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This is admirable but the truth is that these jobs will not disappear, they will simply be outsourced abroad. There’s swaths of competent people abroad that ar

This is admirable but the truth is that these jobs will not disappear, they will simply be outsourced abroad. There’s swaths of competent people abroad that are happy to take your (overpaid) place and the major shift to remote work tools has made it all the easier to blend in your team even if they’re working from another country. On top of this, foreign workers usually get paid 1/3 of the American salary, so the employers are extra incentivized to outsource these jobs.

kaycebasques 5y ago
The first counterargument that comes to my mind is timezones. I was on a team distributed across San Francisco, New York, London, Munich, Australia, Tokyo. Not being able to schedule a meeting time that works for everyone was a neverending source of friction and frustration. In other words while I don't disagree that there is a lot more work that can be outsourced, perhaps we will reach the limit earlier than you expect.
- AlgorithmicTime 5y ago
  Timezones arguably benefit some places that require a 24/7 coverage schedule.
- bluedino 5y ago
  Doesn't matter. I'm not sure what time it is in India, the Philippines, or the Czech Republic, but the support teams answer the phone between 8am and 5pm our time.
- beckingz 5y ago
  One growing trend in the US is outsourcing to South America. Lots of great value developers down there in the same timezone. The second issue that still comes up is communication and culture. Successful cross cultural communication requires more clarity in messaging and tasks. It can work and can work well and deliver good quality at great prices, but the obvious savings are partially offset by the higher communication and management costs. Sometimes more than fully offset.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- TexanFeller 5y ago
  There are tons of competent developers in Central and South America in time zones close to the US. The language/accent barriers as well as cultural differences are much less than say India IMHO. On average the folks I’ve worked with haven’t been as good as US staff, but I bet the gap could close quickly.
_dibly 5y ago
From reading the article it seems like the job areas getting hit the hardest would be low level hospitality jobs and on-site jobs with little to no remote opportunity. I imagine those would be the hardest positions to outsource. People quitting their job at McDonalds are in more danger of losing their job to a high school dropout than a foreign agent.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
We'll have to see how that works out in the aggregate. Here in the US, we pretty much outsourced our manufacturing to China. This has always been the case (since after WWII), but this time, we did it to such an extent, that we have destroyed our domestic manufacturing infrastructure. A number of folks made a lot of money on this, but a much larger number of folks have really taken it in the shorts. Arguably, a lot of the troubles we've had, over the last decade, have found a root cause in this. It's no secret. Pretty much everyone knows this, but the will to do something about it is weak. It's been my experience, that when the pain gets great enough, the change will come. That's not always a good thing. Change like that, more often resembles an amputation, as opposed to a disinfectant swab and some stitches.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  This narrative is largely false. Both because nothing was "outsourced" and because american manufacturing is at an all time high. Automation ended the vast majority of high-labour manufacturing. What was left was only economical to do without automation at extremely low labour costs. In the next decade, china itself will see large segments of its manufacturing labour gone to automation.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    Yes and no. It depends on what is being manufactured. We manufacture big, expensive things. I have friends that run Garment District companies, and they are pretty much a Bellwether for this kind of thing. > In the next decade, china itself will see large segments of its manufacturing labour gone to automation. I agree. It will be slower than Japan and Korea, because China has a much larger population of poor folks that will work 996, but, one day, we will see a very different China. It will be a consumer powerhouse. If you think America is a consumeristic society, just wait until China becomes mostly middle-class. There's a reason why so many corporations are abasing themselves so much for entry into the Chinese market.
    - mjburgess 5y ago
      I suspect, based on a type of ecological-thermodynamic reasoning, that china will never be middle class. I think the "global class structure" we have today might be the peak of history. The relevant calculation: Annual US Energy Consumption per Capia: 7,000 kg oil equivalent. China: 2,000 kg. So you're looking at +5,000kg per capita * 1.4bn people annual. So you'll need to add that energy capacity to the world, ie., a c. 10 trillion kg oil eqv. -- it's not clear we can do this.
wayoutthere 5y ago
Yeah, the offshoring boom is over. Everyone is bringing those roles back to the US. The communication, cultural and skill gaps are too great and costs aren’t that much lower anymore. Anyone who has worked on virtual teams will back up how much less productive things are when having to juggle time zones even between the east and west coast of the US, much less different countries without overlapping work hours. Nobody wants to offshore to India anymore because the business culture at the big body shops is totally unethical by western standards and there’s just an expectation of getting swindled on QoS; so people only ship low-value jobs like customer service over there. And even those are moving to South America for time zone reasons (and the business culture more closely aligns with the US).
