Comment by inglor_cz
1 month ago
Recruitment of talent from India is complicated. To be precise, sifting for actual talent in the sea of mediocre nephews of VIPs is complicated. You can't even rely on actual identity of the person who is sitting in front of the camera, it can well be someone who was hired to impersonate them. Low trust societies tend to operate like that.
That's rich coming from someone in Czechia. Indian tech salaries [0] are comparable to Italian [1] and Romanian salaries [2].
We deal with the same problems in Czechia, Poland, Romania, and India when paying at the lower end of the spectrum.
A Czech, Pole, Romanian, and Indian are all equally commodifiable to me as an American.
Either way you guys are taking American jobs, which represent the majority of tech jobs. And it's ironic that you sound the same as the Brits who railed about Polish, Romanian, and Czech immigrants before Brexit.
Anyhow, it doesn't matter. India's working with Czechia to lobby against CBAM, Agrofert has JVs with Indian SoEs, and India is one of the only non-CEE markets where Skoda has PMF so everyone who matters in Czechia will fall behind the deal.
[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/india
[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/italy
[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/romania
I am sure you do. Czechs aren't particularly honest people on average (why should I pretend otherwise? Mine is a medium-trust society at best, no Denmark or Iceland), and without the necessary cultural knowledge you will struggle to spot the red flags that the locals can spot easily.
Maybe the whole idea of just easily cherrypicking talent from very distant nations with very different cultures is less workable than naive people think?
Edit: you edited your response, I will add something to mine.
In capitalism, jobs are commodity. Business really only cares about efficiency, not nationalist sensitivities. For every "American" job taken, there is an "American" boss who gives it away, but that is the point: the boss does not feel any patriotic duty to keep jobs onshore. He is beholden to the bottom line of his business.
Edit 2: (this will be a long war of edits). Where did I "rail" against anything? Are you having some stereotype in your head and simply decided that I am a good fit?
I literally wrote that fishing for actual talent in India from the outside is hard. Not desirable or undesirable, but hard. That is the result of actual experiences of people around me. I didn't say even a single word about whether it should be done or not.
> this will be a long war of edits
That's my fault. I abused my HN account instead of using the HN API years ago during a drunken hackathon in the early days of LLMs. As such my replies are rate limited.
> without the necessary cultural knowledge you will struggle to spot the red flags that the locals can spot easily
I agree. This is why most VC/PE funds have a deep bench of Asian American operators.
> In capitalism, jobs are commodity. Business really only cares about efficiency, not nationalist sensitivities. For every "American" job taken, there is an "American" boss who gives it away, but that is the point: the boss does not feel any patriotic duty to keep jobs onshore. He is beholden to the bottom line of his business
Absolutely. Hence why I made choices to move offices from SV to Karlin, or moving Brno offices to Delhi. And that's my point. I don't give a shit if I'm hiring in Karlin, Koramangala, Krakow, Capitol Hill (Seattle not DC), ir Cebu (imo the next Bangalore).
> Maybe the whole idea of just easily cherrypicking talent from very distant nations with very different cultures is less workable than naive people think
It's not that difficult. Most VC/PE funds have a roster of a couple dozen (VC) to couple hundred (Megacap PE) operators we can poach to manage investments. This is why the recent boom in Indian American C-Suites and VPs happened.
> Czechs aren't particularly honest people on average
Ehn, y'all are honest enough. Czech pragmatism is refreshing after dealing with Germans.
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I think what happened was a mutually heated moment of emotion, but largely we sound aligned (and from personal experience, I have tended to agree with your thoughts somewhat). When I'm back in Praha let's grab some Pivo - I'm a Mliko guy to be honest.
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