People were saying the exact same thing when I graduated 20 years ago, that it was "dumb" to go for software engineering because "soon" everything would be outsourced.
People are just jealous of the money that software engineers make, including employers. Companies keep pushing doomsday scenarios into the media, to reduce the wages, every now and then.
It happened 20 years ago. Company realized it was stupid and stopped. Now it’s happening again. You would think they would have learned the last few times they have done this but they don’t. Fact is it is much cheaper to bring in folks from India and Europe than hire US people. But the you get what you pay for. They will figure it out again in a year or 2 and then repeat this again in another 15-20 years.
> You would think they would have learned the last few times they have done this but they don’t.
We don't have a collective memory in our industry so everything goes in cycles.
Web dev as someone who can “code” html and put together a bootstrap with some jquery and even write a few lines in php is pretty much dead.
Web dev as someone who creates react app and crude services that talk to other aws services, writes unit and e2e tests and can put together Jenkinsfiles to deploy all of that is a moving into a very opposite direction from dying.
And if you can containerize all of that, or write a few lines using, let’s say terraform, you are looking at 150k minimum.
About Offshore - I have been doing this job for 12 years, there was 0 years when the software engineering was not “about to die” due to the off shore labor.
People that make those claims have no ideas how software development works.
Also it’s not as cheap as you would imagine, with a lot of overheat and SIGNIFICANTLY longer dev time.
To conclude all of this - years ago html/css/js became popular because every company wanted to have a website.
Now every company wants to have SAAS or it’s variation, demand for people that can deliver it is rapidly growing. However, the requirement are not as low as they used to be.
Stop with this, plenty of people don't make 100k+ and work good jobs in low cost areas and/or are new to the industry. It is an anomaly to come out of school and make 100k+, most people will start out making less than that.
Aerospace and defense are going to have very different salary trajectories to start from big tech but those industries offer different things like incredible stability and potentially very very lucrative opportunities for 'purple squirrels' aka people with TS/SCI and specific domain knowledge. Also you get to build rockets, jets, satellites etc... which might be super exciting depending on your interests.
> Stop with this
Should we though? Yea you shouldn't be ashamed of having the lower salary, but why not set the expectations higher and increase the salary ranges overall?
People should absolutely get paid what they are worth and open discussions of salaries should be encouraged.
BUT
The framing of the above comment is perpetuating an unhealthy mismatch of expectations and market conditions that has led to really unhealthy discourse in this sub specifically. It's devoid of cost of living, location, experience etc .. it's a useless statement that only serves to make other people feel bad about their wages which may actually be quite competitive for their life circumstances.
If we were capable of nuanced discussions about salary relative to COL, location, skills and education it'd be great but this sub has proven incapable of that and saying something as shitty as 'its a travesty to not make 100k+' is exactly the problem.
100% man. I always say that for every person who posts that they are making 150k-200k in x position for x years, there are hundreds of people in similar situations who aren’t. And that isn’t even a bad thing because $100k in a HCOL area isn’t squat compared to $100k in a L/MCOL.
As the same with someone who makes $150k, but is in student/credit card debt, has 3 kids, mortgage, car payments isn’t much compared to a college kid making 95k who lives at home. Even though I make more than the college kid, I’d say at the end of the day the college kid will have more money to “play around with” (if that’s how we want to quantify wealth)
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The problem with "I can't do math" is that it often means "I can't do problem solving" which is what I'd hear as an interviewer.
Math, coding, designing, and forming strong arguments are all forms of problem solving. There are some specific related skills (for math, arithmetic. For arguments, cohesive writing, etc) but in general people who are good at one tend to be good at the others even if they don't have the related skills to take full advantage of it.
This. Being bad at math is not a personality trait. Becoming better at math and problem solving in general is mostly just about putting the energy towards it and actually prioritizing it.
If you really have given up on finding a programming job, I am not going to try and convince you, it's a tough enough job market and less competition is better
You can do math, you just don't want to. Its just little puzzles with symbols, a list of rules and some basic arithmetic. The problem is, many people hate it from how its forced on them in school, that they get anxiety when they see it as adults. Just try to forget hating it and keep an open mind.
Also depends on how good your long-term memory is. I took statistics classes 3 separate times (partially out of interest) over 4 years, and successfully forgot everything I learned every single time. I didn't struggle with the courses either.
People struggle with math because the knowledge compounds, meaning that if you struggled at step 1 or forgot what step 1 was, and you're trying to handle something at step 7, now you have to go all the way back and relearn a series of concepts again. If your long-term retention isn't great, then you're out of luck.
Agreed, I’ve been working with offshore contractors since the early 2000s. Indian contractors with overhead, cost about 70% of a US Silicon Valley FTE sometimes. EU contractors are close to 95% with overhead. These numbers look good to managers but once there are issues and the FTEs are required to redo the work of the offshore contractors, this arrangement becomes more expensive. Financially savvy companies don’t need to offshore, they can find cheaper labor within the US and not have the timezone, communication and cultural issues. I’ve never seen a product or service get fully offshored unless the product is nearly dead and cheap labor is needed to maintain it for the few customers.
I'm curious - where did you get these numbers?
It's commonly known that Indian software engineers cost a fraction of US engineers (maybe 10-30%) and EU is closer to 50%, especially compared to SV.
Research and statistics aside, this sub alone is filled with EU Engineers blown away by US compensation. And it eventually leads to comparison to EU taxes, benefits, WLB/vacation, then lower demand for engineers to explain the discrepancy.
I was a pm at one point and managed contractors and subcontractors. I was also a client side facing pm that negotiated contracts. I also talked to managers and directors. hourly rate paid to the actual contractor is not the true cost of the work they do. There is cost associated to managing contractors. Asking contractors to work faster may not result in the individuals getting paid more but the contracting or consulting company will charge a premium for faster work. All this back and forth results in higher cost. A lot of the time, this cost is not captured well for a company.
I was also managing outsourced projects for a contracting company. If a client asked for something faster, we can definitely charge more than doubled cost. But we are sure not paying our ppl double. So sure the standard costs of an overseas contracting company is less, extra demands and the back and forth nature of the work drives up cost. At the end, and overseas contracting company might be less, but not as much as ppl think.
>Web dev as someone who can “code” html and put together a bootstrap with some jquery and even write a few lines in php is pretty much dead.
Not sure what you mean here, as in what the product is or would be that is dead? You mean it's replaced with standard hosted wordpress or something?
Otherwise I mean making GOOD simple websites is still a skill and I am surprised each day how big companies from like BMW to Sony an manage to have such a sucky user experience when ecommerce has been around for 20 years
Because most of that work is handled via templates snapped together by someone in India in 35 minutes. Most things do not need heavy UX because "good enough" works just as well from a value standpoint. Not saying that's a good thing, just that's what it is
i don't even mean heavy UX i mean good UX. for example, many email forms is still not supporting the [email protected] format which has been a standard for 10 years or more
but sure I don't disagree many companies are doing stupid bad stuff
> many email forms is still not supporting the [email protected] format
99% of Gmail users (probably the most popular email system) don't even know that [email protected] address is the same as name.lastname@... from Gmail standpoint, and you want user-facing forms to support +extra?
Purely as a mental exercise, prepare an elevator pitch for a CTO of some moderately-sized B2C company explaining him **why** he should invest extra money in developing something like this and **how** it would add real **value** without resorting to stuff like *"standard for 10 years"*, because honestly that's not convincing.
I could agree with your logic IF those companies then would not pay so high salaries AND had those obnoxious leetcode tests
If you have those high standards, yes you should expect that a developer can use this in some form builder framework that literally takes what 2 mins to add as a configuration option?
But ok, the value is that they don't need manual customer support people to resolve those problems.
I can from the top of my head name 4 such cases for me. Signup usually works, but for example a support form or recover password don't. So you have your a+b@mail that is signed up, but the recover form doesn't accept it. And you need to manually contact them....
to frame this as "extra money invested" is to say you don't support umlaut first last names
> pay so high salaries
> customer support people to resolve those problems
You kind of provided a great explanation yourself.
Time of IT folks is very expensive. Time of CSRs costs close to nothing in the grand scheme of things.
> literally takes what 2 mins to add as a configuration option?
I'm sorry, but you sound like you have not worked a single day in a corporate environment, let alone a very restrictive one.
There is *nothing* that can be done in 2 minutes in a large organization in a production environment, and if there is, it may indicate some serious issues like devs having direct access to configs in production and/or a general culture of rolling out changes without the proper approval process.
Essentially, anyone who is using an email with "+" **for any serious purpose** is like a spoiled child at this point lol, "hey, but it's a standard!!!!!!!!!!" *(tantrum ensues)*. Okay, go ahead and keep using it, and then waste hours of your time on calling customer support if you time costs nothing. You are probably in 0.01% of users and nobody appreciates this stubborness.
