiday and stay at 5 star hotels
Taking into account the minimum salary here is 300 USD / month and with 50k per year you are already top 1%, 100k gives you an unimaginable level of wealth. You'd earn about the same salary as the president of the country and more than most CEOs from local companies
But that would be if you spend all your salary every month which is not so smart, what most of us (bilingual developers) do is continue living a standard middle class life and just invest heavily, I invest more than 50% of my salary, mostly in real state and US stocks
I would say I live even further than the suburbs (45 minutes from Medellín, one house every acre / 5000 m2) and we just got a second fiber option maxed out at 300mb so that may be changing.
As an American who moved to Colombia, I can highly recommend it. That said, there’s a lot of downsides not mentioned here. First off, your foreign earned income and your US credit score mean nothing here. You will not be able to get a loan and if you want to buy property, you’ll be paying cash. I had to pay 8 months of rent into a bank deposited escrow just to rent a fairly cheap house for one year. That also involved (literally) about 6 trips each to a physical notary office and banks). Things that would be unheard of in the US are common place, like constant physical signatures and finger prints to authenticate documents and asking for your national id number in order to do anything and everything.
A small empty lot in the nicer parts outside Medellín will be at least $225,000. Not bad and beautiful land but again you’ll have to pay cash for everything. Taxes are very high and you can expect to pay 30% - 80% more for many foreign products (“nicer” cars in particular seem to be ridiculously high priced). Tech product selection is terrible, everything lags way behind or simply isn’t available. Amazon does ship a selection of lighter weight items here but you’ll pay a VAT tax of 20% plus an import tax of 10% on the total including shipping. It usually works out to be a 40% premium. Electric vehicles essentially do not exist unless you want a Twizy. I just had my radiator fan go out on my car and was quoted $900 for the part alone which is available in the States for $200. With shipping and taxes I can order from the US for about $550 but it will take about 2 weeks to get here.
There’s a lot of unnecessary friction in daily life, just trying to do “simple” things like an online purchase.
Still an amazing place, lots of great things but as someone trying to actually make a long term life here it can definitely be frustrating.
I have seen succesful outsourced projects. They were more expensive than hiring local, because they required a massive amount of up-front analysis, requirements definition, design documentation, and involvement from an expensive middle-management tier of analysts. It took understanding that the process was going to be hard and have a lot of iterative rework. It took understanding that communication is hard.
Markets clear. If outsourcing were so great, it would have completely taken over by now. It has been tested for decades now and it hasn't.
Outsourcing fits really well for organizations that have a lot of explicit, documented, well-understood domain knowledge, for which the org is the key inventor. But that's not most organizations. Most organizations are operating by the seat of their pants, competing in markets where a large number of other orgs know their business. That they turn a profit at all is more a testament to the perseverance of a few, key employees than it is the exceptionalism of the organization itself.
Every axis of communication is a potential friction point, be it collocation, industry, experience levels, language, time zone, culture, personality types, etc. The more you can remove those friction points, the more successful your project can be. But outsourcing throws several of those out the window, never to be touched again. So you're left optimizing on the few that are left, where most companies only ever optimized on those axes that have already been removed.
Employers had 20+ years to switch to overseas workers. The percentage of jobs that went east has stabilized, and it's not going to change dramatically.
This is absolutely untrue. In The Netherlands the government has a 30% tax rebate for devs who come from elsewhere and it’s leveraged intensely, more than half of the devs I work with at bigger companies here are usually not Dutch.
It is incentivizing highly skilled and highly compensated people moving to The Nederlands from beyond 150km from the border by not charging the 30% tax for up to 5 years. This is similar on intent to the O1 visas in the US.
What makes you think that these companies will pay above-market (local) rates sufficient to overcome other frictions? I think it's more likely they'll look at the local market rates and maybe pay a modest premium--not enough to create a huge draw of local talent looking for remote work, and not enough to make a dent in the labor market dynamics in general.
Will it happen though? Hiring someone from a foreign country is easy for a temporary contract, but in industry we need to "own the code" and continue to maintain it.
Ultimately outsourcing has issues with accountability.
> It is worth noting that software salaries are artificially inflated HEAVILY due to a general unwillingness or lack of interest in hiring overseas developers.
Yes that's right; business hates saving money and loves hiring super expensive US talent.
Just to be clear, there’s a big difference between China and the rest of east Asia in terms of hiring. So it might be good to edit that and differentiate.
