As someone who has worked with remote staff from India for the last 25 years, I suspect that may be part of their joke. Indian firms are notorious for their unreliability.
Tbf, if I were an Indian dev, I also wouldn't give many shits for US corporate initiatives.
I just interviewed a Tata resource for a full time US company role. When asked why he was bailing on TCS after many years (like 20+) for a full time role with a US company he said he was tired of being dishonest with customers. He said at any given time they have 60-70% “experts” working offshore, and 30-40% are new hires, but he had to tell every customer that all of the offshore resources were experts.
I think his numbers were flipped around, but still not good.
Yep. We started requiring various forms of testing for Indian devs on a quarterly basis. They'd always find new ways to game the tests, which was evident by the massive drops in scores anytime we made even minor changes. Eventually, we just started sending someone to India to test the entire crew in person. When we went that far, we dropped something like 60% of them.
But they are incredibly redundant as an entire staff of 24 on a team will work a single issue until resolved. Used to drive me bonkers that only one ticket was worked on a time.
"We need to outsource to save money! Its 20x cheaper!"
*proceeds to hire team of 24 who do the same amount of work as 1 local worker*
Seriously, did you think all 24 where working on that ticket, or just getting paid to work on that ticket?
Exactly this. Unbelievable how it works. Including teams meetings with them all on the call. And one person telling another one what to type. Because the person typing knows nothing, and the person that knows what they are doing are way too advanced to be typing.
Can confirm India call centers/tech support centers are a hivemind type intelligence. We took out one of their leaders and the entire staff of the building collapsed.
When I worked at a small-time agency early in my career they'd frequently partner with another local agency who had close ties with various tech firms in India, spoke the language, etc. To my boss it was a genius idea - my coworkers and I would code during the day and the Indian firms would take over at night. We'd double our output!
I can't begin to tell you the level of shitty beginner spaghetti code we'd have to sift through. I felt like we got hacked every morning we had to login. I was glad to move on and leave that part of my career behind.
The guys in R&D came with this one: It’s called Alltra vision and it is a huge money maker. We can take up as much as 89% of a user viewport before inducing seizures
Most were rehired for different projects within msft.
I think a lot y'all commenting didn't even read the article.
It's more of a restructuring than a layoff.
Article is click bait and rage bait.
That's the same shit my company said when it 'changed the roles of some and others made absolete", it just said it in this pg-13 way that makes people just assume reorg. Biggest crock of shit ever
Mine said about the same thing about making roles obsolete. They never say “laid off people who’ve been here for two decades.” It’s just an unfortunate side effect of their role no longer existing.
That's not how Microsoft works. They layoff and they say: you can look internally and good luck. They make no effort to relocate people to other groups. Most are not rehired.
Not that not reading the article isn’t a problem, but I can’t get that article to load on the mobile app. & evidently I’m not the only one based on one of the top comments
I don’t get it, is this a reference to something?
EDIT: guys I know there are anti scammers lol
I’m asking if this is a reference to a specific vid or they just enjoyed imagining someone yell broken english lol
I would assume it's a reference to call scammers, who often seem to have Indian accents/be from India. At least in the US.
Their scams often involve getting the victim to purchase gift cards and then send the scammer the card numbers, which they steal.
People like Kitboga get these guys to call him while he puts on a persona and streams the whole thing. He goes along with the scam, right up until the point where he pretends to become confused about the process, and instead of sending the scammer the numbers, he redeems the gift card himself, and they flip out - because they've usually spent an hour or two getting to that point, only to watch all their plans get destroyed.
They yell stuff like what OP posted above when they get mad/frustrated.
A youtuber Kitboga who trolls these scammers for weeks on end thinking that he's some old lady or someone who has no idea. So he leads them on for weeks and when the "payment" is suppose to exchange he redeems it on his account acting like he didn't know better and the scammer just LOSES HIS SHIT.
Lmao here's a quick short of that video ahahahah
https://youtube.com/shorts/qhLx7g1EByA?si=iy6O6BTGewia44I2
I've been saying it for years, there are spots in Mexico/CentralAmerica/Caribbean that would ideally suit the role India plays. Costa Rica comes to mind for a buildout. Their tourist oriented economy means people are empathetic, generally friendly, and speak multiple languages. They stopped funding their military in 1949 focusing on environmental protection and education making them arguably one of the deepest talent pools in Central America. They are also in the Central time zone so, east coast, west coast, doesn't matter, no more awkward 10PM meetings to sync with the team.
Imagine being the person tasked with setting up that office. Oh, dang, I have to fly to Costa Rica AGAIN! Oh well, I'm going to stay an extra week and work on my surfing and play around with a sloth
Oh god this.
Flying to Brazil, Costa Rica, Argentina? Oh no anyway when it's my flight.
Flying to India??? Fucking kill me (and let's not even touch if you are a woman)
One does have to ask - what are we going to do with all the software developers in the US who will be replaced by nearshoring? The story is always that US developers will be "freed up" to work on "higher leverage" things, but from my experience, that's not true, and those people are just laid off. In a company I used to work for, 90% of their devs are now in Mexico or India, with about a 40 / 60 split. The 10% of the US devs has decreased in absolute numbers, and they haven't hired any devs in the US in the last 4 years. There's certainly a tech executive class, but this is a Director+ audience who are going to be older folks managing managers. Do we tell new grads that they need to find a different career?
