r/cscareerquestions • u/shitdealonly • 1d ago
What stops every programming/cs jobs from being outsourced to lower income countries?
Genuine Question:
I'm looking to make a career change but I have this one question.
since cs/programming have low barrier to entry, what stops it from all the jobs from being outsourced to poorer countries (ex. india)?
what would make developers from advanced countries to be competitive ($50k+/yr) vs developers from developing countries ($3k/yr)?
isn't studying programming/cs in rich/advanced country equivalent to taking highway to being jobless/unemployed since barrier to entry is so low and globally accessible?
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u/Ashamed_Map8905 1d ago
Being close to the customer/user. Software solves problems. Socialising that problem through people and process at the end customer, understanding pain points, requirements, risks, issues, etc. Users/customers, as people, still value relationships.
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u/FrewdWoad 3h ago
Yeah every single step of distance between the customer and the programmer multiplies the time and effort required to write code that solves the problem.
Originally the first outsourcers struggled with incompetence too (3rd world employees who got their degree/job through bribes and had barely ever touched a computer in their lives). But places like India have improved a lot on that front now.
But distance, alone (being in a different timezone and never being able to meet face-to-face around a real whiteboard) is enough to 10x the amount of time required to build a given software product.
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u/KarmaFarmaLlama1 1d ago
reminds me of this video from the onion back in the 2000s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYaZ57Bn4pQ
outsourcing has been common for like 35 years. the overall size of the pie has emensely grown over the time so there has always been a need for more people. this has been despite short term slowdowns like we are have recently experienced
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u/Sparaucchio 1d ago
And now the pie isn't growing as fast as the supply of software engineers. And this is the reason of the current state of the job market despite big tech scoring record-high profits every year
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u/Sparaucchio 1d ago
Nothing. That is the reason why it is not possibile to find devs for 3k per year. Salaries in developing countries are going up real fast thanks to offshoring and outsourcing
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u/pizza_the_mutt 1d ago
Coordinating across time-zones, geographies, and cultures, is hard.
You will get cheaper engineers in India, but it may push your launch back 6 months compared to hiring locally. And you will spend a lot more time on meetings in the middle of the night, and trying to sort out miscommunications, so quality might suffer.
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u/victorsmonster 1d ago
You know I just thought of this but it is pretty funny to tell people they need to return to the office to do SWE work while simultaneously moving that work to a whole different country halfway around the world.
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u/1234511231351 1d ago
Outsourcing is a contributing factor to the lack of remote jobs. If they don't mind having a remote employee, they'll look to outsource it and save money. If they want someone local, they'll force you into the office.
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u/Seaguard5 1d ago
The irony is supreme indeed.
I was contracting for a fortune 100 bank that did exactly this.
They hired me with my team of nine other engineers. Then, not half a year later, decided to offshore us all and I was gone.
I had to move half way across the country (and so did my team) from all across the USA. Only to be outsourced to India…
Makes no fucking sense.
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u/coworker 21h ago
They probably didn't offshore but rather reshore. Nowadays companies move the entire team/department including management to a remote office. This is wildly different than the usual offshoring of individual roles and does tend to work better for the higher ups since remote management is in the same timezone and culture.
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u/mavenHawk 1d ago
The people halfway across the world are still going to offices near their location with these mandates
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u/havok4118 1d ago
That's the absolute truth. India is the absolute worst time zone for US pacific to work with. Just a nightmare.
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u/junker359 22h ago
I'm not a programmer, but I am a consultant. I've worked for one of the big consulting firms, they try to outsource as much work as they can, but fundamentally, most clients will not want to directly with a team comprised entirely of people on a radically different timezone and with radically different cultural norms.
I've been on teams with 15 plus India resources and 3-5 US based ones. The US team did some of the build work but also acted as the middlemen between the two teams.
I'm sure some of the places I worked for would love to drop and replace me with cheaper talent but most clients won't stand for that just yet.
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u/joeldg SRE 1d ago
Have you ever worked with them? There are huge cultural hurdles to overcome as well as timezone issues.
For instance, developer teams in India will say yes to anything you ask, it is s cultural thing. Ask them if they can create a Java music player "yes" and then later you find out that they had to hire some guy who said he knows Java (but said 'Yes' again) and now he is learning or had to be fired.
Then, because of language, cultural and so on they will be incredibly specific and you have to be super clear about how you put together instructions.
Then the timezone issue causes issues.
Most places now will outsource specific things, like web design, and leave core work for US-based teams. AI is likely going to change this entire dynamic though.
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u/Machinedgoodness 1d ago
Dude the nonstop yes thing is so true. It’s a race to the bottom. No long term vision and innovation just pure short term wins. So many Indian teams I’ve been on fail to deliver on time. They’re always late and so disorganized and don’t know how to push back and say no and spend time to come to the right solution. Just “yes ok” and push stuff as fast as possible.
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u/UsefulSimple6482 1d ago
I've seen this with both outsourced Devs and Devs that have been relocated. They talk a BIG game but when you see the quality of the code, it's vomit on the screen. Vomit you need to clean up
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u/anor_wondo 1d ago
I am from India. Its obviously a generalization but I have seen the kind of people described.
Its usually engineering managers and senior leadership, usually with no faang experience. They didn't learn to push back, being subservient is ingrained in them
They say yes to everything, don't push back against product management's lofty dreams in prds. Get the short term win. Then fuck off to another company before shit hits the fan
They just culturally never learned to brainstorm with dissenting opinions, their previous workplaces never encouraged it.
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u/XupcPrime Senior 1d ago
>since cs/programming have low barrier to entry,
That is ABSOLUTELY not true.
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u/Upset-Waltz-8952 1d ago
It is true. All you need to get a SWE job is 1) know how to program and 2) convince someone you know how to program.
And tbh 1) is optional.
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u/XupcPrime Senior 1d ago
You will be weeded out very quickly if you don't know wtf you are doing.
Inb4 stories
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u/RichCorinthian 1d ago
LOL I don't have a specific stand-out story that sings, but I have definitely worked with people who have either:
- Bounced from job to job about every 12 to 18 months. This is about how long it took me to really know that they didn't know wtf they were doing, and I could no longer attribute it to changes in process or the problem domain. I presume they moved on to continue the saga.
- Sucked at actual programming, and made moves to project management...or software management. They can't write the code, but at least they know a little about it, and they understand the problem domain.
