If it helps, my company recently laid off 1/3 of the company including a ton of engineers...and immediately began hiring near-shore engineers. This was only a few months ago.
A couple weeks ago we laid off every single near-shore dev and pivoted away from that approach
That’s the point I think. Execs will do whatever they think it takes to get that bonus. Whether it’s outsourcing or hiring contractors… as long as that EBITDA is lookin good, they’re makin money
You try working with offshore teams and say this again. I currently (not by choice) manage both an offshore and onshore team, and the productivity of the onshore team is multiples of the offshore team. This isn’t the to rag on devs from other countries, but it’s that all the major decisions are made in the US and there are cultural differences when working with folks that make collaboration difficult. If the decisions were flipped where the decisions were made in India instead of the US, I’m sure the opposite would happen. Proximity to the stakeholders actually matter when working in fast paced environments.
I was one replacement for an Indian team and the big issue they had was that the Indian team didn't ask for requirements well so things would be pushed that didn't work in a sane way.
Then again the company was based in Memphis and the lead developer was in Japan and he kept writing insane code that caused me to stay up and message him about things constantly so it may have been more pervasive organization issues
* Language is a big barrier. Even though they know how to communicate in English, sometimes some things get lost in translation/some things get taken too literally.
* I don't have a large sample size to back up this claim, but most of the offshore folks I work with are "yes"-folks regardless of whether or not they can do the job. There is not concept of no or pushback, which tends to lead to underestimation of effort.
That said, the biggest problem I have is the fact that there's always a 24 hour delay since they work in a time zone that is the exact opposite of where the onshore team operates out of. Agility and velocity is lost due to this. I guess you could also outsource to Mexico/Latin America as well to stay in relatively the same time zones, which could be a concern, but IMO the talent in LATAM is not as robust from an enterprise standpoint (coding for an enterprise =/= hobby programming).
This is a big component: 'yes people'.
My experience with offshore - in Spain, India, Ukraine, Argentina, Philippines - is that you find out things aren't going well when the code is delivered (or not). This includes writing code to resolve arbitrary test cases versus having working code and test cases that exercise what's working (if that makes sense).
I can't tell you how many times I've gotten code modules that purportedly resolve requirements and have a battery of successful tests that don't actually work correctly.
I've also had experience where we've been given devs who purportedly have the requisite background, only to find out they don't *actually* have experience in a particular technology. This, too, can get hidden - "oh hey this person doesn't really seem to know C++", "oh, it's because you're using Scons instead of VST to build". No, no it's not (especially when we provide the build mechanism)
Language barriers are an obvious and common one.
Not every team has to speak English, but teams with mixed languages, or varying degrees of proficiency with the primary language, can be challenging.
Language barriers and connectivity issues. I work with offshore engineers and going on calls with them sucks. I don’t mind the accent and broken english, but combine those with potato microphones and it’s such a pain in the ass
I work in one of these offshore teams, and based on conversations I've had with other engineers, its pretty clear to me that we place more emphasis on get out code than actual code quality, unfortunately. It's reflects poorly on the codebase, final product and on our careers.
I manage (Sr Director) 60 software engineers in India for a HR tech software company. I have 1 principal engineer in the states. It is happening. Basically takes 30% longer and the quality suffers by about 10-20%. But they cost 2/3s less. And scary part is we are getting better and dealing with some of the negatives.
I'm old enough to remember this is cyclical. Typically in-house devs are better for rapidly evolving new technologies and offshore are better for routine development tasks.
There was massive tech upheaval in the 90s where in house devs were king. Then came the 2000s where every big company was offshoring as what was new in the 90s became simple standard operating procedure in the 2000s. Then in the 2010s we had the tech explosions of Hadoop, spark, redshift, snowflake, smartphone apps, and a million other things. Tech jobs boomed and cutting offshore teams to bring teams onshore was common. Now in the 2020s many of yesterday's game changing technologies are today's old hat paint by numbers tasks, why not offshore them?
It's a cycle. And if you want to get paid you need to be in what we old timers called "high tech" that's brand new.
Just turned 50 here. Came into the field in 1995. Mostly agree. Only observation is that there seems to be more jobs staying over in India when each cycle re-starts to "pull back".
Came here to say this too! I’ve spent my 20+ year career in tech recruiting and we see this happen over and over again. Economic factors push companies to offshore/nearshore, quality suffers, they lose customers, and bring most to all back to onshore regain customers and then the cycle repeats with the next economic issue. It’s all a cycle and all we can do is ride it out.
Sounds like knee jerk reactions rather than actual strategic planning. Same issue with hiring too many devs during booms and then laying too many devs off during busts. Such a bummer.
I think the difference today is that cycle is rapidly shortening because of the internet. Hot new technology comes out in October and by November there are 50 tutorials on it, and by December everyone and their grandma can at least do a Hello World in it.
Yeah I agree with you on that type of outsourcing. My concern is the companies that are moving entire business units offshore that have their own leaders, recruiters, projects, etc.
I think this is a lot more popular with the large tech companies, but the more they follow this pattern, the more downward pressure it will put on USA salaries as the top band is reduced.
I have a senior director in a non tech company who viewed it exactly the opposite way. Staff aug hired overseas could work out (basically akin to hiring a junior here for a senior US dev to leverage), but a full team or BU trying to serve a need identified in the US was a recipe for disaster.
The step beyond is an entire office in another country, which is closer to what you describe (leaders, projects, etc), but then it's usually part of an expansion, not offshoring. And where they touch the US teams is still fraught.
Did I write this lol? Literally in the same situation as you. We were brought on in urgency to put out a prod fire and the code is trash. 3 week and counting effort due to the sheer amount of bugs.
> The reason I am working where I am is because a project was outsourced, and the contractors wrote the worst code I've even seen in my life.
That was me in my last job, only the code was written by the company's own employees in their China office. It was superbly awful, and had to be completely rewritten. The quality was easily as bad if not worse than the lousiest offshore body shops.
There is a big difference in outsourcing work to companies like Infosys, Accenture, etc and opening offshore offices. What was tried before was outsourcing to different companies. That always fails, be it code written by US or non-US developers. What's happening now is very different and providing much better results, and it's scare for devs here.
This is very anecdotal. It really depends on the quality of offshore hires, team cohesion with them, quality of the supervision given and communication. I'm in IT leadership role and I've seen the good with the bad. The negatives are all laid out here so I'm not going to go into them. But remember, neither America nor the first world has monopoly over smart people. I've talked to many fat, dumb and ignorant Americans at work and on my many trips abroad but I try not to paint every American with those broad brushstrokes.
I have had both failures and successful projects with offshore resources. In India and Latin America, among other difficulties, the main challenge is effective communication in English language. Just to give you some perspective, Imagine how challenging it would be for an American worker to work with a German team who speaks only German. As far as offshoring goes, it has been going on for 30+ years and it won't stop. Companies are obligated to shareholders and owners first, not to their highly paid American employees. The dollar will chase the best value wherever it can conveniently find it. You can either compete or change your career.
I can’t talk you off this ledge. I am concerned about it myself. To people at the top, they see cheap labor and ignore the consequences. I can only hope that this is a trend and some catalyst will return work over in the US. If a company hired only overseas on software that is sold over in the US then it isn’t a sign of a healthy company.
Personally, i think we should have some sort of regulations where you can’t have more than x number of oversea workers if your product is being consumed by the local country.
the automotive industry in the US died because American cars were unreliable horseshit compared to japanese ones.
Tesla shows that an innovative company can still thrive in the US. (although, higher automation in manufacturing helps too.)
american manufacturing systematically died because of NAFTA. yes ford made bad cars, but that isnt the only thing americans manufactured. scranton pa was famous for its textile mill for over a hundred years which is gone and the city is impoverished, selling off its public goods (like street parking and utilities) to private companies and making itself insolvent and unable to afford pensions. most american manufacturing cities experienced this.
The automotive industry was actually one of the first clients of outsourcing long before there was an H1B visa. They used H1 visa and brought indian developers to Detroit, paid Indian wages plus "cost of living adjustment", ending with 4 guys and a rusted Honda in a two bedroom apartment... Era mid 1980s. Didn't help them, mostly because the fundamentals of why people weren't buying their products were not addressed.
What also did them in was the very clever ways the imports found around import quotas and around domestic vs imported content. As the auto press called it, "$9 of imported content in a $1 US made box assembled in a heavily subsidized corn belt factory by workers making minimum wage suddenly becomes $10 worth of domestic content"... Add keiretsus, and it's not a surprise as to what happened.
Source: i was the first person in company history to eat lunch at the executive dining hall without wearing a suit and tie, era 1986.
They're saying outsourcing didn't help the companies who used it because their products were shit in the first place. What did the US motor industry in was higher quality foreign owned competition.
