Have they seen India's track record on tech innovation? The education system there does not produce very innovative people or engineers. However they are great at following exact instructions so I'm sure that part of engineering team will do well
They produce plenty of competent engineers, but my layman's interpretation is the problem of capital being concentrated in Silicon Valley, so there's little chance for tech entrepreneurs to flourish within India itself.
No doubt they produce many great engineers, my argument is that they are not necessarily innovative (having studied in the same system, I've seen it first hand)
Yeah, that's correct. Most people are poor and afraid to venture into unknown territories. The consumer market isn't so receptive either for this reason. Coaching institutes and education centers are touted or seen as a path to wealth but they are just sad factories with tens or hundreds of students in one class.
You are not wrong overall but the mindset is changing. It wil take many years though due to the systematic and cultural norms. Most Indians are taught to do "service" instead of "innovate" because it has been a poor country with tons of competition for good jobs. Only in the last decade or so, the younger generation is realizing that innovation is important and even though the Govt. is mostly inept in encouraging this, I have seen first hand how the kids think these days and it is a good start. With more people moving into the Middle class, their access to resources is improving as well. May takes decades though.
I wonder how much of this is the engineers themselves (and their training), and how much is due to how the industry was built and continues to function in India. Traditionally, innovation and creativity wasn't a positive thing for the type of work that was outsourced there, and I'd imagine there's a good deal of momentum that has created a culture of valuing accuracy to spec and timeliness over creativity and innovation within companies.
I certainly don't see a lack of creativity or innovation from immigrants from South Asia working in North America.
I am from Hyderabad and one of my friend works at Uber Engineering here. From what I understand, the quality of engineers matches to that of his US counterparts, if not better. He got his degree from IIT, a tier 1 college in India.
I agree that India has not been the best in terms of tech innovation but the situation is changing. The start up ecosystem is booming here and investments are following too.
Relative to what? India has 1.34 billion people. If other countries put a million self selected students to compete with each other in a dog fight, I am sure the resulting 50k might have good chance of being similar.
Startup ecosystem is booming on foreign investment especially from china. Local investment is still dire.
> He got his degree from IIT, a tier 1 college in India.
Students from IIT in India are filtered from millions of students. They only take about 10-15k students every year and the rest are in NIT and other relevant institutions (around 50k). About 1 million self selected students participate in jee-mains every year. I only meant to highlight that OP's friend may be biased compared to the common situation here.
That is incorrect. The tech innovation track is bad because most of talented indians join mostly Trading based family business.
Most of Agarwals,Jains,Brahmin are mostly businessman.(most indian big startup-enterprises are from this community.ex.Paytm,Reliance,Birla,Flipkart,OYO,OLA)
for example,I am jain(Baniya). I am having masters degree in IT(2013),had offer from US based MDM startup still I chose trading.
Even now I spend 20 hours a week in IT work(hobby),from node projects,System drivers to my trading business specific IOT devices and even DIY Electronics project.
But I dont find myself in IT business in near future.
My cousin who is also master degree holder in IT, He runs successful family owned supermarket with 15000+skus. His store is more advanced in tech then bigger competitors which I bet will earn him fruit in next 3-4 years.
Its personal choice not lack of innovation or talent.
Hard disagree. Most of the talented Indian engineers in top N tech companies in the US came from the Indian education system. They all migrated here in search of better opportunities.
Things are however changing in India due to the rapidly growing startup ecosystem which eventually lead to good careers and high salaries for software engineers back home. This is giving people less of a reason to move.
This comment is pretty ill informed on the tech scene in India. Most large companies already have engineering offices in India dealing with varying complexity of projects. You are probably only thinking of outsourcing companies.
How does the SV crowd here see this? Considering that even entry web devs with only bootcamp experience often enough make >$100,000, outsourcing to India is a good idea, economically speaking.
Could a successful outsourcing project by Uber threaten all SV tech jobs?
I don't think it's fair to assume the quality of Indian workers is worse. They are paid less purely because of cost of living and locational differences. Uber is smart enough to know this and it's the exact reason they will end up paying less for similar quality.
Also, in every company there are jobs that are trivial and jobs that require talent. I assume the more trivial jobs like bug fixing will be outsourced, while the rest of the engineers are kept for product design.
> They are paid less purely because of cost of living and locational differences.
Cost of living is a red herring. No one’s going to pay me more if I live in Manhattan rather than the suburbs of Boise if they can avoid it. It’s all about the locational differences. If there’s a thick, liquid market for the product you’re selling, your labour, you’ll get a good price for it. If there isn’t employers have substantially more power to set wages. A lot of the reason engineers in SV get paid more is that they’re just better but the engineers in Boulder are pretty great too and fewer of them are getting those wages, even fewer in Boise. All about the competition for talent.