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u/Alarming-Course-2249 1d ago
Even with AI assistance, its incredibly obvious if you know what you're doing or not. AI will definitely lower the barrier to entry, but it will still completely destroy your code quality and code base if you don't understand even the most basic coding concepts
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u/donjulioanejo I bork prod (Director SRE) 1d ago
You'd be surprised how far I've seen people get by gluing together stuff from Stack Overflow and nagging other team members to basically do their work for them.
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u/Trick-Interaction396 1d ago
Compared to lawyer, doctor, engineer the barriers to entry are WAY lower. You don’t legally need a degree or a certification like the bar exam.
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u/dfphd 1d ago
Right, but you brought up 3 of the like 5 professions that have a higher barrier of entry (add accountants and psychologists/therapists).
Si yes, compared to the most restrictive professions it is a lie barrier of entry.
But there are WAY more white collar careers with lower barriers of entry because you not only don't need any credentials, but you also don't need any particular skill to get the job and the skills you need to do the job are easy to acquire.
And that is largely ignored here - sure, you can in theory get a job without a college degree. But that would imply that you can learn to code by yourself to a high enough level for companies to ignore the lack of degree - and that is in and of itself a really high barrier.
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u/Feeling-Schedule5369 1d ago
Do you know what those white collar jobs are?
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u/dfphd 1d ago
Literally any job in corporate America that isn't legal or accounting.
Marketing, sales, advertising, supply chain, operations, IT, customer support, learning and development, HR, talent acquisition, business development, pre-sales, solutions architect, event coordinator, facilities coordinator, project manager, product manager.
None of those jobs technically require a college degree any more than CS jobs do. Mind you - in practice, all of those jobs ask for college degrees almost always - just like CS jobs do.
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u/Remote_Volume_3609 1d ago
I agree with your overall point but would add that certain roles do end up having other bars.
As a product manager, if you're trying to enter product directly like you would CS or any other career, school name becomes 100x more important because it's used as a filtering factor and the number of roles available are so limited (especially these days; the rotational program I did is defunct for example). I went to a solidly well-known, T20 but it was def one of the lower-end schools and I think half the alums of my program were grads of just the upper Ivies + Stanford + Berkeley. The actual skillset is fluffy so the compensatory factor is to ramp up selectivity through non-direct qualities (e.g. school name). Of course, there are multiple routes into product and product wasn't once so selective but there's a reason the most popular routes for FAANG PMs tend to be something along the lines of "big tech SWE -> Product" or "MBB -> M7 MBA -> product).
This is also true for roles like high finance (e.g. investment banking) and management consulting (for MBB), where the actual skillset is trivial so school ranking/target status + GPA become so much more important. In that respect, banking, management consulting, product, etc. are all more selective than CS. A CS major from a meh school with meh grades and projects can probably still get a CS job. The equivalent "finance person" is just not working in finance or is at best doing FP&A which is a different role.
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u/Federal_Employee_659 DevOps Engineer, former AWS SysDE 1d ago
Off the top of my head; PR, HR, finance, sales, marketing, management. Generally anything without a specific license to practice.
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u/cookingboy Retired? 1d ago edited 1d ago
It is absolutely true when compared to other professional jobs.
Hell, in many countries engineers require actual certificates or graduate degrees, but not software engineers.
I started programming when I was 6 years old and there are middle schoolers making money from writing basic HTML sites by taking jobs on Craigslist.
The barrier of entry can’t get much lower than that. Show me a middle schooler with no professional training making money in the field of medicine or law of even trade.
Yes, the ceiling is incredibly high and nobody is saying it is easy to be great at, but there is barely any barrier of entry.
This is one of those fields with high ceilings but also low floors.
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u/Majestic-Finger3131 1d ago edited 1d ago
Don't forget that large portions of the populace cannot learn to program. If you give them the following two statements:
x = 1 x = 2they will say it isn't possible. Then you explain "no, I am setting x to 1 and then later to 2" and they simply cannot understand it.
Once you get past that hurdle, the number of people who can successfully program creatively without just copying and pasting solutions from somewhere else is still a small subset. The number of people who are truly good at it is smaller still.
There are massive barriers to entry. They just aren't in the form of official certifications. There are boatloads of bootcamp grads who can't get a job despite knowing how to program on paper. If they had the analytical skill to do it competitively, they would have been good math students and studied CS to begin with. Obviously there are exceptions, people with latent skill, etc... but the odds are that if you were an English major, you will never become a programmer due to lack of aptitude.
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u/stevefuzz 1d ago
Agreed. People need to stop saying coding is easy. It makes them sound like an idiot, or worse, management.
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u/Adventurous_Pin6281 1d ago
Okay but the core concepts of coding ain't that hard. I've thought middler schoolers the basics in an afternoon.
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u/SandOnYourPizza 1d ago
Like surgery, flying, sports, lawyering, cooking, and just about everything else in the world worth doing, you don't get paid for the core concepts, you get paid for the things that are much much harder.
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u/cookingboy Retired? 1d ago edited 1d ago
that are much much harder
Oh for fuck’s sake so much of the software field is writing HTML or basic CRUD applications, let’s not make it sound like every entry level programming job is like architecting AWS or designing MapReduce.
Yes the ceiling of this profession is fucking high and most people will never be great software engineers but the floor for this profession is also incredibly low.
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u/Dirkdeking 1d ago
Good point. It's the floor height where the difference lies. In healthcare professions you have a much higher floor. The floor for doctors or even pilots is much much higher.
Programming is like chess or football in this regard. Low skill floor, high skill ceiling.
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u/met0xff 1d ago
True although I think the number of concepts to know has grown a lot. Making money of some crappy PHP Page like I did almost 30 years ago as a teen probably won't work anymore (or perhaps it does?) or stitching together some MS Access plus VB.
But that's also true for many other office jobs. My father was in insurance all his life and so I ended up enjoying some jobs at insurances and not everyone is doing insurance mathematics there but also lots of paperwork. Of course this is gradually being automated. I remember at the red cross we had all those reports from each operation and there were people spending tons of time just transcribing the paper scraps and entering them into their system.
Frankly even the job as a basic medic... the theory could be learnt in a week for the basic grunt medic job (I also did extended emergency medic training later on that was more but also still far from the average university exam). And frankly many there weren't exactly the brightest :). Similarly many GPs just have their diagnosis playbook they repeat all day long and if something is trickier they send you to a specialist. In some regions I completely stopped going to GPs at all as there wasn't any value on top of my medic experience and my wife's veterinarian studies ;). And just always directly went to the specialists.
