4 ms·

I recently worked as a consultant doing back office talent sourcing work. It is a stated, explicit ambition in the industry to offshore & automate as much work

I recently worked as a consultant doing back office talent sourcing work. It is a stated, explicit ambition in the industry to offshore & automate as much work as humanly possible. You're thinking, reasonably, that companies aren't going to go through the trouble of immediately opening a whole office in Bangalore for a few QA testers. You're right. They're either going to (1) offshore to an MSP (2) automate or (3) just not do QA, and (without realizing) just let bad code get written. Now that IT is working remotely anyway, why the heck NOT call Cap Gemini? Presto - we have QA. Who cares if they're in Penang?

Traster 6y ago
The obvious answer is that the companies that have their QA in Penang fairly quickly learn that the 7,500 engineers in Penang that you got for the price of 20 engineers in the US not only don't do the QA correctly, they're actively making the quality worse by DDOSing the engineers in the US with jira tickets. Then you find out that the senior management outsourced core activities to Penang, and before you know it you're on 14nm++++++ and angry US engineers are being forced to fly to Penang and figure it out, and the CEO is being blackmailed into a resignation using an office affair as a pretext. May have gotten a bit too specific with my hypothetical there.
- raverbashing 6y ago
  But it doesn't need to be Penang It can be Canada. It can be Mexico or South America. It can be Eastern Europe. Yes, it will be more expensive (but maybe not overall), and there will be fewer "yes-men" and less bottom-kissing but more actual work done and maybe better communications since time zones overlap.