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The market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent. This is not to say outsourcing can't ever work, but the situations where it does work are
by Nextgrid 2y ago
The market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent.
This is not to say outsourcing can't ever work, but the situations where it does work are much rarer than what every outsourcing vendor would like you to believe.
I bet a previous client's attempt at outsourcing (well into the 6 figures now) is included in that number... yet the expensive onshore devs outsourcing was supposed to replace are still there 2 years later except now they have to also babysit the offshore idiots and fix their messes.
But hey, the vendor got paid, the idiot executive who fell for their pitch wouldn't want to lose face, so it all gets handwaved away as a continuing success and more money gets thrown into the dumpster fire.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoFWIW, if you believe that long-term, the market is a good optimizing engine (I think it's a very reasonable and well-proven belief), then this is just a matter of time before things sort themselves out. The need for companies to get more value out of less spend won't disappear, nor will the comparative advantage of companies in lower CoL areas of the globe. That's two fundamental incentives on both sides that are aligned, driving the market to find the lowest-energy path from here to there. It'll get there, even if it ends up looking strange (like, idk., maybe cutting out management intermediaries but involving a middleman acting as insurance). That is, if LLMs won't leapfrog it all and end software dev outsourcing before it started to work well.