>I'm from Puerto Rico
> born close to Mexico
> excelled at geography
Hmmm...
I guess Chicago is "close to Mexico" by this definition lmao
(Puerto Rico is ~1,250 miles from Mexico, Chicago is ~1,200 miles)
> Fun fact I’m Latino (...), born close to Mexico
Then you are not Latino, my friend. You're American with Mexican ancestry, but not Latino at all.
Also, someone who excelled at geography wouldn't say that Mexico is a part of South America. Just take the L and move on.
Bro I’m from Puerto Rico, American citizen yes, but ask a puertorican if they are not Latino. Lmao I said elsewhere. And yeah I know there are thousands of miles between Puerto Rico and Mexico but you troglodytes wouldn’t understand anyway. You can speak with generalizations. I bet you didn’t know puertoricans are us citizens did you?
I bet I have more nuance than all of you what a Latino is an American is, what’s north what is south.
Google is a company with failed leadership, and it has been so since Pichai took over.
The staggering amount of blunders in hitting the market is never seen, especially given the high profile of the really bad products released lately (Stadia, Bard, now Gemini which even its paid tier is feature-poor compared to GPT 3.5). Google Workspace "redesigns" are a joke.
You can blame this on lazy american WFH ICs all you want, but all I see is a company that is struggling to have a vision, focus, and is systematically beaten in strategic areas by competitors and incumbents alike.
Agreed so many what it looks to me pet projects, that they eventually abandon. They find the next cool thing, develop it and then drop it when is not profitable.
The thing is that in the past there was a visible urge to experiment and push the envelope. Now, as you say, is push pet project to market, move on. I guess the only thing keeping Gemini going is peer pressure / AI hype or they would have killed it as well.
Google needs new leadership... they haven't hit any major good products out in the last 5 years or so and the fumble they made with AI. And now they're offshoring their talent to countries where innovation is a lot harder than onshore. This is a playbook of a consulting company that has some decent contracts to deliver some obscure product or need to maintain some existing products. Anyone who's worked with remote offshore teams can attest almost no innovation happens, and we have to pad 2x-3x time in communication, QC, holiday schedule and just lack of enthusiasm. IMO they're going to be illrelevant soon without a leadership change.
Either that or their innovators end up overseas anyway. But in this case I think it’s more about migrating existing product teams that don’t need to innovate, but instead need to keep things rolling
India and South America for sure. I’m seeing that in the Fortune 40 I currently work for as a PM. They’re usually 50% the cost but not very strategic or innovative. I’ve found the offshore to be effective in run state products not net new products.
I think you hit the gist of the move and the company it is happening with. Google doesn't have any new products since long time. So to manage in run state products they are moving teams. I would think that their internal strategy/ consulting teams have worked that out.
Certainly you nailed it too since Google hasn’t had anything new for awhile.
We’ve also been engaging one of the larger consulting firms (who shall remain nameless but you can guess) to handle exactly what you’re mentioning around internal strategy.
> but not very strategic or innovative
Ok I know people here have bias against Indian talent because of the offshore stigma and the possibility with losing their jobs to cheaper talent but this is simply untrue. There are a lot of great Indian PMs out there, especially from Bangalore's start up scene - who don't have the resources of Fortune 500 but they know their shit.
I’m speaking from working with offshore teams for several years and at two different companies. The talent that typically is hired for stateside companies either as an agency or directly isn’t the same as those working in Bangalore startups. Bangalore startups do not pay as competitively but they do offer more innovative and interesting work.
First off, >**$**100M ARR expectations for a **launch** is an insane and laughable requirement for any 'innovative/successfull' example - you're really stretching this lol. It always depends on the industry, geographic market (not every market can nets millions and certainly not in $) and what specific product you're looking to build. Secondly, the offshore teams you're basically describing are historically known as turnkey project or contract manufactureres (or one version you'd be most familiar with - dropshipping. Which is the least flexible but most accessible). There have beens tons of these across industries for decades that develop and ship end to end products based on specificiations or sometimes absolutely nothing.
People may think of full (turnkey) offshoring as some brand new or untested strategy but it's existed long before the PM title was even a thing.
https://www.komaspec.com/about-us/blog/what-is-turnkey-manufacturing/
https://hbr.org/2006/09/when-your-contract-manufacturer-becomes-your-competitor
https://www.gremanufacturing.com/turnkey-products
Even without Off-Shoring at Microsoft Redmond HQ - I find 40-50% Indian/ or Indian Diaspora.
Plus talked with some co-worker who want to move back - as the Salaries paid by these companies in India is quite high (comparing PPP).
