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To anyone who has lived through various attempts to 'outsource' software development to various countries over the past two decades this is a sad joke. There is
by evgen 5y ago
To anyone who has lived through various attempts to 'outsource' software development to various countries over the past two decades this is a sad joke. There is a reason most (possibly all?) of these projects fail. For quite a while the people who were capable of performing the work ended up migrating to a few locations; now that they are spreading out a bit in a post-COVID world we are likely to see more work move out of specific geographic locations, but the work is still going to be done by the same people. There may be a small bit of price competition from lower COL areas, but those same coders will also be able to compete for a wider range of available work so that will maintain the higher price for labor.
- jmfldn 5y agoYeah this is essentially my take. I also think this report is drawing a fall equivalence between the impact of globalisation on manufacturing in the 1980s and in white collar roles now. Former can easily be moved abroad, eg steel production from Scotland to India. The latter involves splitting a high skill knowledge-based company across cultures, timezones etc. Most of what I've seen of this in IT has not been good. It's also not like our whole sector hasn't been theoretically offshorable for a decade or two either. The barriers from a pure labour point of view have been low for a long time. In other words, it could have happened en masse already but conspicuously hasn't.