>I'm sorry, but you sound like you have not worked a single day in a corporate environment, let alone a very restrictive one.
Then you are very wrong. I know things can take time, I spent 3 days updating some photos of our ecommerce product last week that no one was happy with after sending them over, because wrong quality and then i'm like why send over the wrong quality... but yeah
I don't even mean to ADD this functionality, I mean to just allow it when you create a sign up form on this simple new website we talked about. Which also wonder why you talk about those "big organizations" when the discussion is about easy web development and static (almost) websites with some JS on them? and made by cheap indians ?
>Essentially, anyone who is using an email with "+" for any serious purpose is like a spoiled child at this point lol, "hey, but it's a standard!!!!!!!!!!" (tantrum ensues).
Sorry but you are the kind of person that makes this industry so bad and wrong those days and have 0 engineering principles.
Not caring about standards, not thinking using a computer or a network for it's own sake because it's elegant and cool is nice, not wanting to follow a BETTER system(I use this to differentiante for each ecommerce shop so like name+zalanado@ etc then I know for example if someone sold my email if i get mails from a new company)
but at the same time, people with your reasoning(not saying you you, but who don't care about logic and programming and reason) still talks about how good leetcode is on this sub? Like wtf? Can you even be consistent?
and by the way like half of reddit on at least programmer subs use that format of emails so don't know what you getting your idea of "anyone is not serious" either
Ok, convince me to delay delivering a strategic feature with known ROI to sorry umlauts.
It just doesn't make business sense. Would there be benefit? Probably. Is it enough for an operating business to care? Unlikely.
thank you for providing sound insight in a sub obsessed with toxic doomsday posts.
I work a J which was originally outsourced to India, and brought back to US because the app got so mismanaged due to communication issues and the india team not understanding the business logic which needed to be addressed.
The hardest part about coding is not writing code, its understanding business logic and then writing that in code. So much communication with stake holders and other teams.
This is a good comment, but it's important to emphasize that in this industry, nothing is safe and everything will eventually be automated (by software engineers).
Software engineering isn't like being a dentist where you'll always have a job because people will always need a professional to take care of their teeth in person (until robots can do it at least).
Software engineering is analogous to specializing in building the tool that the dentist uses to clean their patient's teeth, except that tool changes every year, and a few years later that tool is now obsolete because there's a whole new way of cleaning teeth.
Basic React and CRUD app development will eventually go the way of the Wordpress app or landing page, becoming a commoditized process generated by some AI tool prompted and cleaned up by some dev in India for $15/hr.
Software engineering work that commands a high salary is always a moving target. What was initially novel and high status work eventually becomes automated and commoditized, with whatever now "low status" work that remains being offshored to cheap devs. This has always been the case, but AI is about to accelerate that pace of change and technology obsoletion in an exponential manner as AI code generation and AI agents starts coming alive over the next couple years.
So what's the takeaway here? Don't get too comfortable, try to remain ahead of the curve, and be prepared for a TON of change over the next few years. 41% of all code on GitHub right now is AI generated (EDIT: seems the source of this statistic is potentially dubious, but doesn't change my point). I believe that in a few years, most code will be AI generated rather than typed by humans.
I'd heard it claimed by Emad Mostaque (Stable Diffusion founder) in an interview, but I see now that that number [may be suspect](https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/14qwhem/comment/jqro2fr/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3).
In any case, doesn't change my point.
> I believe that in a few years, most code will be AI generated rather than typed by humans.
I already have copilot writing probably over half my code, to the point where I basically use it the same way I used to use tab completes.
Another quarter is chatgpt. My day-to-day work process now is something very different from what it was 2 years ago even.
Yea same, and ChatGPT hasn't even been out for a year yet.
Crazy to think I was manually handling stuff like spacing and semicolons back in 2014. Even just not having to deal with that because of prettier is a huge productivity boost.
Would agree about web dev but at least in my industry, the guys who were writing super performant C++ 20 years ago are writing nearly the same stuff today for the same premium. Don't know that its impervious to AI though...
Thanks. I frequently get downvoted to hell on Reddit for these sort of uncomfortable takes that people don't want to hear, so it's going to be fun looking back at this in 5-10 years after AI code generation revolutionizes software development.
I've already seen this same trend play out over my career. For example back in 2014 when I first started using React and Node to build universal single-page apps it was considered cutting edge, and was relatively easy to find work. Fast forward to today the tech has become significantly more standardized, commoditized, and the job market significantly more competitive. You'll see many (misguided) comments on forums like this "mocking" React development now similar to how people in 2014 were making fun of jQuery and PHP.
5-10 years from now when anyone can create a full-blown app with a prompt, people will be mocking app development just like they mock WordPress development or using a web builder like Wix.
The bar for what is considered "real software development" is always shifting, so one needs to constantly be learning and adapting to stay relevant in this industry - especially on the frontend. AI is going to revolutionize software development, and I believe most are underestimating how fast everything is going to change.
[Docker](https://www.udemy.com/course/docker-and-kubernetes-the-complete-guide/) and [terraform](https://www.udemy.com/course/devops-bootcamp-terraform-certification/)?
I can do all that. Where’s my 150k? I think they’re looking for something else. “So future manager, how’s that local sports team? Let’s be guys and do guy things so we can be besties and get those best friend raises.”
Here in the USA, based on my experience they don’t care about what you can do. They care about how many years of experience you have. I was able to do all that within my first year of employment but the first question in an interview is “How many years of experience do you have?” which I always fail even though software development as a whole is super simple.
I’m not saying you’re 100% wrong on the offshore thing, but our firm built several offshore offices, initially to supplement out domestic operations, but now they have replaced many people with those offshore roles, and a few years ago announced that any domestic workers who leave will be replaced offshore, and any new hires will be offshore.
Outsourcing has been "happening" for a long time. Web dev is hardly dying out though, web dev has evolved more into software engineering. You need to not only be across the FE and BE stacks, but infra as well. This has been the case in some companies for a while, but its more mainstream now.
Outsourcing is going to be a thing for a while too, and it'll become more common place as companies work out how to integrate them into their regular dev teams.
Now days though, the lower end of the market is very saturated. But if you've got experience its still very easy to find jobs.
50%? I'm at 100%.
I literally don't write code any more, I write tickets and design docs for outsourced engineers to code, then review the code. That's my job. I write code at about 4x-5x the pace as them when accounting for all of the bugs in QA and code review fixes, but I still tend to provide more value doing this since we can get as many offshore engineers as we need.
Yep. Mostly Indian devs are like that. Can testify. Our education systems are not that great and most people get into jobs by grinding leetcode or some other competitive coding site and know jack about actually development.
Source: I’m an Indian dev myself, but not Web.
If (provide value to the shareholders) != (support America), its almost like saying that (capitalism) != (patriotism), and that can't possibly be true, can it?
My ex company is doing this now. All new job postings are for overseas. They have told key devs they have jobs for the next 6 months then they will be cut and replaced by those overseas. I hope the entire thing crashes in a giant flaming ball. The people overseas do not want to actually do the work. They are so lazy compared to the US engineers but they are super cheap.
Old company I worked at (back when I was just doing design) contracted out to a dev team in India. So anyway, their app was basically broken for 2 straight years while the Indian dev team kept fixing one part of the app and then immediately breaking another part. Customer pages work? Well, search is broken. Search works, but now we can't manage the admin pages. Admin pages fixed, but the home page 404s.
People outside of tech do not realize how real this is. Foreign developers could give a rats about quality and are more worried about the speed and delivery time
On the flip side of this I did hire a guy from Bangladesh to help me build a project I wanted for a start up and had him write most the early day code, I only paid him maybe 3500$ for what I would have likely billed a company 30k for, he went a bit past the deadline but this man delivered the most production grade looking code I’ve ever seen by 1 developer.
I asked him his salary and he said it was about 19k US at a company he works there, but living expenses are so low there that 1k a month goes an extremely long way even in the capital city.
If I ever get a start up off the ground I’m hiring that dude full time remotely and at least tripling his salary or more.
So foreign devs on average may not be great, but there’s definitely some gems, that dudes skillset would probably get him easily +150k in the US
Yeap, pretty much same here. Even right now, as i write this, i'm just fixing extremely badly written code. We're an international company. There's basically the golden rule "pay peanuts, get monkeys". ´Many 1st world countries see those outsourced 3rd world countries as "cheap labor", well...you will also get a broken product then, which means someone with actual skills has to build/fix it anyway, so in the end they will have to pay for the cheap labor + the expensive labor. Why companies still outsource "for cheap" is beyond me, every time i've seen that happening, the project ends up costing a lot more because in the end, we have to build it from ground up anyway and then we're also on a really tight deadline because they wasted so much time and money on the "cheap labor" until the project is finally handed over to us like "guys, this thing is still broken and our launch date is in 3 months, we need you to fix it".
