[chocks]

I’m genuinely curious why companies don’t do this? It seems like a great deal, many cities in US are great with decent cost of living. I used to live in Kansas before & home ownership is cheaper and time zones are usually better. Maybe the total cost of hire is still higher? idk

[ghaff]

Because the cost of living delta is mostly just home ownership. Yes, that trickles down to somewhat higher prices for contractors, child care, etc. but it's mostly rents and houses. So $50K/year say is probably a pretty reasonable cost of living adjustment between the Bay Area and most reasonable low CoL areas. Cut more than that and you're also cuttings savings and spending power for things that are priced similarly across the continental US.

[vsskanth]

Just looking at annual pay, lets say you pay devs a reasonable 75K USD in Chattanooga. Thats 56 Lakh INR annual pay in India. You can get a top engineer for that kind of pay.

This doesn't even account for the difficulty in hiring an engineer of the same caliber in Chattanooga and all the associated overhead like health insurance, etc.. which are much lower in India.

If you already have experience building a high quality engineering team in India (thus know how to overcome cultural barriers), its pretty much a no-brainer.