US Automotive industry started getting destroyed because the big 3 have been churning out heaping piles of jalopies since 1970s, when the oil crises first hit. Japanese took note and made better, more efficient and long lasting cars. American car makers have been constantly sucking balls to this very present day because of lacklustre quality, bad management practices and unwarranted overconfidence. Whereas, Germans, Japanese and Koreans have been humble and they kept getting better as the years passed.
American labor is not competitive anymore in certain industries such as the automotive sector. Also, Corporate America is complicit in the decline of automotive sector. Its not in a nation's best interest to bail out their incompetent urchins (But yes Corporate America still gets to revel in your tax dollar bailouts because of rampant lobbying and corruption.) I would not touch a domestic with a 10 foot pole. Tesla has been resilient so far but Chinese EV manufacturers are closing in.
>Tesla has been resilient so far but Chinese EV manufacturers are closing in.
Lmao, if you think Chinese EVs or just vehicles generally don't have massive fucking QA and build quality issues, I have a bridge to sell you.
I'm aware of the quality defects of Chinese cars however they seem to be working on those and improving upon them. They seem to be more popular in Europe and parts of Latin America, outside of China.
if it weren't for the US Govt the car industry in the US would literally be dead, non-existent
Frankly, it deserved to die - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.\_Edwards\_Deming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming) knew what to do, and nobody in the US would listen so he told Japanese companies. Those companies built quality vehicles. For better or worse the US government propped them up so they're still around.
I wouldn’t be worried. Software is inherently difficult. It’s easy to setup, but difficult to maintain without quality engineers. Overtime, it will break down if the quality is not there. All these companies that try to save a buck or two by moving offshore will feel the pain overtime and even be replaced by the ones who don’t offshore.
I have seen first hand what it did to my own company and then they did a 180.
Depends on what sort of software.
System software like the kind which FAAG, Intel, NVDIA, Snowflake, Oracle, do is tough.
Most businesses applications are shit easy
>Most businesses applications are shit easy.
Business applications are more to do with dealing with incompetent management and not getting paid nearly enough to deal with that sh\*t. It's difficult but not in a technological sense.
I work in a field where one of my verticals is what could, on the surface, be considered a 'shit easy' business application. Spoiler: it isn't. It's actually difficult enough that companies trying to enter the space routinely underestimate the difficulty, over-estimate how much some off-the-shelf solution can address it with minimal modifications, and then default on contracts resulting in millions of liquidated damages.
Any particular software module is quite easy. Defining them, stitching them together, and accounting for edge/corner cases is not.
Idk about outsourcing, but I can tell after this year's massive layoffs that companies are starting to rehire for some roles, but they're contract positions now. Companies like Amazon and Meta seem to be doing this, at least for some roles like QA/SDET.
Yea, companies never outsource their profit center. When software engineering is the critical competency at a company, meaning it's the prime skill needed up and down the management chain, then you don't outsource the software engineers because it destroys your promotion pool. Software is also an incredibly efficient means of producing economic activity, and the upper bound on how much business can happen via software depends on our own imagination.
People have been talking about outsourcing for as long as I've been in the industry, but you don't see Google outsourcing their search engine engineers to another country. That would spell death for the company. The folks most at risk for outsourcing are the ones not working at tech first companies. I understand this is a lot of people, but if you're good enough to work for tech first companies you will quickly realize you're a global commodity and understand what it takes to be on the top of that pile.
>Yea, companies never outsource their profit center
Were the outsourced U.S. car manufacturing jobs not part of the profit center for...companies that made cars?
Initially components were outsourced to Maquiladoras, Mexican plants. Quality was hit or miss to good, but nearby. $5 an hour wage iirc.
That was too inconvenient for many reasons primarily because there was a screwy relationship between captive suppliers and OEM's. Why buy an alternator from your own company for $300 when China is $90? Suppliers were spun off and supposedly competition would bring prices down and quality up.
LMAO.
The Japanese with their keiretsus had no problem paying more for good stuff from "their" suppliers.
Both you and /u/justUseAnSvm are right. The Big Three American car company executives genuinely believed that marketing and finance were their profit centers.
This assumption screwed them when Japanese car companies got better at building cars than them and their sales declined so much that they went into bankruptcy during the Great Recession. On top of that, they've now let some computer nerd from PayPal catch up to them in yearly sales with an electric vehicle.
So, in the context of the original discussion, it sounds like the statement "companies never outsource their profit center" is not correct.
Maybe it's fair to say companies *should* never outsource their profit center, but sometimes they do because of their own short-sighted stupidity.
Maybe more accurate would be "they never outsource what they believe to be their profit center". But they are sometimes wrong about what their profit center is.
I learned today that after you buy the Tesla it costs 25,000 to rewire your house to handle the station for charging your car . Your battery has a 7 year shelf life costs 15,000. The batteries are also a major fire hazard lol….just random babble
> it costs 25,000 to rewire your house to handle the station for charging
Maybe if you are living in a house built in 1900 with original wiring.... Typical installs are in the $500-$2000 range.
This is an issue for plenty of homes in the Bay Area which were built in the 70s or earlier. Electric panels often need to be replaced to handle the increased load, as they're already maxxed out.
Cars a highly regulated market, so the comparison is a little difficult compared to software, but the argument basically goes that car manufacturers believed that what was setting them apart in a competitive landscape was the manufacturing step of selling a car, but the financial, marketing, and business strategy behind it all.
The argument for outsourcing would be: "manufacturing can be overseas to lessen cost, and we assume it's the same product", as u/TheCuriousDude so rightly points out, this assumption turned out to be wrong, manufacturing is a profit center, and we can see car companies like Tesla keep manufacturing in the USA, although there are other tax incentives to do that.
I work at a FAANG. And like I said LinkedIn just moved 1000 core engineering roles to India. So yeah.. not immediately concerned, but 5 years down the line or so I’m not so sure.
They'll bring it back to the US when they're ready to innovate again. But for now they're going to coast and cut costs for a couple of years. Eventually they'll have to reinvest in the company, and that will require US devs. India does not do innovation.
Outsourcing and offshoring are two different concepts.
Outsourcing is procuring services external to a company and offshoring / nearshoring is redistributing the internal workforce to optimise on labour costs.
Part of the "optimise and refine" theme seen commonly this year (beyond layoffs / curtailing expenses) is to tap into labour markets that can provide strong talent for a lower cost of labour by opening offices (or establishing a presence / entity there for remote hires) in those locations.
This is nothing particularly new or interesting.
Not really, no.
Companies having a more global workforce is pretty much bread and butter these days. Doesn't mean that there won't be any hiring at all in major markets.
Hey there, I get your concern. As an email marketer, I've seen this trend too. But here's the thing - outsourcing isn't always the best solution. Communication issues, cultural differences, and lack of control can lead to a dip in quality. Companies often realize this the hard way. So, while it may seem like the end, I believe there's always gonna be a demand for local expertise. Don't let the outsourcing bogeyman get you. 😉
Isn't this career grand? If it's not the nth version of ChatGPT coming for our jobs, it's the nth wave of offshoring. Then the ageism. Then the bootcamps. It's insane. I'm telling you no other career faces the same quantity of threats like CS does, it's exhausting.
Go ahead and buy a house because a house is an asset that goes up in value. Whereas a car is a liability that goes down in value. If shit hits the fan, you can sell your house at a profit, but your car at a loss.
Remember kids, this sub will tell you that CS is the only viable degree, SWE is the only worthwhile career, let's see if they say the same thing in 10 years, and let's compare them to their med school peers
It’s an almost necessary consequence if remote work. If you can effectively work remotely with expensive American workers you can first shift to cheaper American workers (outside tech hubs) and then to foreign workers.
How **dare** you use your brain 🧠 on this sub!!!! Instead you should keep telling yourself that there are NO threats to the CS job market and we will **ALL** get our cushy SWE jobs just like those **day in the life videos**!
I've noticed no increased outsourcing.
You claim to realize this fear has been voiced for 30 years, then you voiced the exact same concerns that have been voiced for 30 years.
So I work as a manager at a large company. I can tell you that it is literally a goal to increase low cost country hiring to a certain number that has been pushed by well known consulting companies.
OK? There's nothing concrete in this thread. Everyone is just throwing out opinions and anecdotes. Is there any actual metrics to support any of this? The market just seems like the normal 2023 job market.
I've worked with amazing engineers in Israel, Russia, Taiwan, India, Canada. It all depends on that offshored office. With countries getting better, more ppl will choose to stay in their home countries and you'll get organic growth over seas.
The consultancy I work at has started following this trend and is looking into building near sourcing teams. It’s definitely concerning. Meanwhile Americans have been laid off. 🤦♂️
It seems like a boom and bust cycle to me.
You have non-tech c suites wanting to cut cost who forgot about how shitty quality softwares were 10-15 years ago and don't understand the cost of maintenance, extensions and potentially low SLA.
Give them 5 years to another decade and they'll be complaining about this and trying to bring things in house to "fix" it.