It's all interrelated though. If Silicon Valley CoL were more along the lines of the many Tier 2 areas where there is a lot of tech of various kinds, the big SV employers wouldn't have to pay as big a premium to get people to relocate. They'd still pay a premium to get the talent they want, but they wouldn't have to also basically cover the difference in housing costs needed.
But it's complicated. For that matter, you could argue that the perks of Bay Area weather and great number of employment options should make the Bay Area attractive even if the salaries weren't great relative to CoL. But there's enough competition among large employers who generate enough value per employee that they can afford to offer top-shelf salaries so they do so to entice the people they want.
To the last point, I don't expect dramatic short term changes. But to the degree that things tilt more in the direction of remote work and small distributed offices, I expect some equalization of salaries at least within the US.
I think you are pretty wrong on that mark. I know fairly good devs in India who can't get a job because most pays so bad that they end up either switching the field or moving to somewhere abroad. Sometimes, they just wander around like ghosts on family money. Unlike US, it's not uncommon to spend your whole life with your parents/joint family.
To get a good job in India, you will need more than skills - connections and a limited edition degree.
What about moving to Europe? Salaries in the UK, Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands are much lower than in the US, and even lower in Central/Eastern Europe. While the timezone barrier is still there (although lower than India), the work culture is basically the same as in the United States (except with more work-life balance).
Actually, why not Canada? Salaries are again much lower than Silicon Valley, the timezone is the same, the language is the same (except in Quebec), and it would be great to stop Canadian software engineers from moving to the US in droves due to lack of opportunities at home.
The difference b/w salaries in EU/E.Asia and India are not that large for FAANG-like companies IMO. It's likely the case that Uber will allow its Indian employees to relocate back to India, in light of both Covid and the new visa restrictions.
They already do what you're saying, by some extent (maybe not Canada right now, and of course, finding English-speaking developers in Quebec is a non-issue)
Not true at all (I have team members in India). It is not even close to "roughly the same". For a decent engineer with 2-5 years of experience, you would pay anywhere from 8K-20K USD PER YEAR. That's average. Sometimes even lower than the 8K and sometimes higher than the 20K.
Indian engineers making more than 20k-25K USD Per Year are considered top talent in most companies across India. Are there engineers making more ? Yes absolutely. Are they a minority ? Yes, absolutely.
People are downvoting the other response, but it's absolutely correct. You can't hire 1:1 between the US and India and get the same quality for less money. You can try, but it won't end well.
Indians are not stupid. They understand market dynamics as well as anyone. At best you will get a 5% markdown, and instant flight once a 4% markdown opportunity comes up. This is not enough to cover for the many downsides to outsourcing.
> Outsourcing to India has gone on for 2-3 decades. It's not some new disruptive thing.
I guess what's different here is that Uber is a proper tech company and knows how to identify good engineers to hire. The same cannot be said of non-tech companies that have outsourced to consultancies like Infosys and Wipro.
And I don’t think that makes a difference. All FAANG companies (which I’d say can also identify good engineers) already have engineering offices in India.
The results that Uber gets will depend on exactly how they execute. If they're serious about their goal to "shift engineering innovation to India", then it might be different from what the FAANGs have done.
In my experience working with the India team at (one of) the FAANGs, it seemed like they were offloading the work that people didn't want to do in SV to the Hyderabad office (e.g. testing, maintenance of legacy systems).
But it could also be the case that there are innovative things being built in these India offices that people just assume were built in the US.
So are Google, Microsoft, Amazon and many other companies that have large offices in India.
This isn't a new thing. This is just a common strategy that many companies take once they are large enough to be able to handle the extra overhead of working across a 12 hour time difference.
Uber is on top of a death spiral with covid, the kill lift strategy by being unprofitable not working, softbank...
From the engineering point of view Uber is done. The self driving automation is probably not possible in the next x years. It has a working successful product probably too many developers now working on non-core projects.
Moving it to India they can keep the same numbers employed reduce costs and probably throw away things created there anyways.
My guess is a key lean operations team will remain in sf. Ensuring the system runs and is updated. Self driving research can be done India.. UI screens will be local.
Or just not done. There's no reason for Uber to be working on self-driving at this point. Door to door fully autonomous driving in relatively dense areas--i.e. where it makes sense for Uber to operate--is decades away. Autonomous highway driving--which will probably arrive earlier (maybe much earlier)--does absolutely nothing for a would-be automated taxi service.
