> who graduates a bootcamp today will need about 4 - 5 years of highly focused coding to become as productive as the Indian L4/L5 engineer that they would be compared to in this real comparison
First of all, I think it’s disingenuous to compare a boot camp hire with any L5 engineer, regardless of what country they’re from. A boot camp hire should be compared to a new hire/L4. Doing an L5 comparison is moving the goal post, which I assume wasn’t intended on your part.
A boot camp engineer absolutely can be as productive as any other L4 hire, Indian or not Indian. I think the L4 Indian hires in particular come better prepped for the leet style coding interviews. But in terms of quickly ramping up and becoming productive engineers, there’s absolutely nothing unique about a hire from India in many, if not majority of cases.
There are other stronger incentives for indexing on non resident hires. I could pay you market rate at $200K/year + equity that vests over four years. Or, I can bring a person from India and pay them $140K a year, reduced equity grant, and for the most part, I know that person isn’t going to quit. Especially with certain cultures that are more risk averse, they’re going to think twice, even if another employer is willing to offer sponsorship.
[Levels are confusing, I was using the non amazon leveling where l3 is entry, l4 intermediate, l5 is senior, for this post I'll use amazon leveling, l4 = entry, l5 = intermediate].
> First of all, I think it’s disingenuous to compare a boot camp hire with any L5 engineer, regardless of what country they’re from. A boot camp hire should be compared to a new hire/L4. Doing an L5 comparison is moving the goal post, which I assume wasn’t intended on your part.
Lets look at this from the perspective of the Director/VP, you're looking at filling headcount in your org, 25 seats. Its May, and you're behind the targets that were given to you in January. You have easy to source from talent pools (intermediate level or fresh masters degree graduate L5 H1Bs from India) and bootcamp graduates (3 months of coding experience). Your budget can pay up to 200k/person, which is much higher than the going rate for either of these profiles, so comp isn't a problem. Your boss (VP/SVP) is largely evaluating you on your ability to staff your org and complete projects. Do you fill these 25 seats using L5 Indian immigrants, or fresh bootcamp grads?
At Amazon, a director would either bring the Indian immigrants. Hell - he will bring them from his own city in India.
But if you’re asking me what I would do - I’d probably look for anyone who is a competent hire, without favoring H1Bs, and try to evaluate them a bit more than a leetcode style interview.
As I was saying, Amazon has entire organizations that are H1Bs. These are stable businesses that I don’t believe are really growth focused in 2022z
If we want to focus on costs, I think there are better options to deprecate and sunset entire services. There’s also significant opportunity at Amazon to trim the fat. Not necessarily firing people but moving off places that aren’t as valuable and moving them onto initiatives with a meaningful ROI.
Could you kindly elaborate on the latter? Are you suggesting Amazon could outsource more of their SDE jobs to India, a huge fear of mine as an engineer in the west
Talent is global now, but culture and time zones still matter. For the top 15% of companies and talent offshoring is less about “pay people less” and it’s more about “hire a team of 80 people in a year”. It’s extremely difficult to hire a team of 80 US based engineers in 12 months, even with top of market pay, even with fancy stock and remote work. It’s much easier to do this in Latam for example because there is more slack in the labor market.
Is it the slack? Or is it the fact that US-based companies have much more to offer this pool than they can offer the comparable group in the US. In particular, much higher pay than locally available and the prestige of working for a US firm.
This is a very accurate hypothesis. I live and work in LatAm and know several CTOs of startups over here. The last 2 years have been ruthless for Engineering leaders around here: lots of turnover of Devs that are being hired by US companies throwing loads of money at them. While the local tech companies cannot afford to get engineers as they are unable to compete on salary.
It's great for ICs but terrible for leaders, particularly of small/starting startups .
It's already happening. Amazon has it's biggest office in Hyderabad. They literally hire tens of thousands of Indian devs for 30-40k dollars per year. The talent pool in India is much bigger than US. A lot of SDE jobs are definitely moving in India. Indians are good at tech due to their STEM focussed education, work harder(due to economic instability), complain less and come cheaper. A perfect opportunity for corporate America to exploit. All American companies from Adobe to Goldman to Intuit have offices in India.
First of all, I think it’s disingenuous to compare a boot camp hire with any L5 engineer, regardless of what country they’re from. A boot camp hire should be compared to a new hire/L4. Doing an L5 comparison is moving the goal post, which I assume wasn’t intended on your part.
A boot camp engineer absolutely can be as productive as any other L4 hire, Indian or not Indian. I think the L4 Indian hires in particular come better prepped for the leet style coding interviews. But in terms of quickly ramping up and becoming productive engineers, there’s absolutely nothing unique about a hire from India in many, if not majority of cases.
There are other stronger incentives for indexing on non resident hires. I could pay you market rate at $200K/year + equity that vests over four years. Or, I can bring a person from India and pay them $140K a year, reduced equity grant, and for the most part, I know that person isn’t going to quit. Especially with certain cultures that are more risk averse, they’re going to think twice, even if another employer is willing to offer sponsorship.