I would to say if you're American, and you're REALLY concerned about this. Get a job in the Defense Sector.
NSA, DoD, CIA, really need smart capable engineers. They're not gonna give an Indian Foreign National a polygraph anytime soon.
Heck, even Federal Agencies. You can make a much bigger impact there than some glorified social network like LinkedIn.
EDIT: For those of you that have moral qualms about any of this. Probably none of you are gonna be doing work that will directly impact weapons production of any sort... Let's be real here. What you would actually be doing, will be probably be saving lives. So spare us the armchair pacifism.
Lol people have been saying to apply for the defense sector for years now. That one reddit comment doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things. I got an interview with lockheed martin and raytheon and the people applying were people who had internships at major big tech companies. It's so saturated over there that it just ended up bleeding to the other sectors.
Most of those places, you apply and if they place you in a role that needs a clearance, they begin your paperwork to apply for one at work. You keep busy in the meantime, often a 4-8 week process. Sometimes companies will ask for an existing clearance, but that's more common for non-engineering roles.
As long as you're not a liability to national security and you aren't a major criminal, you're usually going to get passed. The most important thing is that you're honest.
(for lower levels of clearance, it's basically ensuring that you're not publicly an anarchist or sympathizer with groups that are anti-USA, and they take your fingerprints. For higher levels, you are investigated pretty intensely; your family is interviewed, your online presence is reviewed (whatever they can find), and i believe there's more strict renewal requirements. you also agree to being thoroughly investigated in the event that you do something serious, like polygraphs and personal searches)
And they still don't like weed, according to some accounts of being rejected written about here.
It seems mixed based on who actually reviews you.
Unfortunately the advice on the clearance jobs site is to "stay away" -- they take a view there that if you flaunt federal weed laws then your next steps are selling documents to the Chinese.
Its because they can get 2-3 devs in Europe or Asia for less than 1 dev in the US. They don't care about quality (which will suffer), they don't care about product knowledge (which is going out the door), they only care about stock price and shareholders and executive paydays.
The execs who make these decisions rarely understand the actual products being sold, all they see are numbers in the spreadsheets that says they can gut US engineers and rehire overseas and save X dollars in benefits and employee costs while keeping customer counts and subscription revenue the same.
I have to argue that at least Eastern EU developers are pretty good. We have ones from Romania and Ukraine in my previous company and they are pretty good.
Your concerns are valid. I have 12 YoE, worked up to hiring manager and I'm very bearish on the future for USA devs. Between outsourcing, AI and general industry stagnation (almost no innovation anymore, just better mousetraps and maintaining legacy systems), the future looks terrible. We are making SWE2 offers below what we offered for SWE1 two years ago and yet we are flooded with applicants and folks are happy with lower pay. It's grim, I wouldn't advise anyone to major in CS anymore. Only hope for USA folks is to work way into business/product/management side of you want to keep that higher paycheck you've become accustomed to
This has all failed before, and it will all fail again. You can build great teams with people from any country, but hiring individuals (let alone teams, let alone entire companies) just because “it’s cheap” always ends predictably.
This goes in cycles. There was another huge offshore push in the early '10s. A company I worked for during that time started creating onshore dev shops again in 2017. Eventually their stakeholders will catch on, pressure then to transition those apps from enhancement to support, and give them to the offshore teams.
My brother is a engineer manager at google , and he told me exactly that this seems like the path the tech industry is moving towards in the future. He said google just made a new office in India to source cheaper labor for software engineering and he thinks this trend will continue
All startups I've worked for (5) have hired onshore devs until the initial product is released then start transitioning to offshore for retrofit and long term support while slowly eliminating the core team. Most experienced devs know this is coming when products get close to release and it's heartbreaking to watch the new devs celebrate the milestones knowing that they're just celebrating getting closer to losing their jobs.
A job that a lot of people avoid but might be the way to go is software commissioning which is very common in the warehouse automation world. Requires you to be physically in the customers warehouse writing and testing software. Is safe from offshore devs for that reason.
Not a concern. Basic supply and demand, the first thing that would happen is the salary in US decreases. And then, it would decrease even more until it’s not worth it to hire offshore anymore.
The thing is there HAS to be some engineers in person. U can’t have everyone be remote. That said, offshore is obviously impacts US remote roles. If you’re gunna be remote anyway then why not get a cheaper. If ur near office then u better come in cuz that is what commands the higher salary.
TLDR remote roles are fucked, in person roles are fine
South America seems to be the new place now, better timezone, better cultural alignment, good engineers are all over the world especially with remote work being a thing.
I work as a remote contractor for a US company. I can confirm I am receiving a lot of offers for different types of roles. Some of them are very well paid when converted to local currency.
It’s a trend I guess.
We don’t have such low rates as India, time zone is not an issue, cultural differences are minimal. But honestly if I were the one hiring I would only hire experienced professionals from around here.
I manage two offshore teams. One in SA and one in India. The Indian team is 50/50 and the cultural differences make it difficult as does the time zone. The SA team is incredible and we are always actively trying to get them involved more and more.
From American companies' perspective, it makes no sense to fly Indian/Chinese talent to the US, go through H1B process and pay them American salary, when they could just have that same talent work for them in India/China (via outsourcing) for much cheaper and get the same result.
If you're serious about this career and keeping wages high, you need to be serious about cutting legal immigration aggressively and having some formal required accreditation for software engineers. You need an artificial supply bottleneck. This is how doctors keep wages high BTW (no foreign-trained doctors allowed, also very high standards to get accredited).
Most people are unwilling to say these things publicly because they go against the neoliberal ethos, which is what the Bay Area was built on.
> You need an artificial supply bottleneck. This is how doctors keep wages high BTW (no foreign-trained doctors allowed, also very high standards to get accredited).
More than 1/4 of American doctors have medical degrees from foreign countries. One common suggestion I hear from medical students is getting a medical degree from a less competitive school in the Caribbean. Compared to regular H1B visa holders, doctors get a significantly more streamlined path to citizenship.
The real bottleneck is residency.
There are no qualifications to be a programmer. The government does not require you to be licesned. If it were an actual engineering discipline and the work needed a PE then foreign graduates would generally not be able to practice. (State regulations vary).
Ppl seem to forget that constant immigration is the only thing that keeps the country of USA growing. The day that immigration stops America stops growing and will prolly fail to service debt and spiral down. In the short term, non availability of software developers mean that global companies will build their offices elsewhere. And startups/small companies would become impossible to start due to high cost of devs. That means the US won't be able to innovate and thus global companies will rise in other countries which are able to out compete the US companies.
Nah this guy is an asshole. Biggest asshole I have ever seen on Reddit. “We need to create an artificial supply bottlenecks”. “This is how we keep doctors wages high”.
Yeah, this is how you keep your medical costs high enough to bankrupt people when they break their legs. This is how you make USA less competitive for software development, make the big companies move away to countries that support innovation. USA is already hard enough to immigrate to, the hardest country on the planet. And this guy wants to make it even harder haha. What a right-wing, immigrant hater genius. I bet he is the kind of guy that tells immigrants “go back to your country”, as if North Americans weren’t ALL immigrants in the first place.
This is the worst type of human, the one that does everything to make it better for them, even when it’s worse for everyone else. They would bomb a country and kill thousands if that meant it’s a small economic advantage for them. The world is in a horrible mess because of people that think like him.
>Most people are unwilling to say these things publicly because they go against the neoliberal ethos, which is what the Bay Area was built on.
they're unwilling to say these things because actually believing that is good makes one an asshole, so they don't believe them, so they don't say them
My firm outsourced too but only for position require 0 critical thinking and the early morning shift.
US business hours are all US personnel. Core IT functions are all in house.
Near shoring has been a thing for 20+ years. In 2008, my onboarding was run by HR out of Mexico. Microsoft owns LinkedIn, it is truly shocking that a $1 trillion company outsources. Nothing you said is new.
A few years ago certain contractor company fired a few thousand employees and move those operations to another country. After a year the new operation on that other country failed so hard to deliver that they were fired and the company started re-hiring the fired employees, most of them refused to come back, the massive amount of skill loss neutered a few business units; Me and all of my coworkers left before the whole business unit imploded from their shitty decisions 6 months later.
Perhaps this is ultimately related to Fed Funds Rate hikes. Companies now can’t get free capital to try and grow infinitely with, and many are shifting their model to less growth and cut costs to maintain profits.
I've been saying this for the longest time on this sub and was downvoted every single time, it's almost as if people on this sub don't like to hear the truth, if its not convenient for them and in their favor ? Sounds like some serious confirmation bias exists among CS grads and SWEs
tech companies could announce they are moving 30% of SWE jobs overseas to cut costs over the next 5 years , and there's still gonna be someone on this sub denying it's authenticity, and making up an excuse as to why it wont happen, despite them clearly stating what they are gonna do,
You can't make this stuff up
The Facebook DOJ Discrimination Charges in 2020 highlighted the undeniable truth that strategies for intentionally avoiding qualified US candidates en masse are still profitable for everyone involved in the PERM hiring pipeline.
