I hate this attitude. It reeks of privilege and naivety of the working world outside the speaker's bubble, which is especially ironic considering that its propo

I hate this attitude. It reeks of privilege and naivety of the working world outside the speaker's bubble, which is especially ironic considering that its proponents are usually very liberal (and thus love to talk up how pro-worker and considerate of their privilege they are, except when it concerns xenophobic straw conservatives). But I digress, so let me tell a story instead. My dad was working in $TECH_FIELD for a subsidiary of a multinational megacorp ($BIGCO; you might have heard of them). Said subsidiary had decided to branch out into providing $CERTAIN_KIND_OF_TECH_SERVICES to $OTHER_BIGCOS. My dad's team was one of the few that got their work done without trying to play "the game" too hard. Almost everyone else in the company would fight them every step of the way, fighting to gain control over a certain aspect of his account (for the power and influence, of course), then never ever doing any work towards it, forcing my dad's team to pick up the slack for everyone else while they took the credit. Say, a team would receive the job of designing $TECH_SOLUTION, but the deadline would loom and my dad's team would never, ever receive the design from the design team for him to implement, so it would end up being all on him and his teammates to design and implement $TECH_SOLUTION. So it was just under a dozen people with my dad, working their asses off to provide services to this particular account. A friend in middle management let slip once that they were the only profitable account in the entire division, and their customer was the only one happy about the service they were receiving. After a few years of depressingly poor management and vicious office politics, $BIGCO decided it was time for a change, and brought in a new CTO to turn the ship around. Naturally, said CTO decides that the best course of action would be to lay off almost the entire team working on the only profitable account in the whole fucking division, and replace them with offshore contractors. Only a few months before a critical infrastructural change required by the contract needed to be completed, and just over a year before the contract was to expire. I'm sure you can see where this is going. My dad was one of the few spared from this show of gratitude, and was promptly tasked with training the offshore workers. Pretty straightforward, right? Employees are just cogs. It doesn't matter if they've spent decades, almost their entire working careers, mastering this field. You can just take any random college graduate and bring them up to speed in a month, right? Better yet, get an offshore one that costs a 10th or a 20th of what a Red Blooded American would demand, and pocket the difference. That's like, free money! Wrong. Said contractors barely spoke English, and knew less about $TECH_FIELD than I did. As futile as it would be to train a western college grad up to the required proficiency before the deadline, it is downright impossible to do the same with language barrier erected in front of you. My dad and the rest of his team would spend hours on the phone with the outsourced workers, trying to walk them through a process, starting from very basic first principles that anyone with their degree in their field should know, and... silence. Needless to say, my dad and most of the other remaining members of the team got out of there ASAP. $BIGCO realized their incompetence too late, tucked their tail between their legs and tried to hire back the laid off team members, but unlike most of the stories you had scoffed at, they were all able to get new jobs in the mean time. Service quality plummeted, the customer was appalled when they realized what had happened, and when the time came, decided not to renew their contract. A few months later, $BIGCO decided to get out of $BUSINESS and laid off the rest of the division. --- Ok, so what can we learn from this? Let's consider a few (not necessarily mutually exclusive) possibilities: 1. (Some) corporations are mind-boggling stupid, with the foresight of a goldfish, and greed that would make Ebeneezer Scrooge blush. They will happily ruin a profitable business to save a few pennies in the short term. 2. (Some) offshore firms from third world countries know this, and build their business around pulling fast ones on these stupid corporate executives. They tell them everything they want to hear about how the workers in $COUNTRY are just as good as the ones in America, but will work for pennies on the dollar, and so much harder! Then, when they seal the deal, they go out and hire a bunch of newly minted college grads with zero experience in said field, and tell them to play the part while they cook up some nice resumes. Yeah, I said it. It's stupid enough to begin with to fire 75% of a business, leave it in the hands of a few college grads, and expect everything to work out. It's downright suicide when you consider the rampant degree and resume fraud that these offshore firms perpetrate, and how brazenly corrupt many universities from the third world are. And the beautiful thing is, the language barrier makes it extremely difficult for management to tell that anything is wrong until it's already too late. 3. Of course not all foreign workers, or even all foreign workers from the third world, are like this. When people talk about incompetent offshore workers taking their jobs, this is the kind of downright fraudulent practice they speak of, not the honest workers that really are just as good as their western counterparts (and will probably end up moving as soon as they can...) 4. Don't be intellectually lazy and lean on the perception of racism or xenophobia. Said stupid corporations will also happily fire older workers with decades of experience for clueless American college grads, and ruin businesses that way. It never occurs to them that you can train young employees while the old guard keeps things running smoothly, because they're seeking the petty short term profit at the long term detriment to the business. Why? 5. Corporations are managed by psychopaths. They ruin their businesses in these ways because the go-getters all want the short term boost in profitability that will promote them up the corporate ladder quickly enough that they won't have to deal with the consequences. Even if it destroys the company, these psychos will have long since bounced to another job beforehand. Said psychopaths wage wage war in the office. An interpretation that I didn't initially consider of my dad's story was that maybe said CTO or one of his new managers was deliberately trying to justify axing the division by destroying the only profitable team. So it's also entirely possible that in many cases of offshoring, the "incompetent" actions of the corporation at large is really just one person trying to snuff out someone else vying for the promotion they want. --- So, all of this giant wall of text considered, my point is that, well, there are a lot of reasons beyond employee incompetence why a corporation might offshore a worker. It's intellectually lazy and downright rude to imagine some straw factory worker screaming "DEY TOOK ERR JEERRRBS" and shut off your brain every time you hear someone complain about the practice. As for the question of "what about the guy that got offshored and has been unemployed since," I have more stories (some my own, some from others) I could tell, but since I've already overstayed my welcome, I'll be explicit: Economic downturns suck. Getting laid off or offshored during one could very well leave you unemployed for years, during which no one is willing to hire you. Even when the economy picks back up, it's going to look bad on your resume if you spent years unemployed (or employed in an unrelated field). It's even worse if you're older, and ageism kicks in. In this scenario, you'd probably need to change careers to survive. As programmers, this doesn't sound so bad to us, because we know (knock on wood) that some kind of programmer will be demand for the foreseeable future, and we should always be able to change a technology "stack" or platform or whatever and find a new job doing very similar things. But not everyone is as fortunate as us. For most people, having to change careers means throwing everything away and learning something new. If you need to do that to keep the lights on, you do it, but it gets harder and harder to do so as you get older. So don't be so hard on people that made the wrong choice and picked a career that disappeared from under them.