There are many,.many jobs that aren't rocket science.
But yes, I fully agree. I went from programming vocational training to CS bachelor to CS master to PhD because I was always unhappy with the intellectual stimulation I got from the respective jobs. I went from PHP pages for the local butcher in small European pig farm towns in the middle of Europe to leading an R&D team for a US tech company. The spectrum is huge
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u/DesoLina 1d ago
Software engineers do not require certifications because on average errors in software do not have nearly the same costs in assets and human lives as errors in building a bridge or sn apartment
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u/MCFRESH01 1d ago
There are plenty of self taught software engineers working from small companies building internal tools all the way to FAANG. There are no self taught lawyers
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u/microwaved_fully 1d ago
Because good software engineers everywhere cost more money and are not cheap.
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u/Ok-Response-4222 1d ago edited 1d ago
Let me drop a weird one on you.
I live in Denmark, with extremely high taxes and virtually everyone is in a union.
Still. Microsoft smacked down multiple large offices here.
WHY? That seems counterproductive to their goal of saving money??? It is the opposite of outsourcing to a cheaper country.
We have free university and litterally everyone takes a masters degree because of it. There is a fat crop of highly educated specialists that they want in their workforce. So much that they invested millions in building local operations here.
Obviously, walking distance to the Technical University of Denmark, which is just ~20 ranks below MIT if you ask the international community. Impressive for a country with 6 million people.
It is not always about cheapest. They won't dissappear at home in the US for the same reason. Companies at that scale need a wide variety of skillsets.
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u/Sparaucchio 1d ago
Denmark has lower salaries than the US and huge tax relief for R&D, so it is comparatively very cheap for software companies that can easily shift profits to Ireland and pay nothing above the salaries. Lol
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u/donjulioanejo I bork prod (Director SRE) 1d ago
They're not that much lower. Easily comparable to, like, Midwest or Atlanta or something.
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u/AMX_30B2 20h ago
Engineering salaries are significantly higher in the US than Europe. In Atlanta Google hires 22 year olds with $100,000+ salaries.
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u/MakotoBIST 1d ago
Brother, if anything that proves OP point.
I work in big tech and offices like Netherlands or Denmark were seen as cutting costs lol. Now it's all about eastern europe (ie Poland).
My company has opened an office in Istanbul near a pretty solid university...
Your premise is wrong, the costs of engineers aren't high there. Maybe they are high compared to idk Italy or Spain.
If India starts outputting good engineers, it will be hard times, but we are not even close.
Even tho every big company has already built tons of offices in india/south asia, so we can guess what they are predicting lol.
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u/NoApartheidOnMars 1d ago
Lack of qualified engineers.
India has some amazing colleges but they don't churn out enough graduates to replace us all.
The good ones go overseas or work for the big boys' Indian subsidiaries. But if you're a not so well known company most likely you'll deal with an Indian company that specializes in outsourcing and they definitely don't hire the best. And the cheaper you go, the worse it gets.
I went to India on a business trip for a FAANG over 10 years ago and even back then, the cost ratio was 2 max. An Indian engineer cost about half of what a US engineer did (everything included). It's probably narrowed somewhat since. That used to be the trend.
So when you hear people claim that their company will save 70% on labor costs, you know they're getting bottom of the barrel workers. Little more than warm butts in seats.
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u/NoFornicationLeague 1d ago
Have you worked with them? Because they’re not as good, and if they are then someone sponsors them to move here
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u/Positive_Temporary24 1d ago
I don't want to generalize or be racist, but every project I worked on where indians were involved were a total mess
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u/ambulocetus_ 14h ago
Sr eng at work was having problems with his container images. I looked at his Dockerfile and asked him, "why do you need this one line here?"
Response? "Not sure, ChatGPT told me to put it there". And it was indeed the source of the issue.
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u/cookingboy Retired? 1d ago
massive barriers to entry
The fact that we’ve seen software engineering explosively grow in many developing countries literally prove otherwise.
It’s like saying math has a high barrier of entry because a large portion of the population are bad with numbers, or wood working, because a large portion of the population are hopeless with tools.
Nobody said coding is easy to get good at, but I don’t think you understand what the word entry means in “barrier of entry”.
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u/Sparaucchio 1d ago edited 1d ago
Indeed all developing countries have their fully functional and very high-quality versions of Uber, JustEat, Revolut, WhatsApp, etc... developed locally
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u/ImpressiveProgress43 1d ago
Location has nothing to do with skill or work ethic. Ive seen sr. Devs off shore that fail to fix issues that dont even require code change. Others, i have worked with for years and trust them completely.
The issue is that some offshore contracting companies are complete trash (same is true in u.s. though) that give a bad reputation. What really stops offshoring is culture fit and business knowledge.
I know i dont have the strongest skills but i have specialized knowledge in the business and do things nobody else fully understands. Have made it through multiple rounds of large layoffs so far.
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u/creakyvoiceaperture 1d ago
I work for a company that helps other companies hire all sorts of roles, not just developers. Quite a lot of companies decide they’re willing to pay for US employees after all once they discover the labor laws in other countries are more favorable to the employee. Ive seen companies say they prefer US employees for at will alone.
It sucks, but a lot of companies will pay more to be able to treat their employees worse.
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u/CommandGrand1484 1d ago edited 1d ago
Some maintenance projects and migration projects can be moved to lower income countries. Like Angular fronted to React migration.
But if you are developing a brand new product that the company is hoping will bring in tons of new customers, it is critical that such development happen close to where the product leadership team is. Otherwise it would lead to the same kind of Catastrophe that happened in Boeing. All of the R&D and manufacturing of planes happens in Seattle, but the leadership team decided to move to Chicago away from where all the engineers and scientists worked. Look at the how the company is doing right now.
Software engineers don't just produce software they make critical product decisions as well. That kind of forces the companies to keep developers close to where the leadership team is.
Sometimes though, companies like Microsft, Google offload a lot of product development work to teams in India. That is because:
- They are top tier companies and they can attract top tier talent in countries like India. Bringing top tier talent from India to US would mean paying them 3x or 4x of what they are paid in India. For those companies it does not make any sense to move people from India to US or hire developers of comparable caliber for much higher costs in US. But for less prestigious companies, they just cannot attract top tier talent in India. They cannot go to career fairs in IITs and hire people who would otherwise go to Msft or Goog. Compare to the kind of people they can hire in India, they get much better quality developers in the US.