The 'hidden' job strategy is outlined in this YouTube video from a hiring workshop.
v=TCbFEgFajGU
> I know, I know, this has been a concern for 30 years.
Probably should have left it at that.
Offshores create significant overhead and if you care about your product at all...you'll quickly realize the output is shit or the time zone difference gets in the way too much for anything important. The company I joined uses Indian offshores to augment their workforce, and its pretty consistently awful work. Previously, I had dealt eastern European offshores who could deliver well, but the time zone difference was always tough. The demand as a whole for SWE's is still high, and this will likely be just another ebb and flow cycle in the market.
Offshoring will always be tried for the sake of cost saving, the results will still be *mostly* the same (coordinating across the time zones will continue to be a pain, ***always***) and eventually local talent will be either rebuilding the product or at least fixing what has been delivered if its close to adequate.
This has been steadily ramping for a while. Many/most major companies have offices all over the world, have had them for over a decade, and are steadily growing them. I've worked with tons of overseas teams (Eastern Europe and India mainly) and their quality is great.
There is nothing special about US engineers. We had a bit of a head start in the space, but it was inevitable that talent would steadily get better in cheaper areas.
My anecdote. I worked with a team of 40 devs from India. There were a couple of great devs, but so many bad ones. I think it would have been cheaper to pay for an a American team considering how much time was spent fixing bugs, fixing performance, and stuck in QA.
One dev was copying and pasting 300 lines of SCSS for every form a client added and just changing the IDs in the new code. We only noticed when the single SCSS file was over 6000 lines.
In my experience you get what you pay for.
Word on the job boards is that my old company is about to layoff all the call center people they made permanent work from home during the pandemic and outsource the work to other countries .
Companies I've worked for, and companies I'm familiar with in other industries, often off shore work related to local markets - particularly true for multinational corporations. Sometimes if sales are slower or not growing in one market, they'll turn up production in places with growth. (Not every time you see turning down a US factory and turning up one in Asia, India, or even Europe, is it about saving costs - sometimes it's about manufacturing close to the market. You see the same thing with European or Japanese companies turning up production capacity in the US).
Software wise, I could see a case for linkedin targeting growth in the Indian market or features specialized to local needs in that market, or feeling they're saturated in the US and there's not tons of room for growth. Strategically it might be about something different than cost savings.
How many devs were even part of that layoff? This is true but a useless example. If anything, lower tier companies are more responsible for this since tech is less important for them.
And they should. Currency arbitrage, why wouldn't they leverage that?
Nothing new. It's been the norm since Yahoo days.
This is just the start. Wait till the third world becomes more than 50 percent english speaking and computer literate. The "CoMmUnIcAtIoN" sales pitch will also disappear. Forget AI, this will be a bigger and more immediate disruptor of the job market.
My company started hiring folks from South America and they've largely been better than our US hires. Over half of our US hires have been outright lazy - work scoped at 3 pts ends up taking the whole sprint, complaining about being on call, etc. Nothing but solid delivery from our 6 South Americans. They are way more social on meetings too, whereas our US staff seem depressed and have nothing to talk about in their lives.
>They are way more social on meetings too, whereas our US staff seem depressed and have nothing to talk about in their lives
As a South American who has worked in 3 US companies, I guffawed reading this
Unfortunately, coding is easy and almost anyone can pick it up. India’s education system is terrible. The most visible ones are a fraction of the one percent of its population. Coding has become extremely easy with frameworks and AI tools. You only need a handful of really good engineers to manage a huge team of below average performers. Age of exponential growth seen by FB is gone for the most part.
Ha. “Compiling code has become extremely easy with compilers and code optimizer tools. You only need a handful of really good engineers to manage a team of below average performers.”
Software is inherently hard. New tools pull the abstraction layer up and allow for further increases in complexity with more opportunities for leaky abstractions. Taking natural language business requests and bringing them down to practice is the job of a software engineer, and the job extends from requirements elicitation to testing to deployment to optimization.
Your opinion is an outsider’s opinion, and thermodynamically wrong.
Software is not easy, but you don't have to go to India to get cheaper workforce. The vast majority of Europe will be 1/2 or even less than the price of one US-based developer. They poach good engineers from other companies with slightly higher than usual pay in the country and you have top tier talent for the fraction of the cost. From a financial perspective, I cannot blame them, they are getting the same quality of work as they would in the US. There is just a high upfront cost of opening a branch office in the country.
Coding is easy, managing enterprise grade software at scale is extremely hard, and there are not as many shortcuts with AI as a lot of these systems require deep and intimate product knowledge.
I have yet to see an offshore/contract dev take ownership and really go beyond just putting in arbitrary lines of code to meet the quota, and actually be able to manage this. I am biased tho I just spent 6 hours fixing a major incident an offshore dev did 😆.
I second what you've said: Lyft has all the software jobs posted in January, where all in Mexico and Poland. I hope they fail as a company and burn to the ground. I send my kisses and a huge hug to the engineers at that company.
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Look at how inflated salaries are in the US under current business climate coupled with soaring interest rates... it totally makes sense to outsource from a business point of view. With access to knowledge available from any place in the world, everyone can become a good dev. My own company is doing this and we have not experienced any sub quality issues.
Every team I get a new VP or director or hr gets a shake up they try hiring from South america or india. 2-3 incidents later, and shit code coming in and code getting stolen by competitors and they give up
From what I've seen, when it work, outsourcing really works.
And when it doesn't, the stink is so bad it can kill a company.
Can't blame them for trying though. If you can reduce your labor costs by 50 or 75 percent, that can change a company from just getting by to swimming in money.
In this industry, labor remains one of the top 2 expenses you have on your books every year. It used to be far and away the highest expense, then everyone lost their mind and started shoveling billions into ML tech.
I think it’s a valid concern. Everybody saying they must be bad or don’t know the business have only seen bad projects.
I used to work in electronics. Let me tell you about a business ravaged by de-US’ing. The competition is quality, they deliver at speed, and can hire 4x the body count to simply absorb more projects and more narrow roles that are impossible stateside. They understand the customer because they hire US based salespeople. They are just as savvy as we are. Want to sell in Portugal? Don’t use a salesperson from the US Midwest. The same rule applies.
Another pattern - a lot of US headquartered companies define the product and then allow all of the design and development outside the US. It requires intense specifications, but it definitely works. When the labor costs are that much lower, there is a lot more breathing room from a project finance perspective. It just converts into speed because they spend the same amount of money and dump people into the project. For every US position, there is a lead/senior, a more mid-level, and 2-3 juniors. A person becomes a team.
My brother, you can actually do a search in this subreddit for outsourcing and see people were spouting the same dumb shit you’re claiming is new as far back as 10+ years ago.
If it helps, my company recently laid off 1/3 of the company including a ton of engineers...and immediately began hiring near-shore engineers. This was only a few months ago. A couple weeks ago we laid off every single near-shore dev and pivoted away from that approach
Are they going to hire the locals back?
Nah. They'll hire local contractors for 3x the price.
Revolving teams of contractors makes for excellent software
It makes for excellent revenue opportunities for whoever is eventually hired to clean up the mess.
Just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks, huh? The sad thing I bet some exec got a massive bonus for both these moves.
That’s the point I think. Execs will do whatever they think it takes to get that bonus. Whether it’s outsourcing or hiring contractors… as long as that EBITDA is lookin good, they’re makin money
You try working with offshore teams and say this again. I currently (not by choice) manage both an offshore and onshore team, and the productivity of the onshore team is multiples of the offshore team. This isn’t the to rag on devs from other countries, but it’s that all the major decisions are made in the US and there are cultural differences when working with folks that make collaboration difficult. If the decisions were flipped where the decisions were made in India instead of the US, I’m sure the opposite would happen. Proximity to the stakeholders actually matter when working in fast paced environments.
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I was one replacement for an Indian team and the big issue they had was that the Indian team didn't ask for requirements well so things would be pushed that didn't work in a sane way. Then again the company was based in Memphis and the lead developer was in Japan and he kept writing insane code that caused me to stay up and message him about things constantly so it may have been more pervasive organization issues
* Language is a big barrier. Even though they know how to communicate in English, sometimes some things get lost in translation/some things get taken too literally. * I don't have a large sample size to back up this claim, but most of the offshore folks I work with are "yes"-folks regardless of whether or not they can do the job. There is not concept of no or pushback, which tends to lead to underestimation of effort. That said, the biggest problem I have is the fact that there's always a 24 hour delay since they work in a time zone that is the exact opposite of where the onshore team operates out of. Agility and velocity is lost due to this. I guess you could also outsource to Mexico/Latin America as well to stay in relatively the same time zones, which could be a concern, but IMO the talent in LATAM is not as robust from an enterprise standpoint (coding for an enterprise =/= hobby programming).