dudul 5y ago
This was attempted in the 2000s and it was a massive disaster.
- username90 5y ago
  China in 2000 and China in 2021 is like night and day in terms of standard of living, education etc. Just because it didn't work back then doesn't mean it wont work today.
  - dudul 5y ago
    The massive outsourcing experiment failure had nothing to do with standard of living or education. It was the combination of timezones and cultural differences. Turns out cultural differences around work, communication, etc between the US and India/China are pretty massive. I seriously doubt that these went away in 2 decades. Also, your argument around standard of living and education would actually be more proof that outsourcing would not work. It is no longer as financially beneficial. That being said, you're also right, past failure doesn't mean that it can't ever be successful in the future.
    - jason0597 5y ago
      But India/China are not the only places where you can outsource to. What about France? Minimal cultural differences, and you still get massive savings when it comes to paying salaries.
      - dudul 5y ago
        You absolutely do not save anything by outsourcing from the US to France. And cultural differences are there too. That was probably the worst possible example in the EU :-) That being said, yes there are other options. Eastern Europe is more and more popular for outsourcing, so is South America. Honestly, I'm maybe dead wrong but when I compare the mentality two decades ago (ie let's minimize cost by any means, who cares who writes the code? it's just code) and today, I truly see an equivalent to the "not invented here" syndrome.
deleted 5y ago
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FredPret 5y ago
I'm from the third world and have moved to the west, so I have experience of working in both environments and with both sets of people. The difference in pay is not just due to proximity and will likely persist to some degree.
wil421 5y ago
People have been saying this since I was in high school post dot com bubble burst. “Don’t get into IT or software development it’s all going to be outsourced.”
- u678u 5y ago
  Its true though. 75% of my IT dept are outsourcers - or those who used to work for such companies.
- vsskanth 5y ago
  The software field expanded so much that there is a massive need for both in-house developers for tech firms and outsourcing for traditional businesses with legacy systems like banks, insurance etc.
- jason0597 5y ago
  Outsourcing is not exclusive to India. What if they outsource to Italy? Spain? Ukraine? Greece? Hell even Germany. All of those places have salaries that are a fraction of the typical US salary. US salaries are incredibly ridiculous on the global stage. And all of those places with actually good developers
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Then why hasn't this been happening in significant amounts to impact the U.S. software job market in the past thirty years?
  - ArkanExplorer 5y ago
    Those places have payroll taxes in the realm of 30-70%, and high progressive income taxes. The overall labour cost is similar. American developers are just lucky that they live in a low-tax society.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  In my experience, outsourced code is almost always harder to maintain and I haven't seen example of successful outsourcing of ongoing code maintenance. I'm sure there's a lot of variance, but I don't think "outsourced everything" will be practical for most software businesses that place importance on quality of service. Outsourcing can be great for developing a green-field new initiative, but at some point the in house folks are going to need to learn the new codebase so they can fix bugs, scale, and keep the lights on.
mehphp 5y ago
> There’s swaths of competent people abroad that are happy to take your (overpaid) place How is it overpaid? Engineers provide a lot more value than they are getting paid. If anything, people abroad are underpaid.
- granshaw 5y ago
  I’m on a slack channel with other startup founders and just this week I was seeing chatter about how asking rates for Eastern EU devs were skyrocketing lately
  - fuzzylama 5y ago
    Can you give me an idea on what the rates are?
- willis936 5y ago
  The answer is bigger than the question. Almost everyone in the West is overpaid because Western Society reaps the benefits of an underpaid working class on another continent. Out of sight, out of mind.
  - bradlys 5y ago
    I don’t know if the west is overpaid or if it’s just that the people outside the west are underpaid. I think it’s more likely the latter. Both can be underpaid, ya know?
  - TheCoelacanth 5y ago
    I think it's less that some people are overpaid and more that some goods are too cheap (mostly the goods that the West has stopped producing in favor of outsourcing to underpaid working class on another continent).
notsureaboutpg 5y ago
It's really hard to outsource middle management and executive roles, which are the next step for most dev roles. So the outsourcing effect has lots of limitations. I welcome outsourcing though. I do quality work and know what it's worth and can advocate for myself. Any foreign worker who can do the same is welcome.

kaycebasques 5y ago

The first counterargument that comes to my mind is timezones. I was on a team distributed across San Francisco, New York, London, Munich, Australia, Tokyo. Not being able to schedule a meeting time that works for everyone was a neverending source of friction and frustration. In other words while I don't disagree that there is a lot more work that can be outsourced, perhaps we will reach the limit earlier than you expect.