Where are these boot camp web dev jobs starting out at $100K? If such jobs are plentiful, wouldn’t they be in area where the cost of living is so high that it would be better to live in a lower cost of living area with a lower salary?
How about your job, do you volunteer to have it outsourced to a poor engineer? Would they do what you do as well?
Don't they have their own ridesharing companies? I don't see why they need uber's jobs, that wouldn't bring much wealth to them but to institutional American shareholders mostly.
Assuming this question is asked in good faith, this is obviously not the right way or anyone's idea of distributing wealth. And ultimately this is for Uber's profit, not the good of India.
I know you are being sarcastic but this is called "capitalism". Not doubt a country like India benefits tremendously from the jobs created by foreign companies BUT it is not a charity. Companies are doing it because they see enough value and profits for their shareholders. It has nothing to do with being fair or not. If you truly want outsourcing to stop, create better incentives for the companies to hire locally. Until then, welcome to a global world.
What a huge mistake in my opinion if that goes through. Everyone who worked with indian companies should keep an eye on what's going on. Far too much more damage can be done!
I think you are comparing it to the wrong scenario. Hiring for your own company(Uber in this case) is far different than outsourcing to an Indian company like Infosys and TCS. Microsoft already has a huge presence in India, and so does Amazon. I have interacted with engineers in FAANG in both India and the west coast, and there is no huge quality difference in people on the same job levels.
Well this has worked great for Boeing, a once great American engineering company.
On the other hand India has an excellent education system and highly skilled engineers, and any capital flow away from the five big cities in the world that sinks the vast majority of it can only be a good thing.
OK, I'll bite. The top academic institutions in the exact sciences and engineering (old IITs, IISc) are excellent by any standard, and the students are top notch, due to the large pool from which they are selected and the brutally tough selection process. Example: a significant number of the top CS researchers in the world are graduates from these institutes.
> The top academic institutions in the exact sciences and engineering (old IITs, IISc) are excellent by any standard, and the students are top notch, due to the large pool from which they are selected and the brutally tough selection process.
It's a result of huge population and most institutions being trash so students are concentrated in one place. That is in no way a feature of the education system itself.
The quality of your peers is an important feature of any educational system (if not the most important) -- by that measure alone the top institutes in India are excellent. The top researchers/professors at those institutes are also a product of the same institutes, and the same selection process, so the top institutes are generally of a high standard (in terms of workload, choice of topics, teaching quality, etc.). Although, here, admittedly the draw of industry and universities abroad has a large effect and the teachers are not the top 0.01% of their age group in the same way as student are.
I'm not indian, so I only see the surface of all the socio-economic issues, some of which go way back -- as far as I know, the reservation issue is highly charged and sensitive (similarly to gender/race issues in the US), and I have no strong opinion on them.
As far as I see, all energy spent railing against the reservation system is better spent improving yourself.
That article is misleading. India has a huge amount of people going into Engineering, and calculating what % of engineers (not CS engineers, or even CS+ electrical engineers) can code, is a useless metric. Not to mention, a textile engineer not being able to code doesn't have anything to do with engineering quality. And the survey has many useless stats like that.
India is well suited for building and supporting applications like this since it has an extremely good talent pool that can manage and deploy solutions. Uber app in itself is not that difficult to operate and hence I strongly believe this is the right thing for shareholders.
It is cheaper because the cost of living and running an office are significantly cheaper than that of SV. Indian engineers are not always bad engineers that write low quality code.
The challenge with outsourcing is management overhead and turn around times. Biggest mistake I see my customers make is outsource and not control the quality of the engineers.
Inhouse they have a sophisticated and long recruiting process. When outsourcing they take the first they get (and as a new customer, be assured, you do not get the best engineers but you need to fight to get them).
my company tried to outsource a ancillary product we develop in 2011-2013 timeframe. It wound up being non-viable and we brought it back in-house.
I think many don't see how pernicious turn-around times can be. They continue to build upon each other like compounding interest. It can be a very very hard loop to break out of. The cycle of question -> answer -> further question -> meeting can grind progress to a halt when each iteration takes 12 hours.
This article is not talking about outsourcing but offshoring. Uber still has total control on the people, the project and rewarding the right behavior. It will just happen in India instead of the US.
Working for a very large tech company as a technical manager with lots of offshoring to India and outsourcing to East-Europe and the Middle-East it didn't feel there was a difference between how outsourcing and offshoring worked regarding engineer quality or turn around times.