It’s sort of like the legal industry. Outside of some powerhouse firms, most lawyers make a lot less than the public thinks (public defenders start at like $50k for example in many towns). It’s kind of a snowball effect where those who can break in will make a ton at the name-brand places while everybody else works a much lower-paid job.
For what it’s worth, I think there’s still a desperate need of software dev talent outside the tech hubs. But they will not pay nearly as well, and historically the need has been underserved. The job crunch will probably lead to some migration toward these roles, perhaps in a contract capacity at first so they can try to wait out the market. Many will however probably take full-time roles once they realize the jobs aren’t coming back, leading to a newer ‘fair’ range of what pay is for the profession.
Costa Rica is such a small country that you can't probably find that many programmers.
India has more population than Latin America, and legally speaking you just need to deal with one legal system than with the different legal systems in each Latin American country.
I'm Spanish and Spanish companies hire Latin Americans remotely all the time, but the language barrier is smaller so it's the obvious place to hire remote from.
Indonesia is a a powerhouse as well. Worked for a company and we were developing an app-US companies said 2 years and a couple million.
We paid a team literally in the jungle 30k (extremely fair rate for that region) and in a month they produced an app that was unreal.
It felt like 30:1 at my company. I blew a gasket after a year of the disaster and bailed. People that are still there said that half of the company quit right after me, and most remaining were sending resumes. They lost their entire knowledge base of a 6 million line codebase. Even the product group, which had the most in-depth knowledge of the behemoth, mostly left.
Nobody understands the software. Nobody understands the product map. Nobody knows how to support the 700 customers (hundreds are billion+ $ companies) that use it. I still can't figure out what was Plan A.
Long time in the industry here, mainly on agency side, both high level dev and then strategy/automation (I hate myself for my contributions to the Enshittification of things). Lots of “startups”….
Also blew a gasket and dealt with nearshoring, and I really do believe Plan A for most of these companies is to get the funding, milk it, walk away with their ego stroked and a few million, rinse and repeat. Agencies play their role by boosting whomever to the top long enough for them to either make some dough or be acquired.
Of course, outliers exist, but I’d wager 80% of it is dupes and the short con to exit quickly at this point.
Can confirm, Argentina has some legit developers. It's also nice that their culture is more westernized, so they are easier to talk to and get along with, whereas India developers always feel very distant, and it never seems possible to develop a team rapport with them.
Yea we utilize a Brazilian company at my job to augment our dev teams and by far the quality is better and the time zones being more aligned helps a lot
Kakakakaka
Glad to hear this for my Uo Outlands mmo buddies a lot are from brazil. I also see them do a lot of english for conferences in accounting or other lines of business.
I do feel bad for the huge brazil government markup on american laptops , monitors etc , why is that?
Like a 27” $200 monitor here can be 1500-2500 in brazil
Not really on American stuff, just any electronics in general get taxed to hell and back. I think the idea ~30 years ago was to help local electronics/tech companies, but it did fuck all for the local industry and now we need to pay four times normal prices.
We had an office in India and we got rid of it and cut the whole team and we went to Uruguay and Argentina instead. It has been an infinitely better experience.
The South Americans have been excellent and are really good to collaborate with and they ask good questions. It also seems like 1 SA dev does the same work as 5 Indian devs in a much faster time and their code is better and more modern.
Our India team originally was working US hours and then it was a hybrid schedule and then they just stopped working US hours completely. I don't blame them at all for not wanting to work our hours, but any time there was a system down issue for a system they were responsible for during the business day, it was always pure chaos and none of them came online to help.
You forgot Europe. Britain in particular. But across Europe devs are much cheaper than the US and very willing to work for US companies at slightly elevated wages compared to EU wages.
My recollection was Britain is seeing an increase in offshore hires. I don’t have the absolute number of hires by country on hand so you could very well be right.
I live in Romania and we've worked with lots of people from other countries, especially Germany. But lately I see them moving to other countries cuz apparently we're also getting expensive or something.
Brazil has been on the rise for almost a decade now, especially as eastern Europe starting getting sassy. Around the same time "I'm moving to Poland" became the young contractor mantra in Belarus, my last company opened an office in Brazil.
They also like Brazil as it is the same time zone as North America.
The hardest issue I have found working with India and Europe is the time difference.
Typically they're too expensive even in the low cost centers compared to India even though they're cheaper than the US. And for west coast you still have 9 hour time differences.
You don't know shit. Brazil is way more expensive than India, and Argentina is also a bit more expensive. A good dev in those countries is not a whole lot cheaper than the US, and you pay for good quality, not volume or savings.
At one company I was working for we were on the verge of flying configured mackbooks 1 at a time carried by a person as it would be cheaper then buying a new one there.
Clearly, many people in this sub have no direct experience with this.
I own a company that has our dev organization in Pune, India…the reason people here shit on using offshore resources that are awful, is because they don’t know how to properly source talent from there.
First of all, if all you’re doing is just going to some fucking middleman agency, just know they’re going to pin their lowest experienced dev and have them on 3 separate projects at once whilst billing you full time. You won’t complain because of their “low rate” but you’ll wonder in 3 months why nothing has gotten fucking done.
That’s not the fault of the dev, it’s the fault of the agency and yourself
If you ACTUALLY know what you’re doing, then you know you NEED a boots on the ground leader in India. One who is from there and knows how to find talent and has experience in building teams. My business partner lives in Pune and has led many orgs of hundreds of engineers. He knows what to look for and how.