- Companies like Msft, Goog have so many products and projects that they can afford to offshore the development of whole entire product lines to countries like India. They have so many departments that they can have an entire department in India. Thus keeping the leadership close to where the development is happening. Small companies cannot do this.
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u/These-Bedroom-5694 22h ago
Technical competence.
Every story about offshoring software development results in reshoring a decade later and spending billions to fix the damage.
It's hilarious that management never learns.
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u/FlyingRhenquest 18h ago
Nah, whenever an offshoring effort starts up everyone jumps on the bandwagon and supply/demand drives up the cost of talent in the target country. While traveling abroad, I've bumped into people who were shopping for a new cheap country with new talent because their old one had become too expensive. Pretty much anywhere these people go, they snap up all the local talent including the university professors who should be teaching the next generation those skills, and with the increase management overhead of coordinating teams in a time zone halfway around the planet it ends up costing more than it would have just to do it locally.
Most of the projects that fail do so because of requirements anyway. They're either overly-ambitious or vague and constantly shifting. Or both. The whole "minimum viable product" thing from Agile is supposed to address that, but management only hears what they want to hear in agile training and end up running their project as agile-waterfall, with no product feedback for a year or more after the team ramped up.
In other words, the problem is and has always been a people problem, not a technical one. And the people who need to understand that don't want to understand that.
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u/Reasonable_Bunch_458 1d ago
what would make developers from advanced countries to be competitive ($50k+/yr) vs developers from developing countries ($3k/yr)?
Because the work FUCKING SUCKS. I'm not kidding, id rather hire a talented 16 year old than an Indian in india developer. I've worked as an integrations engineer reviewing third party code from India and I have yet to see a well designed app.
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u/CarthurA 1d ago
My guess would be twofold:
international red tape that would require the company to fill out a ton of paperwork and documents for foreign funds to be transferrred (amongst other related barriers)
Simply just trust in the quality of work. It's easier to vet those that are domestic to you and also have similar timezones, etc.
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u/adilstilllooking 18h ago
It’s really simple, it’s quality. Just like in developed nations, there are a significant amount of kids that graduate with a degree but have not learned anything. They cheat/find ways to get ahead.
When you outsource, companies are paying the bare minimum. You will get a team that consists with one person that’s a lead that is smart / gets it. The rest are junior employees or fresh grads that are getting paid bottom of the barrel. There is a constant churn every 6 months as they get better jobs and will leave.
This leaves companies (say in the US) a way that they save money, but the quality they get is usually not that great, there is no knowledge that’s being saved, there is no long term quality that’s being generated/maintained. You literally get what you pay for. God forbid, the lead gets a better offer and leaves, your entire project is at jeopardy / will collapse. What happens next? Company just finds another low cost vendor and this happens again.
Yes, companies will save money in the near term, but they won’t be building anything great long term and you don’t have a gem of employees that will be there long term so there is no company culture.
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u/Minute_Objective1134 17h ago
One thing that could stop or limit outsourcing is industry-level sovereignty. For instance, working in the US national security or critical infrastructure space requires US citizenship at a minimum or more often than not a security clearance. The working environment is a little different, and the hoops to jump through can be a pain, but if you want to stay in the tech field with some level of job security then working there may be necessary.
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u/Early-Surround7413 21h ago
How it works:
Step 1: Hire cheap devs
Step 2: Everything breaks
Step 3: Hire Americans to fix the shit built in Step 1, for 5X the cost of having built it by Americans in the first place
Step 4: Go back to Step 1
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u/Special_Rice9539 1d ago
Coordinating between teams across time zones is actually a hard problem even among the top players. You can really mess up the delivery schedule if no one can find a meeting time that works
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u/Sparaucchio 1d ago
South America is in the same timezone as the US. Europe can hire devs as far as in Vietnam and still be in a totally compatible timezone for 100% overlap with working hours (assuming Vietnamese people are okay working afternoon to evening, which they are)
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u/my-ka 1d ago
in an average enterprise office
were is area where fulltime sit
dedicated area where contractors sit
every Indian goal is to climb to management and build a network of nepotism and control budgets.
They have corners where wifes sit and just talk on phone.
They often do what they call "manage offshore"
(cannot forget sacral Babita sitting in a cubical next to me)
if they cannot replace a position with proper person, they will try to eliminate it
the only exclusion is a position where you need to really work/think and take resposnsibilities.
they they oursource to AI (Affordable Offshore)
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u/some_clickhead Backend Developer 1d ago
There is nothing stopping it, but there ARE reasons not to do it. A company might only need a handful of developers to take care of the technical work. If you replace this number of developers with the same number of people across the world, you will have problems related to timezone differences, cultural differences, language barriers, etc. Basically, on average those developers just won't be able to work as well for your company.
Now, you might think "why not just hire double, or even quadruple the number of devs then?", but the problem is that just having a whole lot of poorly fitting devs working on what would take a small handful of well acclimated devs can actually be a net negative. It's not like manual labor where having more people linearly increases the amount of work done, devs can interfere with one another, push bad code, etc.
Add to that the fact that people often hire for soft skills (which mostly comes down to how well they would get along with you), and the result is that most companies will favour hiring local talent.
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u/BNeutral 1d ago
Offer and demand. And you get what you pay for. Nobody who is any good at CS is going to do any fucking decent work for 3k a year.
You'd be surprised at the amount of people working remotely for US companies living in complete shitholes and earning 50k-100k a year, which is still less than an American may make so the company is happy if they are getting good results back, and the guy doing the work is doing great.
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u/dfphd 1d ago edited 1d ago
Three factors:
- Quality of overall education
There are universities in countries outside the US that have stellar education as it relates to core math, but in terms of providing a more holistic, well-rounded education, plus using access to state of the art research and technology, it's really hard to match the American system.
So I think you'll find that the top tier schools in every major country compare favorably to the top schools in the US, but once you get outside that top tier I think you have a much more dramatic dropoff when compared to the US.
And that has nothing to do with the students and a lot to do with the financial resources.
- Logistics and culture
Time zone difference are a pain in the ass. The countries that are in US- friendly time zones either have job markets that are expensive (Canada, Mexico), or not enough of a supply of computer scientists (every other americas county).
