5 ms·

I think this is the year this finally comes to pass. The US demand for devs has grown so much faster than our own ability to supply that demand, even with boot

I think this is the year this finally comes to pass. The US demand for devs has grown so much faster than our own ability to supply that demand, even with bootcamps and exploding CS dept sizes, that this hasn't been an issue. But if that demand is met somehow, things will change. 10 years ago Asia tried to supply that demand but for a variety of reasons it didn't really work. 5 years ago it was eastern Europe and it worked a lot better, but still companies that wanted the best team environment possible wanted people in the US and since many had the money to pay for it, demand remained above supply. Now South America is taking their turn and I think they can actually finally pull off being an outsource or remote-office option that has very few downsides and the enormous upside of being 1/5th the cost. Combine that with everyone going remote, removing the last of the two big differentiator between US and offshore employees (timezone and being on site), and I think in the midsts of these layoffs we're going to see a shift of a lot of that work to SA. Unless demand continues to explode, outstripping even the supply of SA, I think we should all expect lower wages and fewer jobs in the coming years.

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
I used to be in the camp "let's outsource it" and I found out, it is not working. Code which you get is mostly useless and needs to be integrated into whole solution and you are potentially letting others to stole your IP and sell it to somebody else.
- eagsalazar2 4y ago
  Just because it didn't work for you once doesn't mean it can't work. I know of many US companies using Eastern European and south American people very successfully and getting high quality contributions.
- nootropicat 4y ago
  From all anecdotal reports of 'not working' I noticed all think of outsourcing as something they contract a middleman foreign company for, rather than hire individual remote developers. That company then hires locally. Then they wonder why it doesn't work. That's because no good local dev wants to work for an outsourcing company like that.
  - Viliam1234 4y ago
    Exactly this. I had a few Indian colleagues, contracted individually, and they were very smart and capable and a pleasure to work with. I also had an entire team contracted using a middleman Indian company, and they were barely competent. First they impressed us with an awesome demo (an animated login screen and some generic dialogs... which in hindsight they probably copied from some other project and reused to impress all customers), but afterwards all requests took a lot of time to complete, and the things they delivered were often not the things we have actually requested. We assumed this was a honest misunderstanding and thought "we can clarify the misunderstandings and let them do it over, and it will still be much cheaper than hiring a local team for the same job", but one year later we realized we still had nothing useful, and if we had hired a local team instead, they could have the same thing done in a month or two, so it would even be cheaper that way. But this was not about India, but about using the middleman. In a different company we have hired a local team using a middleman, and it also turned out to be a disaster. Not as horrible as with the Indian middleman though; it is probably easier to be completely shameless if you never have to meet the people in person. I guess the lesson is that you can outsource programming, but you can't outsource hiring programmers.
itsokimbatman 4y ago
It's possible, certainly. I started my path to this career back in 1998, and dropped out of college because I was not prepared... it kinda worked out well because the tech bubble popped and I would've had a bad time around the time I would've graduated. When I went back to school sometime later, the job market had recovered a good bit. The whole time I had followed the countless predictions of the end of the software bubble, and not a one of them has come true. I'm not going to say that devs can expect infinite growth and FAANG level pay across the entire category of dev jobs. But I think in general it will still be a viable path to a reasonably comfortable, middle to upper middle class lifestyle for many years to come like most other professional careers, and there will always be a strong market on the high end as well for FAANG or those with niche, in demand skillsets.
voxl 4y ago
Yeah i'll believe it when I see it.

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago

I used to be in the camp "let's outsource it" and I found out, it is not working. Code which you get is mostly useless and needs to be integrated into whole solution and you are potentially letting others to stole your IP and sell it to somebody else.

eagsalazar2 4y ago
Just because it didn't work for you once doesn't mean it can't work. I know of many US companies using Eastern European and south American people very successfully and getting high quality contributions.
nootropicat 4y ago
From all anecdotal reports of 'not working' I noticed all think of outsourcing as something they contract a middleman foreign company for, rather than hire individual remote developers. That company then hires locally. Then they wonder why it doesn't work. That's because no good local dev wants to work for an outsourcing company like that.
- Viliam1234 4y ago
  Exactly this. I had a few Indian colleagues, contracted individually, and they were very smart and capable and a pleasure to work with. I also had an entire team contracted using a middleman Indian company, and they were barely competent. First they impressed us with an awesome demo (an animated login screen and some generic dialogs... which in hindsight they probably copied from some other project and reused to impress all customers), but afterwards all requests took a lot of time to complete, and the things they delivered were often not the things we have actually requested. We assumed this was a honest misunderstanding and thought "we can clarify the misunderstandings and let them do it over, and it will still be much cheaper than hiring a local team for the same job", but one year later we realized we still had nothing useful, and if we had hired a local team instead, they could have the same thing done in a month or two, so it would even be cheaper that way. But this was not about India, but about using the middleman. In a different company we have hired a local team using a middleman, and it also turned out to be a disaster. Not as horrible as with the Indian middleman though; it is probably easier to be completely shameless if you never have to meet the people in person. I guess the lesson is that you can outsource programming, but you can't outsource hiring programmers.

itsokimbatman 4y ago

It's possible, certainly. I started my path to this career back in 1998, and dropped out of college because I was not prepared... it kinda worked out well because the tech bubble popped and I would've had a bad time around the time I would've graduated. When I went back to school sometime later, the job market had recovered a good bit. The whole time I had followed the countless predictions of the end of the software bubble, and not a one of them has come true. I'm not going to say that devs can expect infinite growth and FAANG level pay across the entire category of dev jobs. But I think in general it will still be a viable path to a reasonably comfortable, middle to upper middle class lifestyle for many years to come like most other professional careers, and there will always be a strong market on the high end as well for FAANG or those with niche, in demand skillsets.

voxl 4y ago

Yeah i'll believe it when I see it.