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> It had all the hype, hands off, cheaper for the same work, faster to market, every other argument you've all certainly heard. Like some of the other response
by hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
> It had all the hype, hands off, cheaper for the same work, faster to market, every other argument you've all certainly heard.
Like some of the other responses, I'm baffled by your comment. Have you not seen what's happened in the past 5 years or so?
Yes, there was an outsourcing craze to India after the .com bubble burst in the early 00s that largely failed - the timezone, cultural differences, and lack of good infrastructure support made it fail.
The past 2 companies I've worked for offshored the majority of their software engineering work, and there was no quality difference compared to American devs. The offshore locations were Latin America and Europe, so plenty of timezone overlap. The companies are fully remote, so what difference does it make if the dev is in your same city or a thousand miles away?
I think offshoring has absolutely put downward pressure on US dev salaries in the past couple years.
- makeitdouble 2y agoI think you're talking about a different phenomenon, having remote mixed teams is IMHO different from offshoring. There's at least the crucial difference that you had devs in both western countries and traditional "third world", where the 90s view of offshoring was throwing whole processes abroad and only keep "heads" in-house while the remote teams/companies would deal with all the execution, making it inherently difficult to deal with production monitoring. PS: to your point offshoring to India has become more common but Indian companies are also not that cheap, so we're past the initial framework. Perhaps the same way outsourcing production to China used to be about sweatshops, when it can now be about unrivaled expertise at a cost.