Having a 6+ time difference sucks, and it makes projects difficult to execute. And it means that at some point there is a high enough ranking person that will have to deal with that and not love it.
There's also cultural differences that are not always easy to navigate.
- Increasing salaries
On top of all of that, the more a country is able to bridge those gaps, the higher the salaries will get. Which then makes offshoring less appealing.
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u/rwilcox Been doing this since the turn of the century 1d ago edited 1d ago
Good developers cost money no matter where they are.
And BAD / cheap developers, 12 time zones away, will burn out their onshore stakeholders. (You have 2 hours to meet them at the start of your Eastern Time day (at the very very end of their day) or meeting them at 3AM at the beginning of their day. Which one do you pick every day for a year or two or five?)
Eventually the wheel turns, a new VP comes in, demands quality and less bugs, and onshore resources hired (because same time zone, same legal system, and same holiday expectations), and quality is looked for while hiring those people, while paying American cost of living money.
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u/serial_crusher 1d ago
A few reasons it isn’t great:
- when you compromise on cost, you lose quality too. Sure, there’s a guy in India who can do pretty much the same job for 30% less. There’s another guy who’s willing to tell you he can do the job for 60% less. Companies hire that second guy and he fails to deliver
- coordination across time zones is hard. Companies try to mitigate the above issue by having tech leads, architects, etc in the US and expecting them to micromanage the less-senior offshore team. But that means those guys have to call into meetings late at night or early in the morning. Nobody likes that, and if you’re any good, you’re going to look for a job that doesn’t expect it.
- coordination across cultures is hard. A product manager can only explain functional requirements so well before stuff gets lost in translation.
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u/NewChameleon Software Engineer, SF 1d ago
good question, the answer is something you can answer, are you good enough such that you warrants companies to pay you big bucks?
otherwise you are correct, why would a company pay you $50k+ a year when they could be paying $3k a year? if you cost $50k/year and you're no different than someone that costs $3k/year then why keep you?
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u/yourbasicusername 1d ago edited 1d ago
There’s a spectrum of WHAT on one end and HOW on the other end. It’s very difficult and not advantageous for a company to do knowledge transfer regarding WHAT needs to be done. However there is money to be saved on the HOW end, for the actual writing of the for-loops and whatnot. If you want to work in the US, focus on learning the domain really well and knowing what needs to be done, and let anyone else offshore actually implement it. Anyone can write a for-loop.
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u/BIGhau5 1d ago
Every corporation in every industry will seek out the employee willing to take the lowest wage. That's the nature of capitalism.
You either need laws regulating outsourcing. Which goes against capitalism or they could simply be bypassed anyways.
Or you unionize and get it in your contract that the company can only outsource X% of the work. Similar to what the airlines have with their mechanic unions.
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u/freethenipple23 1d ago
We're in an outsourcing cycle right now. Jobs in the US are being outsourced to Canada, Ukraine, India, Bulgaria, you name it.
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u/thisisjustascreename 1d ago
The industry as a whole tried it already in the late 00s and early 10s. You should look up how that went.
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u/mhilliker 1d ago
Your premise is false, since the equivalent talent won't be anywhere near $3k/yr. For example, an L64 Senior SWE at Microsoft in India will make the equivalent total comp of over $100k USD. (Check levels if you don't believe me.) While it is a lot less than what we make in the US, it is not really as big of a disparity as you assume.
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u/Federal_Employee_659 DevOps Engineer, former AWS SysDE 1d ago
Genuine question; were you alive back in 2001 that last time this was a big thing? Don't bother answering, just read what Chad Fowler had to say about it: https://theswissbay.ch/pdf/Gentoomen%20Library/Programming/Pragmatic%20Programmers/The%20Passionate%20Programmer.pdf
tl;dr- the first edition of that book was called "my job went to India and all I got was this book" It covers what and why everyone was worried about offshoring back in the early 2000s. Spoiler alert... we're (mostly) still here with our jobs in 2025...
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u/andlewis 1d ago
Writing code is not the hard part, it’s knowing what to write, how to manage it, how to measure it. That can’t be done disconnected from core business strategy, and struggles during outsourcing.
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u/Elizabeth9996 1d ago
no idea. I work with indian engineers from india im usa but work eemoye and they honestly are way better than me. the quality is there
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u/Chili-Lime-Chihuahua 1d ago
Some places still care about quality. And quality can be more than the raw code output. Everyone wants to dump on working in the same location, but there actually is a difference talking to someone or a group of people in person. Yes, I understand people want to focus and have quiet time, but you can notice body language and other things in person.
I did some consulting work at a major pharmaceutical company. Most of their developers were contractors in India. I talked to someone on a team and told them their development environment was down. Someone responded three days later saying it was online. Those kinds of turnaround speeds are just awful. I'm not saying every place is like that, but there are trends and generalizations.
Also, people can ignore/filter email/and instant messaging messages. If you actually walk over to someone's desk/office, they can't necessarily avoid you. It sounds kind of sucky, but sometimes you need to actually physically track someone down.
My last remote company had even senior level people taking days to respond. I texted our company's CEO about a meeting with the client's CIO. He said he had it covered. It turned out there were two meetings with the CIO, and even though he was invited to both, he was only aware of one of them. The meeting was a disaster, but so was that company.
Please do not underestimate actual communication. I'm not saying it's impossible to do remotely or even internationally. I've worked with some incredible developers from Brazil. But it really depends on the quality of the folks that are hired and their willingness to work together.
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u/ryanboone 1d ago
Language barriers are an issue. I've worked with Indian developers that are awesome and speak perfect english, but they're not the majority. More often, I've worked with Indian devs that believe they are hiding their poor English by nodding their heads and telling the managers and analysts that they understand their assignments, then later when they can't figure it out they come to my desk asking for an explanation in technical terms. But if I do that, then it's my solution they're implementing, not their own. So they're no better than a Jr. Dev even though they were hired to be Sr. It gets pretty tedious.
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u/Efficient_Loss_9928 1d ago
It is a competitive labour market, and the best of the best Indian developers at not earning Indian money, they are in the US earning 500k.
Same for Chinese developers, the best of the best are either earning over 1 mil CNY in China, or are in other countries earning big bucks. It is hard to find good ones that's also cheap.
