You’ll get downvoted but in my experience, which may not be representative of the entire population, this is true.
A mid-size US tech company I know well went fully remote after a lot of insistence from the workforce, prior to the pandemic they were fully in office.
Soon enough they started hiring remotely from EU, and now the vast majority of their technical folks are from there. The only US workers remaining are mostly GTM/sales. I personally heard the founder saying “why should we pay US comp when we can get extremely good talent in EU for less than half the cost”. EU workers, on average, also tend to not switch job as frequently, so that’s a further advantage for the company.
Once you adapt to remote-only, you can scoop some amazing talent in Poland/Ukraine/Serbia/etc for $50k a year.
I think most programmers in the US simply don't realize how much they earn compared to the rest of the world.
I'm not talking about rural Chinese villages whose name you can't pronounce. Or the stereotypical Indian call centers. I'm talking about highly educated programmers who can communicate fluently in English, in cities like Beijing or Munich. If people in SV know how (relatively) little their counterparts make in these places, they'd be much more opposed to remote work.
And that was before LLM. Today practically the entire planet can write passable English.
Yeah, for $100k or slightly less you can hire very good devs with 5+ yr experience in CN or DE. Often speaks English at full professional proficiency without the help of LLMs too. I know because I currently work for a fully remote startup with people from both countries. For that kind of money you can do what in the U.S., hire below average juniors? Even the most clueless junior likely makes more in SV.
Flip that around. Junior devs in the US earning $100k is the anomaly. The fact this is the case indicates the pipeline for competent developer talent is bottlenecked. Right now is still an amazing time to be in Tech. The fact the industry is so hungry for talent it’s paying such rates and is expanding abroad in search of new supply is a sign of it’s health.
Agree. It is harsh truth. Even the good old outsourcing seems in resurgence. Lately I see at work large delegations of IT bodyshops claiming 60% saving with AI + a dev/support center in India.
It may or may not work but it can crater 70% of IT/software department by 2027 as per their plan.
It's interesting, ai seems to be enabling the middle in a positive way.
On the other side, we have started to find that the value of outsourcing to very low cost regions has completely disappeared.
I expect that the wages in eastern Europe will quickly rise in a way they never did in former outsourcing hotspots (India for example), because they are able to do similarly complex and quality work to westerners, and are now enabled by awesome translation tools.
The low quality for cheaper is now better served by the Artificial Indian.
There's a lot of nuance in these types of stories. First, the US is far from uniform in salaries. Salaries in large metro areas are different from smaller areas and are different from CA/SV. Europe also isn't uniform, and in Western Europe if a company doesn't move to all contractors they will pay significantly more into a countries equivalent to social security. Personally, I would be uncomfortable having my entire development staff be contractors as their interests are not exactly aligned with mine.
Amazing talent may end up cheaper in certain locales for a period of time, but if they are amazing they will become more expensive.
IMO, what's at risk are the entry/mid FAANG type jobs that pay a lot for what they are.
The fixed exchange rates between EU countries massively drags down the international cost of a German software engineer, and US companies have yet to wisen up to that fact.
My previous employer stopped hiring in the EU (except for the UK, where they were based, and South Africa, where the CTO was from) because the labor laws there made it too difficult for them to fire people, which was a particularly troublesome for them as they had almost quarterly layoffs. They switched back to hiring in the UK and US where there are fewer worker protections.
Does the UK really not have labor laws as strong as most countries in the EU? It's not like you can't fire people in EU, you just have to have an actual legitimate reason to do so, exactly because doing quarterly layoffs is absurd and shouldn't be tolerated by anyone.
The UK seemed generally slightly less strict than, say, Germany, France, or Poland. It sorta felt like it was splitting the difference between the US and the EU.
> About half the public identify the cost of groceries as a major source of financial stress.
And some other portion of the population, anecdotally much larger than what I would have thought, orders DoorDash/UberEats regularly, what a stark contrast.