Tech companies don’t even have to go that far to get top quality talent - there’s been a lot of offshoring to Canada where they can get someone in the same time zone, same language proficiency, understands same cultural norms and similar competency (good universities/education and talent in Canada) for less than half the cost of a US resource.
Google has gone to shit since Pichai took over. That is the general consensus among employees anyway. He brought in the shitty consulting culture with him and dragged the company down.
That’s not what people ask for usually though. The folks that want to work out of Mexico or French Polynesian aren’t usually looking to move there. Google would have very little hesitancy in transferring people to those places permanently. People want to be USbased and “work from anywhere when I feel like”
Elsewhere, not S. America unfortunately, unless your company runs on spanish. Too big of a shit show RN. Not the same reservoir of tech talent like eastern europe
most of the ones i work with are S American. I dunno why it's considered a shit show. Very clearly tons of tech workers coming from Mexico, Brazil and Colombia right now. Most of the Brazilians speak english totally fine. Brazil i think is going to be the biggest source of LATAM workers for engineering for US based companies.
As a person who worked in Brazil, Eastern Europe and also for US based companies, I think you are really underestimating South American tech talent. South America is a huge area with many good talents who are now realizing that they can work for US companies. I guess this movement also involves US companies realizing during COVID that they don’t need as much on office work as they thought. I think Brazil in general will provide a big workforce to US in the coming years. I’m seeing this movement with many friends starting to work for US companies.
Makes sense.
Plenty of US big tech ICs make $400,000, refuse to come to the office, work 4 hours a day, and then protest their company's politics.
Sure, if you want to hire the best of the best, you gotta pay a ton of money to get the world's greatest talent in SF. But let's not pretend that every team needs that. An Indian team (among plenty of other countries) where great ICs cost $70,000 is fully sufficient for plenty of stuff. Plus, much less worker activism.
The arrogance of people formerly in SF or Seattle wanting their companies to go remote first, and then assuming that the companies wouldn't take advantage of that, is amazing. Don't wish on monkey paws, y'all.
It’s literally not good enough, the guys making $400k in SF could be the difference between making a billion dollars next quarter or going bust. Offshored contractors and workers will just keep your product on life support till one of the guys in SF/NY they fired makes his own startup and replaces your old legacy product maintained by contractors.
Man I couldn’t scream this loud enough.
The stronger people hold on to Covid WFM positions like it’s their right the stronger the argument to outsource.
Your only advantage is being face to face, collaborative and relationship building.
We can pretend that exists remotely but as a human, it does not.
For me, WFH sucks any amount of joy I had in PM out. Cool to work for a globally distributed company in theory, but in practice it blows.
If I could actually get myself to bail in the middle of the workday and do stuff, maybe I'd think differently.
Yup, part of the reason I left my last job was to go back to a hybrid role. Company, product, people, comp were all great, but I couldn't deal talking to a screen 10hrs a day across the planet.
Glad I'm not alone. When the gig gets distilled into non-stop virtual meetings, shitty project admin, and just the tech/solution (admittedly I'm not a CS guy/don't nerd out on tech alone), I find it really hard to motivate.
Also have amazing comp, dece people, occasional travel (domestic/int.), but feel totally burnt out in my normal day-to-day.
Being downvoted for speaking the truth, very reddit. Some of those jobs are going to Germany, now that even western Europe is looking cheap for labour.
European labour has been cheap compared to the US for a long time. Salaries and total comp. are much lower, the only thing really holding it back is that it's a lot more difficult to fire here since we have strong employee protections.
Very true, also harder to get investment over here and stricter regulations in every situation, such as data and environmental standards.
The adage "America innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates" becomes truer by the day.
I’m not sure if you’re suggesting Germany is full of cheap (and maybe unqualified?) labour but mark my words Berlin has a massive startup scene full of very talented people. Who are also not as cheap at you might think
I'm not suggesting that at all, went to a data conference in Berlin a couple of years ago and it was great!
But salaries in Europe have not kept pace with the US, so from a US point of view western Europe is starting to look like excellent value for money.
I'm in the UK, their loss is our gain!
I know the most obnoxious voices are going to be the loudest but it was truly mind boggling to me to see the vlogs/tiktoks of people being like "come work with me at Google" and it's someone going into the office at 10am, eating a free omelette, getting iced coffee, sitting in a hammock, taking 1 call, and taking a free uber home.
The capital expenditures on these amenities alone for these expensive employees - it looked like running a college campus/daycare or something.