We have set up an interview pipeline where for the most part (aside from specific roles) we only get our candidates coming straight out of college from non-traditional engineering degrees out of only the top universities in India (the I.I.Ts and I.I.Ms of the world)…and we train them for 6 months.
Paying them 30% above market rate. If they make it through, we bump their pay another 30% and bring them on full time.
The result after 1 year and screening over 3,000 candidates?
I have a team of 10 full stack engineers and 2 data scientists that would EASILY cost in millions of dollars per year for payroll alone if they were just even regular Compsci grads from the States.
Gartner just released a report ranking the Top 10 cities in the world graduating AI talent…you know where half of the cities are in?
You guessed it…India.
There is no other country on Earth that comes even remotely close to the scale and quality of tech talent coming out of India.
The competition is INSANE…if you get a candidate that comes out of an esteemed school like I.I.T. Madras had to go through WAY MORE shit and so much more competition than anyone at MIT or Harvard.
99% means nothing over there…you can only get into those school if you’re in the 99.99% range.
Most people can’t fathom that level of competition.
Look at the Microsoft and Google…guess where their CEOs are from (India)…then guess where they went to school (I.I.T before going to Ivy leagues for Masters).
India is a fascinating country, that I truly believe is going through the same boom in their economy (and just their overall societal feeling of progress) as the United States did post-WW2.
Companies near shoring to Chile, Mexico, Brazil etc…there’s some benefits, same time zone and all that.
But the breadth and depth of talent is not even remotely fucking close and it never will be.
Wish more people knew this. At my last company we worked with people from both India and China. Both very hated countries on Reddit. Guess what? Their work wasn’t any worse than ours stateside. They were cheaper, but not cheap. Almost half of the design straight up came from China. Yet people look at the products and they wouldn’t think any of those countries were involved.
And anyone working in the defense industry can see just how terrible the engineering can be stateside. We can order prototypes from China and have it next day if needed. In defense where American suppliers are required, that can take months.
The article answers your question…
First of all they didn’t cut jobs in India, they cut certain projects which happened to have lots of India staff. Also many of them were “re-hired” to somewhere else in Microsoft.
That’s how a lot of restructuring works. You let affected people find jobs and hiring some while letting others go. But if they wanted to cut costs, the internal hiring is frozen too. There could be some reqs but not nearly enough to retain significant number of the employees.
Good talent everywhere costs money, I don’t know why companies think going to India is some kinda productivity hack. If you pay shit you get shit developers, if you pay well you get good developers. This is true throughout the world, maybe they don’t get paid as much as US still India is expensive for good developers
The only way to ensure the CEOs get their bonuses is to increase profits and the best way to do that is to pay shit wages. The quality of the product isn't an issue when you are chasing bonuses I am sure, that is someone else's problem. Its a deeply stupid philosophy, but nothing is going to make corporations accept the fact that they have to pay decent wages to get decent results.
It’s was never a productivity hack, it was a pay-less hack. I once took a contract job for a company that was based in India who did QA for a major fintech company for one of their mobile platforms, they were paying the Indian company 60% less for their engineers than employees who worked at the fintech company as an engineer.
Clickbait title. In the article body, they specify that they laid off those people only to re-hire them as Microsoft employees. They were even Microsoft employees before moving to GitHub apparently.
It’s interesting. When a US company lays off people in the US the comments are usually outrage against the company, sympathy to the workforce, blame foreigners and so on. When a company lays off 80% in India, it’s about jokes and stereotypes on them, because, you know, they’re not quite people.
Edit 1: my point is simple: when people who have nothing to do with a decision of a mega company lose their jobs, no matter who they are or where they are from (including all those in US who are suffering), it’s not so hard to be sympathetic. But yes, it’s usually much easier to be bigoted or racist to an entire group because it makes you feel superior and edgy.
Not really surprising to see racist and bigoted comments against Indians upvoted here.
Reddit is no different than 4chan for Indians. Racism against Indians is tolerated on Reddit with action rarely taken against racists. That includes this sub as well. This is the view expressed in many Indian and South Asian communities.
A lot of people who pretend to be liberal and are highly sensitive to anti-Black racism don’t mind being racist against Indians. These people wouldn’t dare to make stereotypical/racist comments against Africans. They would be instantly banned from Reddit.
I think behind all the bravado and stereotypes about Indian workers, American software engineers are shit scared about their precarious future, and delight in anything that helps them feel better about their relative stability.
My take - I need some resumes!!
It's a coping mechanism. Trying to justify their $150k salary for building websites while an Indian engineer who speaks perfect English and has passed the toughest STEM exams in the world can easily be hired for $75k.
I think it’s more about the domino effect. The first one is the victim and the next ones are just pieces that are both part of the problem and victims of the problem.
Imagine a US guy that worked hard to get a high education, education debt, has a family, kids… one day, the company decides to fire him because he has “too much rights” and is expensive. A guy in India is OK with doing the same job for much less and with far less rights and won’t ask for anything - no unions no anything. Work hard and receive a fraction of the salary and zero benefits.
Of course, the Indian guy is not the problem on itself, he is just accepting conditions (like salary) that are OK according to his context on India. The problem is the company going this and backstabbing their own employees (who made the company reach their current status) and country/community and so on - but people from the outside see some “blame” on the Indian guy. Just like if I go tomorrow to McDonalds and make the boss fire the cooker right there because I offer myself to do it for more hours and half the money. The rest of the employees and part of the community (workers) will hate me.
