CS major with 30yrs in tech. What you describe is just how the tech sector works. When something is needed and you have the right skills, companies are willing to pay. As any technology matures and innovation slows, other geographies will pick up. Folks in US has to stay in the forefront, keep learning and innovating to be competitive. It’s never boring and not for everybody. Keep it up.
For over three decades, a significant number of jobs from American companies have been outsourced to India. Now, the situation has escalated to the point where even top Computer Science graduates from Berkeley struggle to find employment. Some have been unemployed for more than three years, while others are resorting to becoming elementary school teachers. Unfortunately, many Americans remain unaware of this phenomenon.
I work in tech, but in the bottom half of the OSI Model and I'm glad I'm there. It will be a long while before remote workers and AI can pull physical cable, rack servers, bolt on wireless access points, configure from new-in-box, and be trusted to engineer the core network and firewall policies. "You can talk about us, but you can't talk without us."
I think we're heading more and more towards self entrepreneurship, when you have a set of skills you won't need a company to hire you to work for its clients. Instead, if you can prove you're skilled in a certain area, that final client will hire you directly to work for a limited time as a contractor basically, so no commitment for the long term from both sides.
Senior Software Engineer and Data Science Engineer here with 30 years experience. Back in 2007 we hired teams from India because every company was doing it as it was a good look for your division. Language barrier could be an issue and was sometimes but it did work out most of the time. This is not a new thing, it’s been going on for some time. The big difference is the cost of communications between countries is not longer huge and FaceTime or Zoom for free is a game changer from 2007.
After applying for 400 jobs and not hearing anything back I've decided to work on finding ways to monetize my own personal projects. We will see how that goes!
I work in tech as a RHEL sysadmin. The tech industry is a LOT larger than strickly software engineering. Infact Software Engineering only makes up a small faction of the entire Tech industry given that the I.T field is a very broad field with so may domains and specificalies. There are plenty of jobs out there as you aren't tied to a single industry in IT since you can work in any field in IT. You can work in cyber Security, Networking, Cloud, DevOps, System Administration, Data Science, Artificial intelligence and so on. Theres a lot of over lap in many roles esp DevOps Engineer which is common for Developers or Sysadmins to transition into.
I'm a frontend developer from Mexico and I got 6 months without a job, and now I see that the companies need fullstack, that's not cool, if you are a frontend dev or backend dev, so I decided to learn all about backend, but to be honest, is all about LUCK
There is one more reason that existed before covid. Most software developers are not hi-tech anymore with open source projects, cloud services that handled everything. Software developers just need to know how to use these tools. Same in AI, most developers just need to know how to call these models. That's different 10+ years ago, when you are the super hero if you can build a website that can serve millions users.
This is true partly but the interest rate in the US also makes it hard for companies to hire without free money.
Interesting. I live in Indonesia, and yeah, being a software engineer here doesn't pay really well (if you work at an Indonesian company or overseas companies that have office branches here), it's even hard to get a salary raise. That being said, I recently saw many remote opportunities from US companies hiring people from the philippine, thai, and other SEA countries. While the salary is not as high in the US, I think the salary is more than enough to live in here
Most IT jobs require 3-5 years of experience minimum. There are barely junior jobs. It's frustrating.
good points. Also another reason, there was a law called Section 174 that started in 2022, that changed how businesses could write off software development expenses and salaries as research and development purposes to get a tax deduction that year (and was changed so the tax deduction gets spread out over 5 years). This impacted tech companies and hurt the tech market
Healthcare needs good software engineers, I can tell you that. Software is everywhere.
Definitely this feeling of uncertainty is flying around all of us software engineers these days, not only in the US but around the world. The pressure of stay relevant has been always strong, and even more now with the AI as a new player. On the other hand there's this situation where as you mentioned, companies in the US (and other countries as well) are looking for software engineer out there, expecting to pay less for the same skills, and probably people in India, China, or Latin America will find these salaries attractive, although is not that easy, due in addition to all the soft and technical skills and experience that you may offer, there's another layer of complexity to add, the language. Anyway, for one reason or another, things have changed and there's nothing else to do but keep playing the best possible.
Hi, I am someone that always did CS, in the UK I did it in College, Bachelors and masters. I have always been a software engineer and have been working as one for 17 years now. Although companies can always go to cheaper countries to get cheaper engineers, I would that this is less likely and mainly happens on smaller less established companies, bigger stronger companies rarely do this or if they do, it is only partial. The main reason for layoffs is high interest rates, not many people know that a lot of tech companies have to borrow money to employ people and if interest rates are high, then they are less likely to borrow
move to south america and work for lower wages, it's quite a lot down here anyway, thank you for sharing it, greetings from Perú 🇵🇪
You nailed it. There are still many people in the US complaining about returning to the office, arguing that their work could be done remotely. Those people don't realize they are essentially arguing their way out of a job. If your position can be done remotely, it will be done by someone else willing to work for lower wage in another country. As for AI, it's just another tool in a programmer's toolkit. It will make programmers more efficient, as opposed to replace them.
I live in the US and was a hardcore programmer. Now, my company moved me to a cheaper branch location to manage 7 offshore programmers with much cheaper cost and cover multiple time zones for continuous 24hr DevOps cycle.
@logicthat5591