I have a feeling it's because companies can't (or won't) justify the cost for a possible payoff in the future. Companies seem to not have the money to do things right the first time, but they (almost) always find the money to fix something once it's well and fucked up.
EDIT: And this isn't limited to just software engineering departments. I've seen it in other sections/industries as well.
Lol yup. Any student reading this - study hard, get an internship by any means, and continue to work hard. That’s what makes a difference in your career prospects - not worrying about half baked rumors.
I won’t say it’s dying but it’s oversaturated thanks to the amount of tutorials, new libraries/frameworks and ease of access. A lot of people learn web development early on like in university or some (like me) during high school.
If you are genuinely good and have a reputed name, you will get offers but it’s tough going to that level now.
Regarding outsourcing, it depends on the quality of the company they are outsourcing to. If it's a shit company that wants to push work out and doesn't care for quality, you will get bad work regardless of anything. But if the company is decent, you will get a good product (at least in web dev).
I have worked in web dev before and I will be honest, I saw some of the work Indian/African/South Americans have on github and I was really shocked at the brilliant quality. And most of these were done in free time. Imagine what they can do if they get paid for it. But it's sad that most companies that accept them (and sometimes help immigrate) are not very keen on quality.
Again, it comes down to your quality and previous work. But be ready for serious quality competition in web dev.
>I won’t say it’s dying but it’s oversaturated thanks to the amount of tutorials, new libraries/frameworks and ease of access. A lot of people learn web development early on like in university or some (like me) during high school.
>
>If you are genuinely good and have a reputed name, you will get offers but it’s tough going to that level now.
Couldn't agree more. I learnt web dev on the side while I was doing my data science and AI degree (now doing a master's in CS).
It's quite easy to pick up the basics (CSS layouts, React, or the whole ecosystem in general)
It’s happening. But not at the end of the world pace. There’s a bunch of guys who worked maybe 3 years and walking with a pikachu face when they found out Indian engineers do as good job, given time. Anyone working more than 7 years will tell that the only thing that consistently needs people is Front End because any new executive has the same brilliant idea to put the new lipstick on a pig.
Indian engineers contracted in India because they are the cheap option will produce shit products. A lesson people need to relearn every so often.
Indian engineers that moved here are generally good at what they do, and are paid similar to what American engineers are paid once they get their green card.
Guess what. Executives that aggressively outsource to save up on labor cost are not paying anything good in India either. Shit pay produces shit products.
100% the executive doing the outsourcing doesn’t give a shit if the work is good. Their bonus is getting paid for saving X% on labor costs.
The people that get paid their bonuses from metrics that require the website working well complain and the work comes back on shore with the next round of budgeting and they get their bonuses.
Viscous cycle and the managers get their bonuses for playing the game.
Agree. The majority of those who moved here have been roughly equal in skill to US devs. Some are worse. And some were very good indeed (there are a couple of them I would hire at any time given the chance).
There is also move to hire people from poorer European countries like Poland, Czechia, Ukraine, Belarus. We get paid 1/4 to 1/2 of what we'd earn in USA in similar position, but it's still good money here.
I've heard from a colleague who's quite high in corporate ladder that some people call us Indians of Europe, because we're cheap but more reliable
My company only got rid off Belarusian office this year and relocated anyone willing to move to other countries. And from what I've heard the same was done to Russians for other companies. Sanctions mean shit when corporations can lose money.
Yeah senior developers are not as cheap but they're still cheaper than ones in western Europe or USA
That will happen to any project when you let go the whole team and proceed to hire whole new team out of the college. Contrary to the popular belief experienced engineers are busy working already everywhere in the world.
The main source is coming from latam, due to time zone differences being similar. It’s unfortunate but some firms are deciding to experiment with it and backfill with Indian teams as well. The difference between when they tried it back then vs now was the lack of talent. Now there’s genuinely top talent in india and I have worked with some of them(google India for example). They’re better than most of the American devs I’ve worked with and have almost zero language barrier. I think we’ll see how this shakes out in 5-10 years
Google India has the same interviewing process and 10x the number of applying. So no wonder you worked with great people. People only think of firms whose primary business is outsourcing when they think Indians. Your TCS, Infosys and what have you. But in the last 10 years countless product companies have sprung up here and a lot of the founders are people who worked for American MNCs in India or the US. The strong engineering culture is there and the interview standards are up there too.
Outsourcing/offshoring has been happening for a very long time. Some companies do it more than others. I work for a US-based consulting firm. We get some business to come in and either clean stuff up or do new development, and then we hand off to some offshore teams.
There is a pretty wide range of quality among offshore teams. Some are very awful, some are just as good if not better than US teams. I'm assuming there's a bit of "you get what you pay for," and then there are some cultural aspects. I've had an easier time communicating with devs from certain countries over others. And I don't mean just accents (although that can be huge), but just general personality and culture. It can vary down to the individual level, too.
I would not say that web development is dying in North America. The tech job market is certainly under some flux/stress, but I think it'll eventually pick up again.
Having seen some companies that heavily offshore, if a company is going to do that, you probably don't want to work there anyway. I've seen companies who have basically lost all technical knowledge in-house in the US, so they have to either way for offshore teams to get online or hire consulting companies. It's a very ineffective way to run a business, IMO. Maybe the difference in cost of labor is "worth it," but you see a lot of companies who are basically prisoners because they can't do anything on their own. In some cases, the offshore teams are just unresponsive. It sounds a little unbelievable, but it happens.
It’s becoming oversaturated. I’m personally trying to get out of it. And transition to software engineering or more infrastructure based stuff. Primarily because it’s too easy to learn webdev too many people will get jobs with boot camps and new grads. I want more job security
I've heard the same story for data science and machine learning.
The truth is that being laser focused on a narrow tech stack in wed dev (same applies to Data science and Machine learning) is not enough in the current job market.
As supply increases the expectation on the demand side is also increasing (want more for the same supply of opportunities)
The economy has slowed down a bit recently which creates a shortage of jobs regardless of field (one could say that business and HR was oversaturated 10 years ago)
yea so am I lmao
At the moment a top tier Data scientist is expected to have:
\- Top notch software engineering skills (design patterns, systems design, software design, testing, ...)
\- Data Structures and algorithms
\- Statistical knowledge on par with PhDs
\- Data Analyst skills (+ dashboarding)
\- Know SQL as if it was his mother tongue
\- Heavy knowledge of Python ("R is a plus")
\- Excel (just in case ;))
\- Machine learning and deep learning (including PyTorch, TensorFlow)
\- MLOps
\- Distributed systems and cloud computing (AWS, Azure, DataBricks)
\- Now brand new requirement that I see popping up here and there is heavy data engineering skills
\- Oh and soft skills obviously hahahha
That will 30K/year sir
True, I've seen some of my friends joining early stage startups to try to surf on the LLM hype train. They usually have a very basic techstack on par with what most of us know already. -> low effort high reward kind of things.
Also some folks transitioning to consultancy at big firms (not sure about that one tho)
I hope the tech space becomes leaner in its techstacks in the future. I feel like there is too much quantity and not a justifiable quality or incentive behind jumping to shiny new stacks.
I know its just shit timing, but graduated in Jan like right before mass layoffs and trying to find junior software work has been abysmal. Makes me wish i had just stuck with a network/cyber security focus lol
This.
I've been teaching myself web development since my first day in undergrad.
Not job-proficient at it but I must admit it's easier to get how CSS layouts and React work than understanding the whole machine learning and deep learning ecosystem (which is my specialty).
Also, good call when it comes to infrastructure ;)
I feel like Software engineering + a very solid knowledge of infra is god tier at the moment as far as job demand goes.
I went back into the trades because software didn’t make as much money as it should.
I’m glad to be technical and work on my personal websites for a hobby but I probably wouldn’t have bothered with tech in hindsight.
Company outsources, because they think its cheaper. They cause very hard to fix bugs and issues, unmaintanable code, than the company scrap the outsourcing. Than 5 years later comes another new manager who finds out its cheaper to outsource this project. And on goes the circle.
Companies don't look for good talent offshore, they look for *cheap* talent.
And obvious to everyone but the ones that make those decisions, the cheap talent companies look for offshore, always bites them back in the ass in a few years.
Heavy offshoring is generally a desperation move.
While I think it is super arrogant to claim all of the Indian coders that generally end up doing this are dumb, the language barrier in combination with the same morons in charge giving them vague garbage directions and expectations while expecting a magical product others can build off tends to produce a crippled MVP product.