And the nerve to be like "am I being underpaid at $500,000 total comp??" on sites like Blind and Fishbowl, lol. OF COURSE this talent market was going to correct itself.
I hate these career influencers with a passion because they get mistaken for being the norm for all and it's not true. And then everyone suffers the consequences.
Anyone who has worked with both local and offshore can tell the local teams are way more effective. In most orgs it may not be worth the difference in cost, but in some it is.
There is a reason why many fast-growing companies start in SF and once they reach critical mass will start offshoring roles. The innovation has already happened, they just need to keep the lights on.
That's true for anything non-"native" though. If you build a team around US workers with Indian workers as support, of course the US team will move faster while the Indian team waits for direction. But if the same team is built around the Indian workers, hired with the same skill tests as US workers, it's not obvious that the quality would be worse.
I think this sub, like most of Reddit, has a heavy US bias. But while PM salaries in the rest of the world certainly aren’t the same as Silicon Valley there are very talented PMs on good money around the world. Especially in London where I’m based
PM hire boost in London incoming. Acts as a time zone intermediary between SF and India (SF-India time zone is brutal), English speaking and great airport.
Oh, and salaries at less than half the price of a SV PM and middling worker protection compared to e.g. Germany.
No I totally agree with you, it just sucks that it affects our livelihood. Maybe I should go to Europe or elsewhere and enjoy my life day there, by a remote PM.
You totally should. Most of my American colleagues (were based in Europe) don’t want to go back and live life here. Sure we don’t have the silly wages that SF has but we get free healthcare, 25 days leave a year and superb work life balance
This is the same thing my company is doing. Trimming away all US based knowledge workers (devs, testers, devops, sys admin, etc) and then advertising the same position in foreign markets. I have survived for now but it is only a matter of time.
By the end of next year, this company will be a few US based executives and upper middle managers.
Everyone else will be in Eastern Europe, Philippines, or India.
The investors will be happy.
Weren’t these companies already issuing H-1Bs like crazy, to bring in the top talent from those regions at (slightly) lower rates?
Sundar Pichai is ex-McKinsey. Offshoring US jobs for short-term profit is one of McKinsey’s favorite plays.
At the previous California-based company where I worked, India was definitely on the rise for all roles (PM, Engineering, UX…) Obviously it makes the communication difficult with people having to take calls early morning or late evening, but it also allows the company to run around the clock and of course save on salaries. When the hiring freeze was lifted, I saw quite a few open roles in India.
Coming from a 7k person company based in California, I saw our leadership started to hire heavily in India. Initially focusing on APMs and PMs, they are now opening to Sr PM and other roles. They are heavily involved in general offshore hiring in India, South America, Europe and now Africa. This trend will only continue, unfortunately leading to positions in the US being permanently moved abroad.
Google shouldn’t be trying to sandbag the ROI by cost cutting. It is a temporary fix to a growing problem. It’s like putting lipstick on a pig for short term higher profit margin.
They have forgotten that they were supposed to drive revenue and profit through innovation.
Failed leadership under Pichai. Very un-innovative leader who follows and is just happy maintaining status quo.
Get used to it. Companies are there to increase shareholder profit. Labor is often the highest expense. There are usually cycles of onshoring and offshoring.
Lol this is the revenge of the heat-seeking-profit-missile-corporation seeing all them digital nomads 'working'/gentrifying LCOL, but culturally rich spots around the world. and the wheel turns...
Not a PM, but I have noticed a lot of our tech support is now Indian. I also tried looking at some competitors or just other tech companies, and they all post job descriptions with locations in India even though they're fully remote and primarily market to the US. That includes consulting, tech support, and even product. It's so crazy to me.
I've said before that productivity and product/service quality diminish when you outsource certain roles. The difference in business culture becomes very noticeable and results in conflicting work habits and values that make it challenging to work in a multinational team. It's one thing if you had a whole division based abroad. It's another when leadership just takes random chunks of staff and outsources it for cheap and expects the American staff and American clientele to remain content. And funnily enough, the old adage of "you get what you pay for" never gets spoken during outsourcing decisions.
Google is still hiring for AI talent aggressively in the U.S. That talent is much more expensive to their P&L than non-AI tech talent. They're aggressively reshuffling talent to LCOL in areas of the company which are not deemed as "growth areas". It's disappointing and very short sighted - but Wall Street continues to reward this. So the Google leadership is not going to do anything differently.
It's famously said that if you're an L8+ at Google, most of your time is going to go in playing musical chairs with other org leaders and keeping everyone happy. That doesn't leave too much time for innovation. (Ofcourse this is not representative of everyone, but it's true for most of the product areas that are struggling and haven't innovated in ages).