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u/pstbo 1d ago
Low barrier of entry? Almost everything has a low barrier of entry. I can be a CEO in 1 day if I register my own corporation. Barrier of entry is not what you should focus on unless you go into medicine, and that may change significantly in one or two decades. Aim to be the best. That’s what is always in demand. Be great and try to be great at a specialized and in demand field now and in the future. Skate to where the puck is going.
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u/scoobydobydobydo 1d ago
Defense and small business? Idk
From someone who has worked in the outsourcing sector..
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u/Masterzjg 1d ago
Communication barriers. Every single mistake made early in the planning process is 10, 20, 100, etc. times more expensive as you go through the rest of the development and maintenance lifecycles. When you don't share the same language and culture, communication is so much harder and you create so many mistakes that inevitably cost far more than the so called savings from paying low salaries.
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u/OompaLoompaHoompa 1d ago
From my exp, it’s really a gamble. My higher mgmt had offshored to India but with lackluster results. The Indian Devs are a hit | miss situation. A lot of them claimed that they have Java exp and JS exp, but after they’re hired, they’re asking questions like “What is a class?” Or “Why can’t I call this function?”. It’s creating a huge hidden factory for our engineers, trying to explain to them how an object works and how dot notation works.
How they got hired… well… IYKYK
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u/GuyF1eri 1d ago
There is a surprising amount of value in being in the same timezone, and frankly being a native English speaker. Also, US universities are generally considered the best in the world
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u/xabrol 1d ago edited 1d ago
English -> Developers need to speek decent enough english to communicate with english speaking customers (which most of the customers that are outsourcing are).
Time Zones -> Most customers that outsource are in the USA, working with time zones on the other side of the world is troublesome. Most "good" outsourcing shops don't work from 2 in the morning to 9 in the morning, they do close to a 9 to 5 and are asleep during USA business hours.
English is important. You need code that has english variable names and comments and documentation, stuff you can use and transition to on source employees if you need to. You can't expect your english employees to learn Chinese or w/e to understand a code base.
Most developers write code in english sure, but it's still a communication barrier if they're not good at English. And English is one of the hardest languages to learn to a non native English speaker.
And in closing... Many MANY companies try, they outsource, they think it'll work or w/e and save tons of $$$.. and it almost never does. It's like a right of passage for every mid to large size company. They outsource, and more often than not it fails horribly, and then some company like the one I work for ends up saving them.
I work in the USA for an onshore consulting company. We're expensive, like $185/hr expensive. Our bread and butter (what keeps us in business) is clients coming to us with disaster code bases they outsourced to somewhere and saving them... It's like 90% of what we do. So I've seen it SOOO many times.
Not always, there are some good over seas consulting shops, but they are RARE and not the majority. And most of it, is communication issues and timezones. You can't manage a project efficiently when you're sending and replying to emails with a 16 hour gap between them.
In the USA outsourcing to Mexico and Costa Rico is becoming the common path because they tend to speak better english and they have more compatible time zones. So companies are going oh we can save 30% with better compatibility instead of "oh we can save 10,000% with no compatibility and bad communication."
And in a lot of projects that come back from failed outsourcing.. It's us basically telling the client, the code base is unsalvageable and it would be more efficient to start over, if you want the project to succeed and not have debilitating performance issues at load and scale.
I'm not saying over seas doesn't have great developers, they do, but in the outsourcing space, it's not the majority.
You have to also understand that developing countries don't have the legislation that developed ones do. They don't have the same labor laws, credential systems, ethics, culture, and on and on. Many laws and contracts don't really hold water too. "We swear every dev has a masters degree and 5+ years of experience!" none do and some started coding last week.
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u/chud_meister 1d ago
all jobs
You have to have clearance to even access most parts of the codebase and any part of the systems at my job. Even lower levels of clearance generally require a US citizenship.
Outside of this, anny firms see the value in having everyone in more or less compatible timezones and more or less on the same page. Communication gets really complex otherwise. Urgent hotfixes to infrastructure are astronomically more challenging when the engineer who is most familiar with the failing part of the system is asleep at home.
since cs/programming have low barrier to entry
What?
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u/bigpunk157 1d ago
The cost of having a language barrier in development is the main thing that shocks management every 5-7 years.
They will forget and continue the cycle. This has always happened in tech.
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u/PlasticPresentation1 1d ago edited 1d ago
People already covered most of it here but a few more bullet points:
The US is the most profitable market to operate in by far. Having engineers in the same timezone and same culture has synergistic benefits
Margins in tech are so high due to economies of scale, especially big tech, that paying software engineers billions is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. And the companies which operate at smaller scales probably can't eat the overhead effort to setup a productive offshore office
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u/Rascal2pt0 Software Engineer 1d ago
It's usually scheduling problems (managing from different time zones) and the biggest one IMO is cultural differences, while languages are the same societal expectations often differ greatly even when dealing with European countries.
The real killer IMO is when companies hire offshore devs team without any technical leadership near the US founders. Non-technical people can have a hard time conveying requirements and evaluating if the systems are being built as expected.
I've had really good experiences with Latin American based devs.
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u/cs_throwawayyy 1d ago
There is no free lunch in capitalism when everyone is for themselves, not even if your a business.
You think you can hire great talent for cheap in some other low income country, but do you think THAT talent wants to get paid relatively low wage forever. The cream of the crops eventually want to move to high income countries, so what you get are the bottom of the barrels left in those places for those low wages.
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u/Jake0024 1d ago
Quality control. There's next to no accountability once you move an entire engineering team overseas. Maybe you'll get lucky and have a great team, or maybe you'll get what you pay for an spend 6 months building a project only to find it repeatedly delayed and then eventually shipped with the worst performing, least maintainable, buggy, and insecure software ever written. And you won't even know it until you start running into issues. And when that issue happens, all your engineers will be asleep, because they're on the other side of the world. And when you try to communicate the issue, you're going to struggle because none of them are native English speakers, and the code looks good enough to them, so what's the big deal anyway?
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u/cocoaLemonade22 1d ago
Lots of coping in this sub. Overtime, outsourcing will become more and more of a threat.
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u/Professional_Mix2418 1d ago
Timezones, Language barriers, cultural awareness, that bloody saying yes to everything but realistically they meant no, they have no clue. And layers of managers (who translate). And then nog even looking at the actual quality of the code which often looks like it’s something just out of bootcamp with no good secure defensive coding skills.
But despite those parts on the supply side, the company needs to invest in really good technical products management, architecture, and lead engineers.
I don’t think it’s worth it most of the time.