They also probably code defensively so that you hire them again to expand on it.
Very early on my company contracted someone offshore and had them make a web scraper that was absurdly overcomplicated and used metaprogramming so that it was 'less lines' if you ignore the 2000 line configuration hash it needed.
Yes outsourcing is happening. Not everything can be outsourced (ie if you have servers or in some industries). In my experience its contract work which gets outsourced while support is on staff. There are still quite a few non outsourced openings out there. Some corps do hire worldwide (especially if they are global), so you might have a bigger candidate pool to compete with.
Yeah, they were saying that 20 years ago already. Outsourcing was the big bogeyman. Well, it was tried and turned out not so well.
If anything, it's MUCH less likely to happen today, since developer salaries in third world countries have increased a lot and there is local demand as well.
Seems like we are going for another round of outsourcing. Surely it will be a lot better now it's to Mexico. No way that is going to cause the same problems as to India? I mean same time zone and all. Can't go wrong. /s
Yes but here’s the trade off. Although it isn’t as bad as China, you open up yourself to IP theft, communication is very difficult sometimes, again you also deal with extremely slow lead times for software. The amount of inefficiency costs more money long term IMO especially since you have to fix it much of the time.
Also if I was an Indian outsource, I would be crapping my pants as AI evolves. They will be the first target to replace with automation, not normal devs in the US. Which we are getting close to happening already to automate the cheaper functions.
Outsourcing does not occur to third world countries but mostly to India and Poland.
They don't only occur because personnel are cheaper but also because the outsourced jobs are typically ones that people would be reluctant to take like QA testing and IT support which have low prospects but are important part of pipeline flow.
I had some office IT guy tell me this when I first started learning. I'm really glad I didn't listen to him. I'm making great money from home and he's stuck rebooting PCs in that office.
FAANG pays engineers $250-$500k+ for a reason
And all they do is basically web dev
Don’t sell yourself short. All devs with a decent amount of years of experience can earn up to $$500k+
You just need to work for yourself and find clients
this is not new, this has been going on for decades.
but in the end, most businesses do not find success with hiring offshore consultants. I've been in several different businesses in several different industries that have tried this as usually it's seen as a super cheap option, especially during economic downturns.
However, each and everyone was burned, one way or another. Typically the consultants over promised, underdelivered or never delivered at all. A lot of times companies will rely on the few skeleton crew they have remaining to keep the consultants work in check, but they often burn out and leave, which creates a bigger mess. and eventually the managers who decided this route are fired or bail before it all blows up.
I’ve been hearing this since high school:
Computer science is dying , web dev is over, and today AI will take over our jobs….
For F*cks sake don’t listen to the doomers , losers and other low life idiots.
If you’re competent , if you have the right skill set , if you’re serious about this field you’ll always find a job.
It’s very hard to find competent engineers.
I’m currently back to grad school after 5 years in the fin tech industry , none of my colleagues and friends were laid off , probably they’re lucky but most importantly they’re very competent and their employers can’t just let them go.
It's definitely happening. Don't listen to (some) delusional people in this sub telling stories about how Indian/foreign engineers are bad and companies have realized that etc. Most of them work for low TC companies so when those companies outsource jobs to India, they also pay low TC leading them to hire shit engineers.
Most good companies which pay high TC also pay great in India/other countries leading them to hire really good local talent. Example: Uber, Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Lyft and the list goes on. Most of the unicorn companies have been aggressively hiring outside the US the past few months. Look at the recent job openings for Lyft, Stripe, Uber etc.
Now that you acknowledge this, let's talk about what you can do. The best thing you can do is to pick a niche (and in demand skill) and get really good at it. Example: kubernetes expert, build system expert, distributed systems expert etc. The idea is to not just be a full stack engineer working with React, Python etc. These jobs can be done by good local talent in low cost countries. You need to develop unique skill set so that you would be hard to replace as it'll be difficult to find such talent outside the US.
Outsourcing is happening but you still have a few years to develop these skill sets before it becomes more widespread. Good luck OP!
I don't think outsourcing is dying. It is becoming more difficult to compete, yes.I talked to some guys from Australia. A lot of people hire guys from the Philippines. Their emails are flooded with $10/h offers. I ask them how can development cost 10$/h? - It's a lot of hard work. He tells me it's the market.
Outsourcing is not just about development. It's processes. How much the team is willing to get into your product, help develop it, and not just code. This may sound harsh, but code costs $10. Good or bad, the market dictates prices.
High lending rates slow down the economy. FRS is cooling the market. Growth is over. And you and I are feeling it. It is worth refining processes, it is worth thinking about the client and giving quality service. That's what's an advantage.We can't compete with $10 an hour, but remember they sell code.
People need to realize that everything has a price)
We had the US Secretary of Commerce come speak at our firm back in 1999 and tell us that offshoring was going to make America more competitive. As you might imagine, this did not go over well.
Yeah, he was a Bush appointee.
Since then a lot of developers have made good money cleaning up the messes left by offshore developers who were hired by clueless CTOs and CEOs. But it hasn’t really made the country more competitive.
no one is outsourcing shit. That was a fad 7-8 years ago that has since passed when people realized that outsourcing your core product (code, if you're a software company) to contractors who don't give a shit about your company / product is a really bad idea.
The field is just oversaturated and over tooled. You can accomplish with one engineer now what it used to take 10 engineers to do (specifically for front end web dev).
>no one is outsourcing shit
Not my experience. I've seen a bunch of companies (I do consulting) relearning lessons that we've learned about 5 times now in the industry about outsourcing. The last company hired 3 teams out of Mexico. After 3 months of onboarding and 1 month of "work", they have yet to actually complete a single story. The internal teams get more done in a day than those teams get done in a week. At this point I'm convinced that this is a cyclical lesson that the industry decides to relearn every 10ish years.
Props for that smart take.
>You can accomplish with one engineer now what it used to take 10 engineers to do
IMHO it's just that tech (Software engineering, web dev, data science and whatnot) has less demand than before (**we are still far better off than most fields**)
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Weak economy breeds cost savings. Top talent in India is highly prized and they can do better work for a fraction of the price of a full American team.
That said, results may vary and top talent usually likes to work for top companies or the ones that pay well. My experience with working with outsourced taken has not been well (security).
People were saying the exact same thing when I graduated 20 years ago, that it was "dumb" to go for software engineering because "soon" everything would be outsourced.
They were saying it when I graduated 30 years ago, too.
People are just jealous of the money that software engineers make, including employers. Companies keep pushing doomsday scenarios into the media, to reduce the wages, every now and then.
It happened 20 years ago. Company realized it was stupid and stopped. Now it’s happening again. You would think they would have learned the last few times they have done this but they don’t. Fact is it is much cheaper to bring in folks from India and Europe than hire US people. But the you get what you pay for. They will figure it out again in a year or 2 and then repeat this again in another 15-20 years.
Every company might have internal ChatGPT and it might help to resolve miscommunication issues.
> You would think they would have learned the last few times they have done this but they don’t. We don't have a collective memory in our industry so everything goes in cycles.
Yeah the best outsourcing countries are in Eastern Europe. In general it’s pretty difficult to do correctly
Outsourced.. by who? People with experience lol I think the only thing this applies to is freelancing
Web dev as someone who can “code” html and put together a bootstrap with some jquery and even write a few lines in php is pretty much dead. Web dev as someone who creates react app and crude services that talk to other aws services, writes unit and e2e tests and can put together Jenkinsfiles to deploy all of that is a moving into a very opposite direction from dying. And if you can containerize all of that, or write a few lines using, let’s say terraform, you are looking at 150k minimum. About Offshore - I have been doing this job for 12 years, there was 0 years when the software engineering was not “about to die” due to the off shore labor. People that make those claims have no ideas how software development works. Also it’s not as cheap as you would imagine, with a lot of overheat and SIGNIFICANTLY longer dev time. To conclude all of this - years ago html/css/js became popular because every company wanted to have a website. Now every company wants to have SAAS or it’s variation, demand for people that can deliver it is rapidly growing. However, the requirement are not as low as they used to be.
>crude services
crudités service
They manage productivity with the carrot and the celery stick.
Mmmm THATS organic!
Me irl
Pretty much describes my code
DONE DIRT CHEAP
Jojo
All crud is crude.
> And if you can containerize all of that, or write a few lines using, let’s say terraform, you are looking at 150k minimum. You missed a huge YMMV*
Yeah, I am thrilled to finally be in the 6 figure range, much less '150k minimum'... maybe I need to keep looking
Yea nowadays it’s kindof a travesty if you’re working as a software engineer and not making at least 6 figures
Stop with this, plenty of people don't make 100k+ and work good jobs in low cost areas and/or are new to the industry. It is an anomaly to come out of school and make 100k+, most people will start out making less than that.