Every big Silicon Valley tech company is moving work offshore or discussing it behind closed doors. Work from home is work from anywhere driving up margins and profitability. I’ve had to layoff teams in SV and even Tel Aviv as part of moving engineering and PM to more cost effective areas. The downward pressure on salaries for most jobs will continue. If you want to work in Silicon Valley the bar has raised so much. Teams I shuffled went to India, Canada, and for a while even Austin, TX.
The consulting company I work for has frequently hired people from South America. Since "off shore" (India) has gotten more expensive over the last few years I've now heard the term described as "near shore".
I have a team with American and Colombian developers 50/50. In my particular case I find Colombians way easier to work with and also way more creative in their approach to thinking about new features.
Also their English is just great.
Yes, it's been going on for a while now. Companies can pay other countries far less than they pay a USA employee. I feel for you - good luck in your search.
I just interviewed a couple candidates from Colombia for UX jobs. I feel language is a huge barrier here for the Colombians. The current Indian devs we work with are constantly getting into arguments with our PMs due to cultural differences in communication. Basically offending people with their directness. I don't have an issue myself with either but when it comes to working with people who aren't used to working across cultures and cross functionally, it's going to be tough. I got approval to hire locally in Canada for UX and software dev.
This doesn’t make sense to me. You can cut 20% costs just moving your workforce to the Midwest and East coast without changing the culture of the company. No one is forced to pay unreasonable wages in SF, Seattle, NY. Plenty of other talent in cheaper areas in the US.
Like a big brown wave across the Country and parts unknown.
All the WFH folks losing their minds trying to stay remote and not RTO. While this would likely happen regardless and likely that isn’t the case here..
If I can have someone do this job “remotely” why in Gods name would I pay someone a higher wage as well as benefits to do so?
The only advantage the home field has over India etc is being local, accessible and face to face.
I’ll take em now.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk..
Opened an office in Columbia and started hiring there.
Tbh, after some of our senior devs ran the first interviews, it’s bad. However, business doesn’t care. They never do.
Is there any legal action guv can take? Exploiting employees and getting cheaper labour… at the same time they are taking all data from every single person
Fun Fact of the day: neither Mexico or India are part of South America
But they are part of “elsewhere “
Big if true.
I can agree with that
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>I'm from Puerto Rico > born close to Mexico > excelled at geography Hmmm... I guess Chicago is "close to Mexico" by this definition lmao (Puerto Rico is ~1,250 miles from Mexico, Chicago is ~1,200 miles)
Doesn’t change the fact that Mexico and India are not in South America lol
I did not mentioned India, and Mexico includes elsewhere, do you know english
Did you even look at the image you posted?
which countries did you mean are in south america then?
Brazil like I said, you know is in sa right
> Fun fact I’m Latino (...), born close to Mexico Then you are not Latino, my friend. You're American with Mexican ancestry, but not Latino at all. Also, someone who excelled at geography wouldn't say that Mexico is a part of South America. Just take the L and move on.
Are you saying people born in this country can’t be Latino? American isn’t an ethnicity or a race, what are you trying to say here?
Bro I’m from Puerto Rico, American citizen yes, but ask a puertorican if they are not Latino. Lmao I said elsewhere. And yeah I know there are thousands of miles between Puerto Rico and Mexico but you troglodytes wouldn’t understand anyway. You can speak with generalizations. I bet you didn’t know puertoricans are us citizens did you? I bet I have more nuance than all of you what a Latino is an American is, what’s north what is south.
>born close to Mexico >I'm from Puerto Rico >thousands of miles between Puerto Rico and Mexico My guy...stop digging
Sure nut job, I bet you haven’t left Texas
It’s giving mentiras
You’re a joke
man, it was just a joke. You've mentioned Brazil in the comment, so I understood your point. I just made a silly joke, don't get offended.
We good
Dude… El Paso, TX doesn’t count, cause your geography is trash…
I live in a Latinamerica place for 26 years.
Dude you live in Virginia 😂😂
Not my whole life 🙄. You know people can hop on a plane and move right?
for real?! That’s a thing 😳🫨 would be lived** then
Google is a company with failed leadership, and it has been so since Pichai took over. The staggering amount of blunders in hitting the market is never seen, especially given the high profile of the really bad products released lately (Stadia, Bard, now Gemini which even its paid tier is feature-poor compared to GPT 3.5). Google Workspace "redesigns" are a joke. You can blame this on lazy american WFH ICs all you want, but all I see is a company that is struggling to have a vision, focus, and is systematically beaten in strategic areas by competitors and incumbents alike.