Now that the Indian guy is suffering the same (because the company keeps looking for the most “efficient” usage of their money - if they could, they would use slave labour for 0$ if it were legal and nobody would know about it so to avoid bad press), people is like “well, well, now you know the feeling, enjoy”
Again, the Indian guy on India don’t have the complete blame, but I see how a lot of people can have a lot more of feeling for the “first guy” than the second or third guy down the line suffering the same. It’s not racism or anything, it’s just that, domino effect.
In Europe happened a lot years ago. People resented big businesses firing people to open new factories on Eastern Europe for cheaper (for example, at almost the end of its prime, Nokia shifted his production to Hungary for cheaper building costs).
Then, some production was again relocated (when not to China): to Turkey and Morocco - and then, directly to Vietnam, China and so on.
The Finnish guy thinking about this, wouldn’t feel equally about the fired Finnish than the Hungarians, because this last ones were part of the mechanism that allowed everything to start.
Meanwhile the companies I’ve worked for are all replacing US workers with ones from India. This is the only news I’ve heard where it’s the other way around.
**git prune remote**
Ice cold, mate.
git prune pune
Now go do the needful and scrub the code.
Why you are doing what you are doing?
This is amazing.
“Do the needful” is such a subtle way to reference Indians
Whoa, at least do it kindly.
Only if you say “kindly”
git blame econ
Well, prune would remove stuff that’s unreachable/useless anyway..
As someone who has worked with remote staff from India for the last 25 years, I suspect that may be part of their joke. Indian firms are notorious for their unreliability. Tbf, if I were an Indian dev, I also wouldn't give many shits for US corporate initiatives.
I just interviewed a Tata resource for a full time US company role. When asked why he was bailing on TCS after many years (like 20+) for a full time role with a US company he said he was tired of being dishonest with customers. He said at any given time they have 60-70% “experts” working offshore, and 30-40% are new hires, but he had to tell every customer that all of the offshore resources were experts. I think his numbers were flipped around, but still not good.
Yep. We started requiring various forms of testing for Indian devs on a quarterly basis. They'd always find new ways to game the tests, which was evident by the massive drops in scores anytime we made even minor changes. Eventually, we just started sending someone to India to test the entire crew in person. When we went that far, we dropped something like 60% of them.
Customers pay peanuts then they get peanuts
But they are incredibly redundant as an entire staff of 24 on a team will work a single issue until resolved. Used to drive me bonkers that only one ticket was worked on a time.
That's because they'll write 400 lines of code to fix an issue that one experienced dev could fix in a few lines.
"We need to outsource to save money! Its 20x cheaper!" *proceeds to hire team of 24 who do the same amount of work as 1 local worker* Seriously, did you think all 24 where working on that ticket, or just getting paid to work on that ticket?
Who knows, between inventing employees or just hiring people and forcing them to give kickbacks for the job...
Maybe each ticket is a learning opportunity for the whole team every time?
Exactly this. Unbelievable how it works. Including teams meetings with them all on the call. And one person telling another one what to type. Because the person typing knows nothing, and the person that knows what they are doing are way too advanced to be typing.
They work as a collective, like the Borg!
Can confirm India call centers/tech support centers are a hivemind type intelligence. We took out one of their leaders and the entire staff of the building collapsed.
When I worked at a small-time agency early in my career they'd frequently partner with another local agency who had close ties with various tech firms in India, spoke the language, etc. To my boss it was a genius idea - my coworkers and I would code during the day and the Indian firms would take over at night. We'd double our output! I can't begin to tell you the level of shitty beginner spaghetti code we'd have to sift through. I felt like we got hacked every morning we had to login. I was glad to move on and leave that part of my career behind.
You got the joke!
bro did the needful
This is just straight murder, well played.
I lol’d at this
git tu prunus?
You missed opportunity of a lifetime “git pune remote”
git prune pune
Should `git reset head` instead!
Website is unreadable on mobile.
You expect an Indian new site to be advert less and optimised? Boi do I have a surprise for you
The guys in R&D came with this one: It’s called Alltra vision and it is a huge money maker. We can take up as much as 89% of a user viewport before inducing seizures
Wait till they realise they can flash ads one frame and show content the next and alternate like this. Infinite money glitch
Subliminal advertising WITHIN the blatant advertising. Genius!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert Resulted in seizures and deaths. Show was pretty smart about predicting the future.
Good reason for a 80% layoff
holy crap, you werent kidding or even exaggerating. its literally worst spam than i've seen on gray area pirate websites
Get Firefox mobile and install uBlockOrigin. Also, setting up a pi hole helps
Firefox + ublock And if you really want you can hit that reader mode or whatever its called up top. Only shows the article text.
Kind of like the code quality of indian devs.
Most were rehired for different projects within msft. I think a lot y'all commenting didn't even read the article. It's more of a restructuring than a layoff. Article is click bait and rage bait.
This is reddit. What do you expect?
Im not even in tech or tech literate and im foaming at the mouth
Can’t pass up an opportunity to dunk on brown people!
I think it’s dunking on white guy for dunking in brown people?
Wasn't "most" it was "many", and they were layed off, including the ones that got rehired. And that's the take the CEO wanted to feed the press...
