Comment by tenpies | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tenpies | Hacker News Reader

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> Yet tech is such a small portion of the labor force that layoffs here basically mean zilch when it comes to the unemployment rate/inflation, and thus there's a long way for it to fall before the Fed adjusts policy

The really scary thing for me is the possible macro environment for tech.

Indians will soon overtake any of the Western countries as the largest English-speaking population on the internet. As I'm sure many of you know, Indians are hugely talented and most of us who had to deal with CS or Maths have probably resorted to some of the extremely generous Indian experts who teach these subjects on Youtube. There are some very good institutes and universities with solid reputations, many expanding to boot camps and such - so there is a very good volume of tech talent coming online fast.

So you have a tsunami of highly educated, English-speaking tech workers coming online AND a sudden surplus of laid off tech workers in the West. It could potentially get really ugly for the Western tech workers used to six figures for working 30 hours per day and then spending the rest of the day on activism or "day in the life of a X" Tiktoks. After all, we just tested remote work and you can live like a king in India for much less than even the cheapest Western town.

> tech workers used to six figures for working 30 hours per day and then spending the rest of the day on activism or "day in the life of a X" Tiktoks

> You've never worked a job that isn't 30 minutes of work and then the rest of the day is posting "day in the life of a FAANG employee" Tiktoks or being a paid activist.

That is incredibly not what it's like to work in tech in the US. I doubt you've been anywhere near a big tech programming job.

In my experience, it varies highly between teams. I've personally worked at 3 FAANG companies and the culture was meaningfully different between them. There were times we were doing 12+ hour days, and times where you could get by working an hour or less. They all pay competitively, so it's really up to the individual to decide how hard they want to work and whether to focus on something of interest.

This gets said in every conversation about remote work but this has been the case for a few decades now. If the software business was just about chucking commodity CS grads at problems and YouTube videos and the man month theory was true then everyone would be running their companies on batteries of commodity Devs already.

>It could potentially get really ugly for the Western tech workers used to six figures for working 30 hours per day and then spending the rest of the day on activism or "day in the life of a X" Tiktoks

I don't know where you work but the people actually doing the core work that drives multi billion companies don't work like this.

Multi billion Companies aren't stupid they aren't paying these salaries because of cost of living they're paying them because the economics mean get more value from the work done than they're paying out. The best developers in India already get hired by FAANG and they're working in SV.

Have you ever worked with an Indian company? I am just laughing each time I hear huge talent pool. So maybe your top 1% is incredible but they already left the country.

You’re not wrong but there has been a big shift in the Indian tech education scene the last couple of years. All these startups raised an insane amount of money and are suddenly hungry for product-focused talent.

The average Indian engineer used to aspire for consulting jobs (think TCS, Infosys) since product-focused jobs were so few. Now their goal is to get a job at a startup.

Consequently, the tech stack and skills they’re learning is entirely different. Not .NET and Java but React and Rust and UX design.

I really think the quality and type of Indian engineering talent you will see in the next 5 years will be radically different. The market has shifted drastically.

This is my experience too. Worked with an Indian start-up and most of them were utterly useless. They also never managed to make any of their deadlines because they'd always say yes to whatever you asked. Thank god for the one guy who always fixed everything we needed.

Of course, this is a broad generalization, but so is the idea that Indian talent will take over the world.

Seems like a culture problem and not a talent problem. Us developing world folks do not easily say "no" because we grew up in a top-down, authority-driven place.

Americans are pretty uppity when it comes to taking orders if you compare to others.

There is also a difference in interviewing. Only in America do you have to proactively market and sell yourself. Most other cultures are more timid and humble.

It's not about the yes or no culture difference, it's just the lack of autonomy to solve a known problem, root cause analysis, debugging skills, proposing a solution, empathy towards customers etc.

And don't get me started with the caste system making a bunch of clueless people arrogant to no end.

I spend these days 4h+ a day in calls to explain basic stuffs and basically debug a multi-awards SaaS application as nobody has a clue in that company.

Damn 30 hours a day sounds like a slog though.

That one weird trick is to sleep -6 hours to fit it all in.

Unfortunately I agree but what can we aka a western tech worker do to combat this?

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