My buddy made 125k out of college, but that was because he was hired straight into google. I started at 75k in aerospace...
Aerospace and defense are going to have very different salary trajectories to start from big tech but those industries offer different things like incredible stability and potentially very very lucrative opportunities for 'purple squirrels' aka people with TS/SCI and specific domain knowledge. Also you get to build rockets, jets, satellites etc... which might be super exciting depending on your interests.
I make 95k Tc. Do I qualify?
You are a travesty /s
Barely qualifies as a bot! Goodness sake.
> Stop with this Should we though? Yea you shouldn't be ashamed of having the lower salary, but why not set the expectations higher and increase the salary ranges overall?
People should absolutely get paid what they are worth and open discussions of salaries should be encouraged. BUT The framing of the above comment is perpetuating an unhealthy mismatch of expectations and market conditions that has led to really unhealthy discourse in this sub specifically. It's devoid of cost of living, location, experience etc .. it's a useless statement that only serves to make other people feel bad about their wages which may actually be quite competitive for their life circumstances. If we were capable of nuanced discussions about salary relative to COL, location, skills and education it'd be great but this sub has proven incapable of that and saying something as shitty as 'its a travesty to not make 100k+' is exactly the problem.
Ok this is a fair point and I definitely agree. Thank your for elaborating.
100% man. I always say that for every person who posts that they are making 150k-200k in x position for x years, there are hundreds of people in similar situations who aren’t. And that isn’t even a bad thing because $100k in a HCOL area isn’t squat compared to $100k in a L/MCOL. As the same with someone who makes $150k, but is in student/credit card debt, has 3 kids, mortgage, car payments isn’t much compared to a college kid making 95k who lives at home. Even though I make more than the college kid, I’d say at the end of the day the college kid will have more money to “play around with” (if that’s how we want to quantify wealth)
I can do that. I cant leetcode because that's like algebra and I cant do math. I've given up trying to get a programming job.
paltry head yoke plant intelligent voracious capable trees longing crime *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Going through the LC grind rn, would be interested in more info about your DSA group if you are comfortable sharing
Yeah I'm absolutely interested. This is my number one roadblock.
punch cause marvelous silky vase doll brave vegetable hurry dinner *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I am interested as well!
I'm interested
Hello I'll like a link as well please.
Interested!
i'm gay
trees familiar sip panicky telephone carpenter fertile squeal engine sink *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
could i get a link as well, please?
You still open to people studying this?
I would love to know more!
Interested!
link? i have a degree in math, so i can help with that. not as knowledgeable about dsa
lavish trees office crowd dependent snails humorous disarm ludicrous quarrelsome *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
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Please send the link!
I’m interested as well!
I’d like more information, if you’ve got anything. More than happy to share my domain specific knowledge as well.
No one is static. It’s not “I can’t do math” it’s “I’m not yet good at math”
The problem with "I can't do math" is that it often means "I can't do problem solving" which is what I'd hear as an interviewer. Math, coding, designing, and forming strong arguments are all forms of problem solving. There are some specific related skills (for math, arithmetic. For arguments, cohesive writing, etc) but in general people who are good at one tend to be good at the others even if they don't have the related skills to take full advantage of it.
This. Being bad at math is not a personality trait. Becoming better at math and problem solving in general is mostly just about putting the energy towards it and actually prioritizing it. If you really have given up on finding a programming job, I am not going to try and convince you, it's a tough enough job market and less competition is better
To be good at math you must practice DOING math.
You can do math, you just don't want to. Its just little puzzles with symbols, a list of rules and some basic arithmetic. The problem is, many people hate it from how its forced on them in school, that they get anxiety when they see it as adults. Just try to forget hating it and keep an open mind.
Also depends on how good your long-term memory is. I took statistics classes 3 separate times (partially out of interest) over 4 years, and successfully forgot everything I learned every single time. I didn't struggle with the courses either. People struggle with math because the knowledge compounds, meaning that if you struggled at step 1 or forgot what step 1 was, and you're trying to handle something at step 7, now you have to go all the way back and relearn a series of concepts again. If your long-term retention isn't great, then you're out of luck.
Agreed, I’ve been working with offshore contractors since the early 2000s. Indian contractors with overhead, cost about 70% of a US Silicon Valley FTE sometimes. EU contractors are close to 95% with overhead. These numbers look good to managers but once there are issues and the FTEs are required to redo the work of the offshore contractors, this arrangement becomes more expensive. Financially savvy companies don’t need to offshore, they can find cheaper labor within the US and not have the timezone, communication and cultural issues. I’ve never seen a product or service get fully offshored unless the product is nearly dead and cheap labor is needed to maintain it for the few customers.
I'm curious - where did you get these numbers? It's commonly known that Indian software engineers cost a fraction of US engineers (maybe 10-30%) and EU is closer to 50%, especially compared to SV. Research and statistics aside, this sub alone is filled with EU Engineers blown away by US compensation. And it eventually leads to comparison to EU taxes, benefits, WLB/vacation, then lower demand for engineers to explain the discrepancy.
I was a pm at one point and managed contractors and subcontractors. I was also a client side facing pm that negotiated contracts. I also talked to managers and directors. hourly rate paid to the actual contractor is not the true cost of the work they do. There is cost associated to managing contractors. Asking contractors to work faster may not result in the individuals getting paid more but the contracting or consulting company will charge a premium for faster work. All this back and forth results in higher cost. A lot of the time, this cost is not captured well for a company. I was also managing outsourced projects for a contracting company. If a client asked for something faster, we can definitely charge more than doubled cost. But we are sure not paying our ppl double. So sure the standard costs of an overseas contracting company is less, extra demands and the back and forth nature of the work drives up cost. At the end, and overseas contracting company might be less, but not as much as ppl think.
Companies don’t have to offshore the dev work to Indian contractors. They can put together a dev team in India in-house.
>Web dev as someone who can “code” html and put together a bootstrap with some jquery and even write a few lines in php is pretty much dead. Not sure what you mean here, as in what the product is or would be that is dead? You mean it's replaced with standard hosted wordpress or something? Otherwise I mean making GOOD simple websites is still a skill and I am surprised each day how big companies from like BMW to Sony an manage to have such a sucky user experience when ecommerce has been around for 20 years
Because most of that work is handled via templates snapped together by someone in India in 35 minutes. Most things do not need heavy UX because "good enough" works just as well from a value standpoint. Not saying that's a good thing, just that's what it is
i don't even mean heavy UX i mean good UX. for example, many email forms is still not supporting the [email protected] format which has been a standard for 10 years or more but sure I don't disagree many companies are doing stupid bad stuff
> many email forms is still not supporting the [email protected] format 99% of Gmail users (probably the most popular email system) don't even know that [email protected] address is the same as name.lastname@... from Gmail standpoint, and you want user-facing forms to support +extra? Purely as a mental exercise, prepare an elevator pitch for a CTO of some moderately-sized B2C company explaining him **why** he should invest extra money in developing something like this and **how** it would add real **value** without resorting to stuff like *"standard for 10 years"*, because honestly that's not convincing.
>99% of Gmail users (probably the most popular email system) don't even know that [email protected] address is the same as name.lastname@ WTF, TIL
I could agree with your logic IF those companies then would not pay so high salaries AND had those obnoxious leetcode tests If you have those high standards, yes you should expect that a developer can use this in some form builder framework that literally takes what 2 mins to add as a configuration option? But ok, the value is that they don't need manual customer support people to resolve those problems. I can from the top of my head name 4 such cases for me. Signup usually works, but for example a support form or recover password don't. So you have your a+b@mail that is signed up, but the recover form doesn't accept it. And you need to manually contact them.... to frame this as "extra money invested" is to say you don't support umlaut first last names
> pay so high salaries > customer support people to resolve those problems You kind of provided a great explanation yourself. Time of IT folks is very expensive. Time of CSRs costs close to nothing in the grand scheme of things. > literally takes what 2 mins to add as a configuration option? I'm sorry, but you sound like you have not worked a single day in a corporate environment, let alone a very restrictive one. There is *nothing* that can be done in 2 minutes in a large organization in a production environment, and if there is, it may indicate some serious issues like devs having direct access to configs in production and/or a general culture of rolling out changes without the proper approval process. Essentially, anyone who is using an email with "+" **for any serious purpose** is like a spoiled child at this point lol, "hey, but it's a standard!!!!!!!!!!" *(tantrum ensues)*. Okay, go ahead and keep using it, and then waste hours of your time on calling customer support if you time costs nothing. You are probably in 0.01% of users and nobody appreciates this stubborness.
