Comment by blackeyeblitzar
1 year ago
The post suggests their jobs were offshored. Is this a common practice versus just closing the roles? I feel like US legislators should do more to protect domestic jobs from domestic companies, or else they’ll face the same eventual collapse as in manufacturing.
Yes it’s common. At Google and across America.
When Google did its massive 12k person layoff they moved a lot of those roles to places like India. They had another tranche of layoffs that were “delayed exit” to train those Indian employees.
You can call me bigoted or racist, I don't care. The fact is with moving technical roles to India quality plummets. But I can totally see how in some beancounter's narrow mind this makes perfect sense.
In this case its Munich I think based on previous comments. Also, in India things depend on who you hire and how much you're willing to pay (like everywhere else). If you pay a salary you expect in rural Alabama in the Bay Area for a tech job you'll attract shitty devs as well.
You comment isn't wrong. I've observed the same thing but only when things get outsourced to low cost consulting shops. If Google pays decently in India (which I think they do), they'll get much better devs. There's a pretty strong start-up ecosystem and dev culture but as with everything you need to pay good $$ - as in not 10% of bay area pay but closer to 60-70% of it to attract top talent.
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Every company thinks that they're going to hack the system. They think that they'll be the first American company to ever outsource and get the best developers. But all of the best developers are happily working for local companies, and they don't want to have to deal with an American boss.
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That's not bigoted or racist. There are two forces when it comes to pricing labor:
1. The forces that dictate the lowest price.
2. The forces that dictate the highest price.
These are completely orthogonal to each other.
Lowest price is based on cost of living, you can hire the cheapest person as long as you pay them enough for them to keep on eating. That's it. Notably this lower-end is going to have a lot of variance based on location.
Highest price is based on how much value a worker creates for a business, the highest price that you can pay that worker is somewhere that leaves the business with a margin profit. Of course it is in the businesses best interest to increase the margin for themselves, but as talent becomes harder to find, fat margins become less of a necessity and more of a nice-to-have. The job needs to get done or their golden-egg machine will die.
So!
You go to the lowest price at a another country, that's what you get in quality. Execs think that people are replaceable so they believe that the average X is the same here as it is anywhere else, the only difference to them is cost.
So yeah. You are not racist for pointing out that quality suffers due to cost cutting through offshoring. The lower cost-of-living countries (such as India) still have top tier talent, but that talent is priced similarly across the world, they are smart and they price themselves according to the value they bring.
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Cut salaries 90% and quality will drop. It's a false economy however you slice it or wherever the replacements are based. It never works.
> The fact is with moving technical roles to India quality plummets.
Of course your assessment of those who can literally steal your job from under you is fair and unbiased
Disney famously did this, I think it was tech support for their Florida parks.
>When Google did its massive 12k person layoff they moved a lot of those roles to places like India.
But remember, everyone has to be 'in office' for collaboration! /s
This might be my prejudice but when someone talks about offshoring a role, moving it to Munich isn't the first thing that comes to mind. It may be slightly cheaper than California but not by so much that if expect it to be the main reason for doing so.
You might think twice if you looked at the figures; the numbers in this article comparing US and UK wages are astounding: https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/britain-white-collar-j...
(and this article goes into the rationale too. Basically the idea is you're paying more than you would in a developing economy, but you can trust the team with more autonomy and fewer cultural misunderstandings, so it's an option for offshoring higher-value work)
> cultural misunderstandings
It's funny that you think that being located in Europe the positions will be stuffed with Europeans...
I'm in this exact situation: work for American company, while living in the EU. Am not a EU citizen (Eastern Europe / Middle East). More than half of those working with me are foreigners too. Eastern Europe, Middle East, Latin America and India would be the most common origin countries. Europe immigrates tech workers by a truckload.
To reflect on the original issue. I'd guess that some manager either hated some other manager, or was looking for a promotion or was just dumb and executed some instruction in the stupidest way possible... there doesn't seem to be any apparent reason to move a team like that. Even if the team was entirely rehired in the poorest place on Earth, we are still talking about ten people. Whatever difference Google makes from the move is not even peanuts. If there's a manager being rewarded for this stupid idea, their bonus will probably be more than whatever savings this move can possibly generate.
I don't believe there's any actual rational justification for this move. Just middle management being middle management.
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You know, it makes me wonder how hard it would be to use this divide to actually move to the EU and get residency. Then again, with so many countries having to beef up military spending and facing economic headwinds you really have to question whether all the social / quality of life programs that make europe more livable than the US would be sustainable long term either.
Who knows maybe in 30 years Americans ultimately have a higher quality of life just due to our stronger economic position making it easier to sustainably fund M4A or whatever.
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There are tons of people in Europe working as offshore resources for American companies.
Being the same Western culture helps a lot versus other areas favoured for offshoring.
> It may be slightly cheaper than California but not by so much that if expect it to be the main reason for doing so.
extremely wrong. what are you basing your assumption on?
the cost of a Munich employee is less than half of the cost of a California one, when you take into account salary, stock, office costs, whinging, etc.
