[yolovoe]

That's a good point.

I used to work at a SF startup before the FAANG about 4-5 years back. All the engineers there have unfortunately been replaced with those in LATAM too. LATAM engineers were making like $80-$90K in USD, which is apparently really good money there, whereas US engineer asked for base pay twice that. So it seems like a win-win deal for the cofounders and LATAM engineers.

Just not so great for those of us in the US.

[addicted]

This was unsurprising when American employees decided to use the significant power they gained over the pandemic to insist on WFH.

Whether working collaboratively in an office was beneficial or not, employers certainly believed it to be so. They believed it so much that employers, pre pandemic, were willing to hire employees a single time zone away from SF, and then pay them a significant one time amount along with a much higher annual salary to relocate them to SF.

This belief in higher productivity when teams were geographically collocated was the entire basis for which employers were willing to pay American employees several multiples of what they would pay employees abroad.

But the same employees who were benefiting from this decided they didn’t want to keep that advantage anymore.

And now since WFH has become the norm in the US, employers are realizing there’s no need to pay to keep employees in the U.S. and outsourcing to significantly cheaper locations instead.

[xienze]

> And now since WFH has become the norm in the US, employers are realizing there’s no need to pay to keep employees in the U.S. and outsourcing to significantly cheaper locations instead.

“Whoa we can do this cheaper in another country???” is not a new phenomenon. Companies have been trying to do this for literally decades at this point. The reason so many jobs still exist in the US is because it doesn’t end up working that well. I’m not _that_ old and I was around at IBM for two separate rounds of “outsource-it-to-India-no-wait-bring-it-back” and IBM was and still is very keen to ship everything overseas.

I’m not saying it won’t eventually stick, but I think it’s important to dispel this notion that WFH made everyone have this sudden epiphany that US workers aren’t necessary anymore. It’s been going on for ages.

[potamic]

That doesn't explain why many execs were keen on RTO. If it was reducing costs, you would thing they would've wanted to draw out WFH for as long as possible. But there a clear rush to end WFH as soon as possible and implement unilateral mandates to get everyone back to office.

[CalRobert]

Incidentally 80-90k is pretty normal pay in Europe too. High, even, for southern Europe.

[lnsru]

Exactly. That’s around salary for senior engineer at big corp according union tables in Germany. If you’re really good or a manager, 110k is in there. More is doable at senior manager/director level or in key position in a company led by owner. US faang salaries sound here like science fiction.

[kavalg]

Currently the going annual salary for a senior developer in Bulgaria (Eastern Europe) is somewhere between EUR 50k - 75 EUR net, with 25-30 days of paid time off. The gross will be about 25% more (income tax is 10%, social security around 40%, but there is a cap on the salary base, so effectively it is less). For freelance senior developer, the (B2B) daily rate is in the range EUR 350 to EUR 550, depending on the technology and project complexity. Of course, there are rare examples outside of these ranges (e.g. top talent in ML, BigData etc). Leadership roles are usually at 10-20% premium.