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440 points pseudolus | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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fibers ◴[] No.45052852[source]
The accounting note is not true in the traditional sense. The field in the US is just getting offshored to India/PH/Eastern Europe for better or for worse. There is even a big push to lower the educational requirements to attain licensure in the US (Big 4 partners want more bodies and are destroying the pipeline for US students). Audit quality will continue to suffer and public filers will issue bunk financials if they aren't properly attested to.
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raincole ◴[] No.45059205[source]
It's amusing to see programmers in the US promoting remote work.

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?

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elevation ◴[] No.45060951[source]
As a US-based developer I do not feel threatened by the "cheap" offshore developers I encounter. I've repeatedly been hired to clean up after offshore developers who:

* lied about their capabilities/experience to get the job,

* failed to grok requirements through the language barrier,

* were unable to fix critical bugs in their own code base,

* committed buggy chatgpt output verbatim,

* and could not be held liable because their firm is effectively beyond the reach of the US legal system.

In a couple of projects I've seen a single US based developer replace an entire offshore team, deliver a superior result, and provide management with a much more responsive communication loop, in 1% of the billable hours. The difference in value is so stark that one client even fired the VP who'd lead the offshoring boondoggle.

Software talent is simply not as fungible as some MBAs would like to believe.

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Cthulhu_ ◴[] No.45061219{3}[source]
I've worked alongside (but never with) offshore developers, often from the big consultancy companies. One thing they tend to do is place one competent developer and a dozen less-so, so that the work gets done by the one but they get paid for a dozen people.

But I also believe the managers hiring offshore employees are fully aware of this. If they aren't then they're not very good managers and/or have no idea what they're doing.

The offshore people mainly work on SAP and legacy systems though; it turns out it's very hard to find willing or competent people in Europe that actually want to work on / with SAP. However, foreign workers have less qualms about learning stuff like that, since the money is really good.

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1. rafaelmn ◴[] No.45062789{4}[source]
Yes this is the agency model here in Croatia. You would get one senior developer covering 2-3 projects and a few junior/mid developers working full time.

I have a feeling it's not working that well anymore because the people covering those juniors just earn more going to work straight for the client and they have less burden on them. Used to be harder so the agencies had leverage, nowadays even big companies will hire individual B2B contractor.