It's extremely hard to lay off in Germany, so existing Google employees in Germany are, on the margin, nearly free, and so can be reassigned (with something else being done with their current project).
How hard is it? As in - they have to let you work for the duration of the notice period hard? Honest question.
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You might be surprised - the absolute difference in salary between Munich and a trendy US tech hub is more than $100k. The difference between getting a decent dev in Poland vs Munich is $30-50k max.
”Slightly cheaper”? What are the actual numbers we are talking about regarding yearly comp?
TC diffs of 230k vs 350k is what i've seen, for a mid-career SRE
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In USA it is quite easy to get above 200k USD. In Europe the comparable salary would be around 180k and it almost never reaches that point.
Even 100k is considered a lot.
I believe the replacements were already Google employees. Just not python-team employees. So it's sort of offshoring but not exactly.
This really doesn't make any sense to me. When I was there python was a pretty big part of the google internal ecosystem. Each major language there had a team supporting it. Not sure why you would be gutting those teams.
I get what you're saying about them already being Google employees, but this feels like a loophole and not a material difference. I could see this being exploited if there ever were offshoring rules. Just hire your offshores a month or two ahead of time.
That said, I find that most sensitive managerial decisions aren't fully explained right away, if ever. I don't expect someone in this position, especially upset by the change, to know the full story. There's possible extenuating circumstances, such as team performance (even the manager was RIF'd).
This isn't the greatest submission and lacks any semblance of context. The poster is in Netherlands apparently and the new team in Germany? I have no idea what to make of this.
Google pays people by region. As I recall, SF, NYC, and Seattle get full wages, and other geos get discounted by a certain percentage. If you live in the US but not in one of those metros, your pay could be ~15% lower.
Yesterday's layoffs seem to have been framed as reorgs. Some teams have been wholly dismissed. Some have been consolidated (two teams -> one team).
There does seem to be a pattern that favors people in lower cost regions. For instance, two teams get combined and the higher cost manager is laid off. Or a whole team is laid off, but those duties are being restaffed by people in a lower wage office.
> As I recall, SF, NYC, and Seattle get full wages, and other geos get discounted by a certain percentage. If you live in the US but not in one of those metros, your pay could be ~15% lower.
Seattle is actually in the tier below SF and NYC, which makes its pay around 10% less. However, it's mostly a wash when you consider that Seattle doesn't have state income tax, so your net is roughly the same in both places.
Wages by Geo is a Urs Hözle move, whom should get paid in NZ dollars.
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for many many yearsr it's been a SVP-level project to move people and teams out of the expensive US parts to cheaper regions - Munich was a particular target for some reason (maybe it was the cheapest medium eng office in that timezone). there used to be a lot more carrot, though.
My read of it is that a US team was laid off. The poster is in NL and has to train he Munich team. The poster was not laid off.
yeah, that's basically it.
Looks like the new roles in Munich, if I’m reading the thread right? Could be more than just offshoring? Why not do India or some other cheaper place instead of Munich which isn’t cheap and has relatively strong labor protections?
Just for this specific team. They are “defragging their global footprint” and moving roles to Mexico City, Bangalore, and Germany (probably to to go after gov contracts).
Less cultural clashes, and still cheap versus US.
How do you "protect" a job?
Is this a genuine question? You can go for a strict, legalistic approach, like requiring cause to dismiss workers, or you can tweak incentives, like tax breaks or tax penalties encouraging desired behaviors and discouraging undesired ones. You can make arguments for why it shouldn’t be done but it is not hard to imagine things an interested government could do.
It's not that simple, long-term. Companies will just be founded elsewhere, because a hard-to-fire worker is worse than no worker. However, you could add additional layers like "if you do business in the US you must have x% of your employees here". But it's getting messy.
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Tax breaks for hiring citizens.
Tariffs for hiring non citizens.
Force companies to follow all the same employment laws for employees and contractors in other countries.
Yeah, and really enforce anti-dumping laws.
The cost of living of an Indian developer is way less than that of a US one, especially if the US one is in a high cost of living area such as SF or NYC. How can the US worker complete when they have US housing and college costs, not Indian ones, that need to be paid for?
Offshoring like this is allowing dumping of below-cost labor into US markets. Great for US C-suite folk and their profit-based bonuses, and for lobbyists getting paid big bucks to let this happen, but not so great for US citizens trying to make a living as software developers, which one might have thought would be a thing the US would strategically want to encourage, rather than strengthening a foreign country.
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The problem is that companies will simply change the countries they incorporate in. Will SAP be tariffed for hiring Germans (where the company is based) rather than Americans? If not, you are giving SAP an unfair advantage over its American competitor.
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Look up "protectionism", the USA has historically frowned upon other less-developed countries when they implement protectionist policies, they go as far as censoring them from the international market. So it would be very incongruent if they suddenly did that for their own workforce.
Not that incongruent; look at Chinese EVs. Or TikTok.
Historically protectionism was a major part of how the US developed its economy but typically countries become less protectionist once they have highly developed economies (because free trade tends to benefit them more).
You start a business.
Laws and regulation.