A better option: shift it's engineering to everywhere else in America, and go full-remote, but pay less.
Imagine if Uber told it's developers: we're cutting salaries by 40%- but you are now full-remote, and we want you to live somewhere less expensive than SV. Spread out across America!
A lot of folks would quit. But some would see the incredible opportunity. In that situation, I'd move somewhere like Chattanooga TN- average rent at around $1000/month, vs SF's $3000-5000. Food is cheaper too. And being a city, it's far less conservative than you'd think (well, okay, it is TN).
They could cut their engineering costs dramatically while improving the overall lifestyle of their developers.
And given we're soon going to be in a post-pandemic world where tightly-packed open offices don't exist anymore, they'd probably just be ahead of the rest of us by a few months if they did it.
I’m genuinely curious why companies don’t do this? It seems like a great deal, many cities in US are great with decent cost of living. I used to live in Kansas before & home ownership is cheaper and time zones are usually better. Maybe the total cost of hire is still higher? idk
Because the cost of living delta is mostly just home ownership. Yes, that trickles down to somewhat higher prices for contractors, child care, etc. but it's mostly rents and houses. So $50K/year say is probably a pretty reasonable cost of living adjustment between the Bay Area and most reasonable low CoL areas. Cut more than that and you're also cuttings savings and spending power for things that are priced similarly across the continental US.
Just looking at annual pay, lets say you pay devs a reasonable 75K USD in Chattanooga. Thats 56 Lakh INR annual pay in India. You can get a top engineer for that kind of pay.
This doesn't even account for the difficulty in hiring an engineer of the same caliber in Chattanooga and all the associated overhead like health insurance, etc.. which are much lower in India.
If you already have experience building a high quality engineering team in India (thus know how to overcome cultural barriers), its pretty much a no-brainer.
This is not as good as it sounds just because it works for you.
People don't love moving, and they usually move for better work opportunities, not to accomodate a pay cut at their current job. Moving to a lower cost of living area also means moving to an area with less opportunities, and not to mention moving away from your social circles and the life you have established somewhere.
The only way I can see this working if uber started hiring bew remote engineers in the US, but asking their current ones to move from SF so they can take a pay cut?
To add to this when I worked remotely for two years I was always worried that if I move to a low cost of living city and I lost my job I will be screwed. No one would hire me at the rate I was paid with the SF company.
This has happened to me. Ended up working for a very scary company because they were the only local option that came close to matching my bay area salary. Moved back to the Bay Area less than a year later.
Lesson learned, I won’t be moving again without a relocation package
Silicon Valley (mostly) is "the suburbs." Although there are more tech jobs in downtowns than there used to be, in a lot of areas most of the tech jobs are in suburbs/exurbs.
It's a bit different here on the East Coast. While there are plenty of options in the suburbs - the number within an individuals commuting radius drops.
I live (well) outside of Boston. About 20 years ago, there wasn't a single real tech employer in the city. That's changed primarily with Kendall and the Seaport. But there's still a huge amount in Metrowest and some in the northern suburbs going up to southern NH.
I've been lucky that through several jobs I've never had a really bad commute except into Boston for a time--but I didn't have to do it every day and there is a commuter rail.
> In that situation, I'd move somewhere like Chattanooga TN- average rent at around $1000/month, vs SF's $3000-5000. Food is cheaper too.
That rent difference turns out to be $24000-$48000 a year. If salaries are cut by 40%, it would only make economic sense to move if you earned less than $60000-$120000 a year (not accounting for cheaper food).
Whether the lifestyle differences would be positive or negative is highly dependent on the individual. And that's without getting into other opportunities available if you stay in SF.
> Add other bits of cheaper living: lack of commute, cheaper food, etc. It's not just the rent.
At this point, people arguing for moving to lower cost of living area should just show the math.
> Also think how much is an extra hour every day (or however long you commute) worth to you in quality of life.
Just live close to the office. You can literally pay thousands of dollars a month and still be better of financially.
And really, how much is it worth? Is it worth $100K a year? Because that's how much less disposable income/savings some of the people with higher salaries would find them selves with in the proposed scenario.
You can't really show the math beyond personal experience and even then it's all relative to your lifestyle.
Living in the city near the office also depends on the area. I can get out off my town in ~5min at any time of the day. There's no traffic on my street. I've got a creek and walking paths nearby. I have time to cook at home and save on takeaways and potentially improve my health. I wouldn't exchange this for an extra $100k and daily commute.
Living in a smaller city will be different. Having different hobbies will have an impact. I don't see any way to show this makes sense in general. It will be make sense for some people though.