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u/Powerful_Resident_48 1d ago
It's the good old work triangle:
You can have it cheap, you can have it fast, or you can have it good. You can never have more than two of those at once.
And if you outsource, good isn't a valid option anymore, so you're stuck with cheap- and if you're lucky fast.
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u/Historical_Emu_3032 1d ago
Quality.
I've managed outsourced staff and acquired dev houses before.
Like many other industries to make some unique it requires a team of critical thinkers.
Writing the code is the easiest part of the process, to outsource you can't be stumbling through a technical design of any value, you gotta have someone hands on who understands the point of the product to get a good result.
Outsourcing is mainly for process work, you gotta give real specific instructions to get any valuable output.
Unfortunately for CEOs AI is basically the same as outsourcing and probably not getting heaps better from here. so the dream of dev becoming a sweatshop industry is dead again. You're always better off in the long run to just pay for good talent.
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u/montereybay 1d ago
Outsourced coders never seem to give a shit as much as permanent coders who have to maintain the code for years. You always get super quick slapdash code that is impossible to maintain, that fills all the hard requirements, and none of the requirements that aren't easily quantifable, like ease of maintenence.
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u/japanesejoker 1d ago
Currency debasement. It’s not that Chinese are paid less. It’s that the dollar is more expensive than the yuan
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u/bidimensionale 1d ago
programming for someone else has nothing do do with translating from specifications to code but from expectations to specifications.
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u/badboi86ij99 1d ago
Coordination.
Unless you also move the entire decision-making team to those low COL countries, you would have gaps in passing the requirements/needs between teams from different cultures.
It's even likely that pay gap between teams lead to "why should I work so hard, if I am only paid 1/10 the salary of yours?".
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u/quantum-fitness 1d ago
The health of your codebase, ability to work and think independently.
Advantage to work woth people in a office, having the same culture.
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u/RepulsiveFish 1d ago
As someone who has trained contractors from lower income countries on my codebase and then been laid off once they could do my job for me TWICE, not much. I think mostly time zones. If leadership is all US-based, it's easier for them to collaborate with and build teams of people in nearby timezones. They'll tell you it's best to have people in the office, and so if they really mean that, then they'll build teams in the cities their offices are in.
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u/Sharp_Fuel 1d ago
Because companies will eventually run into the same problem they have in the West, good developers are rare and there's a lot of terrible ones, this leads companies to competing with each other on salary to get the best ones, pushing wages up
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u/redhairdragon 1d ago
I am working in a cloud provider. We have customer from big company operating in south east Asian country...
We examined their code. And the issue was obvious; they wrote code in a weird way that the platform is not designed for. They insisted the platform was the problem. Our leadership offered to rewrite everything for them.
And this happens every month. Our oncall became their coder.
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u/PineappleLemur 1d ago
Boss not wanting to retrain start over with someone new.
In a large company you have people whose only job is doing this.. so it's easier to do and it's rarely whole teams at one go.
Always have a few top players to run the show.
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u/foresterLV 1d ago
we are in industry where output of talented person can be 10x of average Joe. are you average Joe? from question it sounds like so so yes it will be hard to compete.
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u/ISpreadFakeNews 1d ago
Because good devs are really hard to come by. It doesn't matter what country you're looking at, good devs are rare. One good dev can be the difference between making or breaking your entire project. If you let good devs job hop because you didn't pay them enough you will regret it. You just don't hear many stories like this because management ego will never allow them to publicly admit their mistake.
Yes, with offshoring you could get decent devs for cheap but you're gambling. The gamble only pays off if you have backup. Backup = well paid good devs, who will always exist.
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u/Void-kun 1d ago
My company did this for one team. That team caused more damage and disruption than any other team. They simply did not follow any standards, refused to follow any of our own and delivered work that was full of security vulnerabilities.
But doing really stupid shit like their change password endpoint never generates a link and sends to the email, all it did was generate an access key that it could give to anybody unauthenticated, and use that in a 2nd HTTP call to change the password of any account, not just the one the code was generated for. Zero validation, I genuinely was in disbelief at how bad it was.
Their code was full of shit like this. The quality was so much lower than our own that we just stopped using contractors at that scale.
Now we hire contractors from the same country (UK) and we only have 1-2 per team where necessary.
Offshore is cheaper but the quality is much lower, most businesses understand this, many larger companies won't take this risk when working with PII data. Too many regulations and ways to be fined. It isn't worth hiring developers that don't understand these laws and regulations.
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u/beyphy 1d ago
Because it's a mixed bag and is very project dependent.
Need someone to build a full-stack JS app? That's something that is very easy to outsource since a lot of people have those skills.
Need someone to build something like a pricing tool for underwriters? That's much more complex. And it doesn't just rely on the dev's coding ability. But also their ability to understand and speak in English. They will need to understand the complex requirements given to them. And they will need to ask questions in English. This is because some of those concepts will be very advanced, can involve lots of math, etc. And those concepts need to be understood and implemented for the project to succeed. You can also struggle with things like setting up meetings due to time zone issues.
At the end of the day, you are not getting a highly skilled dev with a good understanding of English who's willing to work odd hours for $3k a year. The devs with all of those skills know that they're good and have lots of opportunities. What you can get for $3k/yr is some bottom-of-the-barrel Indian dev who didn't go to college, went to an Indian coding bootcamp, and has maybe business knowledge of English.
So basically it comes down to, at the higher end of dev skills, there isn't that enough of a difference for companies to meet their salary reduction goals. And at the lower end of dev skills, projects are a mixed bag. The more complex a project is the more likely the project will be to not succeed.
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u/Comprehensive-Pin667 1d ago
It works the other way around too - competent developers from cheaper countries can simply charge a lot. Definitely more than $50k/year.
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u/UsefulSimple6482 1d ago
The big one is cultural differences. It's actually a huge thing to be able to communicate effectively when you share cultural similarities
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u/Nosferatatron 1d ago
How much actual programming does a programmer do? If you just have a load of crystal clear requirements that you wanted turned into code, then offshoring probably works well (so does ChatGPT). Once you start getting very complex systems or vague requirements, you find that proximity to the stakeholders gets more important - which needs to be supplemented with good business analysts and good management who can keep projects on track. The proximity thing can also be a problem with any team that is nominally in the same country but never works in the same office
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u/yvrelna 1d ago
80% of software development is talking to various stakeholders to understand the requirements for the software. Coding is only a very small part of the process.
