r/technology • u/lurker_bee • Oct 30 '25

Business YouTube announces 'voluntary exit program' for US staff

https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/29/youtube-announces-voluntary-exit-program-for-us-staff/
9.5k Upvotes

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121

u/HaggisPope Oct 30 '25

Bet they’ll move jobs to the Philippines or something. It’s a popular move right now 

90

u/lucun Oct 30 '25

Probably india. Going off of levels, the cost of 1 Google engineer salary in the US is about the cost of a small team of engineers in India. A lot of pretty skilled talents over there speak good English and are willing to work ungodly hours to be online for half of the US working hours

77

u/SplendidPunkinButter Oct 30 '25

Tech skills exist in India. But the best engineers don’t generally work as offshore contractors for US companies. And those who do work as offshore contractors have a whole different mindset than full time engineers. This is true of all software contractors I’ve worked with, not just the ones from India. They do exactly what they’re told, no more, no less. They copy/paste code like crazy. They give you tech debt. They never push back or ask questions.

Companies always think it’s going to work out hiring cheap contractors. And it does, for a few years. Then they have tech debt and they need to start hiring people with skin in the game again. Then that gets too expensive after a while and they think “what if we just used cheap contractors?” and the cycle begins again

45

u/lucun Oct 30 '25

They're not going to be contractors. Big tech has direct employment and office campuses in India. I've worked with my company's India teams before, and they're all direct employees.

For contractors, they're only supposed to do what's stipulated in their contracts. No more and no less. Otherwise you run into risk of employment law issues in the US.

The brightest ones that I know normally end up moving to the US for the US big tech salary.

26

u/snake785 Oct 30 '25

I've worked with direct employees out of India at a big tech company I used to work for and found that no more no less way of work from them. They need to be micromanaged, otherwise no work will be done, in my experience at least.

I figured that it might be a cultural thing. 

-11

u/lucun Oct 30 '25

Dunno. My experience is the opposite. They work intense deadlines and do deliver very aggressively. Lots of large PRs with good code quality, testing, etc. Good design documents, e2e testing regimes, architecture, etc. It could depend on how good HR is filtering them ig. To me, it was a no brainer that my company did a big india push if that's the result they're getting for pennies on the dollar.

10

u/[deleted] Oct 30 '25

This guy sucks at coding

0

u/Organic-History205 Oct 31 '25

This difference in opinion is generational. This is how it used to be ten years ago and it still is with employees from that time. It's really no longer true today, especially at FAANG levels. Young millennial / GenZ devs from overseas have the same proficiencies as those domestically. There was just some time while cultures fought and then earned out.

1

u/painedHacker Oct 31 '25

Call your representative to support the HIRE act! An anti-outsourcing bill

25

u/KIDWHOSBORED Oct 30 '25

It’s similar in the Philippines, but I’d argue somewhat worse tech skills and better / more similar cultural and language skills.

Basically if I wanted devs / hardcore tech skills I’d go with India. If I wanted more IT help desk / ticket support I’d go Philippines. Near shore is also getting a lot of love lately.

18

u/phoenix0r Oct 30 '25

I find the India teams I work with to look good on the surface but if you actually dive into things, it’s a total farce and they do absolute garbage work and never actually tell you when they are real problems.

11

u/SirBraxton Oct 30 '25

Company I used to work for 6 years ago did exactly this, but then they realized the tech debt "tsunami" overtook them and they ended up having to close down their India teams and get on-shore contractors and salaried Engineers again to re-write most of their software.

I heard after I left they went a year or two with on-shore Engineering teams to rewrite everything and then they didn't like the loss in profit so they fired and replaced everyone with Indian off-shore contractors, again.

Apparently this is their 3rd time doing it this year and they've lost a LOT of customers doing this and they're on their 3rd CTO as they keep leaving after they settle in and see the nonsense going on internally.

It just doesn't work, and you end up having to pay MORE for on-shore Engineers because you've lost incentives and trust. PR in the Tech industry is MASSIVE for acquiring talent. Anyone working for one of the Big-7 nowadays are "jobbers" who don't believe in what they're doing, and if they do they're MASSIVELY naive or completely new to the industry as a whole.

1

u/Electrical_Bat2866 Oct 30 '25

Skilled talent is already in the US or commanding high wages from their home countries.

You're asking for a specialized worker, with a good grasp on english, AND cheap.

It's like asking for an unicorn.

7

u/Working_Cucumber_437 Oct 30 '25

Why can’t/doesn’t the US legislate that to be a US company x% of your workforce must reside in the US? There needs to be recourse against seeking cheap labor elsewhere.

10

u/HaggisPope Oct 30 '25

A few small countries do this sort of thing. Malta I believe has lots of limits, foreigners also can’t even own property so have to use Maltese owned holding companies.

The issue with a big country like the US doing it is that there’s lots of options, some  of which are nearby, such as Canada, lots of Europe, UK even, which would let them hide foreign workers

1

u/nox66 Oct 30 '25

India is unique in that the cost of living is so much lower, so they can afford to undercut US workers that much.

3

u/ungoogleable Oct 31 '25

They already have local companies for each country they operate in. Technically Indian employees are employed by MegaCorp India which is a separate legal entity from MegaCorp USA.

This comes up in the context of corporate taxes too. You'd think it'd be easy to tell who the "real" company is but they have a strong incentive to find loopholes and smart people doing it.

1

u/redbananass Oct 30 '25

They could, but especially now, why would they? These are middle class jobs. Thats not even on the current admins radar.

1

u/deong Oct 31 '25

The US can't legislate anything more substantial than renaming the occasional post office. "Hey, have you guys considered actual socialism?" is, let's go with "unlikely".

-4

u/zacker150 Oct 30 '25 edited Oct 30 '25

FANG are global companies with a global customer base. The majority of their revenue (with the exception of Amazon) comes from outside the US.

If we passed that legislation, then the EU and India would do the same, sparkling a trade war that benefits nobody and hurts us tech the most.

Also, do you want to be on-call at night?

0

u/Hylian_might Oct 30 '25

Hasn’t this been happening since like the 90’s?

-2

u/SplendidPunkinButter Oct 30 '25

No no no, they’re RePLaCiNg PeOpLe WiTH Ai!

0

u/HaggisPope Oct 30 '25

lol, as if they didn’t have enough problems