I am in a good financial situation, but I still could never stomach the prices of those apps, $30-40+ for any item once one includes fees and everything. I recently got a promotion through my credit card that led me to take another look at DoorDash, and my local grocery store deli sandwich, which is already very expensive at about $10, would have been $25+ on there.
Yet it’s full of people using them, multiple times a week and for an entire family. I had coworkers casually mention that they spend $2k+/mo on DoorDash orders. It’s one aspect of the American consumerism that always baffles me.
When employees are underpaid (see Windsurf), HN be like: investors and C-suites take all the gains, off with their heads!
When employees are generously (and proactively) compensated for the financial milestones of the company, HN be like: it’s a bubble, it’s irresponsible, investors are fools, off with their heads!
I applaude OpenAI and its investors for approving these moves. Even if it’s a bubble, sharing some of it with employees “before it bursts” is a noble action. I worked in startups where management kept employees in complete illiquidity until full wipeout inevitably happened, while many senior folks were able to take some off the table in targeted secondary transactions.
I really dislike these types of comments as they don't really contribute to the conversation. Beyond generally going against HN's rules, they don't really highlight anything meaningful or represent an actual cognitive dissonance.
Forums are composed of diverse sets of opinions and perspectives. When you get a lot of opinions together, opinions change - some of which can be explained simply by randomness.
Perhaps, it's not strictly against the letters of the guidelines - but I've always found these types of comments against the spirit of the guidelines. I'd largely say they go against the spirt of a few rules, especially: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes."
They're low effort, generic, populous comments that do little to contribute to the discussion.
I don't often comment on HN in either of these cases but... I think aspects of both things are true.
There is a serious AI bubble right now and also it is the norm in the startup/VC world to fuck over regular employees.
I'm happy for any normal people who got 1.5M here. But even in this case I believe this has more to do with weird poaching politics (and hype building) than it does being legitimately altruistic.
Both of these scenarios could be framed as “evidence of high variance”. Given that human societies as all levels of scale generally thrive under low-variance scenarios, it’s not surprising to see the general category of “high-variance” scenarios critiqued by the community.
You realize of course that you are also on HN and thus this apparent dichotomous behaviour applies to you as well? I imagine you have some reason for why it doesn't and I think you'll find that it can just as easily apply to everyone else.
While I clearly cannot control who upvotes my comments (though what you suggest seems completely nuts IMHO), I can genuinely say this is coming from an ex startup employee who has seen, and been subject to, many startup equity shenanigans (my comment history very likely touched on those over the years), so I will always applaud companies that generously compensate employees and not only senior management/investors.
Startups I worked before, who lost talent due to FAANG poaching (myself included), did not even have the business acumen to fight that, which would have been trivially possible by offering some liquidity at their “inflated” valuation. Instead, they kept those liquidity opportunities gated to senior management and investors. So I am applauding the difference in behavior here.
Do you have any hope that either what you are suggesting, or an increase in housing supply, will ever actually happen?
It's clearly interesting to speculate the ideal solution on the Internet, but after having been here 10+ years I worry that it's just never going to get better.
I wouldn’t even be interested in a house. Just give affordable cookie cutter apartments in a 50-floor building somewhere.
I am a renter so I don't have a horse in this race, but renting is many times the financially worse choice even in HCOL.
Why? Because rent inflates like crazy over here! In the Bay Area 7%+ a year is completely expected, and 10% is not unusual. I have been all over the Bay Area for more than a decade (San Francisco proper, East Bay, South Bay) and know this well. It's been nuts.
Random example: the 1 bedroom apartment that I lived in 2012 and was then going for $1,500 a month, is now going for $3,800 in the exact same building (with no/minimal renovations it seems, I just looked it up). An ~8% YoY increase. That will do it to any buy vs rent calculator, very easy to break even in under 5 years, and that's excluding the speculative ability to refinance if interest rates go down from the current 7%, in which case it becomes a huge boost.
Renting as a long term choice just works in European countries where normal people can lock in 5+ year leases with no or minimal rent increases. America is too profit-seeking and greedy for that.