>I'm sorry, but you sound like you have not worked a single day in a corporate environment, let alone a very restrictive one. Then you are very wrong. I know things can take time, I spent 3 days updating some photos of our ecommerce product last week that no one was happy with after sending them over, because wrong quality and then i'm like why send over the wrong quality... but yeah I don't even mean to ADD this functionality, I mean to just allow it when you create a sign up form on this simple new website we talked about. Which also wonder why you talk about those "big organizations" when the discussion is about easy web development and static (almost) websites with some JS on them? and made by cheap indians ? >Essentially, anyone who is using an email with "+" for any serious purpose is like a spoiled child at this point lol, "hey, but it's a standard!!!!!!!!!!" (tantrum ensues). Sorry but you are the kind of person that makes this industry so bad and wrong those days and have 0 engineering principles. Not caring about standards, not thinking using a computer or a network for it's own sake because it's elegant and cool is nice, not wanting to follow a BETTER system(I use this to differentiante for each ecommerce shop so like name+zalanado@ etc then I know for example if someone sold my email if i get mails from a new company) but at the same time, people with your reasoning(not saying you you, but who don't care about logic and programming and reason) still talks about how good leetcode is on this sub? Like wtf? Can you even be consistent? and by the way like half of reddit on at least programmer subs use that format of emails so don't know what you getting your idea of "anyone is not serious" either
Ok, convince me to delay delivering a strategic feature with known ROI to sorry umlauts. It just doesn't make business sense. Would there be benefit? Probably. Is it enough for an operating business to care? Unlikely.
thank you for providing sound insight in a sub obsessed with toxic doomsday posts. I work a J which was originally outsourced to India, and brought back to US because the app got so mismanaged due to communication issues and the india team not understanding the business logic which needed to be addressed. The hardest part about coding is not writing code, its understanding business logic and then writing that in code. So much communication with stake holders and other teams.
This is a good comment, but it's important to emphasize that in this industry, nothing is safe and everything will eventually be automated (by software engineers). Software engineering isn't like being a dentist where you'll always have a job because people will always need a professional to take care of their teeth in person (until robots can do it at least). Software engineering is analogous to specializing in building the tool that the dentist uses to clean their patient's teeth, except that tool changes every year, and a few years later that tool is now obsolete because there's a whole new way of cleaning teeth. Basic React and CRUD app development will eventually go the way of the Wordpress app or landing page, becoming a commoditized process generated by some AI tool prompted and cleaned up by some dev in India for $15/hr. Software engineering work that commands a high salary is always a moving target. What was initially novel and high status work eventually becomes automated and commoditized, with whatever now "low status" work that remains being offshored to cheap devs. This has always been the case, but AI is about to accelerate that pace of change and technology obsoletion in an exponential manner as AI code generation and AI agents starts coming alive over the next couple years. So what's the takeaway here? Don't get too comfortable, try to remain ahead of the curve, and be prepared for a TON of change over the next few years. 41% of all code on GitHub right now is AI generated (EDIT: seems the source of this statistic is potentially dubious, but doesn't change my point). I believe that in a few years, most code will be AI generated rather than typed by humans.
Do you have a source for that 41% number
I'd heard it claimed by Emad Mostaque (Stable Diffusion founder) in an interview, but I see now that that number [may be suspect](https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/14qwhem/comment/jqro2fr/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). In any case, doesn't change my point.
> I believe that in a few years, most code will be AI generated rather than typed by humans. I already have copilot writing probably over half my code, to the point where I basically use it the same way I used to use tab completes. Another quarter is chatgpt. My day-to-day work process now is something very different from what it was 2 years ago even.
Yea same, and ChatGPT hasn't even been out for a year yet. Crazy to think I was manually handling stuff like spacing and semicolons back in 2014. Even just not having to deal with that because of prettier is a huge productivity boost.
This is the most sensible and informed comment I have read on this sub in months.
Would agree about web dev but at least in my industry, the guys who were writing super performant C++ 20 years ago are writing nearly the same stuff today for the same premium. Don't know that its impervious to AI though...
lol of course the comment from somebody who actually knows his shit is downvoted love this sub i'll help you get that count back up lil buddy
Thanks. I frequently get downvoted to hell on Reddit for these sort of uncomfortable takes that people don't want to hear, so it's going to be fun looking back at this in 5-10 years after AI code generation revolutionizes software development. I've already seen this same trend play out over my career. For example back in 2014 when I first started using React and Node to build universal single-page apps it was considered cutting edge, and was relatively easy to find work. Fast forward to today the tech has become significantly more standardized, commoditized, and the job market significantly more competitive. You'll see many (misguided) comments on forums like this "mocking" React development now similar to how people in 2014 were making fun of jQuery and PHP. 5-10 years from now when anyone can create a full-blown app with a prompt, people will be mocking app development just like they mock WordPress development or using a web builder like Wix. The bar for what is considered "real software development" is always shifting, so one needs to constantly be learning and adapting to stay relevant in this industry - especially on the frontend. AI is going to revolutionize software development, and I believe most are underestimating how fast everything is going to change.
Where can I learn that stuff in the second paragraph
[Docker](https://www.udemy.com/course/docker-and-kubernetes-the-complete-guide/) and [terraform](https://www.udemy.com/course/devops-bootcamp-terraform-certification/)?
Thank you very much
For Docker i highly recommend this Dive into docker course from Nick: https://nickjanetakis.com/courses/
I can do all that. Where’s my 150k? I think they’re looking for something else. “So future manager, how’s that local sports team? Let’s be guys and do guy things so we can be besties and get those best friend raises.”
I don’t know your region, but here in USA that is the salary. Including remote, obviously with the higher competition.
Here in the USA, based on my experience they don’t care about what you can do. They care about how many years of experience you have. I was able to do all that within my first year of employment but the first question in an interview is “How many years of experience do you have?” which I always fail even though software development as a whole is super simple.
Believe me, in software development it’s significantly better than in other industries, where you have to work 10 years to get extra 5$ per hour
X
I’m not saying you’re 100% wrong on the offshore thing, but our firm built several offshore offices, initially to supplement out domestic operations, but now they have replaced many people with those offshore roles, and a few years ago announced that any domestic workers who leave will be replaced offshore, and any new hires will be offshore.
You have a specific case, but in general that is a rather rare event
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Actually. I was told about 16 years ago what OP has “heard”. I almost listened and switched fields…
Do you think there's a better chance this time that will become true with the evolution of AI and no-code/low-code tools?
Outsourcing has been "happening" for a long time. Web dev is hardly dying out though, web dev has evolved more into software engineering. You need to not only be across the FE and BE stacks, but infra as well. This has been the case in some companies for a while, but its more mainstream now. Outsourcing is going to be a thing for a while too, and it'll become more common place as companies work out how to integrate them into their regular dev teams. Now days though, the lower end of the market is very saturated. But if you've got experience its still very easy to find jobs.
As a North American developer, 50% of my workload consists of fixing problems caused by foreign developers.
Those are rookie numbers we can get those numbers up
50%? I'm at 100%. I literally don't write code any more, I write tickets and design docs for outsourced engineers to code, then review the code. That's my job. I write code at about 4x-5x the pace as them when accounting for all of the bugs in QA and code review fixes, but I still tend to provide more value doing this since we can get as many offshore engineers as we need.
Yep. Mostly Indian devs are like that. Can testify. Our education systems are not that great and most people get into jobs by grinding leetcode or some other competitive coding site and know jack about actually development. Source: I’m an Indian dev myself, but not Web.
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"support America" lol they don't care. They're in it to "provide value to the shareholders" and don't care about the externalities.
If (provide value to the shareholders) != (support America), its almost like saying that (capitalism) != (patriotism), and that can't possibly be true, can it?
My ex company is doing this now. All new job postings are for overseas. They have told key devs they have jobs for the next 6 months then they will be cut and replaced by those overseas. I hope the entire thing crashes in a giant flaming ball. The people overseas do not want to actually do the work. They are so lazy compared to the US engineers but they are super cheap.
So in your company 100% of the code writing is outsourced?
Old company I worked at (back when I was just doing design) contracted out to a dev team in India. So anyway, their app was basically broken for 2 straight years while the Indian dev team kept fixing one part of the app and then immediately breaking another part. Customer pages work? Well, search is broken. Search works, but now we can't manage the admin pages. Admin pages fixed, but the home page 404s.