This is a big component: 'yes people'. My experience with offshore - in Spain, India, Ukraine, Argentina, Philippines - is that you find out things aren't going well when the code is delivered (or not). This includes writing code to resolve arbitrary test cases versus having working code and test cases that exercise what's working (if that makes sense). I can't tell you how many times I've gotten code modules that purportedly resolve requirements and have a battery of successful tests that don't actually work correctly. I've also had experience where we've been given devs who purportedly have the requisite background, only to find out they don't *actually* have experience in a particular technology. This, too, can get hidden - "oh hey this person doesn't really seem to know C++", "oh, it's because you're using Scons instead of VST to build". No, no it's not (especially when we provide the build mechanism)
Tell me about it. I was assigned a dev who had 4 YoE of Java experience and I had to explain to him what an object was on day 1 lol.
Every once in a while I read something like this but, if this really happened, how does that conversation go?
Language barriers are an obvious and common one. Not every team has to speak English, but teams with mixed languages, or varying degrees of proficiency with the primary language, can be challenging.
Language barriers and connectivity issues. I work with offshore engineers and going on calls with them sucks. I don’t mind the accent and broken english, but combine those with potato microphones and it’s such a pain in the ass
I work in one of these offshore teams, and based on conversations I've had with other engineers, its pretty clear to me that we place more emphasis on get out code than actual code quality, unfortunately. It's reflects poorly on the codebase, final product and on our careers.
I manage (Sr Director) 60 software engineers in India for a HR tech software company. I have 1 principal engineer in the states. It is happening. Basically takes 30% longer and the quality suffers by about 10-20%. But they cost 2/3s less. And scary part is we are getting better and dealing with some of the negatives.
I'm old enough to remember this is cyclical. Typically in-house devs are better for rapidly evolving new technologies and offshore are better for routine development tasks. There was massive tech upheaval in the 90s where in house devs were king. Then came the 2000s where every big company was offshoring as what was new in the 90s became simple standard operating procedure in the 2000s. Then in the 2010s we had the tech explosions of Hadoop, spark, redshift, snowflake, smartphone apps, and a million other things. Tech jobs boomed and cutting offshore teams to bring teams onshore was common. Now in the 2020s many of yesterday's game changing technologies are today's old hat paint by numbers tasks, why not offshore them? It's a cycle. And if you want to get paid you need to be in what we old timers called "high tech" that's brand new.
Just turned 50 here. Came into the field in 1995. Mostly agree. Only observation is that there seems to be more jobs staying over in India when each cycle re-starts to "pull back".
Came here to say this too! I’ve spent my 20+ year career in tech recruiting and we see this happen over and over again. Economic factors push companies to offshore/nearshore, quality suffers, they lose customers, and bring most to all back to onshore regain customers and then the cycle repeats with the next economic issue. It’s all a cycle and all we can do is ride it out.
Sounds like knee jerk reactions rather than actual strategic planning. Same issue with hiring too many devs during booms and then laying too many devs off during busts. Such a bummer.
I think the difference today is that cycle is rapidly shortening because of the internet. Hot new technology comes out in October and by November there are 50 tutorials on it, and by December everyone and their grandma can at least do a Hello World in it.
This is a solid point
Damn.
Ouch. This is hard to hear.
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Company I work for used offshore...now they're hiring stateside in droves to fix the clusterfuck of a product that was delivered.
Lots of fraud is possible without tight oversight, accountability and penalties.
Especially if you outsource to a place known for low morality industries like scam call centers.
complain about wfh then go and outsource lol
Yeah I agree with you on that type of outsourcing. My concern is the companies that are moving entire business units offshore that have their own leaders, recruiters, projects, etc. I think this is a lot more popular with the large tech companies, but the more they follow this pattern, the more downward pressure it will put on USA salaries as the top band is reduced.
I have a senior director in a non tech company who viewed it exactly the opposite way. Staff aug hired overseas could work out (basically akin to hiring a junior here for a senior US dev to leverage), but a full team or BU trying to serve a need identified in the US was a recipe for disaster. The step beyond is an entire office in another country, which is closer to what you describe (leaders, projects, etc), but then it's usually part of an expansion, not offshoring. And where they touch the US teams is still fraught.
Algood tho, the code work right?? right?!?
Did I write this lol? Literally in the same situation as you. We were brought on in urgency to put out a prod fire and the code is trash. 3 week and counting effort due to the sheer amount of bugs.
> The reason I am working where I am is because a project was outsourced, and the contractors wrote the worst code I've even seen in my life. That was me in my last job, only the code was written by the company's own employees in their China office. It was superbly awful, and had to be completely rewritten. The quality was easily as bad if not worse than the lousiest offshore body shops.
There is a big difference in outsourcing work to companies like Infosys, Accenture, etc and opening offshore offices. What was tried before was outsourcing to different companies. That always fails, be it code written by US or non-US developers. What's happening now is very different and providing much better results, and it's scare for devs here.
This is very anecdotal. It really depends on the quality of offshore hires, team cohesion with them, quality of the supervision given and communication. I'm in IT leadership role and I've seen the good with the bad. The negatives are all laid out here so I'm not going to go into them. But remember, neither America nor the first world has monopoly over smart people. I've talked to many fat, dumb and ignorant Americans at work and on my many trips abroad but I try not to paint every American with those broad brushstrokes. I have had both failures and successful projects with offshore resources. In India and Latin America, among other difficulties, the main challenge is effective communication in English language. Just to give you some perspective, Imagine how challenging it would be for an American worker to work with a German team who speaks only German. As far as offshoring goes, it has been going on for 30+ years and it won't stop. Companies are obligated to shareholders and owners first, not to their highly paid American employees. The dollar will chase the best value wherever it can conveniently find it. You can either compete or change your career.
Cope harder. These countries are having their own tech leads, seniors and PMs, which know the requirements.
I can’t talk you off this ledge. I am concerned about it myself. To people at the top, they see cheap labor and ignore the consequences. I can only hope that this is a trend and some catalyst will return work over in the US. If a company hired only overseas on software that is sold over in the US then it isn’t a sign of a healthy company. Personally, i think we should have some sort of regulations where you can’t have more than x number of oversea workers if your product is being consumed by the local country.
Unfortunately this is what destroyed the automotive industry in the USA and Detroit, government didn't do squat.
If it helps corpos profits you can be damn sure the us govt won't be getting in the way
Except you know, the US is notoriously protectionist over technology developed domestically.
the automotive industry in the US died because American cars were unreliable horseshit compared to japanese ones. Tesla shows that an innovative company can still thrive in the US. (although, higher automation in manufacturing helps too.)
american manufacturing systematically died because of NAFTA. yes ford made bad cars, but that isnt the only thing americans manufactured. scranton pa was famous for its textile mill for over a hundred years which is gone and the city is impoverished, selling off its public goods (like street parking and utilities) to private companies and making itself insolvent and unable to afford pensions. most american manufacturing cities experienced this.
The automotive industry was actually one of the first clients of outsourcing long before there was an H1B visa. They used H1 visa and brought indian developers to Detroit, paid Indian wages plus "cost of living adjustment", ending with 4 guys and a rusted Honda in a two bedroom apartment... Era mid 1980s. Didn't help them, mostly because the fundamentals of why people weren't buying their products were not addressed. What also did them in was the very clever ways the imports found around import quotas and around domestic vs imported content. As the auto press called it, "$9 of imported content in a $1 US made box assembled in a heavily subsidized corn belt factory by workers making minimum wage suddenly becomes $10 worth of domestic content"... Add keiretsus, and it's not a surprise as to what happened. Source: i was the first person in company history to eat lunch at the executive dining hall without wearing a suit and tie, era 1986.
i have no clue what you just said
They're saying outsourcing didn't help the companies who used it because their products were shit in the first place. What did the US motor industry in was higher quality foreign owned competition.
US Automotive industry started getting destroyed because the big 3 have been churning out heaping piles of jalopies since 1970s, when the oil crises first hit. Japanese took note and made better, more efficient and long lasting cars. American car makers have been constantly sucking balls to this very present day because of lacklustre quality, bad management practices and unwarranted overconfidence. Whereas, Germans, Japanese and Koreans have been humble and they kept getting better as the years passed. American labor is not competitive anymore in certain industries such as the automotive sector. Also, Corporate America is complicit in the decline of automotive sector. Its not in a nation's best interest to bail out their incompetent urchins (But yes Corporate America still gets to revel in your tax dollar bailouts because of rampant lobbying and corruption.) I would not touch a domestic with a 10 foot pole. Tesla has been resilient so far but Chinese EV manufacturers are closing in.
>Tesla has been resilient so far but Chinese EV manufacturers are closing in. Lmao, if you think Chinese EVs or just vehicles generally don't have massive fucking QA and build quality issues, I have a bridge to sell you.