I still rent for flexibility reasons, but I definitely see it as a luxury lifestyle choice, the most financially responsible thing would be to buy, even in HCOL.
All this in my opinion and personal experience, totally fine if people see it differently.
SF is the poster child of a HCOL where buying makes absolutely no sense.
Even if rent increases a lot, the buy to rent ratio is so horrible that it could continue to increase for MANY more years before buying could make sense.
I invite you to use the NYT Rent or buy calculator, It is clear as day:
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/upshot/buy-rent-calculator.html
I just did, picturing exactly the situation I'm in right now:
- Rent: $3,500
- Home price: $700,000 (a similar unit just sold for this price a few months ago in my building)
- Rent increase: 8%
- All other parameters left as default, which seem reasonable (and as I said, there might be chances of refinancing over the next 10 years, which would drastically skew the picture, but I'm leaving that assumption out)
The ratio of 0.5% monthly rent/price is common for non-luxury "dated" condos all over the city, so I think my situation reflects well the typical renter.
Once again, in my personal experience, guided by a decade+ of living here, what people miss is the crazy rate of rent inflation. There is always a massive rent increase right around the corner, and God forbid if you are forced to move (because the landlord wants you to, it happened a couple times), then you take a gigantic hit at market rate. Once you factor in these occasional resets and the standard yearly increase, you get very close to 10% rent increase.
Is this a condo with an outrageous HOA that you are not including? Many such cases that explain why condos are valued so much lower.
In SF I have been renting a 1.6M$ townhouse for 4k$/month, and that is very typical of what you can find in SF and in SV.
That has been my experience. Rent increase have been outrageous, but not as bad as the ratio between renting and buying. I would still rent even if my rent went up 50%...
I think you're leaving out other expenses. You'll be paying HOA fees (one friend in SF pays ~$1000 a month and I've heard of worse). You'll also be paying property tax at around $650 a month. You'll probably be paying some maintenance that your landlord would have had to cover (though maybe HOA fees cover some of that?)
On a related note, how do routine inspections work in the US? Does someone walk through the house taking photos every 6 or 12 months, making sure you're keeping the place clean and no damage etc? That's how it is here in Australia, and is absolutely the worst aspect of renting IMHO.
"Routine inspections are common in many states but not universal. Some states, like California and Texas, explicitly allow periodic inspections with proper notice, while others may have stricter regulations limiting landlord access unless there's a specific reason (e.g., repairs or suspected lease violations)."
> Why? Because rent inflates like crazy over here! In the Bay Area 7%+ a year is completely expected, and 10% is not unusual. I have been all over the Bay Area for more than a decade (San Francisco proper, East Bay, South Bay) and know this well. It's been nuts.
If you live in rent controlled housing in SF, your rent increases are gonna be a lot less than 10% a year. And you're unlikely to ever be evicted due to a house sale.
During our last apartment search, it was not particularly difficult to find a rent controlled apartment.
Rent controlled housing (depending on how implemented) can effectively create “land gentry” who have access to a valuable asset at below market prices that they can’t sell.
Nevertheless, I think it's unconscionable to let landlords arbitrarily increase rent and evict people at will. Rent control and increasing the housing supply should be orthogonal issues, more or less.
In the past I got laid off with 6mo severance and it was legitimately one of the best things to ever happen to me - hated the job and paid off all my credit cards. Found another job in a month.
> Over the decades, I have seen too many friends who have fallen for this story, 'hit their numbers' and loose their minds after 'retiring'. This is because the mind just unravels(unable to find meaning), if it doesn't have daily structure and purpose.
What specifically happened to them? I am one of those who cannot wait to quit my job (career altogether really) and I reached a good financial number, but don't have a clear future direction.
> Keep in mind that almost all of the FIRE advice available online has been written in a secular bull market that is almost 2 decades long
Most of the reasonable FIRE advice (e.g. https://earlyretirementnow.com/ quality) suggests a ~3-3.5% withdrawal rate, which has been measured using historical data way before the current secular market.
Is your take that even such withdrawal rate wouldn't work anymore, moving forward?
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