The entire world has already been a recruiting source for FAANG for more than a decade, both remote & via paid relocation & visa sponsorship.
People seem to think that opening up India as another source will drastically lower wages, but I don’t see any reason at all that this will be true - and if the reasoning is just “more supply generally means lower prices” then you’re totally wrong and supply & demand 101ism should just get straight ignored in this conversation.
Hiring a competent and trustworthy software engineer, even at entry level, is extremely hard and expensive. For every 100 computer science applicants, maybe 15 are hirable, 4 are good, and 1 is sincerely worth it.
You can increase the candidate pool but that rate doesn’t change. And if the sources of education and training are substandard in other markets (only a fraction of Indian students can get education or training on par with mid-grade or higher Western universities), the rate of acceptable candidates is even lower. Factoring in the overhead of visas, it is just super unlikely to result in widespread wage reduction.
Besides that, there is still employer competition. Employees don’t typically bid on jobs by quoting lower prices to undercut peers, especially not in a collaboration-based industry like software. Rather, employers compete.
A lot of companies would gladly double their engineering headcount even at San Francisco wages, if only they could actually find that many acceptable candidates.
I admit these dynamics could change. For example if the fraction of computer science job seekers who are actually capable of doing the job at a minimally acceptable level grows much higher than ~20% then perhaps replacements will be cheap and common.
But right now the industry is not at all like that. I welcome remote workers from all over the world. If they are good enough to get hired, then they deserve a wage close to their impact on revenue just like their SF or NY counterparts. I don’t fear this will cause wage depression for me one bit. It will give them access to better quality of life they have earned, and will make our teams more culturally diverse and globally minded. I think all around it’s only a good thing.
People seem to think that opening up India as another source will drastically lower wages, but I don’t see any reason at all that this will be true - and if the reasoning is just “more supply generally means lower prices” then you’re totally wrong and supply & demand 101ism should just get straight ignored in this conversation.
Hiring a competent and trustworthy software engineer, even at entry level, is extremely hard and expensive. For every 100 computer science applicants, maybe 15 are hirable, 4 are good, and 1 is sincerely worth it.
You can increase the candidate pool but that rate doesn’t change. And if the sources of education and training are substandard in other markets (only a fraction of Indian students can get education or training on par with mid-grade or higher Western universities), the rate of acceptable candidates is even lower. Factoring in the overhead of visas, it is just super unlikely to result in widespread wage reduction.
Besides that, there is still employer competition. Employees don’t typically bid on jobs by quoting lower prices to undercut peers, especially not in a collaboration-based industry like software. Rather, employers compete.
A lot of companies would gladly double their engineering headcount even at San Francisco wages, if only they could actually find that many acceptable candidates.
I admit these dynamics could change. For example if the fraction of computer science job seekers who are actually capable of doing the job at a minimally acceptable level grows much higher than ~20% then perhaps replacements will be cheap and common.
But right now the industry is not at all like that. I welcome remote workers from all over the world. If they are good enough to get hired, then they deserve a wage close to their impact on revenue just like their SF or NY counterparts. I don’t fear this will cause wage depression for me one bit. It will give them access to better quality of life they have earned, and will make our teams more culturally diverse and globally minded. I think all around it’s only a good thing.