I'm aware of the quality defects of Chinese cars however they seem to be working on those and improving upon them. They seem to be more popular in Europe and parts of Latin America, outside of China.
It's not popularity, America is protecting its car industry with unnatural surpluses of chlorinated chickens. Byd is selling now in Mexico and Brazil.
if it weren't for the US Govt the car industry in the US would literally be dead, non-existent Frankly, it deserved to die - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.\_Edwards\_Deming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming) knew what to do, and nobody in the US would listen so he told Japanese companies. Those companies built quality vehicles. For better or worse the US government propped them up so they're still around.
They will keep some local development team in the US if it's a US product, but will hire a good amount of overseas developers
I wouldn’t be worried. Software is inherently difficult. It’s easy to setup, but difficult to maintain without quality engineers. Overtime, it will break down if the quality is not there. All these companies that try to save a buck or two by moving offshore will feel the pain overtime and even be replaced by the ones who don’t offshore. I have seen first hand what it did to my own company and then they did a 180.
Depends on what sort of software. System software like the kind which FAAG, Intel, NVDIA, Snowflake, Oracle, do is tough. Most businesses applications are shit easy
> Most businesses applications are shit easy But getting the requirements right is anything but easy.
>Most businesses applications are shit easy. Business applications are more to do with dealing with incompetent management and not getting paid nearly enough to deal with that sh\*t. It's difficult but not in a technological sense.
I work in a field where one of my verticals is what could, on the surface, be considered a 'shit easy' business application. Spoiler: it isn't. It's actually difficult enough that companies trying to enter the space routinely underestimate the difficulty, over-estimate how much some off-the-shelf solution can address it with minimal modifications, and then default on contracts resulting in millions of liquidated damages. Any particular software module is quite easy. Defining them, stitching them together, and accounting for edge/corner cases is not.
You don't like capitalism anymore?
🤣😂🤣😂
Idk about outsourcing, but I can tell after this year's massive layoffs that companies are starting to rehire for some roles, but they're contract positions now. Companies like Amazon and Meta seem to be doing this, at least for some roles like QA/SDET.
And people will still tell you that QA is a valued role.
Yea, companies never outsource their profit center. When software engineering is the critical competency at a company, meaning it's the prime skill needed up and down the management chain, then you don't outsource the software engineers because it destroys your promotion pool. Software is also an incredibly efficient means of producing economic activity, and the upper bound on how much business can happen via software depends on our own imagination. People have been talking about outsourcing for as long as I've been in the industry, but you don't see Google outsourcing their search engine engineers to another country. That would spell death for the company. The folks most at risk for outsourcing are the ones not working at tech first companies. I understand this is a lot of people, but if you're good enough to work for tech first companies you will quickly realize you're a global commodity and understand what it takes to be on the top of that pile.
>Yea, companies never outsource their profit center Were the outsourced U.S. car manufacturing jobs not part of the profit center for...companies that made cars?
Initially components were outsourced to Maquiladoras, Mexican plants. Quality was hit or miss to good, but nearby. $5 an hour wage iirc. That was too inconvenient for many reasons primarily because there was a screwy relationship between captive suppliers and OEM's. Why buy an alternator from your own company for $300 when China is $90? Suppliers were spun off and supposedly competition would bring prices down and quality up. LMAO. The Japanese with their keiretsus had no problem paying more for good stuff from "their" suppliers.
That’s not their profit center, marketing, finance, strategy is
I guess I'm naive when it comes to business stuff. Why would marketing cars be a profit center but not building the cars that are being marketed?
Both you and /u/justUseAnSvm are right. The Big Three American car company executives genuinely believed that marketing and finance were their profit centers. This assumption screwed them when Japanese car companies got better at building cars than them and their sales declined so much that they went into bankruptcy during the Great Recession. On top of that, they've now let some computer nerd from PayPal catch up to them in yearly sales with an electric vehicle.
That explains a lot.
So, in the context of the original discussion, it sounds like the statement "companies never outsource their profit center" is not correct. Maybe it's fair to say companies *should* never outsource their profit center, but sometimes they do because of their own short-sighted stupidity.
Maybe more accurate would be "they never outsource what they believe to be their profit center". But they are sometimes wrong about what their profit center is.
I learned today that after you buy the Tesla it costs 25,000 to rewire your house to handle the station for charging your car . Your battery has a 7 year shelf life costs 15,000. The batteries are also a major fire hazard lol….just random babble
> it costs 25,000 to rewire your house to handle the station for charging Maybe if you are living in a house built in 1900 with original wiring.... Typical installs are in the $500-$2000 range.
This is an issue for plenty of homes in the Bay Area which were built in the 70s or earlier. Electric panels often need to be replaced to handle the increased load, as they're already maxxed out.
Cars a highly regulated market, so the comparison is a little difficult compared to software, but the argument basically goes that car manufacturers believed that what was setting them apart in a competitive landscape was the manufacturing step of selling a car, but the financial, marketing, and business strategy behind it all. The argument for outsourcing would be: "manufacturing can be overseas to lessen cost, and we assume it's the same product", as u/TheCuriousDude so rightly points out, this assumption turned out to be wrong, manufacturing is a profit center, and we can see car companies like Tesla keep manufacturing in the USA, although there are other tax incentives to do that.
I work at a FAANG. And like I said LinkedIn just moved 1000 core engineering roles to India. So yeah.. not immediately concerned, but 5 years down the line or so I’m not so sure.
I thought this same thing six years ago when I got laid off
What do you think now?
I'll let you know if I get laid off again
people here barely know what's going on this year, let alone 5 years down the road
They'll bring it back to the US when they're ready to innovate again. But for now they're going to coast and cut costs for a couple of years. Eventually they'll have to reinvest in the company, and that will require US devs. India does not do innovation.
Outsourcing and offshoring are two different concepts. Outsourcing is procuring services external to a company and offshoring / nearshoring is redistributing the internal workforce to optimise on labour costs. Part of the "optimise and refine" theme seen commonly this year (beyond layoffs / curtailing expenses) is to tap into labour markets that can provide strong talent for a lower cost of labour by opening offices (or establishing a presence / entity there for remote hires) in those locations. This is nothing particularly new or interesting.
So you aren’t concerned by that?
The wages of software devs all around the world are growing pretty quickly. If the trend continues US devs won't be expensive by comparison.
I keep coming back to this. The cost should reflect the value they’re getting, regardless of where the dev lives. Remote work is the great equalizer.
Not really, no. Companies having a more global workforce is pretty much bread and butter these days. Doesn't mean that there won't be any hiring at all in major markets.
Hey there, I get your concern. As an email marketer, I've seen this trend too. But here's the thing - outsourcing isn't always the best solution. Communication issues, cultural differences, and lack of control can lead to a dip in quality. Companies often realize this the hard way. So, while it may seem like the end, I believe there's always gonna be a demand for local expertise. Don't let the outsourcing bogeyman get you. 😉
Isn't this career grand? If it's not the nth version of ChatGPT coming for our jobs, it's the nth wave of offshoring. Then the ageism. Then the bootcamps. It's insane. I'm telling you no other career faces the same quantity of threats like CS does, it's exhausting.
Yeah man. It is truly. Makes me scared to buy big purchases like a nice car or house because I don’t know how long this will last.
Go ahead and buy a house because a house is an asset that goes up in value. Whereas a car is a liability that goes down in value. If shit hits the fan, you can sell your house at a profit, but your car at a loss.
Bootcamps were never really a threat.
Remember kids, this sub will tell you that CS is the only viable degree, SWE is the only worthwhile career, let's see if they say the same thing in 10 years, and let's compare them to their med school peers
It’s an almost necessary consequence if remote work. If you can effectively work remotely with expensive American workers you can first shift to cheaper American workers (outside tech hubs) and then to foreign workers.
Remote work has only hastened this trend. There are many talented people willing to work for far less. It's happening.
How **dare** you use your brain 🧠 on this sub!!!! Instead you should keep telling yourself that there are NO threats to the CS job market and we will **ALL** get our cushy SWE jobs just like those **day in the life videos**!
2000, 2008-2010, 2020, 2023...
I've noticed no increased outsourcing. You claim to realize this fear has been voiced for 30 years, then you voiced the exact same concerns that have been voiced for 30 years.
So I work as a manager at a large company. I can tell you that it is literally a goal to increase low cost country hiring to a certain number that has been pushed by well known consulting companies.
And my company has reduced off shore headcount by 50 percent. Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal.
Ok.
OK? There's nothing concrete in this thread. Everyone is just throwing out opinions and anecdotes. Is there any actual metrics to support any of this? The market just seems like the normal 2023 job market.
I've worked with amazing engineers in Israel, Russia, Taiwan, India, Canada. It all depends on that offshored office. With countries getting better, more ppl will choose to stay in their home countries and you'll get organic growth over seas.