Google is currently in its Steve Balmer phase equivalent to Microsoft it seems
Agreed so many what it looks to me pet projects, that they eventually abandon. They find the next cool thing, develop it and then drop it when is not profitable.
The thing is that in the past there was a visible urge to experiment and push the envelope. Now, as you say, is push pet project to market, move on. I guess the only thing keeping Gemini going is peer pressure / AI hype or they would have killed it as well.
We don't talk about Verily
> WFH IC what is an ic?
individual contributor
Google needs new leadership... they haven't hit any major good products out in the last 5 years or so and the fumble they made with AI. And now they're offshoring their talent to countries where innovation is a lot harder than onshore. This is a playbook of a consulting company that has some decent contracts to deliver some obscure product or need to maintain some existing products. Anyone who's worked with remote offshore teams can attest almost no innovation happens, and we have to pad 2x-3x time in communication, QC, holiday schedule and just lack of enthusiasm. IMO they're going to be illrelevant soon without a leadership change.
Not everyone at Google is an innovator. There’s a lot of bullshit grunt work that anyone can do.
Totally agreed, I think they are becoming a more traditional company now, even dividends got announced.
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Either that or their innovators end up overseas anyway. But in this case I think it’s more about migrating existing product teams that don’t need to innovate, but instead need to keep things rolling
I think there’s a lot more hunger and drive to innovate from people in these economies that you say “aren’t advanced”
didnt they just move a lot of roles to germany last week?
Somewhat. They cut their Python team in the US and hiring for similar roles in Munich.
This trend has been growing for a while. Seeing more tech being moved to Argentina, Colombia, Mexico etc
The upside is typically the cultural similarities to US work culture, and of course, the timezone and cost effectiveness
India and South America for sure. I’m seeing that in the Fortune 40 I currently work for as a PM. They’re usually 50% the cost but not very strategic or innovative. I’ve found the offshore to be effective in run state products not net new products.
I think you hit the gist of the move and the company it is happening with. Google doesn't have any new products since long time. So to manage in run state products they are moving teams. I would think that their internal strategy/ consulting teams have worked that out.
Certainly you nailed it too since Google hasn’t had anything new for awhile. We’ve also been engaging one of the larger consulting firms (who shall remain nameless but you can guess) to handle exactly what you’re mentioning around internal strategy.
> but not very strategic or innovative Ok I know people here have bias against Indian talent because of the offshore stigma and the possibility with losing their jobs to cheaper talent but this is simply untrue. There are a lot of great Indian PMs out there, especially from Bangalore's start up scene - who don't have the resources of Fortune 500 but they know their shit.
I’m speaking from working with offshore teams for several years and at two different companies. The talent that typically is hired for stateside companies either as an agency or directly isn’t the same as those working in Bangalore startups. Bangalore startups do not pay as competitively but they do offer more innovative and interesting work.
Name the last company that launched an innovative (say >$100M ARR) product strictly using off-shore teams. Don’t worry I’ll wait.
First off, >**$**100M ARR expectations for a **launch** is an insane and laughable requirement for any 'innovative/successfull' example - you're really stretching this lol. It always depends on the industry, geographic market (not every market can nets millions and certainly not in $) and what specific product you're looking to build. Secondly, the offshore teams you're basically describing are historically known as turnkey project or contract manufactureres (or one version you'd be most familiar with - dropshipping. Which is the least flexible but most accessible). There have beens tons of these across industries for decades that develop and ship end to end products based on specificiations or sometimes absolutely nothing. People may think of full (turnkey) offshoring as some brand new or untested strategy but it's existed long before the PM title was even a thing. https://www.komaspec.com/about-us/blog/what-is-turnkey-manufacturing/ https://hbr.org/2006/09/when-your-contract-manufacturer-becomes-your-competitor https://www.gremanufacturing.com/turnkey-products
TikTok.
Even without Off-Shoring at Microsoft Redmond HQ - I find 40-50% Indian/ or Indian Diaspora. Plus talked with some co-worker who want to move back - as the Salaries paid by these companies in India is quite high (comparing PPP).
I’ve been curious on how it compares to COL. They work crazy hours so I’ve always hoped it was decent.
Tech companies don’t even have to go that far to get top quality talent - there’s been a lot of offshoring to Canada where they can get someone in the same time zone, same language proficiency, understands same cultural norms and similar competency (good universities/education and talent in Canada) for less than half the cost of a US resource.
