Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?
I've worked with remote workers from around the world. Let me preface by saying there are of course exceptions but:
What I've found is that most often Americans exhibit self-starting and creativity. What I mean by that is non-us workers are great if you give them a specific task, even a really hard task.
But if you give them a nebulous problem, or worse, a business outcome, they tend to perform much more poorly. And I rarely see non-americans say something like "I think our customers would like it if we added X to the product, can I work on that?".
I don't think it's because Americans are better at this -- I think it's cultural. America has a much higher risk tolerance than the rest of the world. Failing is considered a good thing in the USA. And the USA is much more entrepreneurial than the rest of the world.
These two things combined create a culture difference that makes a business difference.
Additionally, what I've found is that the exceptions tend to move here because their risk taking is much more acceptable here (or they are risk takers willing to move across the world, hard to say which way the causation goes).
Isn't that mostly a function of how incentives are aligned? I had a job with a lot of outsourcing to India. The Indians were given specific bits of code to write. They didn't even know how their code fit into the application.
Their entire incentive structure was geared toward getting them to write those bits of code as quickly as possible, finish, and take another task. There just wasn't any room for "self-starting and creativity".
I have a feeling if the entire application had been moved to India things would have been different.
Interestingly the biggest exceptions were ones that had at some point lived and worked in the USA, and then had returned to their home country for some reason or another.
> I have a feeling if the entire application had been moved to India things would have been different.
I had direct experience with this. We had an office of full time employees in India tasked with a project, but I still had to hand hold them through most of the key decisions (which I didn't have to do with the US based teams nearly as much).
You want a long list of simple tasks finished? Excellent workers. An endless ticket queue with simple problems? There's a few issues with them not escalating real problems, but ok.
You want an application developed and a lot of problems solved? Stay away.
And an incentives issue.
Some software engineers work and they do the job and if they finish the work early, the company just start having more expectations of them WHILE PAYING THE SAME. So you are effectively catered if you don't work or take more to do the same atleast in the consultancy or similar business in India.
I feel like a lot of Indians especially software devs don't have this allegiance to a company where we consider a company to be our "family", and I find it really fair. My cousins always tell me that a company extracts 10x more value from you than what they give you back. Not sure how much of that is true in US but some developers are literally exploited in India, they couldn't care less about an application developed if they are this stuck state of limbo where they won't get fired if they do shitty work but they won't really get higher up the ladder either and even if they do the good work, it would take years for the company to notice it and its better to just change companies for that raise.
An incentive issue at its finest which could and is fixed by many people, just because you used a consultancy that sucked or had people that sucked doesn't make us all shitty software devs man.
Its Not a cultural issue, It really offended me as by coating us all in this "culture", you said somethings which are clearly offending.
Maybe I can get the point that maybe software attracts a lot of shy people and so they are shy towards taking the first initiative but that's not a cultural issue.
The culture of our school depends, most schools don't incentivize extracurricular activities that much so we don't do it and that's why we don't usually take initiative, because boom everything matters what you wrote in 3 hours
The incentive system is flawed but maybe I have hope, I mean to be honest, Things aren't that better anywhere else in the world too. I just feel like either the devs I have met irl are absolutely really good from what I've seen or your guys experience hasn't been that good but it isn't that big of a difference and I feel like things are a little exaggerated when I come to such forums.
I'm not claiming they're well-paid, but I don't think this is the issue, or at least not the primary issue.