I don't deny that some people prefer living in smaller cities. That's why I initially said "whether the lifestyle differences would be positive or negative is highly dependent on the individual".
What I object to is people saying that cheapness of such places will make up for massive salary reductions. It won't.
Asking people to take a pay cut that means they need to uproot their families to make ends meet is completely unreasonable. I think they’d suddenly find themselves spending much less on engineering staff but probably not for the reason you think.
The issue with your arugment is that you are looking at it from a "cost" perspective only. Companies have a lot more problems to worry about. Local laws, regulations, is everyone cut out to be able to work remote ? etc etc. In the US, you also have to deal with shit load of laws state wise. For most companies that don't have the pockets of FAAANgs or well funded companies, it is just not viable to go "fully remote anywhere". It sounds exciting but logistically it is not that simple.
Also, you cannot just assume that just because the company decided to cut salaries by 40%, everyone will be excited to pack their bags and move to say "Kansas" or "Idaho" or wherever in the world. Not everyone wants to be a nomad. Lot of us like the stability of a home, a city where we live and have made friends/family and many other reasons. If that was the case, I am sure a lot more people would be moving out of NYC/LA/SF already. Not the case.
I say this as a small bootstrapped founder who has team members in 3 countries and we are only 15 or so. Remote teams are NOT easy. Not at all. I personally would love everyone to be able to work together in 1 office and call it a day. Yes, I am all up for flexibility to work remotely if needed from time to time. I just don't want to deal with the hassles I explained in my first paragraph.
Finally, lets say that we do look at it purely from a cost perspective. On an average, a "good enough" engineer in India will always be at least 10x cheaper than a good enough engineer ANYWHERE in America. It is just the facts of how the global world is. Don't compete on cost. You cannot beat that. Compete on other things.
First we move the factories to others countries and now we are moving the brains. If this extend, this will be the end of middle class in west society.
As someone who worked at Uber from 2014-2018, I'd like to weigh in with some observations based on my experience.
1). While Uber has been very Bay Area-heavy, it has had a distributed engineering team for many of its core operations for a very long time. For example, many of its core infrastructure was built in Europe. Cross-timezone collaboration hasn't been the smoothest, but of all the large "FANGish" tech companies, Uber actually has the most experience with non-HQ teams building business-critical systems. Even companies seen as very progressive in terms of eng culture, like Stripe, seem to keep the core business close to HQ (this is my subjective observation, and I'd love to proven wrong here, because I think Stripe, as a whole, is awesome).
2). India is a country with many people and many engineers. If there's one strong believe I can state in this post, it's that there are many incredibly talented engineers who are living in India and are choosing to stay there. Uber has experience in building engineering teams outside of HQ. It's not a sure thing, but I think they can do it.
Happy to answer any other questions or comments.
(I guess as a disclaimer, I have zero financial stake in Uber, but I have some friends who still work at Uber, so that may or may not influence my opinion)
I think we might see more instances of this happening, not less. The thing is SF salaries are very high compared to just anywhere else in the world. There are many reasons for that (high rent, high concentration of talent), but I doubt these justify paying 300k when Uber can pay 80k to an engineer in India. To people saying the difference in salary is not large, it absolutely is large, and they can check https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Uber/Google for some data points. Not to mention this is just salary, cost of employment will include more things like real estate costs, health insurance, all of which will make this even bigger.
Also, India has good enough engineering talent that product quality shouldn't be an issue given good technical leadership. If companies can hire people straight out of bootcamps for entry level jobs, they can sure get better value by hiring someone having a very good CSE education at much lower cost. Even the vast majority of work at FAANGs doesn't require a Dave Cutler or Jeff Dean. For example, majority of engineers at Google are not working on Search, Colossus,BigTable,Spanner,Borg or the most important technologies. Most engineers just need to know how to use BigTable/Spanner, and that is much easier than designing them.
I was a Uber driver for two years and year after year they keep saying they are struggling. I really don't get it. On a ride where passenger pays 20 bucks, they usually keep something like 8 dollars. How can it not be profitable? The computational and human resource necessary to make a ride happen can't be that high. Maybe they should fire their CTO and CFO.
Wow, some rampant generalization in this thread. What most people outside of India seem to fail to understand is that most of the experience they have had and stories they've heard of are based off of poorly paid, not very highly skilled engineers employed at body shop consultancies.
