[ever1]

'But when asked about this, Mr Libin has a surprising answer: "What if I paid the person in India the same as I pay someone in the US? Well, why not? Right? Like, why do I care where you live? I just care about how productive you are."'

BS, you can have 2x more skilled engineers for half the price and same quality, logic demands that you do not pay an Indian dev (which will still have greater salary than average in India) the same as US one.

[spamizbad]

Not sure how long that will last tho. If labor supply stays tight, you’re eventually going to have to pay more - unless you form an industry cartel that agrees to geographic pay scales

[csa]

Imho, other than at the very top of the market, there is not a tight labor supply — rather, there is a culture of broken hiring practices.

[dmingod666]

That is so shitty on so many levels.

[bartread]

Sure, but it's also a major reason companies offshore. Take away that incentive and suddenly there's no real reason to offshore (you could easily argue this would be a good thing from the perspective of onshore workers though).

Whilst I do not love the salary disparity between onshore and offshore workers, the issue is complex. For example, one has to wonder what would happen to local economies in Indian regions, and elsewhere, that are dependent on revenue from offshoring were Western companies to simply stop the practice[0]. Also, bear in mind that many offshoring outfits are set up by locals who see an opportunity to offer a service to companies in the US and Europe at substantially lower cost than they'd have to pay in their own regions whilst benefitting both themselves and their employees: i.e., there's some complicity there and it's fundamentally very different from, say, colonial exploitation.

I still don't love it, but I can see the benefits for both sides.

[0] One can take this argument too far of course: viz., child labour in the fashion industry. But the situations of a child stitching trainers and a software developer working for an offshoring provider are so different as to render the argument ad absurdum and disrespectful to both of them.

[asenna]

Also not true on so many levels.

I've had some experience in this and what I've realized is that the really good remote developers in India already know their value and they can demand US level salaries for their time.

Yes, it's still not as many and you can still find a lot of good developers for relatively (relative to US) low pay, but the trend is clearly changing.