Comment by nootropicat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nootropicat | Hacker News Reader

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Yes. There's no room for current American dev salaries in a world where remote-first jobs are a norm.

Sure there are timezone differences, but EST is doable for Europe. 08:00 EST = 13:00 UTC, so working 8h in EST means 13:00-15:00 -> 21:00-23:00 in European timezones. Some people may even prefer it. Europe has a larger population of devs that's underutilized because it's dispersed among multiple countries. India is too shifted for America but doable for Europe, so the natural next step is to move work completely into a much larger European-Indian worker pool that can remotely work together.

I don't expect it to happen very fast, first part this decade, second next decade. First part is going to fully equalize dev wages between Europe and America. Second part between Europe and India.

Alternatively I may underestimate the willingness of Indian devs to live a nocturnal lifestyle for a high enough pay. In which case the global equalization of dev wages with India is going to happen during this decade.

This happening. I live in Europe and number of American companies hiring here has skyrocketed over the last 18 months. And it's great. European tech compensation is finally starting to rise. I don't think it will ever match the insanity that is the Bay Area. But a senior engineer making ~€200k total compensation while living in Germany is no longer unheard of.

Anecdotally I've heard from Indian colleagues that wages back home are also rising fast.

In the end I think this will balance out in favor of Europe/India and against the Bay Area. Which is fine by me. But I understand that the $500k/year Palo Alto people are getting nervous...

The only people in Palo Alto who should really be worried are landlords :)

My peers in Chennai earn now in USD what I earned in 2008 (with reasonable schedules for the most part). My salary has since doubled but the gap is closing.

You do realize that what you are describing could have happened any time in the last years or decades for the same reasons but didn’t? The conditions also didn’t really change to make this more true.

Decades? Bandwidth for global scale videoconferencing didn't exist even 10 years ago, especially in poorer parts of the world. Speeds like 8Mbps/1Mbps or even 8/512kbps over ADSL were common. People also had much weaker hardware.

I think the switch to remote work started to really happen just as it actually became practical for a sufficient percentage of people, which is basically now.

https://www.submarinenetworks.com/news/global-bandwidth-pric... "Carriers reached an impressive 67Tbps of capacity on their international internet, private and voice networks in 2011"

https://www2.telegeography.com/hubfs/assets/Ebooks/state-of-... "Total international bandwidth now stands at 618 Tbps"

(note it's from the same company)

That's an increase of 9.2x.

> Decades? Bandwidth for global scale videoconferencing didn't exist even 10 years ago, especially in poorer parts of the world.

We used icq and private irc servers. What's now sold as Slack. Starting 22 years ago.

By poorer parts of the world you mean the suburban US? :) I hear they can't get the bandwidth I can get for 10 eur/month at any price.

This is definitely happening as has been for a while - Poland was first on a big scale now but in places like Czechia too.

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