Comment by deadbabe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deadbabe | Hacker News Reader

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The premise of your argument relies on the idea that engineers are commodities, and any engineer is easily replaced with another engineer for similar results.

Unfortunately (for you), some engineers are just better than others. The right engineers on your team can make or break your company. It can mean the difference between being first to market with innovative game changing solutions, or putting out a shitty product filled with defects and poor design choices.

And experience has consistently shown that the best engineers tend to be American or American educated.

So yea, you can hug your fantastic offshore engineers tightly and treasure them. But the fact is if they are as good as you say, they should easily be commanding higher salaries that justify the kind of ROI they bring to a company. Why go cheap on the salary for an engineer who could 10x your revenue? If they're not being paid those high salaries, then you're exploiting them. And worse: they can easily be poached by competitors who offer to pay them twice as much as you, leaving you with the problem of finding new hires again.

>Unfortunately (for you), some engineers are just better than others.

Yes, and most of these engineers are not in the US and are cheaper than engineers in the US.

The only reason engineers in the US have jobs is because employers, for one reason or another, believe that in an office environment under their constant supervision, workers work more efficiently.

When they stop believing this, engineers in the US will not work remotely, they will lose their jobs.

IME, the best engineers are in America because they have mobility and America is where they choose to be. If you pay someone a big chunk of money in their locale, in the kinds of places cheap enough for companies to be eager to hire there, the first thing they do when they have enough money is leave and move to a HCOL area. And the HCOL areas have a high cost of living because they are desirable.

We're already seeing this in manufacturing. The Chinese middle class developed and now manufacturing moved to Vietnam and India.

Offshoring is just exploiting temporary cost of living arbitrage opportunities. The market is going to naturally fix this as other countries develop and as the skilled labor relocates.

> The right engineers on your team can make or break your company.

Wholeheartedly agree with that.

> And experience has consistently shown that the best engineers tend to be American or American educated.

I call total bullshit on that one. I agree the culture of many Americans and American companies (e.g. taking ownership, more comfort with risk-taking/failure, willingness to speak up when things go sideways, etc.) contributes a great deal to American companies' success, and I've seen some instances of other cultural aspects being a direct negative - for example, I worked with some great engineers in India, but they would often tell me everything was going great right up until a deadline, when they'd then let out all the problems - there was clearly a cultural aspect at play that prevented acknowledging problems early.

But when it comes to raw engineering chops, it has not been my experience that American engineers are any better. Sure, many of the best engineers would come to the US because the potential rewards were greater, but we're seeing the impact of America's (or at least the current administration's) newfound distain for foreigners.

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