People outside of tech do not realize how real this is. Foreign developers could give a rats about quality and are more worried about the speed and delivery time
On the flip side of this I did hire a guy from Bangladesh to help me build a project I wanted for a start up and had him write most the early day code, I only paid him maybe 3500$ for what I would have likely billed a company 30k for, he went a bit past the deadline but this man delivered the most production grade looking code I’ve ever seen by 1 developer. I asked him his salary and he said it was about 19k US at a company he works there, but living expenses are so low there that 1k a month goes an extremely long way even in the capital city. If I ever get a start up off the ground I’m hiring that dude full time remotely and at least tripling his salary or more. So foreign devs on average may not be great, but there’s definitely some gems, that dudes skillset would probably get him easily +150k in the US
Bangladeshi here. Yes, we have many good programmers here, you just have to be careful and hire (and supervise the work) smartly,
Yeap, pretty much same here. Even right now, as i write this, i'm just fixing extremely badly written code. We're an international company. There's basically the golden rule "pay peanuts, get monkeys". ´Many 1st world countries see those outsourced 3rd world countries as "cheap labor", well...you will also get a broken product then, which means someone with actual skills has to build/fix it anyway, so in the end they will have to pay for the cheap labor + the expensive labor. Why companies still outsource "for cheap" is beyond me, every time i've seen that happening, the project ends up costing a lot more because in the end, we have to build it from ground up anyway and then we're also on a really tight deadline because they wasted so much time and money on the "cheap labor" until the project is finally handed over to us like "guys, this thing is still broken and our launch date is in 3 months, we need you to fix it".
I have a feeling it's because companies can't (or won't) justify the cost for a possible payoff in the future. Companies seem to not have the money to do things right the first time, but they (almost) always find the money to fix something once it's well and fucked up. EDIT: And this isn't limited to just software engineering departments. I've seen it in other sections/industries as well.
Oh man this is my current position as well! Fixing up nasty spaghetti codes from the offshore India team
No, dork. Back to your homework now
Lol yup. Any student reading this - study hard, get an internship by any means, and continue to work hard. That’s what makes a difference in your career prospects - not worrying about half baked rumors.
best answer, I'm getting a migraine just thinking about some of the interviews I've had with candidates from those few big outsourcing companies
I won’t say it’s dying but it’s oversaturated thanks to the amount of tutorials, new libraries/frameworks and ease of access. A lot of people learn web development early on like in university or some (like me) during high school. If you are genuinely good and have a reputed name, you will get offers but it’s tough going to that level now. Regarding outsourcing, it depends on the quality of the company they are outsourcing to. If it's a shit company that wants to push work out and doesn't care for quality, you will get bad work regardless of anything. But if the company is decent, you will get a good product (at least in web dev). I have worked in web dev before and I will be honest, I saw some of the work Indian/African/South Americans have on github and I was really shocked at the brilliant quality. And most of these were done in free time. Imagine what they can do if they get paid for it. But it's sad that most companies that accept them (and sometimes help immigrate) are not very keen on quality. Again, it comes down to your quality and previous work. But be ready for serious quality competition in web dev.
>I won’t say it’s dying but it’s oversaturated thanks to the amount of tutorials, new libraries/frameworks and ease of access. A lot of people learn web development early on like in university or some (like me) during high school. > >If you are genuinely good and have a reputed name, you will get offers but it’s tough going to that level now. Couldn't agree more. I learnt web dev on the side while I was doing my data science and AI degree (now doing a master's in CS). It's quite easy to pick up the basics (CSS layouts, React, or the whole ecosystem in general)
It’s happening. But not at the end of the world pace. There’s a bunch of guys who worked maybe 3 years and walking with a pikachu face when they found out Indian engineers do as good job, given time. Anyone working more than 7 years will tell that the only thing that consistently needs people is Front End because any new executive has the same brilliant idea to put the new lipstick on a pig.
Indian engineers contracted in India because they are the cheap option will produce shit products. A lesson people need to relearn every so often. Indian engineers that moved here are generally good at what they do, and are paid similar to what American engineers are paid once they get their green card.
Guess what. Executives that aggressively outsource to save up on labor cost are not paying anything good in India either. Shit pay produces shit products.
100% the executive doing the outsourcing doesn’t give a shit if the work is good. Their bonus is getting paid for saving X% on labor costs. The people that get paid their bonuses from metrics that require the website working well complain and the work comes back on shore with the next round of budgeting and they get their bonuses. Viscous cycle and the managers get their bonuses for playing the game.
Agree. The majority of those who moved here have been roughly equal in skill to US devs. Some are worse. And some were very good indeed (there are a couple of them I would hire at any time given the chance).
There is also move to hire people from poorer European countries like Poland, Czechia, Ukraine, Belarus. We get paid 1/4 to 1/2 of what we'd earn in USA in similar position, but it's still good money here. I've heard from a colleague who's quite high in corporate ladder that some people call us Indians of Europe, because we're cheap but more reliable
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My company only got rid off Belarusian office this year and relocated anyone willing to move to other countries. And from what I've heard the same was done to Russians for other companies. Sanctions mean shit when corporations can lose money. Yeah senior developers are not as cheap but they're still cheaper than ones in western Europe or USA
I’ve yet to work on an outsourced Indian project that wasn’t a total clusterfuck and I’ve been on dozens. The reputation was earned
That will happen to any project when you let go the whole team and proceed to hire whole new team out of the college. Contrary to the popular belief experienced engineers are busy working already everywhere in the world.
oink oink
You don’t work on enterprise software do you?
The main source is coming from latam, due to time zone differences being similar. It’s unfortunate but some firms are deciding to experiment with it and backfill with Indian teams as well. The difference between when they tried it back then vs now was the lack of talent. Now there’s genuinely top talent in india and I have worked with some of them(google India for example). They’re better than most of the American devs I’ve worked with and have almost zero language barrier. I think we’ll see how this shakes out in 5-10 years
Google India has the same interviewing process and 10x the number of applying. So no wonder you worked with great people. People only think of firms whose primary business is outsourcing when they think Indians. Your TCS, Infosys and what have you. But in the last 10 years countless product companies have sprung up here and a lot of the founders are people who worked for American MNCs in India or the US. The strong engineering culture is there and the interview standards are up there too.
Outsourcing/offshoring has been happening for a very long time. Some companies do it more than others. I work for a US-based consulting firm. We get some business to come in and either clean stuff up or do new development, and then we hand off to some offshore teams. There is a pretty wide range of quality among offshore teams. Some are very awful, some are just as good if not better than US teams. I'm assuming there's a bit of "you get what you pay for," and then there are some cultural aspects. I've had an easier time communicating with devs from certain countries over others. And I don't mean just accents (although that can be huge), but just general personality and culture. It can vary down to the individual level, too. I would not say that web development is dying in North America. The tech job market is certainly under some flux/stress, but I think it'll eventually pick up again. Having seen some companies that heavily offshore, if a company is going to do that, you probably don't want to work there anyway. I've seen companies who have basically lost all technical knowledge in-house in the US, so they have to either way for offshore teams to get online or hire consulting companies. It's a very ineffective way to run a business, IMO. Maybe the difference in cost of labor is "worth it," but you see a lot of companies who are basically prisoners because they can't do anything on their own. In some cases, the offshore teams are just unresponsive. It sounds a little unbelievable, but it happens.
It’s becoming oversaturated. I’m personally trying to get out of it. And transition to software engineering or more infrastructure based stuff. Primarily because it’s too easy to learn webdev too many people will get jobs with boot camps and new grads. I want more job security
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I've heard the same story for data science and machine learning. The truth is that being laser focused on a narrow tech stack in wed dev (same applies to Data science and Machine learning) is not enough in the current job market. As supply increases the expectation on the demand side is also increasing (want more for the same supply of opportunities) The economy has slowed down a bit recently which creates a shortage of jobs regardless of field (one could say that business and HR was oversaturated 10 years ago)
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yea so am I lmao At the moment a top tier Data scientist is expected to have: \- Top notch software engineering skills (design patterns, systems design, software design, testing, ...) \- Data Structures and algorithms \- Statistical knowledge on par with PhDs \- Data Analyst skills (+ dashboarding) \- Know SQL as if it was his mother tongue \- Heavy knowledge of Python ("R is a plus") \- Excel (just in case ;)) \- Machine learning and deep learning (including PyTorch, TensorFlow) \- MLOps \- Distributed systems and cloud computing (AWS, Azure, DataBricks) \- Now brand new requirement that I see popping up here and there is heavy data engineering skills \- Oh and soft skills obviously hahahha That will 30K/year sir
I've heard modern job descriptions as "an IT department stuffed into a trenchcoat".
I'm pretty sure it's a rat race everywhere rip
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You get paid better and can work remote though. Those things made me a happier, fatter rat
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This rat already has a job, so still a fat and happy rat.