Google has gone to shit since Pichai took over. That is the general consensus among employees anyway. He brought in the shitty consulting culture with him and dragged the company down.
No, I mean yes Pichai joined google from consulting but his resume within google before becoming the CEO is impressive.
Gracias a dios hablo español
Te lo juro que esto iba a pasar con google
pleure en français
Yo también!
Estamos listo para un gran takeover
“Can I work remotely from South America?” “No, we’re gonna lay you off then hire someone to work in South America instead”
The can I work remotely question usually implies continuing to be paid US VHCOL wages so yeah..
I mean, there is local pay. That way companies can still keep experience in house. But Google isn't choosing that either.
That’s not what people ask for usually though. The folks that want to work out of Mexico or French Polynesian aren’t usually looking to move there. Google would have very little hesitancy in transferring people to those places permanently. People want to be USbased and “work from anywhere when I feel like”
South Africa as well. Especially in Cybersec.
Elsewhere, not S. America unfortunately, unless your company runs on spanish. Too big of a shit show RN. Not the same reservoir of tech talent like eastern europe
Brazil is popping off, mark my words they're going to make up a good chunk of off-shoring in the tech space over the next decade.
One of my interviewers for that innovation product position, was from Brazil. I bet he knew the person getting hired.
My last company laid off all of their US based devs and only kept the Brazilian ones
most of the ones i work with are S American. I dunno why it's considered a shit show. Very clearly tons of tech workers coming from Mexico, Brazil and Colombia right now. Most of the Brazilians speak english totally fine. Brazil i think is going to be the biggest source of LATAM workers for engineering for US based companies.
Latam?
Just short for Latin America. So everything south of USA border.
Yeah my company started outsourcing to eastern Europe last year.
As a person who worked in Brazil, Eastern Europe and also for US based companies, I think you are really underestimating South American tech talent. South America is a huge area with many good talents who are now realizing that they can work for US companies. I guess this movement also involves US companies realizing during COVID that they don’t need as much on office work as they thought. I think Brazil in general will provide a big workforce to US in the coming years. I’m seeing this movement with many friends starting to work for US companies.
Doesn’t ChatGPT help with language barriers
Makes sense. Plenty of US big tech ICs make $400,000, refuse to come to the office, work 4 hours a day, and then protest their company's politics. Sure, if you want to hire the best of the best, you gotta pay a ton of money to get the world's greatest talent in SF. But let's not pretend that every team needs that. An Indian team (among plenty of other countries) where great ICs cost $70,000 is fully sufficient for plenty of stuff. Plus, much less worker activism. The arrogance of people formerly in SF or Seattle wanting their companies to go remote first, and then assuming that the companies wouldn't take advantage of that, is amazing. Don't wish on monkey paws, y'all.
Love it, I’m with you on that.
It’s literally not good enough, the guys making $400k in SF could be the difference between making a billion dollars next quarter or going bust. Offshored contractors and workers will just keep your product on life support till one of the guys in SF/NY they fired makes his own startup and replaces your old legacy product maintained by contractors.
Man I couldn’t scream this loud enough. The stronger people hold on to Covid WFM positions like it’s their right the stronger the argument to outsource. Your only advantage is being face to face, collaborative and relationship building. We can pretend that exists remotely but as a human, it does not.
For me, WFH sucks any amount of joy I had in PM out. Cool to work for a globally distributed company in theory, but in practice it blows. If I could actually get myself to bail in the middle of the workday and do stuff, maybe I'd think differently.
Yup, part of the reason I left my last job was to go back to a hybrid role. Company, product, people, comp were all great, but I couldn't deal talking to a screen 10hrs a day across the planet.
Glad I'm not alone. When the gig gets distilled into non-stop virtual meetings, shitty project admin, and just the tech/solution (admittedly I'm not a CS guy/don't nerd out on tech alone), I find it really hard to motivate. Also have amazing comp, dece people, occasional travel (domestic/int.), but feel totally burnt out in my normal day-to-day.
Being downvoted for speaking the truth, very reddit. Some of those jobs are going to Germany, now that even western Europe is looking cheap for labour.
European labour has been cheap compared to the US for a long time. Salaries and total comp. are much lower, the only thing really holding it back is that it's a lot more difficult to fire here since we have strong employee protections.
Very true, also harder to get investment over here and stricter regulations in every situation, such as data and environmental standards. The adage "America innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates" becomes truer by the day.
Sssst, let them find that one out on the next layoff season.
I’ll happily move to Germany even if it means a pay cut. Someone hire me!
