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Comment by jurschreuder | Hacker News Reader

From an employer's perspective: Why hire someone if they're going to be remote? Then I might as well hire someone from Brazil. Almost the same culture, 1/8th the price.

What's the difference for me as an employer if someone is remote from 10km away or 5000km away?

It's great that you feel like you're more productive at home, but it's still capitalism with supply and demand, and there are much cheaper remote employees with exactly the same webcam stream.

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> What's the difference for me as an employer if someone is remote from 10km away or 5000km away?

There is not - hence there are about 1.5 million software developers in the United States and approximately 1 million just in India alone. Probably another million in other countries across the world (I have 26 on my team working from the Balkans for US company).

already at present there are more devs working offshore than onshore and that trend will continue to grow

You would get laughed out of the room if you limited your customer base to only those within commuting distance of your office, but for some reason with employees, the model is different? You want the broad market TAM but the local employee control.

Certainly, if you think you can hire in Brazil, why have you not attempted to do so yet? The only way for you to know for sure if this model would work is to attempt it. I do wonder if the US is going to begin to tariff goods coming in from outside of the country, if they will also start to look at offshore labor to penalize economically.

Offshore labor is already penalized: For tax purposes under Section 174, costs for US devs must be amortized over 5 years, while costs for offshore devs are amortized over 15 years.

This assumes that your off-shore is doing CAPEX work...

And yet, many firms continue to offshore to Central America, South America, Eastern Europe, and India for technology labor (Africa as well for ML/AI data labeling). Lots of room for policy to run here.

I work at a firm where Brazilians took over engineering management and I see the end results of VERY poor engineering culture and a tribal knowledge is rampant. Sloppy engineering and a lack of empathy in user experience and insular thinking, as they are isolated from current approaches to scale, toil elimination prevalent in Silicon Valley approaches.

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