And why people are jumping out of buildings, actually and metaphorically, in 996 cultures.

i think Amazon only had one person jump out of a building last year. it's not as common as you might think.

One is too many...

"One company only had one suicide via jumping last year" is not a ringing endorsement.

I'd say the exact opposite. engineering is markedly being outsourced to europe.

There’s sort of a rotation going on in a lot of companies. There were companies which had Europe as the low cost location compared to America are now moving the type of work that had been done in America to Europe and what had been in Europe to India. But also companies treating European countries as high cost now and looking for new low cost countries

we also sort of effed up a while ago with changes to section 174... suddenly software devs in the states were 10%-25% more expensive. once that happened it made sense to see if moving devs to europe for situations where you have a european based product and sales team made sense.

in the states we've sort of repaired the damage of the section 174 changes, but i think they were rolled into a tax bill that sunsets in a few years. so we may see this again in 2029.

Are they? Do you have a source for that? My impression is that it's easier to find engineering work in Stockholm than in silicon valley atm, but I haven't measured objectively.

I live in Spain. I’ve been in the industry for the last 10 years.

I’ve seen from a very close distance several European companies move a big part of their operations to India. Have had close friends laid off recently and seen them struggle for months to find a new jobs. Plus, I see tighter freelance market these days.

This was unthinkable not long ago.

UK companies have been moving IT or other operation functions to India for decades

It's the typical Western management behaviour of knowing the cost of everything but the value of nothing

I've seen that happen at Stockholm companies too.

And then a few years later, when it doesn't work out, I saw them bringing it back.

Outsourcing seems to go in cycles, like fashion

My former company had the brilliant idea to outsource native app development to india. This was mabye 2015 in germany and they tried to roll out the app for several years. There were severe communication and quality problems. Our company wasted massive time on it, until they finally added a single native app dev and we started making progress. We already had like 30 people in tech department and adding a single position was a fucking joke on the payroll.

Any manager that thinks he can beat the value of a single dev with a random ass sweatshop from india is delusional. The cultural difference is massive, quality and work ethics as well. It's a high friction job for a manager. Well at least if you expect a bit of quality and timeliness.

(Sorry for all indians that do a good job, it's just the sweatshop/agency remote software dev culture simply doesn't work. Even a european sweatshop usually delivers worse quality then inhouse devs.)

I’ve worked with great engineers from India/Pakistan. I didn’t hire them, so don’t know too much about the process of how to find them but they were definitely as good as anyone I’ve seen in Europe.

The floor is much lower, but the ceiling can be the same-ish on a case-by-case basis. That's been my experience as well.

Stockholm is not representative of entire Europe same how SF isn't representative of entire NA. There's too many variables and shades of gray to give a simple answer, with closest to a correct answer being "it depends" based on where you live, how good you are and how in demand your skill set is to the demand of your local market, but the market is pretty much fucked in many high-CoL locations worldwide due to offshoring to cheaper locations and many businesses in Europe seeing orders fall.

I deliberately chose to compare two tech-heavy locations to avoid weird and difficult comparisons like the tech industry in rural Nebraska Vs Moldavia.

Stockholm was a natural point of comparison for me given that I used to live there until very recently.i have a decent picture of the dev market in Stockholm. Silicon valley is the most mentioned tech centre on here, and is therefore the American tech market I know the most about (even if my knowledge is very limited in this front)

Sure but then you still can't extrapolate the comparison beyond SF and Stockholm. I'm also in Europe but the job market where I live don't give a shit about what it looks like in Stockholm but they can diverge massively.

is that for startups or for the big guys like Ericsson?

i have to admit i was surprised by how much startup activity was going on in Stockholm in the last 20 years. but disappointed by how few startups don't get B or C rounds or get bought after their A or B rounds run out.