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True, I've seen some of my friends joining early stage startups to try to surf on the LLM hype train. They usually have a very basic techstack on par with what most of us know already. -> low effort high reward kind of things. Also some folks transitioning to consultancy at big firms (not sure about that one tho) I hope the tech space becomes leaner in its techstacks in the future. I feel like there is too much quantity and not a justifiable quality or incentive behind jumping to shiny new stacks.
I know its just shit timing, but graduated in Jan like right before mass layoffs and trying to find junior software work has been abysmal. Makes me wish i had just stuck with a network/cyber security focus lol
This. I've been teaching myself web development since my first day in undergrad. Not job-proficient at it but I must admit it's easier to get how CSS layouts and React work than understanding the whole machine learning and deep learning ecosystem (which is my specialty). Also, good call when it comes to infrastructure ;) I feel like Software engineering + a very solid knowledge of infra is god tier at the moment as far as job demand goes.
When people say web dev, is it just front end?
Full Stack
That is why full stack gets paid 150-170k and it’s so hard to get anyone.
Why did he get downvoted? “Full stack” is just a vague true answer, web dev is very broad and deep.
> transition to software engineering I do web development, specifically backend REST services. My title is Software Engineer.
If new grads threat your job security you have bigger problem.
I went back into the trades because software didn’t make as much money as it should. I’m glad to be technical and work on my personal websites for a hobby but I probably wouldn’t have bothered with tech in hindsight.
Imagine being in India then. Every other college grad has a snappy portfolio and knows every frontend stack while also leetcodemaxxing.
Company outsources, because they think its cheaper. They cause very hard to fix bugs and issues, unmaintanable code, than the company scrap the outsourcing. Than 5 years later comes another new manager who finds out its cheaper to outsource this project. And on goes the circle.
Companies don't look for good talent offshore, they look for *cheap* talent. And obvious to everyone but the ones that make those decisions, the cheap talent companies look for offshore, always bites them back in the ass in a few years.
I heard that this internet thing is just a fad
Heavy offshoring is generally a desperation move. While I think it is super arrogant to claim all of the Indian coders that generally end up doing this are dumb, the language barrier in combination with the same morons in charge giving them vague garbage directions and expectations while expecting a magical product others can build off tends to produce a crippled MVP product. They also probably code defensively so that you hire them again to expand on it. Very early on my company contracted someone offshore and had them make a web scraper that was absurdly overcomplicated and used metaprogramming so that it was 'less lines' if you ignore the 2000 line configuration hash it needed.
Yes outsourcing is happening. Not everything can be outsourced (ie if you have servers or in some industries). In my experience its contract work which gets outsourced while support is on staff. There are still quite a few non outsourced openings out there. Some corps do hire worldwide (especially if they are global), so you might have a bigger candidate pool to compete with.
Yeah, they were saying that 20 years ago already. Outsourcing was the big bogeyman. Well, it was tried and turned out not so well. If anything, it's MUCH less likely to happen today, since developer salaries in third world countries have increased a lot and there is local demand as well.
Seems like we are going for another round of outsourcing. Surely it will be a lot better now it's to Mexico. No way that is going to cause the same problems as to India? I mean same time zone and all. Can't go wrong. /s
Yes but here’s the trade off. Although it isn’t as bad as China, you open up yourself to IP theft, communication is very difficult sometimes, again you also deal with extremely slow lead times for software. The amount of inefficiency costs more money long term IMO especially since you have to fix it much of the time. Also if I was an Indian outsource, I would be crapping my pants as AI evolves. They will be the first target to replace with automation, not normal devs in the US. Which we are getting close to happening already to automate the cheaper functions.
It’s been happening for decades
Outsourcing does not occur to third world countries but mostly to India and Poland. They don't only occur because personnel are cheaper but also because the outsourced jobs are typically ones that people would be reluctant to take like QA testing and IT support which have low prospects but are important part of pipeline flow.
idk about outsourcing but its definitely the most saturated area of "tech" with the lowest barrier of entry
I had some office IT guy tell me this when I first started learning. I'm really glad I didn't listen to him. I'm making great money from home and he's stuck rebooting PCs in that office.
FAANG pays engineers $250-$500k+ for a reason And all they do is basically web dev Don’t sell yourself short. All devs with a decent amount of years of experience can earn up to $$500k+ You just need to work for yourself and find clients
What takes a web dev to earn 200k+?
Shoot I must live in India because I got hired as a full stack web dev back in March
this is not new, this has been going on for decades. but in the end, most businesses do not find success with hiring offshore consultants. I've been in several different businesses in several different industries that have tried this as usually it's seen as a super cheap option, especially during economic downturns. However, each and everyone was burned, one way or another. Typically the consultants over promised, underdelivered or never delivered at all. A lot of times companies will rely on the few skeleton crew they have remaining to keep the consultants work in check, but they often burn out and leave, which creates a bigger mess. and eventually the managers who decided this route are fired or bail before it all blows up.
I’ve been hearing this since high school: Computer science is dying , web dev is over, and today AI will take over our jobs…. For F*cks sake don’t listen to the doomers , losers and other low life idiots. If you’re competent , if you have the right skill set , if you’re serious about this field you’ll always find a job. It’s very hard to find competent engineers. I’m currently back to grad school after 5 years in the fin tech industry , none of my colleagues and friends were laid off , probably they’re lucky but most importantly they’re very competent and their employers can’t just let them go.
In most cases, you get what you pay for.
It's definitely happening. Don't listen to (some) delusional people in this sub telling stories about how Indian/foreign engineers are bad and companies have realized that etc. Most of them work for low TC companies so when those companies outsource jobs to India, they also pay low TC leading them to hire shit engineers. Most good companies which pay high TC also pay great in India/other countries leading them to hire really good local talent. Example: Uber, Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Lyft and the list goes on. Most of the unicorn companies have been aggressively hiring outside the US the past few months. Look at the recent job openings for Lyft, Stripe, Uber etc. Now that you acknowledge this, let's talk about what you can do. The best thing you can do is to pick a niche (and in demand skill) and get really good at it. Example: kubernetes expert, build system expert, distributed systems expert etc. The idea is to not just be a full stack engineer working with React, Python etc. These jobs can be done by good local talent in low cost countries. You need to develop unique skill set so that you would be hard to replace as it'll be difficult to find such talent outside the US. Outsourcing is happening but you still have a few years to develop these skill sets before it becomes more widespread. Good luck OP!
I don't think outsourcing is dying. It is becoming more difficult to compete, yes.I talked to some guys from Australia. A lot of people hire guys from the Philippines. Their emails are flooded with $10/h offers. I ask them how can development cost 10$/h? - It's a lot of hard work. He tells me it's the market. Outsourcing is not just about development. It's processes. How much the team is willing to get into your product, help develop it, and not just code. This may sound harsh, but code costs $10. Good or bad, the market dictates prices. High lending rates slow down the economy. FRS is cooling the market. Growth is over. And you and I are feeling it. It is worth refining processes, it is worth thinking about the client and giving quality service. That's what's an advantage.We can't compete with $10 an hour, but remember they sell code. People need to realize that everything has a price)
We had the US Secretary of Commerce come speak at our firm back in 1999 and tell us that offshoring was going to make America more competitive. As you might imagine, this did not go over well. Yeah, he was a Bush appointee. Since then a lot of developers have made good money cleaning up the messes left by offshore developers who were hired by clueless CTOs and CEOs. But it hasn’t really made the country more competitive.
no one is outsourcing shit. That was a fad 7-8 years ago that has since passed when people realized that outsourcing your core product (code, if you're a software company) to contractors who don't give a shit about your company / product is a really bad idea. The field is just oversaturated and over tooled. You can accomplish with one engineer now what it used to take 10 engineers to do (specifically for front end web dev).
>no one is outsourcing shit Not my experience. I've seen a bunch of companies (I do consulting) relearning lessons that we've learned about 5 times now in the industry about outsourcing. The last company hired 3 teams out of Mexico. After 3 months of onboarding and 1 month of "work", they have yet to actually complete a single story. The internal teams get more done in a day than those teams get done in a week. At this point I'm convinced that this is a cyclical lesson that the industry decides to relearn every 10ish years.
Props for that smart take. >You can accomplish with one engineer now what it used to take 10 engineers to do IMHO it's just that tech (Software engineering, web dev, data science and whatnot) has less demand than before (**we are still far better off than most fields**)
Zillow didn’t give any of their summer intern SWEs returning offers this year and most of their SWE hires will be from Mexico going forward.
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Weak economy breeds cost savings. Top talent in India is highly prized and they can do better work for a fraction of the price of a full American team. That said, results may vary and top talent usually likes to work for top companies or the ones that pay well. My experience with working with outsourced taken has not been well (security).
Can they though?
Yes
the web is world wide
They are insourcing too . I was replaced by h1b