Playing devil's advocate: as a business/employer why would I continue to pay you your current first-world salary rather than find someone top-notch for 1/3 your salary in India, or any other English speaking country with a lower cost of living?
I feel like if the only reason you're hiring in the US is because you think there's a 3x productivity boost meeting in person... I mean, to me it's pretty obvious that in-person development does not bring that substantial of a gain. So maybe there are other questions you should be asking if you're in that position.
Abandoning the position of an employee entirely, just speaking as a bystander, I feel like an employer asking that question off the cuff has probably not thought very deeply about their company makeup and hiring processes if they think that sharing an office is the only reason not to outsource development. And I don't mean that to be dismissive, if you're right and you could be outsourcing development, but you're paying 3x more to develop something in-house... maybe you should think more about how your company is structured. Why are you developing your software in-house in the first place?
I've heard manager-types make this argument before, and it's just very alien to me that someone would think the single biggest difference between hiring locally and hiring outside of the US is whether or not the worker sits at a specific desk. Having worked in both a local and an multi-national office, I consider them to be two very different styles of organization, each with their own pros and cons. If you think adapting to an international development team just boils down to using Slack more, I suspect you're in for a shock.
> Presumably because they feel it’s not worth the downsides of working remotely.
I've worked remotely for several employers and clients, and they all seem to hire domestically. A few had stories about their experiences with hiring foreign remote workers, and they came to to the conclusions that doing so isn't always worth the labor discounts versus just hiring domestically.
I don't think remote work is the issue here for workers in the US, because the same employers have no problem underpaying visa workers who live in the US that can't complain because getting fired means being deported.
H1B is a higher wage and much more bureaucratic hassle than hiring the same workers in their home countries, suggesting again that the employer is strongly averse to remote.
You get what you pay for everywhere. You can definitely find high quality talent in India but it isn’t going to come at the “outsource to India” price people who have never done it think it will. Great talent is expensive regardless of where it is because the global market determines it more than the locale.
That being said, I expect some discount to come with the challenge of differing time zones. Also depending on which country you are working with, speaking fluently and clearly is a huge factor too. India and the US have a vast range of low to extremely high talented people with varying communication skills. You get what you pay for (not an India thing)
There are high quality workers everywhere in the world, but they are also expensive. You generally get what you pay for - the skilled developers in others countries are also smart enough to find a better deal if they are underpaid. The 1/3 price workers are not at the same level, and quite frankly often overpaid compared to their relative productivity.
Go right ahead. I double dog dare you infact. Then in 5 years, when your product can't scale, you're being audited for security issues or your customers leave because the quality is now a third of what it once was; then you'll be in a lot worse shape then keeping a couple of people around for 3x the price.
> as a business/employer why would I continue to pay you your current first-world salary rather than find someone top-notch for 1/3 your salary in India, or any other English speaking country with a lower cost of living?
The company I work has hired a lot of personnel based in India over the last several years. While some of the hires are reasonably competent, many of them need a lot of hand holding to get through tasks that most locally hired people would not.
In other words, they don't seem to be getting up to speed in a reasonable period of time based on past experience hiring new university graduates with no prior professional experience. That, in turn, increases costs because they're not accomplishing nearly as much in the time alloted.
In my prior experience there just isn’t much of a discount to be had when you find people of the same caliber regardless of where they live. Someone who performs at the same level as someone local, and there are plenty of them, has usually figured out what people are willing to pay for their services.
You would need to hire a 3rd party contractor and offshore the work to them, otherwise there's tax implications in hiring outside your US state, let alone another country (unless you're in the EU). As others have said, if you could do this you already would have.
If you're a large multinational with offices all over the world and the accounting and HR staff to manage that kind of setup, then that might be an option - but even those hire domestic US workers for a lot of remote/wfh roles.
I'm a remote contractor, and my policy is to essentially work my clients time zone. Right now I'm 11am-7pm (I'm in NZ, they're mostly in Sydney, Australia).
For a while my team was all in Malaysia, so I did 2pm-10pm.
Hell for the right contract I'd work as far east as texas, mon-fri 10am-6pm for them, tues-sat 5am-1pm for me.
No one asks me to do this, but it just makes life easier, and clients like knowing that I'm working normal hours and will pick up the phone.
There are many advantages to remote/home office for employers. Even if you just hire in your country, you can save a lot on office space, costs for niceties in the office (coffee, food, etc).
If I accepted a (negotiable) pay cut and/or agreed to forfeit some of the company benefits, would you allow me to WFH instead of hiring a cheaper engineer?