AlgorithmicTime 5y ago
Timezones arguably benefit some places that require a 24/7 coverage schedule.
bluedino 5y ago
Doesn't matter. I'm not sure what time it is in India, the Philippines, or the Czech Republic, but the support teams answer the phone between 8am and 5pm our time.
beckingz 5y ago
One growing trend in the US is outsourcing to South America. Lots of great value developers down there in the same timezone. The second issue that still comes up is communication and culture. Successful cross cultural communication requires more clarity in messaging and tasks. It can work and can work well and deliver good quality at great prices, but the obvious savings are partially offset by the higher communication and management costs. Sometimes more than fully offset.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
TexanFeller 5y ago
There are tons of competent developers in Central and South America in time zones close to the US. The language/accent barriers as well as cultural differences are much less than say India IMHO. On average the folks I’ve worked with haven’t been as good as US staff, but I bet the gap could close quickly.

_dibly 5y ago

From reading the article it seems like the job areas getting hit the hardest would be low level hospitality jobs and on-site jobs with little to no remote opportunity. I imagine those would be the hardest positions to outsource. People quitting their job at McDonalds are in more danger of losing their job to a high school dropout than a foreign agent.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

We'll have to see how that works out in the aggregate. Here in the US, we pretty much outsourced our manufacturing to China. This has always been the case (since after WWII), but this time, we did it to such an extent, that we have destroyed our domestic manufacturing infrastructure. A number of folks made a lot of money on this, but a much larger number of folks have really taken it in the shorts. Arguably, a lot of the troubles we've had, over the last decade, have found a root cause in this. It's no secret. Pretty much everyone knows this, but the will to do something about it is weak. It's been my experience, that when the pain gets great enough, the change will come. That's not always a good thing. Change like that, more often resembles an amputation, as opposed to a disinfectant swab and some stitches.

mjburgess 5y ago
This narrative is largely false. Both because nothing was "outsourced" and because american manufacturing is at an all time high. Automation ended the vast majority of high-labour manufacturing. What was left was only economical to do without automation at extremely low labour costs. In the next decade, china itself will see large segments of its manufacturing labour gone to automation.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  Yes and no. It depends on what is being manufactured. We manufacture big, expensive things. I have friends that run Garment District companies, and they are pretty much a Bellwether for this kind of thing. > In the next decade, china itself will see large segments of its manufacturing labour gone to automation. I agree. It will be slower than Japan and Korea, because China has a much larger population of poor folks that will work 996, but, one day, we will see a very different China. It will be a consumer powerhouse. If you think America is a consumeristic society, just wait until China becomes mostly middle-class. There's a reason why so many corporations are abasing themselves so much for entry into the Chinese market.
  - mjburgess 5y ago
    I suspect, based on a type of ecological-thermodynamic reasoning, that china will never be middle class. I think the "global class structure" we have today might be the peak of history. The relevant calculation: Annual US Energy Consumption per Capia: 7,000 kg oil equivalent. China: 2,000 kg. So you're looking at +5,000kg per capita * 1.4bn people annual. So you'll need to add that energy capacity to the world, ie., a c. 10 trillion kg oil eqv. -- it's not clear we can do this.

wayoutthere 5y ago

Yeah, the offshoring boom is over. Everyone is bringing those roles back to the US. The communication, cultural and skill gaps are too great and costs aren’t that much lower anymore. Anyone who has worked on virtual teams will back up how much less productive things are when having to juggle time zones even between the east and west coast of the US, much less different countries without overlapping work hours. Nobody wants to offshore to India anymore because the business culture at the big body shops is totally unethical by western standards and there’s just an expectation of getting swindled on QoS; so people only ship low-value jobs like customer service over there. And even those are moving to South America for time zone reasons (and the business culture more closely aligns with the US).

