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Comment by tharne | Hacker News Reader

I really hope American businesses don't bring this headline to its logical conclusion...

"37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home...by people in India or Eastern Europe for much less money"

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Companies have been doing this for decades already.

The current situation is not going to shift even more jobs to India. Reasons being, good engineers from India are already moving to the US in sheer numbers, and good talent is unlikely to remain at Indian IT consultancy companies.

Anecdotally, I have worked along with very clever engineers who happened to be Indian nationals living in the US, but I have yet to find an above average engineer working at an Indian IT shop and based in India.

I've met a few sharp Indian engineers in India. They exist.

not if those jobs entail good written or even oral communication skills. Native English speakers have a huge leg up on Indians and Eastern Europeans in this regard.

For example, I imagine Coca-Cola is willing to pay more to have the person writing their ad copy be someone who has been immersed in American culture from birth.

A good portion of Indian engineers speak good English. Anecdotal evidence only though.

But a good portion don't, which makes hiring take a lot longer.

Ironically, if you google "is speak good english grammatically correct" there are a lot of articles debating whether it's ok, or if "speak English well" is better. This is the kind of subtlety that's hard to understand for non-native speakers.

I don't think there's anything grammatically wrong with "speak good English". The difference to me is language register.

It's already been happening and will increase for sure, but so far hasn't really affected salaries as far as I can see, U.S devs haven't felt a thing yet. If anything, salaries in East Europe went way up.

What I do fear is interest rate starting to rise and the implications of that on our industry but that's another thread.

If it becomes really bad there's a good chance governments will step in and heavily tax offshoring or provide tax benefits for reshoring.

Just like they did with all the cheap offshore manufactured goods...

Don't hold your breath.

Hard to tell. This time it isn't factory workers, it's programmers and who knows what more - finance people, marketing, sales and maybe even doctors. A country can lose its competitive edge really fast by offshoring all of that.

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