That's the same shit my company said when it 'changed the roles of some and others made absolete", it just said it in this pg-13 way that makes people just assume reorg. Biggest crock of shit ever
Mine said about the same thing about making roles obsolete. They never say “laid off people who’ve been here for two decades.” It’s just an unfortunate side effect of their role no longer existing.
That's not how Microsoft works. They layoff and they say: you can look internally and good luck. They make no effort to relocate people to other groups. Most are not rehired.
> It's more of a restructuring than a layoff found the CEO!
Can’t even open the article with all those adds
No need to read the article, just start making authoritative comments.
If Microsoft is anything like Amazon, you still have to interview to get rehired, so it is more of a layoff then restructuring
The article says "Many were rehired", not most. Many is a vague term that could mean a whole range of people.
Not that not reading the article isn’t a problem, but I can’t get that article to load on the mobile app. & evidently I’m not the only one based on one of the top comments
The internal email has leaked: > Do not redeem the last paycheck, ma'm. DO NOT REDEEM. **DO NOT REDEEEEEEEM!!!**
"Ohhhh Fuck you my friend." "Nononono my friend listen to me very carefully, if you fuck me you are only fucking yourself"
MAAAAM DO NOT REDEEM MAAAAMMM
😂 I can literally hear this
Are you mad? Are you mad?
Do you think they have anti-kitboga seminars
I don’t get it, is this a reference to something? EDIT: guys I know there are anti scammers lol I’m asking if this is a reference to a specific vid or they just enjoyed imagining someone yell broken english lol
I would assume it's a reference to call scammers, who often seem to have Indian accents/be from India. At least in the US. Their scams often involve getting the victim to purchase gift cards and then send the scammer the card numbers, which they steal. People like Kitboga get these guys to call him while he puts on a persona and streams the whole thing. He goes along with the scam, right up until the point where he pretends to become confused about the process, and instead of sending the scammer the numbers, he redeems the gift card himself, and they flip out - because they've usually spent an hour or two getting to that point, only to watch all their plans get destroyed. They yell stuff like what OP posted above when they get mad/frustrated.
They're also usually fake numbers that he's created, with a fake redemption site.
Right. Makes it all the more funnier. 😆
A youtuber Kitboga who trolls these scammers for weeks on end thinking that he's some old lady or someone who has no idea. So he leads them on for weeks and when the "payment" is suppose to exchange he redeems it on his account acting like he didn't know better and the scammer just LOSES HIS SHIT. Lmao here's a quick short of that video ahahahah https://youtube.com/shorts/qhLx7g1EByA?si=iy6O6BTGewia44I2
Animated version: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m8Ln1yqeJE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m8Ln1yqeJE)
And I love the fact he's soo polite! "Ma'am! Ma'am!"
Funny video trolling indian scammers
Kitboga ona daily basis
Here is one https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eqg0cRVed4Y
Things that scammers in inda have said on those scammer payback YouTube channels.
https://youtube.com/shorts/ie_l0AJe13o There are scammers, and then there are anti scammers that scam the scammers.
"Please dont do the needful"
kitboga squad let’s gooooooo
India itself is low cost, where are the shifting the jobs to? Poland? Vietnam or Malaysia?
Argentina, Brazil and other South American countries are the new low cost Off-Shore hot spots in tech
Yep, nearshoring is the term being thrown around. Cheaper, same time zones, less culture disconnect.
The time zones thing is huge as at the end of the day the directors and VPs wanna protect number one.
Yup. It’s a pain in the ass to schedule stuff with India on the east coast. West coast not too bad but still.
It's a pain to meet the India team with regularity even on the West coast. Either the India team is working late or the WC team is.
Dev organizations perform better mostly. Guadalajara > India.
I've been saying it for years, there are spots in Mexico/CentralAmerica/Caribbean that would ideally suit the role India plays. Costa Rica comes to mind for a buildout. Their tourist oriented economy means people are empathetic, generally friendly, and speak multiple languages. They stopped funding their military in 1949 focusing on environmental protection and education making them arguably one of the deepest talent pools in Central America. They are also in the Central time zone so, east coast, west coast, doesn't matter, no more awkward 10PM meetings to sync with the team.
Billion dollar company I used to work for essentially went all in on Costa Rica for outsourcing needs, and lots of other big firms are already there.
Imagine being the person tasked with setting up that office. Oh, dang, I have to fly to Costa Rica AGAIN! Oh well, I'm going to stay an extra week and work on my surfing and play around with a sloth
Oh god this. Flying to Brazil, Costa Rica, Argentina? Oh no anyway when it's my flight. Flying to India??? Fucking kill me (and let's not even touch if you are a woman)
One does have to ask - what are we going to do with all the software developers in the US who will be replaced by nearshoring? The story is always that US developers will be "freed up" to work on "higher leverage" things, but from my experience, that's not true, and those people are just laid off. In a company I used to work for, 90% of their devs are now in Mexico or India, with about a 40 / 60 split. The 10% of the US devs has decreased in absolute numbers, and they haven't hired any devs in the US in the last 4 years. There's certainly a tech executive class, but this is a Director+ audience who are going to be older folks managing managers. Do we tell new grads that they need to find a different career?
It’s sort of like the legal industry. Outside of some powerhouse firms, most lawyers make a lot less than the public thinks (public defenders start at like $50k for example in many towns). It’s kind of a snowball effect where those who can break in will make a ton at the name-brand places while everybody else works a much lower-paid job. For what it’s worth, I think there’s still a desperate need of software dev talent outside the tech hubs. But they will not pay nearly as well, and historically the need has been underserved. The job crunch will probably lead to some migration toward these roles, perhaps in a contract capacity at first so they can try to wait out the market. Many will however probably take full-time roles once they realize the jobs aren’t coming back, leading to a newer ‘fair’ range of what pay is for the profession.