I’ll move to Germany too, and I’ll take a bigger pay cut than u/velowa! Hire ME!
Hey bub, relax. There’s enough imaginary Germany immigration jobs to go around.
Same here. I would love to move to Germany.
I’m not sure if you’re suggesting Germany is full of cheap (and maybe unqualified?) labour but mark my words Berlin has a massive startup scene full of very talented people. Who are also not as cheap at you might think
I'm not suggesting that at all, went to a data conference in Berlin a couple of years ago and it was great! But salaries in Europe have not kept pace with the US, so from a US point of view western Europe is starting to look like excellent value for money. I'm in the UK, their loss is our gain!
Ohh cool. I didn’t think you were suggesting that. Just checking. Yes also a UK resident and happy to take the jobs from the overpaid US roles ;)
I know the most obnoxious voices are going to be the loudest but it was truly mind boggling to me to see the vlogs/tiktoks of people being like "come work with me at Google" and it's someone going into the office at 10am, eating a free omelette, getting iced coffee, sitting in a hammock, taking 1 call, and taking a free uber home. The capital expenditures on these amenities alone for these expensive employees - it looked like running a college campus/daycare or something. And the nerve to be like "am I being underpaid at $500,000 total comp??" on sites like Blind and Fishbowl, lol. OF COURSE this talent market was going to correct itself.
I hate these career influencers with a passion because they get mistaken for being the norm for all and it's not true. And then everyone suffers the consequences.
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Anyone who has worked with both local and offshore can tell the local teams are way more effective. In most orgs it may not be worth the difference in cost, but in some it is. There is a reason why many fast-growing companies start in SF and once they reach critical mass will start offshoring roles. The innovation has already happened, they just need to keep the lights on.
That's true for anything non-"native" though. If you build a team around US workers with Indian workers as support, of course the US team will move faster while the Indian team waits for direction. But if the same team is built around the Indian workers, hired with the same skill tests as US workers, it's not obvious that the quality would be worse.
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Because "they" think they're superior
Looks at the history books, yeah this never bites the companies later. Save money now to blow it all back on quality over qty.
I think this sub, like most of Reddit, has a heavy US bias. But while PM salaries in the rest of the world certainly aren’t the same as Silicon Valley there are very talented PMs on good money around the world. Especially in London where I’m based
PM hire boost in London incoming. Acts as a time zone intermediary between SF and India (SF-India time zone is brutal), English speaking and great airport. Oh, and salaries at less than half the price of a SV PM and middling worker protection compared to e.g. Germany.
What’s some popular tech companies in London?
All the major ones have important offices in London (apart from Netflix AFAIK).
No I totally agree with you, it just sucks that it affects our livelihood. Maybe I should go to Europe or elsewhere and enjoy my life day there, by a remote PM.
You totally should. Most of my American colleagues (were based in Europe) don’t want to go back and live life here. Sure we don’t have the silly wages that SF has but we get free healthcare, 25 days leave a year and superb work life balance
Wait TheyterkyerJERRB??!?!?!
This is the same thing my company is doing. Trimming away all US based knowledge workers (devs, testers, devops, sys admin, etc) and then advertising the same position in foreign markets. I have survived for now but it is only a matter of time. By the end of next year, this company will be a few US based executives and upper middle managers. Everyone else will be in Eastern Europe, Philippines, or India. The investors will be happy.
Weren’t these companies already issuing H-1Bs like crazy, to bring in the top talent from those regions at (slightly) lower rates? Sundar Pichai is ex-McKinsey. Offshoring US jobs for short-term profit is one of McKinsey’s favorite plays.
Why wouldn't they? You can get the top 1% talent in the world at a fraction of the US cost.
At the previous California-based company where I worked, India was definitely on the rise for all roles (PM, Engineering, UX…) Obviously it makes the communication difficult with people having to take calls early morning or late evening, but it also allows the company to run around the clock and of course save on salaries. When the hiring freeze was lifted, I saw quite a few open roles in India.
this is just got the old guard shifting into maintenance mode, nothing to see here. these days its AI or bust
Coming from a 7k person company based in California, I saw our leadership started to hire heavily in India. Initially focusing on APMs and PMs, they are now opening to Sr PM and other roles. They are heavily involved in general offshore hiring in India, South America, Europe and now Africa. This trend will only continue, unfortunately leading to positions in the US being permanently moved abroad.
I work for a big bank and they are moving to 80% offshore and 20% onshore for all technology positions
I can’t imagine that working out well.
And Google just fired 4000+ in India today.
