The paradox of remote jobs and offshoring jobs
If companies go full remote, the competition for software engineers positions becomes global – a US software engineer would compete with engineers in the UK, France, India, Brazil, Vietnam etc. The competition isn’t quite fair though
- A US company will prefer having its leadership in the US – this is why the vast majority of directors and above at Google/Meta/etc. are in the US. At some level, soft skills and in person opportunities are more important than raw technical skills
- A software engineer in India (or non Western countries) costs significantly less than a software engineer in the SF bay area
At the end of the day, my expectation is that more and more jobs will move to cheaper markets (cheaper as compensation wise, not quality wise).
One of the common arguments I hear about why software engineer jobs will stay in the US come from anecdotes – I’m sure someone will comment on how their experience working with remote engineers from India showed that they weren’t as good as them. My 2 cents is that this has more to do with the hiring process and the job expectations than anything else – some companies hire people to do mechanical/tedious work and they are less picky about who they hire. It doesn’t mean there are no amazing talents in these places (you can simply look at the amount of US immigrants that are amazing software engineers). The arguments I hear about India, Brazil etc. used to be said about China but I don’t think one would argue today that Chinese software engineers aren’t good – they have built amazing products backed by rock solid technologies (e.g. TikTok and Wechat have massive scale).
A pretty good signal about the presence of great talent is how Google is aggressively expanding in India as are many other large tech companies in similar places. My understanding is that they are not spinning up 2nd class engineering offices there – it may take some time for these offices to adapt to US expectations/culture but they will grow to become as important than their US counterparts.
If you live in India or places where large tech companies are coming, you should consider joining them – I believe these are amazing opportunities that will give you experience that are difficult to get otherwise (e.g. if you work at Google, you will still see first hand a world class infrastructure)