this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
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Thing is, outsourcing never stopped. It's still going strong, sending jobs to whichever country is cheapest.
India is losing out to Indonesia, to Mexico, and to S American countries.
It's a really stupid drive to the bottom, and you always get what you pay for. Want a good development team in Bengaluru? It might be cheaper than in the US, but not that much cheaper. Want good developers in Mexico? You can get them, but they're not the cheapest. And when a company outsources like this, they've already admitted they're willing to sacrifice quality for cost savings, and you - as a manager - won't be getting those good, more expensive developers. You'll be getting whoever is cheapest.
It is among the most stupid business practices I've had to fight with in my long career, and one of the things I hate the most.
Developers are not cogs. You can't swap them out like such, and any executive who thinks you can is a fool and an incompetent idiot.
Outsourcing is realistically often a tool to get mass, not for cost.
There's a reason so many people went to coding boot camps, there was a huge demand for developers. Here in Germany for quite a while you literally couldn't get developers, unless you paid outrageous salaries. There were none. So if you needed a lot of devs, you had the chance to either outsource or cancel the project.
I actually talked to a manager about our "near shoreing" and it wasn't actually that much cheaper if you accounted for all the friction, but you could deliver volume.
BTW: there's a big difference between hiring the cheapest contractors you can find and opening an office in a low income country. My colleagues from Poland, Estonia and Romania were paid maybe half what I got, but those guys are absolutely solid, no complaints.
Except "mass" is not useful by itself. It's not a chair factory where more people equals faster delivery, just like 9 women won't deliver a baby in a month. I wish companies understood this.
You're oversimplifying things, drastically.
Corporations don't have one projects, they have dozens, maybe hundreds. And those projects need staffing.
And that's the core of your folly - latency versus throughput. Yes, putting 10 new devs in a project won't increase speed magically. But 200 developers can get 20 projects done, where 10 devs only finish one.
Opening an office is a completely different thing; there is an enormous difference between offshore contractors and offshore employees. That much, I'll agree with.
In the US, though, it's usually cost-driven. When offshore mandates come down, it's always in terms of getting more people for less cost. However, in most cases, you don't get more quality code faster by throwing more people at it. It's very much a case of "9 women making a baby in one month." Rarely are software problems solved with larger teams; usually, a single, highly skilled programmer will do more for a software project than 5 junior developers.
Not an projects are the same. Sometimes what you do need is a bunch of people. But it's by far more the exception than the rule, and yet Management (especially in companies where software isn't the core competency) almost always assumes the opposite.
If you performed a survey in the US, I would bet good money that in the majority of cases the decision to offshore was not made by line managers, but by someone higher in the chain who did not have a software engineering degree.