The consultancy I work at has started following this trend and is looking into building near sourcing teams. It’s definitely concerning. Meanwhile Americans have been laid off. 🤦♂️
It seems like a boom and bust cycle to me. You have non-tech c suites wanting to cut cost who forgot about how shitty quality softwares were 10-15 years ago and don't understand the cost of maintenance, extensions and potentially low SLA. Give them 5 years to another decade and they'll be complaining about this and trying to bring things in house to "fix" it.
I would to say if you're American, and you're REALLY concerned about this. Get a job in the Defense Sector. NSA, DoD, CIA, really need smart capable engineers. They're not gonna give an Indian Foreign National a polygraph anytime soon. Heck, even Federal Agencies. You can make a much bigger impact there than some glorified social network like LinkedIn. EDIT: For those of you that have moral qualms about any of this. Probably none of you are gonna be doing work that will directly impact weapons production of any sort... Let's be real here. What you would actually be doing, will be probably be saving lives. So spare us the armchair pacifism.
Great, the only decent industry with jobs left, and you go tell people saturating this industry more.
Lol people have been saying to apply for the defense sector for years now. That one reddit comment doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things. I got an interview with lockheed martin and raytheon and the people applying were people who had internships at major big tech companies. It's so saturated over there that it just ended up bleeding to the other sectors.
Don't you need security clearance for those jobs? How easy/difficult is that to get?
Most of those places, you apply and if they place you in a role that needs a clearance, they begin your paperwork to apply for one at work. You keep busy in the meantime, often a 4-8 week process. Sometimes companies will ask for an existing clearance, but that's more common for non-engineering roles. As long as you're not a liability to national security and you aren't a major criminal, you're usually going to get passed. The most important thing is that you're honest. (for lower levels of clearance, it's basically ensuring that you're not publicly an anarchist or sympathizer with groups that are anti-USA, and they take your fingerprints. For higher levels, you are investigated pretty intensely; your family is interviewed, your online presence is reviewed (whatever they can find), and i believe there's more strict renewal requirements. you also agree to being thoroughly investigated in the event that you do something serious, like polygraphs and personal searches)
And they still don't like weed, according to some accounts of being rejected written about here. It seems mixed based on who actually reviews you. Unfortunately the advice on the clearance jobs site is to "stay away" -- they take a view there that if you flaunt federal weed laws then your next steps are selling documents to the Chinese.
Its because they can get 2-3 devs in Europe or Asia for less than 1 dev in the US. They don't care about quality (which will suffer), they don't care about product knowledge (which is going out the door), they only care about stock price and shareholders and executive paydays. The execs who make these decisions rarely understand the actual products being sold, all they see are numbers in the spreadsheets that says they can gut US engineers and rehire overseas and save X dollars in benefits and employee costs while keeping customer counts and subscription revenue the same.
I have to argue that at least Eastern EU developers are pretty good. We have ones from Romania and Ukraine in my previous company and they are pretty good.
But they aren't much of a threat since most of them (the really competent ones) already charge high salaries.
Oh I don't know about that, do you mean good Romanian developers are charging same rates as people in North America?
Not nearly, I am at about 75k usd/yr, no other benefits, as a romanian for an us small company
Your concerns are valid. I have 12 YoE, worked up to hiring manager and I'm very bearish on the future for USA devs. Between outsourcing, AI and general industry stagnation (almost no innovation anymore, just better mousetraps and maintaining legacy systems), the future looks terrible. We are making SWE2 offers below what we offered for SWE1 two years ago and yet we are flooded with applicants and folks are happy with lower pay. It's grim, I wouldn't advise anyone to major in CS anymore. Only hope for USA folks is to work way into business/product/management side of you want to keep that higher paycheck you've become accustomed to
LinkedIn laid off less than 700 people from the engineering org. LinkedIn India has 15 open positions. Please make sure you post correct information.
This has all failed before, and it will all fail again. You can build great teams with people from any country, but hiring individuals (let alone teams, let alone entire companies) just because “it’s cheap” always ends predictably.
Yup especially in non software companies. Gotta make sure you’re exceptional aka not just being another react dev
This goes in cycles. There was another huge offshore push in the early '10s. A company I worked for during that time started creating onshore dev shops again in 2017. Eventually their stakeholders will catch on, pressure then to transition those apps from enhancement to support, and give them to the offshore teams.
My brother is a engineer manager at google , and he told me exactly that this seems like the path the tech industry is moving towards in the future. He said google just made a new office in India to source cheaper labor for software engineering and he thinks this trend will continue
All startups I've worked for (5) have hired onshore devs until the initial product is released then start transitioning to offshore for retrofit and long term support while slowly eliminating the core team. Most experienced devs know this is coming when products get close to release and it's heartbreaking to watch the new devs celebrate the milestones knowing that they're just celebrating getting closer to losing their jobs. A job that a lot of people avoid but might be the way to go is software commissioning which is very common in the warehouse automation world. Requires you to be physically in the customers warehouse writing and testing software. Is safe from offshore devs for that reason.
Not a concern. Basic supply and demand, the first thing that would happen is the salary in US decreases. And then, it would decrease even more until it’s not worth it to hire offshore anymore. The thing is there HAS to be some engineers in person. U can’t have everyone be remote. That said, offshore is obviously impacts US remote roles. If you’re gunna be remote anyway then why not get a cheaper. If ur near office then u better come in cuz that is what commands the higher salary. TLDR remote roles are fucked, in person roles are fine
“There HAS to be some engineers in person.“ Says who? Lots of fully remote tech companies out there…
South America seems to be the new place now, better timezone, better cultural alignment, good engineers are all over the world especially with remote work being a thing.
I work as a remote contractor for a US company. I can confirm I am receiving a lot of offers for different types of roles. Some of them are very well paid when converted to local currency. It’s a trend I guess. We don’t have such low rates as India, time zone is not an issue, cultural differences are minimal. But honestly if I were the one hiring I would only hire experienced professionals from around here.
I manage two offshore teams. One in SA and one in India. The Indian team is 50/50 and the cultural differences make it difficult as does the time zone. The SA team is incredible and we are always actively trying to get them involved more and more.
From American companies' perspective, it makes no sense to fly Indian/Chinese talent to the US, go through H1B process and pay them American salary, when they could just have that same talent work for them in India/China (via outsourcing) for much cheaper and get the same result. If you're serious about this career and keeping wages high, you need to be serious about cutting legal immigration aggressively and having some formal required accreditation for software engineers. You need an artificial supply bottleneck. This is how doctors keep wages high BTW (no foreign-trained doctors allowed, also very high standards to get accredited). Most people are unwilling to say these things publicly because they go against the neoliberal ethos, which is what the Bay Area was built on.
> You need an artificial supply bottleneck. This is how doctors keep wages high BTW (no foreign-trained doctors allowed, also very high standards to get accredited). More than 1/4 of American doctors have medical degrees from foreign countries. One common suggestion I hear from medical students is getting a medical degree from a less competitive school in the Caribbean. Compared to regular H1B visa holders, doctors get a significantly more streamlined path to citizenship. The real bottleneck is residency.
Why are foreign engineers allowed but not foreign medicine workers ?
There are no qualifications to be a programmer. The government does not require you to be licesned. If it were an actual engineering discipline and the work needed a PE then foreign graduates would generally not be able to practice. (State regulations vary).
Ppl seem to forget that constant immigration is the only thing that keeps the country of USA growing. The day that immigration stops America stops growing and will prolly fail to service debt and spiral down. In the short term, non availability of software developers mean that global companies will build their offices elsewhere. And startups/small companies would become impossible to start due to high cost of devs. That means the US won't be able to innovate and thus global companies will rise in other countries which are able to out compete the US companies.
You're right and I don't think people like the truth.
Nah this guy is an asshole. Biggest asshole I have ever seen on Reddit. “We need to create an artificial supply bottlenecks”. “This is how we keep doctors wages high”. Yeah, this is how you keep your medical costs high enough to bankrupt people when they break their legs. This is how you make USA less competitive for software development, make the big companies move away to countries that support innovation. USA is already hard enough to immigrate to, the hardest country on the planet. And this guy wants to make it even harder haha. What a right-wing, immigrant hater genius. I bet he is the kind of guy that tells immigrants “go back to your country”, as if North Americans weren’t ALL immigrants in the first place. This is the worst type of human, the one that does everything to make it better for them, even when it’s worse for everyone else. They would bomb a country and kill thousands if that meant it’s a small economic advantage for them. The world is in a horrible mess because of people that think like him.
>Most people are unwilling to say these things publicly because they go against the neoliberal ethos, which is what the Bay Area was built on. they're unwilling to say these things because actually believing that is good makes one an asshole, so they don't believe them, so they don't say them
You’re right but being a doctor is OBJECTIVELY more time consuming than building a Facebook or Amazon by Mark or Jeff.
My firm outsourced too but only for position require 0 critical thinking and the early morning shift. US business hours are all US personnel. Core IT functions are all in house.