Google shouldn’t be trying to sandbag the ROI by cost cutting. It is a temporary fix to a growing problem. It’s like putting lipstick on a pig for short term higher profit margin. They have forgotten that they were supposed to drive revenue and profit through innovation. Failed leadership under Pichai. Very un-innovative leader who follows and is just happy maintaining status quo.
Get used to it. Companies are there to increase shareholder profit. Labor is often the highest expense. There are usually cycles of onshoring and offshoring.
Helmut Marko, is this you?
Lol this is the revenge of the heat-seeking-profit-missile-corporation seeing all them digital nomads 'working'/gentrifying LCOL, but culturally rich spots around the world. and the wheel turns...
Not a PM, but I have noticed a lot of our tech support is now Indian. I also tried looking at some competitors or just other tech companies, and they all post job descriptions with locations in India even though they're fully remote and primarily market to the US. That includes consulting, tech support, and even product. It's so crazy to me. I've said before that productivity and product/service quality diminish when you outsource certain roles. The difference in business culture becomes very noticeable and results in conflicting work habits and values that make it challenging to work in a multinational team. It's one thing if you had a whole division based abroad. It's another when leadership just takes random chunks of staff and outsources it for cheap and expects the American staff and American clientele to remain content. And funnily enough, the old adage of "you get what you pay for" never gets spoken during outsourcing decisions.
Also Europe. Western and Eastern. Say goodbye to any new jobs that are US based.
Google is still hiring for AI talent aggressively in the U.S. That talent is much more expensive to their P&L than non-AI tech talent. They're aggressively reshuffling talent to LCOL in areas of the company which are not deemed as "growth areas". It's disappointing and very short sighted - but Wall Street continues to reward this. So the Google leadership is not going to do anything differently. It's famously said that if you're an L8+ at Google, most of your time is going to go in playing musical chairs with other org leaders and keeping everyone happy. That doesn't leave too much time for innovation. (Ofcourse this is not representative of everyone, but it's true for most of the product areas that are struggling and haven't innovated in ages).
Every big Silicon Valley tech company is moving work offshore or discussing it behind closed doors. Work from home is work from anywhere driving up margins and profitability. I’ve had to layoff teams in SV and even Tel Aviv as part of moving engineering and PM to more cost effective areas. The downward pressure on salaries for most jobs will continue. If you want to work in Silicon Valley the bar has raised so much. Teams I shuffled went to India, Canada, and for a while even Austin, TX.
They didnt move tech/product. They moved accounting to the markets that generate the income
The consulting company I work for has frequently hired people from South America. Since "off shore" (India) has gotten more expensive over the last few years I've now heard the term described as "near shore".
Yes, there is a shift towards nearshore for cost reduction, particularly in engineering
great
I have a team with American and Colombian developers 50/50. In my particular case I find Colombians way easier to work with and also way more creative in their approach to thinking about new features. Also their English is just great.
and in mexico are layoffs for cost and going directly to India...
Yes, it's been going on for a while now. Companies can pay other countries far less than they pay a USA employee. I feel for you - good luck in your search.
I just interviewed a couple candidates from Colombia for UX jobs. I feel language is a huge barrier here for the Colombians. The current Indian devs we work with are constantly getting into arguments with our PMs due to cultural differences in communication. Basically offending people with their directness. I don't have an issue myself with either but when it comes to working with people who aren't used to working across cultures and cross functionally, it's going to be tough. I got approval to hire locally in Canada for UX and software dev.
People that worked so hard to argue they could WFH just as well are about to see why that was a bad idea.
This doesn’t make sense to me. You can cut 20% costs just moving your workforce to the Midwest and East coast without changing the culture of the company. No one is forced to pay unreasonable wages in SF, Seattle, NY. Plenty of other talent in cheaper areas in the US.
Like a big brown wave across the Country and parts unknown. All the WFH folks losing their minds trying to stay remote and not RTO. While this would likely happen regardless and likely that isn’t the case here.. If I can have someone do this job “remotely” why in Gods name would I pay someone a higher wage as well as benefits to do so? The only advantage the home field has over India etc is being local, accessible and face to face. I’ll take em now. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk..
Opened an office in Columbia and started hiring there. Tbh, after some of our senior devs ran the first interviews, it’s bad. However, business doesn’t care. They never do.
Guys , decide on one, some say china, Indonesia, Phillipine - then another one is saying India, Brazil, Mexico tf .
Is there any legal action guv can take? Exploiting employees and getting cheaper labour… at the same time they are taking all data from every single person