Why we built our core engineering team outside of the SF Bay Area

I was hoping for a thoughtful article about a US company&#x27;s experiences with offshore development.<p>What I got was a very thinly veiled advertisement and business case for Bridge Academy. Originally I thought it was an offshore staffing firm, but having looked at their site I can&#x27;t tell what it&#x27;s supposed to be.<p>I <i>think</i> it&#x27;s an offshore staffing firm that&#x27;s ashamed of admitting it&#x27;s an offshore staffing firm, with the twist that the candidates pay, once hired, rather than the hiring companies. In exchange, they get some sort of nebulously defined training and mentoring for an undefined price. Oh, and the mentors get a commission when candidates are placed.<p>Top it off with a blockchain-focused curriculum and a list of blockchain-obsessed hiring companies and it all feels... naïve, I guess would be the right word. Young. Enthusiastic.

I wouldn&#x27;t build greenfield in India (I&#x27;ve had to deal with the quality coming out of there on numerous occasions) but I also wouldn&#x27;t build greenfield in SanFran.<p>It&#x27;s less the cost to me and more the turnover. I as a worker have every incentive to take a position in SanFran to get to SanFran and get established (outside of the money). I also then have every incentive to leave as soon as possible for one of the Big 5 since it&#x27;s gold on my resume (even if I don&#x27;t stay there more than a year or two).

Come to Salt Lake City. We even have absurd branding to lure you &quot;silicon slopes!&quot;<p>There are a few SF organizations with satellite offices here. I&#x27;ve worked for one, have friends working for others. It&#x27;s a pretty decent arrangement. You can get a team setup here for the cost of a single employee in the bay (especially when you factor in real estate.) Hell, maybe more. Shit, some of us will take pay cuts to avoid working for the Domo&#x27;s of the Provo Valley. Don&#x27;t have to deal with time zone issues, and when shit hits the fan it&#x27;s an hour and a half flight. I&#x27;ve flown to SF and back, same day multiple times.

We have a distributed team in India &amp; Silicon Valley. The market in India has changed dramatically from what’s being portrayed here. A strong VP, engg candidate is about $200k, a new grad is at least $30k and it rises rapidly as you get more senior. There are stock options on top of this.<p>Why is this happening? (a) Lot of companies are opening up offices in India and willing to pay higher to set up the team quickly; (b) The VC finding scenario is as crazy as it exists in Silicon Valley. SoftBank is a global firm :)<p>It’s not as straightforward to build a 10x engineering team in India. Sure, it’s probably cheaper than Bay Area but you need to consider the overall cost of communication, speed of process, especially for a startup.

If you&#x27;re an engineer in India with skills that mirror those of American engineers, why would you settle for a significantly lower pay?<p>The best Indian engineers I&#x27;ve worked with all made their way over to the US OR knew how much they were worth and set their rates SLIGHTLY below US salaries.

ugh, as a developer from a remote country that’s been working for 10+ years for US companies I run as fast as possible from companies like this one.<p>If I provide the same value as US engineers, why should I make less than US engineers?<p>Fortunately, I’ve been able to make my case. I hope these Indian engineers realize they’re making 1&#x2F;15th what they should.

Can&#x27;t agree more. Hiring in Silicon Valley for early-stage startups now is impossible. Total Compensation numbers for software engineering is skyrocketing and you&#x27;ll never be able to compete with FAANG companies. Sad reality but expected.

By all means build a team outside the Bay Area, there&#x27;s plenty of talent elsewhere but the assumption you will get the same talent in India for specialized disciplines like machine learning (as opposed to generic web dev or other commoditized skills) shows this company was built by hucksters with no idea about technology, and not a little contempt for engineers.

&quot;For each engineer that we hired in the Bay Area, we could have hired 10–15 outside of it. Everyone has heard of 10x engineers, but what they don&#x27;t tell you is that the Bay Area doesn&#x27;t have a monopoly on them.&quot; This really surprised me, thought it was a big gap, but not this big

This is a pretty disingenuous comparison, but a great way to advertise your business. I&#x27;m sure everyone involved will gets exactly what they pay for.

This article made me think immediately of the mythical month man. From my rather uninformed perspective - I never tried hiring in India - it would be very hard to actually screen and select well, while quantity alone is not necessarily a good thing.<p>Edit: fixed punctuation

&gt;But who will build this Bridge? With Blah Academy, we have formalized our blah for blah blah blah<p>Of course, when you hire an engineer in the Bay Area, it&#x27;s practical to avoid the fucking middleman.

I&#x27;d take a 60% pay cut to not work in SFBA.<p>Maybe there are 10x-calibre folks in SFBA. But they cost 5-20x.<p>Some companies have recognized that 5x-calibre employees at 1-2x payscale is better than 5-10x-calibre employees at 5-20x payscale. They offer better standard of living outside SFBA.

This is the core theme behind why Drive Capital threw down roots in Columbus, Ohio. The talent is there, and they&#x27;re beginning to see the fruits of their patient investment.

I remember back in the 2000s there was a huge fear of work being outsourced to India. It makes sense: since you can get engineers for 10 times less cost. But these fears never really materialized. there was still so much hiring in the bay area for the last 20 years.<p>Certainly low-margin businesses that need to compete will be hiring in India. That&#x27;s probably why you don&#x27;t see many web development body shops in the bay area. But, for monopoly businesses like google or facebook, the cost of labor doesn&#x27;t really matter much for them.

<i>After struggling to hire top-notch engineers in the bay area as salaries started to spiral beyond reason, we decided to conduct a radical experiment in trying to train overseas developer talent on our tech stack before hiring them.</i><p>TL;DR -- They have rebranded unpaid internships.