There is also another class of software engineers in India who are as good as SV engineers who work at companies like Ola, Bookmyshow, PayTM, Flipkart etc. building quality products at quite a large scale. This is the kind of engineer who is also hired by FAANG/Microsoft/Uber etc. And these engineers are paid very well in comparison to the body shop guys.
So when Uber says they might shift engineering to India, that doesn't automatically mean quality is going to shit.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadHave they seen India's track record on tech innovation? The education system there does not produce very innovative people or engineers. However they are great at following exact instructions so I'm sure that part of engineering team will do well
I certainly don't see a lack of creativity or innovation from immigrants from South Asia working in North America.
I agree that India has not been the best in terms of tech innovation but the situation is changing. The start up ecosystem is booming here and investments are following too.
Startup ecosystem is booming on foreign investment especially from china. Local investment is still dire.
Students from IIT in India are filtered from millions of students. They only take about 10-15k students every year and the rest are in NIT and other relevant institutions (around 50k). About 1 million self selected students participate in jee-mains every year. I only meant to highlight that OP's friend may be biased compared to the common situation here.
Here is the article for chinese investment in top Indian startups - https://www.vccircle.com/here-s-a-snapshot-of-key-chinese-in...
With government trying to shut down foreign investment, I don't see investment opportunities in India increasing.
Most of Agarwals,Jains,Brahmin are mostly businessman.(most indian big startup-enterprises are from this community.ex.Paytm,Reliance,Birla,Flipkart,OYO,OLA)
for example,I am jain(Baniya). I am having masters degree in IT(2013),had offer from US based MDM startup still I chose trading. Even now I spend 20 hours a week in IT work(hobby),from node projects,System drivers to my trading business specific IOT devices and even DIY Electronics project. But I dont find myself in IT business in near future.
My cousin who is also master degree holder in IT, He runs successful family owned supermarket with 15000+skus. His store is more advanced in tech then bigger competitors which I bet will earn him fruit in next 3-4 years.
Its personal choice not lack of innovation or talent.
Indian engineers, at least the ones hired from the top institutes, can certainly innovate if they are provided the right environment.
Things are however changing in India due to the rapidly growing startup ecosystem which eventually lead to good careers and high salaries for software engineers back home. This is giving people less of a reason to move.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23713291
Could a successful outsourcing project by Uber threaten all SV tech jobs?
Also, in every company there are jobs that are trivial and jobs that require talent. I assume the more trivial jobs like bug fixing will be outsourced, while the rest of the engineers are kept for product design.
Cost of living is a red herring. No one’s going to pay me more if I live in Manhattan rather than the suburbs of Boise if they can avoid it. It’s all about the locational differences. If there’s a thick, liquid market for the product you’re selling, your labour, you’ll get a good price for it. If there isn’t employers have substantially more power to set wages. A lot of the reason engineers in SV get paid more is that they’re just better but the engineers in Boulder are pretty great too and fewer of them are getting those wages, even fewer in Boise. All about the competition for talent.
But it's complicated. For that matter, you could argue that the perks of Bay Area weather and great number of employment options should make the Bay Area attractive even if the salaries weren't great relative to CoL. But there's enough competition among large employers who generate enough value per employee that they can afford to offer top-shelf salaries so they do so to entice the people they want.
To the last point, I don't expect dramatic short term changes. But to the degree that things tilt more in the direction of remote work and small distributed offices, I expect some equalization of salaries at least within the US.
To get a good job in India, you will need more than skills - connections and a limited edition degree.
Actually, why not Canada? Salaries are again much lower than Silicon Valley, the timezone is the same, the language is the same (except in Quebec), and it would be great to stop Canadian software engineers from moving to the US in droves due to lack of opportunities at home.
Any references for that?
Indian engineers making more than 20k-25K USD Per Year are considered top talent in most companies across India. Are there engineers making more ? Yes absolutely. Are they a minority ? Yes, absolutely.
But it feels - to my uninformed biased mind - like more of Uber flailing around while slowly failing.
> Could a successful outsourcing project by Uber threaten all SV tech jobs?
No.
It could be part of some downward pressure at worst.
Outsourcing to India has gone on for 2-3 decades. It's not some new disruptive thing.
I guess what's different here is that Uber is a proper tech company and knows how to identify good engineers to hire. The same cannot be said of non-tech companies that have outsourced to consultancies like Infosys and Wipro.
In my experience working with the India team at (one of) the FAANGs, it seemed like they were offloading the work that people didn't want to do in SV to the Hyderabad office (e.g. testing, maintenance of legacy systems).
But it could also be the case that there are innovative things being built in these India offices that people just assume were built in the US.