dudul 5y ago

This was attempted in the 2000s and it was a massive disaster.

username90 5y ago
China in 2000 and China in 2021 is like night and day in terms of standard of living, education etc. Just because it didn't work back then doesn't mean it wont work today.
- dudul 5y ago
  The massive outsourcing experiment failure had nothing to do with standard of living or education. It was the combination of timezones and cultural differences. Turns out cultural differences around work, communication, etc between the US and India/China are pretty massive. I seriously doubt that these went away in 2 decades. Also, your argument around standard of living and education would actually be more proof that outsourcing would not work. It is no longer as financially beneficial. That being said, you're also right, past failure doesn't mean that it can't ever be successful in the future.
  - jason0597 5y ago
    But India/China are not the only places where you can outsource to. What about France? Minimal cultural differences, and you still get massive savings when it comes to paying salaries.
    - dudul 5y ago
      You absolutely do not save anything by outsourcing from the US to France. And cultural differences are there too. That was probably the worst possible example in the EU :-) That being said, yes there are other options. Eastern Europe is more and more popular for outsourcing, so is South America. Honestly, I'm maybe dead wrong but when I compare the mentality two decades ago (ie let's minimize cost by any means, who cares who writes the code? it's just code) and today, I truly see an equivalent to the "not invented here" syndrome.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

FredPret 5y ago

I'm from the third world and have moved to the west, so I have experience of working in both environments and with both sets of people. The difference in pay is not just due to proximity and will likely persist to some degree.

wil421 5y ago

People have been saying this since I was in high school post dot com bubble burst. “Don’t get into IT or software development it’s all going to be outsourced.”

u678u 5y ago
Its true though. 75% of my IT dept are outsourcers - or those who used to work for such companies.
vsskanth 5y ago
The software field expanded so much that there is a massive need for both in-house developers for tech firms and outsourcing for traditional businesses with legacy systems like banks, insurance etc.
jason0597 5y ago
Outsourcing is not exclusive to India. What if they outsource to Italy? Spain? Ukraine? Greece? Hell even Germany. All of those places have salaries that are a fraction of the typical US salary. US salaries are incredibly ridiculous on the global stage. And all of those places with actually good developers
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  Then why hasn't this been happening in significant amounts to impact the U.S. software job market in the past thirty years?
- ArkanExplorer 5y ago
  Those places have payroll taxes in the realm of 30-70%, and high progressive income taxes. The overall labour cost is similar. American developers are just lucky that they live in a low-tax society.
cwkoss 5y ago
In my experience, outsourced code is almost always harder to maintain and I haven't seen example of successful outsourcing of ongoing code maintenance. I'm sure there's a lot of variance, but I don't think "outsourced everything" will be practical for most software businesses that place importance on quality of service. Outsourcing can be great for developing a green-field new initiative, but at some point the in house folks are going to need to learn the new codebase so they can fix bugs, scale, and keep the lights on.

mehphp 5y ago

> There’s swaths of competent people abroad that are happy to take your (overpaid) place How is it overpaid? Engineers provide a lot more value than they are getting paid. If anything, people abroad are underpaid.

granshaw 5y ago
I’m on a slack channel with other startup founders and just this week I was seeing chatter about how asking rates for Eastern EU devs were skyrocketing lately
- fuzzylama 5y ago
  Can you give me an idea on what the rates are?
willis936 5y ago
The answer is bigger than the question. Almost everyone in the West is overpaid because Western Society reaps the benefits of an underpaid working class on another continent. Out of sight, out of mind.
- bradlys 5y ago
  I don’t know if the west is overpaid or if it’s just that the people outside the west are underpaid. I think it’s more likely the latter. Both can be underpaid, ya know?
- TheCoelacanth 5y ago
  I think it's less that some people are overpaid and more that some goods are too cheap (mostly the goods that the West has stopped producing in favor of outsourcing to underpaid working class on another continent).

notsureaboutpg 5y ago

It's really hard to outsource middle management and executive roles, which are the next step for most dev roles. So the outsourcing effect has lots of limitations. I welcome outsourcing though. I do quality work and know what it's worth and can advocate for myself. Any foreign worker who can do the same is welcome.