If you think a dev is a code monkey then yes, it doesn’t matter if you hire someone from vietnam or seattle for your US business. If you’re actually looking for a software engineer then i have bad news for you: professional software development is all about communication (with customers, requirements engineers, other developers and so on). That’s why you are paying them ten times more, so they have a chance to understand your business domain and can consult you on technical decisions. Otherwise every manager and business owner on earth, including me, would hire just the Vietnamese dev instead of the 10 times more expensive US dev.
Even local subcontracting is quite difficult due to communication lines.
I’ve worked with very talented offshore developers. They had good English, good CS knowledge, and good work ethics. Results were always crap anyway. And their number one complaint was always “they don’t tell us enough, and we have to guess things”.
The dutch isn’t earning ten times less than the average US developer. At best two times less, but that’s it (and FAANG salaries in US tech hubs are in no way representative for average US dev salaries)
But it’s exactly the same type of complaint “salaries in SFBA are higher for the same job in Amsterdam”, why shouldn’t a Pakistani dev level the same complain about developers in Amsterdam?
For the same reason i outlined above: communication. Different time zones, language barriers, cultural barriers and so on. The communication between the SFBA and amsterdam team may still be easier due to more similiar cultures than between SFBA and pakistan.