Talking the same language and being in the same time zone, understanding the local context of the application, local regulations, understanding the local competitors, understanding local funeral context, having actual experience using the application in real world, etc; they make the development processes much easier with local developers compared to outsourced developers.
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u/woahdudee2a 1d ago
the salary difference is usually 20%-30%. if you hire a $3k/year engineer you will soon find out its a random person off the street with chatgpt generated resume
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u/zayelion Software Architect 1d ago
People with the skill to do the job are pretty evenly distributed planet wide. Every market is close to tapped for us. There are lots of Indians just because there are lots of Indians generally, and soon, the same will be for Chinese.
Programming is a blend of English and math, adding in engineering (senior level and beyond) ads great reading comprehension, social skills and learning speed as qualifiers.
Its a limited market and every company needs IT. Right now the bottom rung is low cost English speaking cities. Seems to be about 50k a head still. But good engineers solve business problems not just type so 3x that price is worth it when they give 10x the value.
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u/MakotoBIST 1d ago
Return to office. I want to work with real people.
Remote work? We already outsourced an huge part to eastern europe, there you have people who cost a bit more than indians but get shit done.
Also boomer managers can't manage remote properly so right now outsourcing and even average full remote isnt seen as equally productive. Give it two decades and I believe there will be a LOT of outsourcing.
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u/josh2751 Senior Software Engineer 22h ago
“Boomer managers” don’t exist.
Every manager I know in software is genx or millennial, I think I’m even starting to see some gen z.
“Boomers” are in their 70s and retired.
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u/cabropiola 1d ago
Software development at some point is much more than just writing code , you want people with a sense of ownership and long term reasoning and planning, and usually that's hard to get when offshoring.
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u/ligma-smegma 1d ago
i’m not cs but my company did this and was a nightmare: time zones are different, if they suddenly disappear or find something else there’s nothing you can do, 90% is totally unreliable or have different work culture etc
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u/BustyJerky 1d ago
Outsourced SWE quality varies a lot. For tech companies with eye-watering profits and revenues, and relatively low costs compared to brick-and-mortar businesses, you don't want utterly shit code that completely kills your development velocity, business competitiveness, and increases risk of security issues or general bugs.
It's honestly pretty rough finding developers that are actually *good*. When you do, you're not going to cut them to save a few dollars that mean little to your bottom margin.
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u/Sledger721 23h ago
Hundreds of developers at a company I worked for ~2022-2023 outsourced to Jamaica.
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u/Curious-Money2515 23h ago
A single engineer can generate millions of dollars of productivity and revenue for a company. Saving $150k isn't much of a value proposition.
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u/gms_fan 22h ago
The additional costs in managing outsourced dev teams to the point that you actually get the desired result you can ship to a customer are non-trivial and, in my direct experience, ends up nearly equal to the apparent cost difference.
The savings just really aren't there.
It's not because the devs aren't good. It's because the business model of outsourced companies is basically "you tell us EXACTLY what we should do and we will do EXACTLY that". The problem is for anything truly interesting, you just don't have every detail figured out in advance like that.
You generally don't get direct contact with the devs themselves, like you would have if they were onsite and integrated in the team.
BTW, you often see the same exact situation with local consulting or contracting companies.
And you have to add into this additional issues like language and cultural differences, infrastructure issues, tool licensing, IP protection, customer data security, etc etc etc.
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u/CNDW 22h ago
Offshoring seems to be a cyclical trend. Business like the idea of cheap labor but always run into issues with language/cultural barriers and consistently low quality of work. In software, low quality work starts to compound costs over time as the system gets harder and harder to make changes safely, or the business starts to get hurt from consumers being exposed to buggy software.
I think there is a push these days because big tech is banking on AI turning an elite few into managerial super stars and code quality being managed by the AI systems doing the bulk of the work.
It may pay off for very large companies like Google who can build custom models that can speak the languages of their systems fluently enough and they can control costs from the AI side. Smaller companies are not going to have as much success with it and will likely start to hire local again in 10 years or so.
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u/josh2751 Senior Software Engineer 22h ago
Assumes facts not in evidence.
CS is not programming. Programming is not CS.
There are some edges of the programming fields that have a low barrier to entry. These are very simple web development, things they have bootcamps for.
The vast majority of real software engineering has a relatively high bar to entry. Many of us study this discipline for decades and get advanced degrees. Those jobs don’t get offshored.
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u/breakarobot Software Engineer 21h ago
I use to live in Seattle but now live in Las Vegas. I have 8 years of experience working for tech in Seattle so applying to remote positions based out of SF, they find me aligned with their culture but a lot more affordable since I don’t live in a tech city anymore.
When you mentioned nearshoring, I never realized my movements aligned with that. I definitely think I’m more marketable because of it.
I’m applying to senior and lead roles though so remote is more available.
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u/data-artist 20h ago
Lack of talent. A 10x developer knows a lot more than just tech stuff. They have to know how to design, code, test, rollout and support an entire system. This requires you to be a business analyst, product owner, project manager, QA, and developer tied into one. It would take a team of 10 or 12 offshore developers to do this, if they even could.
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u/Creative-Package6213 18h ago
I've got good news for ya then...by the time republicans get done rat fucking the economy, we will be the low income country so buck up buckeroo!
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u/europanya 16h ago
The language barrier is huge and so is the time difference. Shit goes wrong you can’t explain it to them clearly and they only respond at 2am. And if they call you, you can’t understand what they’re saying.
Every tech company I’ve worked for the past 25 years had a dysfunctional offshore team they eventually had to can and dump the code. The ONLY good team I ever worked with was a 100% English literate Latvian team who stayed up late to work with us for half the day at least.
We recently canned our head of IT for hiring two offshore teams in India who accomplished nothing after two years
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u/davidbasil 2h ago
There is a reason why Germany is famous for its engineering while India is not. Culture, mentality, approach, regulations, work ethic... etc.
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u/nsxwolf Principal Software Engineer 1d ago
I’ve been dealing with this for over 25 years. Everyone has always wanted developers that are as close to free as possible and of the highest possible quality. Outsourcing has always tempted businesses with this promise.
The problem is, you’re never the first company that’s thought of this. Everyone got there before you did and hired the very best developers. You get to fight over what’s left.
Every year the costs rise. “Nearshoring” to hire Mexican developers has raised prices so high it soon won’t be an advantage over hiring devs from MCOL US cities.