>I'll tell you that I'm getting overseas talent for roles where 10 years ago I would have hired entry level talent in the US
the US is going to once again cripple one of their critical industries for short term gains, what happens when your senior engineers retire and there are no replacements prepared because it's more efficient to hire foreign senior engineers rather than onboarding and training a college grad? Even before AI improvements and Covid increasing remote work, the bar for hiring entry engineers was absurd and most startups only wanted seniors
I can't blame companies for doing this on the micro level because it makes sense, but macro level the US government needs to take action and treat hiring remote similarly to bringing in a visa worker or add a form of tariff like you would for manufactured products. Government's job is to reign in market forces that are net bad for the country due to unaccounted externalities
Wow, you are right that we are crippling a industry with short term goals, but is the other way around.
We should let them come work here. Each engineer carries a wealth of knowledge, enthusiasm and demand for other services that is very very valuable for the country.
We are all better off if we let every engineer that wants to come and work in the states.
Imposing tariffs on remote work would just incentivize outward migration of companies.
Don't make companies choose either the US or the world, instead make the US the obvious choice.
Have you worked closely with a remote work force from another country? I know a couple of dozen developers in Argentina who trivially rival any American counterpart and they wouldn't move here if we paid them to. Not everyone dreams of migrating to the USA.
I'm sure there's lots of people who wouldn't move to the States. But it's completely untrue to think that more people wouldn't move if given a path, or even if given an easier path.
> what happens when your senior engineers retire and there are no replacements prepared because it's more efficient to hire foreign senior engineers rather than onboarding and training a college grad
This assumes that the overseas engineers aren’t senior or reliable? I (in the US) work with a lot of talented and dedicated overseas folks who keep me on my toes. Some of them are founding or staff level engineers of our SF-based startup.
Most lived experiences with off-shore talent are due to labor costs. There are great offshore engineers but many work for companies who aren't hiring at the top end of the local market: they're hiring off-shore to save. You get what you pay for. And that leads to impressions, even if incorrect ones.
"You get what you pay for" is fair, but its also worth pointing out that in some places "money goes further".
In my city, I can go out, eat at a steakhouse, 3 courses, with wine, 2 people, and the total bill is $30-$40 total, not each). Nice sit down restaurant, good food, linen napkins.
Consequently highly skilled, senior engineers can be paid < $100k and still live like a king. If the exact same person lived in the US, or worse in an expensive part of the US, you'd pay more, probably 5 times more.
Once you embrace remote work (WFH) you quickly discover this very real geographical swing in value-of-money.
Of course -most- remote workers are crap. Most local workers are crap too. The remote-hiring problem is as hard as the local-hiring problem, probably harder. But the cost-savings are immense, and the long-term PR is significant. (Yeah, we're laying off 10% of support, but their all foreigners - kinda skips over the point that they're -all- foreigners to begin with)
You get what you okay for, but that bag of silver you have turns into a bag of gold elsewhere.
> the US is going to once again cripple one of their critical industries for short term gains, what happens when your senior engineers retire and there are no replacements prepared because it's more efficient to hire foreign senior engineers rather than onboarding and training a college grad? Even before AI improvements and Covid increasing remote work, the bar for hiring entry engineers was absurd and most startups only wanted seniors
Presumably you hire more senior engineers from overseas? What, do you think American senior engineers are inherently better somehow?
And then they leave and form better companies, because they understand how things work, and then US politicians are sad because their critical industries are gone.
The tax really isnt all that different vs california. They just dont spend as much money on the military so go figure they can give their residents healthcare.
Damn bro, sounds like Europe has money to spare then. Guess the U.S should cut all spending in the area so Europeans can step up for themselves. I'd love to see the EU take the bill for policing their own back yard or trade routes.
I'd love to. The EU is free-riding on U.S's protection. At this point I don't care if Moscow is rolling tanks through Berlin. I would much rather be on good terms with Russia than prop up the rapidly declining EU while they act smug about their healthcare.
Because Western Europe is, generally, not as shitty as Eastern Europe or Latin America.
There is some tongue and cheek to that comment, but not much. You generally don't hear about waves of people wanting to emigrate from France or Austria to Poland or Latvia.
> Because Western Europe is, generally, not as shitty as Eastern Europe or Latin America.
> There is some tongue and cheek to that comment, but not much. You generally don't hear about waves of people wanting to emigrate from France or Austria to Poland or Latvia.
Latvian here.
Life is reasonably affordable, most of the services you'd expect are available in the capital or most cities. Internet is pretty good (I pay 15 EUR for 200 Mbps up and down, could get up to 1000 Mbps for twice that, though cheaper with some providers), food is okay, rent isn't too bad in most places, went through university (both Bachelor's and Master's degrees) with no debt, healthcare is pretty good (especially with insurance), salaries kind of suck though across the board. Public transportation is pretty good, both between cities and within the limits of a city, I really don't need a car.
