alt Hacker NewsOne thing that I haven’t seen widely reported on, but this article highlights is that the reversal is only for US based employees, so outsourcing jobs overseas will be more expensive compared to American talent (if salaries are equal). This seems good for the US tech industry, and I’m curious how this form protectionism compares to jobs in other sectors.
It’ll also be interesting to watch to see if this has any side-effects on the job market. In my experience in big-tech, a lot of the overseas jobs were historically supporting roles and “keep the lights on” for legacy services. I can imagine these tasks aren’t valuable enough to pay Silicon Valley salaries, and that’s why lower cost talent was used. It’ll be interesting to see if these roles move to low-COL or remote American workers. I can totally imagine that a European or even Indian salary for a senior engineer in big tech would be livable in some parts of the US.
Replies
> so outsourcing jobs overseas will be more expensive compared to American talent (if salaries are equal).
I think this very much depends on how companies are "outsourcing"/hiring.
Like, if the devs you are outsourcing to are delivering you a "project-based app with ongoing support". Did you hire "developers" or are you doing business with a development company?
For many large tech cos, they also have local entities or PEOs, where people working for Facebook work for Facebook Ireland, or Facebook India.
So I'm not sure how much impact it has -- probably mostly for smaller shops that might hire 1 guy directly in a different country?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44470230
> 15-year amort rule hurts your tax deduction, but 50 %+ lower offshore wages more than make up for it.
> (if salaries are equal)
That's rarely the case, right?
> It’ll be interesting to see if these roles move to low-COL or remote American workers. I can totally imagine that a European or even Indian salary for a senior engineer in big tech would be livable in some parts of the US.
I think they will, Indian salaries for the top top eng are already comparable to decent eng from MCOL or LCOL US, so I could see this happening.
> In my experience in big-tech, a lot of the overseas jobs were historically supporting roles and “keep the lights on” for legacy services.
I know a couple of tech CEOs (very small services companies), and they use offshore for all development. They don't have a single US engineer; only project managers.