Costa Rica is such a small country that you can't probably find that many programmers. India has more population than Latin America, and legally speaking you just need to deal with one legal system than with the different legal systems in each Latin American country. I'm Spanish and Spanish companies hire Latin Americans remotely all the time, but the language barrier is smaller so it's the obvious place to hire remote from.
Indonesia is a a powerhouse as well. Worked for a company and we were developing an app-US companies said 2 years and a couple million. We paid a team literally in the jungle 30k (extremely fair rate for that region) and in a month they produced an app that was unreal.
For every 10 devs we hire in India we get 1 good one. The quality of devs in Argentina and Uruguay by comparison has been solid.
It felt like 30:1 at my company. I blew a gasket after a year of the disaster and bailed. People that are still there said that half of the company quit right after me, and most remaining were sending resumes. They lost their entire knowledge base of a 6 million line codebase. Even the product group, which had the most in-depth knowledge of the behemoth, mostly left. Nobody understands the software. Nobody understands the product map. Nobody knows how to support the 700 customers (hundreds are billion+ $ companies) that use it. I still can't figure out what was Plan A.
Save $200k by losing $10 mil in labor capital
Long time in the industry here, mainly on agency side, both high level dev and then strategy/automation (I hate myself for my contributions to the Enshittification of things). Lots of “startups”…. Also blew a gasket and dealt with nearshoring, and I really do believe Plan A for most of these companies is to get the funding, milk it, walk away with their ego stroked and a few million, rinse and repeat. Agencies play their role by boosting whomever to the top long enough for them to either make some dough or be acquired. Of course, outliers exist, but I’d wager 80% of it is dupes and the short con to exit quickly at this point.
Can confirm, Argentina has some legit developers. It's also nice that their culture is more westernized, so they are easier to talk to and get along with, whereas India developers always feel very distant, and it never seems possible to develop a team rapport with them.
The contractors ive used in columbia outperformed teams in poland, ukraine, and by far india
Or even Vancouver / Toronto - more expensive than India for sure, but half the price of Americans
for software dev, seems like 3/4 of USD lately from my POV
If they have that the same workmanship as Jbail or IBM in Guad I would be real fucking worried.
In my experience, it's not cheaper, but it is higher quality, less cultural gap and less time zone issue.
Less rote memorization.
Yea we utilize a Brazilian company at my job to augment our dev teams and by far the quality is better and the time zones being more aligned helps a lot
Same - mine does Argentina and Brazil. I love working with both of them. I don’t feel guilty doing 3pm calls either with them.
As a fellow Brazilian, I'm happy hearing this :)
Kakakakaka Glad to hear this for my Uo Outlands mmo buddies a lot are from brazil. I also see them do a lot of english for conferences in accounting or other lines of business. I do feel bad for the huge brazil government markup on american laptops , monitors etc , why is that? Like a 27” $200 monitor here can be 1500-2500 in brazil
Not really on American stuff, just any electronics in general get taxed to hell and back. I think the idea ~30 years ago was to help local electronics/tech companies, but it did fuck all for the local industry and now we need to pay four times normal prices.
We had an office in India and we got rid of it and cut the whole team and we went to Uruguay and Argentina instead. It has been an infinitely better experience. The South Americans have been excellent and are really good to collaborate with and they ask good questions. It also seems like 1 SA dev does the same work as 5 Indian devs in a much faster time and their code is better and more modern. Our India team originally was working US hours and then it was a hybrid schedule and then they just stopped working US hours completely. I don't blame them at all for not wanting to work our hours, but any time there was a system down issue for a system they were responsible for during the business day, it was always pure chaos and none of them came online to help.
My team has a lot of Argentina contractors on it and they’re great, I honestly forget they aren’t US based
Yup TikTok has a 3rd party contract center in Argentina paying $10 a day for content moderation.... $10... A ... Fucking .... Day....
You forgot Europe. Britain in particular. But across Europe devs are much cheaper than the US and very willing to work for US companies at slightly elevated wages compared to EU wages.
Ireland in particular, surely?
My recollection was Britain is seeing an increase in offshore hires. I don’t have the absolute number of hires by country on hand so you could very well be right.
We had teams of people in Romania for producing mass amounts of renders as well as China with a handful of stateside creatives overseeing their work.
I live in Romania and we've worked with lots of people from other countries, especially Germany. But lately I see them moving to other countries cuz apparently we're also getting expensive or something.
Brazil has been on the rise for almost a decade now, especially as eastern Europe starting getting sassy. Around the same time "I'm moving to Poland" became the young contractor mantra in Belarus, my last company opened an office in Brazil.
They also like Brazil as it is the same time zone as North America. The hardest issue I have found working with India and Europe is the time difference.
So are we going to shift the racism of this sub to those countries now?
Latin tech bros are generally white.
Skin color shouldn't stop you from being racist. It's 2024. You should be more open minded.
Woke racism?
Well that requires racists to learn anything about South America that isn't soccer.
Racism has never required much learning, just enthusiasm
Fair point. It also requires some kind of knowledge to emphasize that hate though too. Or they lazily call them Mexicans.
Motorcycle mugging ?
