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Comment by nivenkos | Hacker News Reader

Hope the employees form trade unions and workers' councils to help stop this bullshit.

Look at DigitalOcean - literally doing "layoffs" whilst shifting hiring to Pakistan: https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/15/digitalocean_layoffs/

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That's the price of real remote work culture which started in honest during the pandemic. I'm seeing US based employees replaced by LATAM based one. This is not the outsourcing scare of the 00's, this is real and it works very well.

I was hit by layoffs but just got several offers. One thing I've noticed is that startups and smaller companies are moving more junior work offshore but are still keeping the higher roles in house (I'm a Principal). Most of the companies I interviewed with talked about working with teams off shore. I will say that a couple of the companies did this for prototyping but were in the process of reversing it and bringing roles back to the US.

Long term I think this is going to result in some interesting changes- senior people don't just come from no where, they're junior people who gained experience and continued learning.

Today's juniors are tomorrow's seniors and principals. What's gonna happen in 2030s?

I’ve been saying this for a while, but a decade from now we’re gonna look back with wonder at the fact that workers in the US had more power than a long time in 2021-2022 and they used all of that to make it easy to move their jobs overseas and destroy the advantages they had over their peers from poor countries.

If you insist that remote working is as good as being physically present with your colleagues, then you’re basically telling companies that the reason they were paying higher salaries to their American employees doesn’t actually exist.

Yes. I think this is a good example of how locally greedy behavior can lead to globally sub-optimal outcomes.

As a Europoor it might actually increase our wages at least!

I doubt. Timezones is a bigger issue than language. LATAM is preferable over Europe.

Would you be willing to move to Latin America to take advantage of the trend?

This is the first time I've heard the term "Europoor"... despite being ethnically "Europoor" (living abroad).

For those who haven't seen it before, it apparently mean "European, but from one of the poorer European nations, mainly from eastern Europe."

Nope it does not. It's a meme referring to the fact that europeans despite living in rich countries are poor in comparison to exorbitant american tech wages.

It's a meme about how even "developed" European countries significantly lag US across the board economically - things like employment rates, standard-of-living, wages, productivity, etc.

Tech wages are just one particularly egregious example of how European policy tends to suppress productivity.

> It's a meme about how even "developed" European countries significantly lag US across the board economically - things like employment rates, standard-of-living, wages, productivity, etc.

I really don't think standard of living lags from the US. Well, it depends on how you are defining standard of living I guess, if it's coming from a consumerist point-of-view I agree, for any other definition of standards of living I believe the US is quite poor compared to developed European nations.

I'm from Northern Europe, but it became popular in the stupidpol and cscareerquestions subreddits on Reddit as European salaries are so, so much lower.

There was a salary survey in my company and even in Northern Europe - every single European engineer entry was less than half the salary of every single US engineer entry.

I don't think Eastern Europe would provide many software engineers nowadays, with the exodus from Russia and war in Ukraine. The poor part of Europe is now south - but I am not seeing many devs there either.

Outsourcing always existed and was the main driver during 2010-2012 era where a lot of jobs went to offshore. Remote work did not change anything.

I'm staunchly anti-union and even I don't see another way forward. It increasingly seems like every company is colluding to set policies, whether it be salary, layoffs, hiring policies, or remote policies. What else is going to bring back your company to the table to negotiate with you as an individual company other than unionizing? I don't think there's any governmental function for legislating away inter-corporation collusion, now or historically.

Im seeing a pattern of tech companies going public the shitting the bed every time. Digitalocean, Rackspace, the list goes on.

Folks, stop doing this. This is squarely the fault of the VC-Startup overleveraged model where the public listing or SalesForce acquisition is the end goal but its about the most disingenuous and disrespectful thing you can do to the user these days because it's so tried and true what happens next.

Haha, sorry, where are my manners.. ahem.. Blood for the blood god!

Deliveroo has just done the same.

They are laying off 350 people mainly UK tech based. At the same time they are still hiring in India.

>Look at DigitalOcean - literally doing "layoffs" whilst shifting hiring to Pakistan

This seems completely consistent. Layoffs are intended to save money and Pakistani workers are cheaper.

In some countries layoffs like this are done as redundancies though, like in Sweden they have to declare a work shortage and cannot re-hire in the same roles (in Sweden) for a few months.

That said, internationally they'll be different subsidiaries so they can do whatever they want. We have global capitalist power but not global worker power.

>We have global capitalist power but not global worker power.

Which is a tremendous advantage to the American worker, who would balk at global average compensation and quality of life.

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