This isn't a new thing. This is just a common strategy that many companies take once they are large enough to be able to handle the extra overhead of working across a 12 hour time difference.
From the engineering point of view Uber is done. The self driving automation is probably not possible in the next x years. It has a working successful product probably too many developers now working on non-core projects.
Moving it to India they can keep the same numbers employed reduce costs and probably throw away things created there anyways.
My guess is a key lean operations team will remain in sf. Ensuring the system runs and is updated. Self driving research can be done India.. UI screens will be local.
Or just not done. There's no reason for Uber to be working on self-driving at this point. Door to door fully autonomous driving in relatively dense areas--i.e. where it makes sense for Uber to operate--is decades away. Autonomous highway driving--which will probably arrive earlier (maybe much earlier)--does absolutely nothing for a would-be automated taxi service.
Don't they have their own ridesharing companies? I don't see why they need uber's jobs, that wouldn't bring much wealth to them but to institutional American shareholders mostly.
On the other hand India has an excellent education system and highly skilled engineers, and any capital flow away from the five big cities in the world that sinks the vast majority of it can only be a good thing.
Explain in which way is it excellent?
Which part do you think Indian education system does well relatively?
Could you be more elaborate?
I can see that statement meaning wildly different things on HN and it doesn't answer my question.
It's a result of huge population and most institutions being trash so students are concentrated in one place. That is in no way a feature of the education system itself.
What do you think about reservation in those institutions?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_policy_in_Indian_I...
2. https://theprint.in/india/education/iits-take-womens-quota-t...
3. For 10% poor all catch reservation which will be implemented soon - https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/10-reservation-for...
As far as I see, all energy spent railing against the reservation system is better spent improving yourself.
> As far as I see, all energy spent railing against the reservation system is better spent improving yourself.
You have approximately 60% seats reserved, the remaining 40% seats are left for everyone else to compete on equal grounds.
This year old article disagrees.
https://www.businesstoday.in/current/corporate/indian-engine...
Depends on the devs and the kind of team they are working in. It's difficult to provide an objective answer to that question.
$10,000/month may not go far in SV, but in parts of India, you can live like a king, literally, with servants and such.
Rent for a studio apartment in India will cost less than $200. I'm not kidding. But a similar space in SV can cost 10 times more of that.
Inhouse they have a sophisticated and long recruiting process. When outsourcing they take the first they get (and as a new customer, be assured, you do not get the best engineers but you need to fight to get them).
my company tried to outsource a ancillary product we develop in 2011-2013 timeframe. It wound up being non-viable and we brought it back in-house.
I think many don't see how pernicious turn-around times can be. They continue to build upon each other like compounding interest. It can be a very very hard loop to break out of. The cycle of question -> answer -> further question -> meeting can grind progress to a halt when each iteration takes 12 hours.
This article is not talking about outsourcing but offshoring. Uber still has total control on the people, the project and rewarding the right behavior. It will just happen in India instead of the US.
But you are right.
Imagine if Uber told it's developers: we're cutting salaries by 40%- but you are now full-remote, and we want you to live somewhere less expensive than SV. Spread out across America!
A lot of folks would quit. But some would see the incredible opportunity. In that situation, I'd move somewhere like Chattanooga TN- average rent at around $1000/month, vs SF's $3000-5000. Food is cheaper too. And being a city, it's far less conservative than you'd think (well, okay, it is TN).
They could cut their engineering costs dramatically while improving the overall lifestyle of their developers.
And given we're soon going to be in a post-pandemic world where tightly-packed open offices don't exist anymore, they'd probably just be ahead of the rest of us by a few months if they did it.
This doesn't even account for the difficulty in hiring an engineer of the same caliber in Chattanooga and all the associated overhead like health insurance, etc.. which are much lower in India.
If you already have experience building a high quality engineering team in India (thus know how to overcome cultural barriers), its pretty much a no-brainer.
People don't love moving, and they usually move for better work opportunities, not to accomodate a pay cut at their current job. Moving to a lower cost of living area also means moving to an area with less opportunities, and not to mention moving away from your social circles and the life you have established somewhere.
The only way I can see this working if uber started hiring bew remote engineers in the US, but asking their current ones to move from SF so they can take a pay cut?
Lesson learned, I won’t be moving again without a relocation package
What did they do?
I'd be curious if this will change as more companies offer full-time remote.
I live (well) outside of Boston. About 20 years ago, there wasn't a single real tech employer in the city. That's changed primarily with Kendall and the Seaport. But there's still a huge amount in Metrowest and some in the northern suburbs going up to southern NH.
