Either your wife is a massive outlier in skills, or the company just isn’t working her hard as they could be. As remote work opens jobs to the broader world, Americans are quickly going to find out that if they can’t generate the business impact of a Serbian or Chinese developer working 60+ hours a week they are going to find themselves in a very unpleasant situation. Some Jeff Dean sorts could do that in 5 minutes a week but most people can’t.
Sure, you're right. I wouldn't say that the problem is that the companies are not working her as hard as they could be; I'd say that what they think is a full time position should actually be part time. But they've refused to see it that way, for one reason or another.
We (Westerners in general) would indeed be screwed if you could just replace people with cheaper workers from other countries. It's not that simple, though. Language and cultural differences are a massive barrier. I say that as someone who has worked with a lot of East and Southeast Asians who are brilliant, hardworking people -- but it still takes a lot of effort to figure out how to work together, and that's at a startup scale where you can really pay attention to each person. Larger companies tend to have a lot of outsourcing horror stories.
Certainly, today, an on-shore American developer has more ability to generate business impact than an offshore Southeast Asian developer. But I think that's more because of the bias-laden and chummy way that companies are managed, which is an artifact of office-driven culture. Remote work cultures will be more based on written communication and demonstrated results, and then American developers not in the FAANG skill bracket are going to find out that they are not a very attractive buy when someone almost as good is available for 1/5 the cost.
Yeah, I thought so too. Then I started hiring (for my very small startup) in SE Asia. And, well, maybe I'm biased and chummy, but it just wasn't incredibly smooth sailing. This is purely remote, almost all written communication, etc.
I have no regrets and still employ the same people today, but it just wasn't so straightforward as you're making it out to be. I think it's actually easier for a startup to have, let's say, an entirely Indonesian team including the founders, targeting an American market, versus a startup having an American founding team then start hiring in Indonesia. (For big companies I don't know, but I'd imagine it all gets even more complicated.)
Haha, man, I had the same thinking ("Surely I can find some genius programmers in Asia or Eastern Europe willing to do the same work for a fraction of the price") but the reality is very different
I had no luck with it at all myself. I'd get completely useless low-quality crap work out of these guys when I got anything out of them at all.
I think you'd have to hire some local managers and maybe send over some experienced devs from the USA to train up the locals, at which point it'd only be a matter of time until they realize their new worth and jump ship for FAANG or whatever.