People can be a bit colder, not really that American small talk, but are nice when you get to know them. Except for some kind of harmful cultural stuff (alcoholism, machismo, LOTS of xenophobia but perhaps due to the country's past, some homophobia/transphobia/etc., people being selfish sometimes), also can't really read news site comments here, most are very toxic, like you wouldn't believe.
The weather tends to be okay in the summer, but sucks pretty badly in the winter/autumn and sometimes spring. Cold, windy, lots of overcast clouds, overall a very depressing mood, sort of. Nature is pretty though, especially if you go on a boating trip down the rivers.
I reckon that other parts of Europe are probably better in many respects, but as with most places, there are positives and negatives.
Not sure if your comment was meant to be sarcastic, but basically, yes, ever since the EU instituted freedom of labor movement, and Eastern countries joined the EU, there have been overall huge amounts of labor migration from Eastern to Western bloc countries.
If you'd gently direct your eyes to Ukraine, you'll realize why Eastern Europe isn't exactly prime location material for a lot of folks right now.
Meso/South America has a stability problem as well. Unless you pick Urugay, I guess, but being surrounded by large countries with both problems and guns is never a fun exercise.
The quality of life is Eastern Europe (and some countries) in North of Europe is great (and even greater than France and many places), but the risk of war spreading among these European countries is a real issue :/
Oh yeah, QoL is pretty decent. The economy for most of Eastern Europe is great as well. It's a geopolitical question more than anything else right now. (Not that Western Europe is much better there, but the time scale for potential conflict is currently a bit longer)
There is objective data to either support or refute this claim. Look at immigration flows from LATAM the the US and compare it with the reverse. Then do the same with eastern Europe.
I agree we seem intent on crippling ourselves, but the inverse move would likely be better, which is give tax credits for hiring US citizens on US soil that offset any savings they'd get by hiring out of the US.
If you run the numbers, you can adjust individual income tax upward marginally across brackets to account for shortfalls, and it will be far less complicated to implement and enforce.
This gives an incentive to keep the dollars domestic vs abroad.
You may even want to give some additional tax incentives for companies that close their foreign offices to re-open them in the US. This would be similar to a scheme that helped with bringing some manufacturing back from overseas
> “treat hiring remote similarly to bringing in a visa worker or add a form of tariff like you would for manufactured products”
How would this work in practice? Visas and tariffs are enforced at the borders.
Where is the checkpoint for taxing foreign remote employees? Would Congress require Slack and GitHub to scan for evidence of work being performed by remote employees?
If you just make a law but have no enforcement mechanism, people will find workarounds because they only have to be justified internally.
>Where is the checkpoint for taxing foreign remote employees?
company payroll/tax reporting I'd assume. If payments are going to a worker in a foreign country, throw an additional tax on it to make it so there's no cost savings compared to hiring locally. That way the only reason to do it would be because you couldn't find the talent locally
The foreign employees are often employees of a foreign company, because it's more convenient that way. It's difficult to do business in a country if nobody around you understands the legal status of your company. That foreign company could be owned by the same holding company as the American company, or it could be technically independent. And if you impose tariffs on buying services from foreign companies, other countries will reciprocate, which will hit US tech companies hard.
that's kind of the point, you want to eliminate companies just doing labor cost arbitrage rather than hiring globally because they actually need a unique talent they can't find in the US. If that's the case, they will happily pay the premium because that person still provides ROI even at US pay rates. That's supposed to be how H1B visas work as well
What's to stop Apple, for example, from setting up companies all over the world that employ their people and own their IP local to the employees? Then Apple US buys / licenses products for US distribution from those companies.
Massive companies have far more incentive to "engineer" their way around such laws than lawmakers have to find something without loopholes. Especially given how lobbying works in the US.
To "own" those companies Apple has to participate in trade agreements between both countries respective legal systems, and also know those agreements mean something.
If your foreign subsidiary is owned by citizens of the country it's in, then how exactly do "you" own it if your claim to ownership doesn't in fact depend on agreements between the respective governments?
They'll just open foreign subsidiaries to hire the devs, and the US company will pay it "license fees". If market forces are net bad for the country, country must improve its game and become more competitive.
the US is going to once again cripple one of their critical industries for short term gains, what happens when your senior engineers retire and there are no replacements prepared because it's more efficient to hire foreign senior engineers rather than onboarding and training a college grad? Even before AI improvements and Covid increasing remote work, the bar for hiring entry engineers was absurd and most startups only wanted seniors
I can't blame companies for doing this on the micro level because it makes sense, but macro level the US government needs to take action and treat hiring remote similarly to bringing in a visa worker or add a form of tariff like you would for manufactured products. Government's job is to reign in market forces that are net bad for the country due to unaccounted externalities