I've been lucky that through several jobs I've never had a really bad commute except into Boston for a time--but I didn't have to do it every day and there is a commuter rail.
Close to Nashville, Huntsville (huge aerospace & engineering base has fiber) & Atlanta.
Pretty sure they also have municipal fiber.
That rent difference turns out to be $24000-$48000 a year. If salaries are cut by 40%, it would only make economic sense to move if you earned less than $60000-$120000 a year (not accounting for cheaper food).
Whether the lifestyle differences would be positive or negative is highly dependent on the individual. And that's without getting into other opportunities available if you stay in SF.
Also think how much is an extra hour every day (or however long you commute) worth to you in quality of life.
At this point, people arguing for moving to lower cost of living area should just show the math.
> Also think how much is an extra hour every day (or however long you commute) worth to you in quality of life.
Just live close to the office. You can literally pay thousands of dollars a month and still be better of financially.
And really, how much is it worth? Is it worth $100K a year? Because that's how much less disposable income/savings some of the people with higher salaries would find them selves with in the proposed scenario.
Living in the city near the office also depends on the area. I can get out off my town in ~5min at any time of the day. There's no traffic on my street. I've got a creek and walking paths nearby. I have time to cook at home and save on takeaways and potentially improve my health. I wouldn't exchange this for an extra $100k and daily commute.
Living in a smaller city will be different. Having different hobbies will have an impact. I don't see any way to show this makes sense in general. It will be make sense for some people though.
What I object to is people saying that cheapness of such places will make up for massive salary reductions. It won't.
Also, you cannot just assume that just because the company decided to cut salaries by 40%, everyone will be excited to pack their bags and move to say "Kansas" or "Idaho" or wherever in the world. Not everyone wants to be a nomad. Lot of us like the stability of a home, a city where we live and have made friends/family and many other reasons. If that was the case, I am sure a lot more people would be moving out of NYC/LA/SF already. Not the case.
I say this as a small bootstrapped founder who has team members in 3 countries and we are only 15 or so. Remote teams are NOT easy. Not at all. I personally would love everyone to be able to work together in 1 office and call it a day. Yes, I am all up for flexibility to work remotely if needed from time to time. I just don't want to deal with the hassles I explained in my first paragraph.
Finally, lets say that we do look at it purely from a cost perspective. On an average, a "good enough" engineer in India will always be at least 10x cheaper than a good enough engineer ANYWHERE in America. It is just the facts of how the global world is. Don't compete on cost. You cannot beat that. Compete on other things.
1). While Uber has been very Bay Area-heavy, it has had a distributed engineering team for many of its core operations for a very long time. For example, many of its core infrastructure was built in Europe. Cross-timezone collaboration hasn't been the smoothest, but of all the large "FANGish" tech companies, Uber actually has the most experience with non-HQ teams building business-critical systems. Even companies seen as very progressive in terms of eng culture, like Stripe, seem to keep the core business close to HQ (this is my subjective observation, and I'd love to proven wrong here, because I think Stripe, as a whole, is awesome).
2). India is a country with many people and many engineers. If there's one strong believe I can state in this post, it's that there are many incredibly talented engineers who are living in India and are choosing to stay there. Uber has experience in building engineering teams outside of HQ. It's not a sure thing, but I think they can do it.
Happy to answer any other questions or comments.
(I guess as a disclaimer, I have zero financial stake in Uber, but I have some friends who still work at Uber, so that may or may not influence my opinion)
Tangential, but the core product of AWS, EC2, was developed in South Africa and (largely) continues to be today.
Although I would argue that S3 is the core product
Also, India has good enough engineering talent that product quality shouldn't be an issue given good technical leadership. If companies can hire people straight out of bootcamps for entry level jobs, they can sure get better value by hiring someone having a very good CSE education at much lower cost. Even the vast majority of work at FAANGs doesn't require a Dave Cutler or Jeff Dean. For example, majority of engineers at Google are not working on Search, Colossus,BigTable,Spanner,Borg or the most important technologies. Most engineers just need to know how to use BigTable/Spanner, and that is much easier than designing them.
Operational costs have only recently become a concern, after becoming publicly traded.
There is also another class of software engineers in India who are as good as SV engineers who work at companies like Ola, Bookmyshow, PayTM, Flipkart etc. building quality products at quite a large scale. This is the kind of engineer who is also hired by FAANG/Microsoft/Uber etc. And these engineers are paid very well in comparison to the body shop guys.
So when Uber says they might shift engineering to India, that doesn't automatically mean quality is going to shit.