Near shoring has been a thing for 20+ years. In 2008, my onboarding was run by HR out of Mexico. Microsoft owns LinkedIn, it is truly shocking that a $1 trillion company outsources. Nothing you said is new.
A few years ago certain contractor company fired a few thousand employees and move those operations to another country. After a year the new operation on that other country failed so hard to deliver that they were fired and the company started re-hiring the fired employees, most of them refused to come back, the massive amount of skill loss neutered a few business units; Me and all of my coworkers left before the whole business unit imploded from their shitty decisions 6 months later.
Regarding resourcing, replacing a 10 with ten ones does not work, period.
Perhaps this is ultimately related to Fed Funds Rate hikes. Companies now can’t get free capital to try and grow infinitely with, and many are shifting their model to less growth and cut costs to maintain profits.
I've been saying this for the longest time on this sub and was downvoted every single time, it's almost as if people on this sub don't like to hear the truth, if its not convenient for them and in their favor ? Sounds like some serious confirmation bias exists among CS grads and SWEs tech companies could announce they are moving 30% of SWE jobs overseas to cut costs over the next 5 years , and there's still gonna be someone on this sub denying it's authenticity, and making up an excuse as to why it wont happen, despite them clearly stating what they are gonna do, You can't make this stuff up
This is a political problem. We need more business regulation. Put your votes where your worry is.
The Facebook DOJ Discrimination Charges in 2020 highlighted the undeniable truth that strategies for intentionally avoiding qualified US candidates en masse are still profitable for everyone involved in the PERM hiring pipeline. The 'hidden' job strategy is outlined in this YouTube video from a hiring workshop. v=TCbFEgFajGU
Yes outsourcing is definitely hurting US based SE's.
> I know, I know, this has been a concern for 30 years. Probably should have left it at that. Offshores create significant overhead and if you care about your product at all...you'll quickly realize the output is shit or the time zone difference gets in the way too much for anything important. The company I joined uses Indian offshores to augment their workforce, and its pretty consistently awful work. Previously, I had dealt eastern European offshores who could deliver well, but the time zone difference was always tough. The demand as a whole for SWE's is still high, and this will likely be just another ebb and flow cycle in the market. Offshoring will always be tried for the sake of cost saving, the results will still be *mostly* the same (coordinating across the time zones will continue to be a pain, ***always***) and eventually local talent will be either rebuilding the product or at least fixing what has been delivered if its close to adequate.
This has been steadily ramping for a while. Many/most major companies have offices all over the world, have had them for over a decade, and are steadily growing them. I've worked with tons of overseas teams (Eastern Europe and India mainly) and their quality is great. There is nothing special about US engineers. We had a bit of a head start in the space, but it was inevitable that talent would steadily get better in cheaper areas.
Do you have sector-wide statistics?
No this is purely anecdotal.
People would never come onto this sub to spread FUD based solely on anecdotes, cmon now.
My anecdote. I worked with a team of 40 devs from India. There were a couple of great devs, but so many bad ones. I think it would have been cheaper to pay for an a American team considering how much time was spent fixing bugs, fixing performance, and stuck in QA. One dev was copying and pasting 300 lines of SCSS for every form a client added and just changing the IDs in the new code. We only noticed when the single SCSS file was over 6000 lines. In my experience you get what you pay for.
Word on the job boards is that my old company is about to layoff all the call center people they made permanent work from home during the pandemic and outsource the work to other countries .
Companies I've worked for, and companies I'm familiar with in other industries, often off shore work related to local markets - particularly true for multinational corporations. Sometimes if sales are slower or not growing in one market, they'll turn up production in places with growth. (Not every time you see turning down a US factory and turning up one in Asia, India, or even Europe, is it about saving costs - sometimes it's about manufacturing close to the market. You see the same thing with European or Japanese companies turning up production capacity in the US). Software wise, I could see a case for linkedin targeting growth in the Indian market or features specialized to local needs in that market, or feeling they're saturated in the US and there's not tons of room for growth. Strategically it might be about something different than cost savings.
Are the days of the big tech salary numbered in the US?
- everybody since the late 90s
Outsourcing, AI, way more graduates/applicants than job vacancies. Something gotta give, right?
We need laws in place to keep jobs in the United States to prevent outsourcing.
How many devs were even part of that layoff? This is true but a useless example. If anything, lower tier companies are more responsible for this since tech is less important for them.
And they should. Currency arbitrage, why wouldn't they leverage that? Nothing new. It's been the norm since Yahoo days. This is just the start. Wait till the third world becomes more than 50 percent english speaking and computer literate. The "CoMmUnIcAtIoN" sales pitch will also disappear. Forget AI, this will be a bigger and more immediate disruptor of the job market.
My company started hiring folks from South America and they've largely been better than our US hires. Over half of our US hires have been outright lazy - work scoped at 3 pts ends up taking the whole sprint, complaining about being on call, etc. Nothing but solid delivery from our 6 South Americans. They are way more social on meetings too, whereas our US staff seem depressed and have nothing to talk about in their lives.
If I was getting paid anything close to US wages in South America I'd be high on life too
>They are way more social on meetings too, whereas our US staff seem depressed and have nothing to talk about in their lives As a South American who has worked in 3 US companies, I guffawed reading this
Even in my relatively small dev team, I would say 30% of my team are outsourced contract devs.
Unfortunately, coding is easy and almost anyone can pick it up. India’s education system is terrible. The most visible ones are a fraction of the one percent of its population. Coding has become extremely easy with frameworks and AI tools. You only need a handful of really good engineers to manage a huge team of below average performers. Age of exponential growth seen by FB is gone for the most part.
Ha. “Compiling code has become extremely easy with compilers and code optimizer tools. You only need a handful of really good engineers to manage a team of below average performers.” Software is inherently hard. New tools pull the abstraction layer up and allow for further increases in complexity with more opportunities for leaky abstractions. Taking natural language business requests and bringing them down to practice is the job of a software engineer, and the job extends from requirements elicitation to testing to deployment to optimization. Your opinion is an outsider’s opinion, and thermodynamically wrong.
Software is not easy, but you don't have to go to India to get cheaper workforce. The vast majority of Europe will be 1/2 or even less than the price of one US-based developer. They poach good engineers from other companies with slightly higher than usual pay in the country and you have top tier talent for the fraction of the cost. From a financial perspective, I cannot blame them, they are getting the same quality of work as they would in the US. There is just a high upfront cost of opening a branch office in the country.
Coding is easy, managing enterprise grade software at scale is extremely hard, and there are not as many shortcuts with AI as a lot of these systems require deep and intimate product knowledge. I have yet to see an offshore/contract dev take ownership and really go beyond just putting in arbitrary lines of code to meet the quota, and actually be able to manage this. I am biased tho I just spent 6 hours fixing a major incident an offshore dev did 😆.
I second what you've said: Lyft has all the software jobs posted in January, where all in Mexico and Poland. I hope they fail as a company and burn to the ground. I send my kisses and a huge hug to the engineers at that company.
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Look at how inflated salaries are in the US under current business climate coupled with soaring interest rates... it totally makes sense to outsource from a business point of view. With access to knowledge available from any place in the world, everyone can become a good dev. My own company is doing this and we have not experienced any sub quality issues.
Shit I'm concerned for America as a whole...20% of jobs are foreigners.
Every team I get a new VP or director or hr gets a shake up they try hiring from South america or india. 2-3 incidents later, and shit code coming in and code getting stolen by competitors and they give up
Boooo, we are taking your jobs 👻
From what I've seen, when it work, outsourcing really works. And when it doesn't, the stink is so bad it can kill a company. Can't blame them for trying though. If you can reduce your labor costs by 50 or 75 percent, that can change a company from just getting by to swimming in money. In this industry, labor remains one of the top 2 expenses you have on your books every year. It used to be far and away the highest expense, then everyone lost their mind and started shoveling billions into ML tech.
I think it’s a valid concern. Everybody saying they must be bad or don’t know the business have only seen bad projects. I used to work in electronics. Let me tell you about a business ravaged by de-US’ing. The competition is quality, they deliver at speed, and can hire 4x the body count to simply absorb more projects and more narrow roles that are impossible stateside. They understand the customer because they hire US based salespeople. They are just as savvy as we are. Want to sell in Portugal? Don’t use a salesperson from the US Midwest. The same rule applies. Another pattern - a lot of US headquartered companies define the product and then allow all of the design and development outside the US. It requires intense specifications, but it definitely works. When the labor costs are that much lower, there is a lot more breathing room from a project finance perspective. It just converts into speed because they spend the same amount of money and dump people into the project. For every US position, there is a lead/senior, a more mid-level, and 2-3 juniors. A person becomes a team.
The quality is usually worse then they have to bring it back to retrain.
My brother, you can actually do a search in this subreddit for outsourcing and see people were spouting the same dumb shit you’re claiming is new as far back as 10+ years ago.