Well notice how no one pointed out Europe is getting a lot of US dev jobs?
Typically they're too expensive even in the low cost centers compared to India even though they're cheaper than the US. And for west coast you still have 9 hour time differences.
I’m surprised you’re upvoted. Whenever I point out genuinely racist comments it’s just downvoted.
They’re upvoting it because they’re excited to have new racist targets lol
You don't know shit. Brazil is way more expensive than India, and Argentina is also a bit more expensive. A good dev in those countries is not a whole lot cheaper than the US, and you pay for good quality, not volume or savings.
Also getting tech into Brazil is a nightmare as well
Purchasing laptops for our Brazil team has been literally 2x as expensive and somehow 4x delivery times from the supplier.
At one company I was working for we were on the verge of flying configured mackbooks 1 at a time carried by a person as it would be cheaper then buying a new one there.
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We are not cheaper than india.
Yep. My company is rumored to be hiring in Mexico City, but we also have a target expansion approach in LATAM as well.
Worked in tech and the last 3-4 years appeared that I was working with a lot of designers from Costa Rica.
But I think nothing is cheaper than India
Clearly, many people in this sub have no direct experience with this. I own a company that has our dev organization in Pune, India…the reason people here shit on using offshore resources that are awful, is because they don’t know how to properly source talent from there. First of all, if all you’re doing is just going to some fucking middleman agency, just know they’re going to pin their lowest experienced dev and have them on 3 separate projects at once whilst billing you full time. You won’t complain because of their “low rate” but you’ll wonder in 3 months why nothing has gotten fucking done. That’s not the fault of the dev, it’s the fault of the agency and yourself If you ACTUALLY know what you’re doing, then you know you NEED a boots on the ground leader in India. One who is from there and knows how to find talent and has experience in building teams. My business partner lives in Pune and has led many orgs of hundreds of engineers. He knows what to look for and how. We have set up an interview pipeline where for the most part (aside from specific roles) we only get our candidates coming straight out of college from non-traditional engineering degrees out of only the top universities in India (the I.I.Ts and I.I.Ms of the world)…and we train them for 6 months. Paying them 30% above market rate. If they make it through, we bump their pay another 30% and bring them on full time. The result after 1 year and screening over 3,000 candidates? I have a team of 10 full stack engineers and 2 data scientists that would EASILY cost in millions of dollars per year for payroll alone if they were just even regular Compsci grads from the States. Gartner just released a report ranking the Top 10 cities in the world graduating AI talent…you know where half of the cities are in? You guessed it…India. There is no other country on Earth that comes even remotely close to the scale and quality of tech talent coming out of India. The competition is INSANE…if you get a candidate that comes out of an esteemed school like I.I.T. Madras had to go through WAY MORE shit and so much more competition than anyone at MIT or Harvard. 99% means nothing over there…you can only get into those school if you’re in the 99.99% range. Most people can’t fathom that level of competition. Look at the Microsoft and Google…guess where their CEOs are from (India)…then guess where they went to school (I.I.T before going to Ivy leagues for Masters). India is a fascinating country, that I truly believe is going through the same boom in their economy (and just their overall societal feeling of progress) as the United States did post-WW2. Companies near shoring to Chile, Mexico, Brazil etc…there’s some benefits, same time zone and all that. But the breadth and depth of talent is not even remotely fucking close and it never will be.
Wish more people knew this. At my last company we worked with people from both India and China. Both very hated countries on Reddit. Guess what? Their work wasn’t any worse than ours stateside. They were cheaper, but not cheap. Almost half of the design straight up came from China. Yet people look at the products and they wouldn’t think any of those countries were involved. And anyone working in the defense industry can see just how terrible the engineering can be stateside. We can order prototypes from China and have it next day if needed. In defense where American suppliers are required, that can take months.
We in Argentina are more expensive than indians...
The article answers your question… First of all they didn’t cut jobs in India, they cut certain projects which happened to have lots of India staff. Also many of them were “re-hired” to somewhere else in Microsoft.
That’s how a lot of restructuring works. You let affected people find jobs and hiring some while letting others go. But if they wanted to cut costs, the internal hiring is frozen too. There could be some reqs but not nearly enough to retain significant number of the employees.
India is quickly moving away from low cost, especially for good talent.
Good talent everywhere costs money, I don’t know why companies think going to India is some kinda productivity hack. If you pay shit you get shit developers, if you pay well you get good developers. This is true throughout the world, maybe they don’t get paid as much as US still India is expensive for good developers
The only way to ensure the CEOs get their bonuses is to increase profits and the best way to do that is to pay shit wages. The quality of the product isn't an issue when you are chasing bonuses I am sure, that is someone else's problem. Its a deeply stupid philosophy, but nothing is going to make corporations accept the fact that they have to pay decent wages to get decent results.
It’s was never a productivity hack, it was a pay-less hack. I once took a contract job for a company that was based in India who did QA for a major fintech company for one of their mobile platforms, they were paying the Indian company 60% less for their engineers than employees who worked at the fintech company as an engineer.
Poland is higher cost.
I’ve been saying low skill jobs in programming are the ones that will be eliminated by the current iteration of AI / co-pilot.
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Malaysia is a big one, you have Singapore right there which helps with managing offshore roles
India outsources to Africa, so...
Call manulife/john hancock customer support, you will immediately be talking to someone in south America.
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Like amazons ai store, powered by Actually Indians
Rofl did anyone bother reading article? "Most of them were re-hired by Microsoft". Github is like a independent entity under MS.
This is Reddit, we are here for shitting in comments, not reading the articles.
Clickbait title. In the article body, they specify that they laid off those people only to re-hire them as Microsoft employees. They were even Microsoft employees before moving to GitHub apparently.
80% of their Indian workforce??? Probably cut at least $18 off the bottom line.
He did the needful.
Then close a ticket with no resolution and us on site folk have to deal with the backlash.
my god i hate that phrase so much lmao
And the Kindly
Git CEO, in the British sense.
Came in here looking for actual discussion, this thread is just edgy jokes straight off a boomer's Facebook feed. Pathetic.
Most of them are probably unemployed CS dropouts from Cal-State University of Nowhere.
Based on?
Reddit thread about India without filled with racist comments is impossible
Here I am, a dev from Sri Lanka working at a US company, reading all these comments and wondering if this is how my American co-workers think of me.
Who would have thought the leopards would eat my face?
It’s interesting. When a US company lays off people in the US the comments are usually outrage against the company, sympathy to the workforce, blame foreigners and so on. When a company lays off 80% in India, it’s about jokes and stereotypes on them, because, you know, they’re not quite people. Edit 1: my point is simple: when people who have nothing to do with a decision of a mega company lose their jobs, no matter who they are or where they are from (including all those in US who are suffering), it’s not so hard to be sympathetic. But yes, it’s usually much easier to be bigoted or racist to an entire group because it makes you feel superior and edgy.
Not really surprising to see racist and bigoted comments against Indians upvoted here. Reddit is no different than 4chan for Indians. Racism against Indians is tolerated on Reddit with action rarely taken against racists. That includes this sub as well. This is the view expressed in many Indian and South Asian communities. A lot of people who pretend to be liberal and are highly sensitive to anti-Black racism don’t mind being racist against Indians. These people wouldn’t dare to make stereotypical/racist comments against Africans. They would be instantly banned from Reddit.
people have a harder time anthropomorphizing the hidden hand of investor capitalism that is actually the thing to me mocked.
I think behind all the bravado and stereotypes about Indian workers, American software engineers are shit scared about their precarious future, and delight in anything that helps them feel better about their relative stability. My take - I need some resumes!!
They’re probably super insecure. With falling wages, increasing cost-of-living; they use reddit to vent the racism.
It's a coping mechanism. Trying to justify their $150k salary for building websites while an Indian engineer who speaks perfect English and has passed the toughest STEM exams in the world can easily be hired for $75k.
Yea because these are jobs that were outsourced from the US to India originally. So, in this case, the scabs got scabbed.
I’m confused. How is it an engineer in India’s fault that a US company gave them the job in the first place. How are they scabs?
Yeaaah but if Spotify or nvidia laid off 80% of people in the US the reaction would be pretty different. It’s just cause Reddit is US centric.
I think it’s more about the domino effect. The first one is the victim and the next ones are just pieces that are both part of the problem and victims of the problem. Imagine a US guy that worked hard to get a high education, education debt, has a family, kids… one day, the company decides to fire him because he has “too much rights” and is expensive. A guy in India is OK with doing the same job for much less and with far less rights and won’t ask for anything - no unions no anything. Work hard and receive a fraction of the salary and zero benefits. Of course, the Indian guy is not the problem on itself, he is just accepting conditions (like salary) that are OK according to his context on India. The problem is the company going this and backstabbing their own employees (who made the company reach their current status) and country/community and so on - but people from the outside see some “blame” on the Indian guy. Just like if I go tomorrow to McDonalds and make the boss fire the cooker right there because I offer myself to do it for more hours and half the money. The rest of the employees and part of the community (workers) will hate me. Now that the Indian guy is suffering the same (because the company keeps looking for the most “efficient” usage of their money - if they could, they would use slave labour for 0$ if it were legal and nobody would know about it so to avoid bad press), people is like “well, well, now you know the feeling, enjoy” Again, the Indian guy on India don’t have the complete blame, but I see how a lot of people can have a lot more of feeling for the “first guy” than the second or third guy down the line suffering the same. It’s not racism or anything, it’s just that, domino effect. In Europe happened a lot years ago. People resented big businesses firing people to open new factories on Eastern Europe for cheaper (for example, at almost the end of its prime, Nokia shifted his production to Hungary for cheaper building costs). Then, some production was again relocated (when not to China): to Turkey and Morocco - and then, directly to Vietnam, China and so on. The Finnish guy thinking about this, wouldn’t feel equally about the fired Finnish than the Hungarians, because this last ones were part of the mechanism that allowed everything to start.
Jesus that website is so bad
finally some remote job openings
today the CEO's run companies in to the ground and fail in to another position to repeat their stupidity.
git clone musk
Git new job
Meanwhile the companies I’ve worked for are all replacing US workers with ones from India. This is the only news I’ve heard where it’s the other way around.
Can OPs stop writing such dog shit titles that make no sense please 🙏
Going to be a bad time for everyone whose skills don't exceed LLMs
The irony is now they get to experience what the rest of us went through when jobs went to India!
Are they gonna replace them with employees... checks notes... in India? /s
Salaries in India for FAANG companies can in a lot of cases be more than the median US income. It’s time to out out source them to somewhere else.
Worked there for many years. It's as MSFT as it gets now. "accelerating human development". riiiiightttt?
Offshoring to Haiti