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this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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Cope, the offshored coders taking the jobs are just as good at a quarter of the pay
People are really depending on this round of offshoring going like the previous rounds, but where that failed is that by the time it was viable a lot of talent from the eastern bloc and India had been poached and working in the US. I think there’s a more conscious effort this time to not drain talent from outside the US in order to have as large of a salary gap as possible, without producing lower quality work. Also, coding is significantly easier now, like I feel programmers of the 90s to the early 00s are genuinely less replaceable than modern programmers.
Yea, companies are now opening a ton of massive offices in those foreign countries and having actual teams together now instead of trying to tightly integrate a few of them into American teams
I don't think coding became easier, it became more difficult imo but it's just more accessible and the difficulty has shifted to frameworks and massive scalable systems rather than lower level hardware knowledge. In the past only the wealthy could afford the hardware and get to know it deeply but most schmucks now can learn how to use AWS or Databricks
I feel like this is a big factor in why offshoring didn't work in the past but probably will this time
(pure speculation with no real data to back it up) like back in the early 2000s, all those indian programmers would likely have been people who purely learned in college because they didn't have a computer at home to practice, so of course they weren't that great. but now in the 20s, computers are cheap and ubiquitous enough that a significant amount of those same types of people do have computers at home, which means they'd be able to get more hands on experience and can now perform just as well as the westoids.
This doesn't account for my many peers who studied compsci with access to computers all their lives and suck at it, or some people who I met who never programmed until compsci and were great at it.
I think comp sci's difficulty parallels math. Lots of people say math is too hard but IMO it's really a matter of effort, or lack of it. Or people lack confidence that they can actually do it and then internalize the belief that they're no good at it. Also, US education sucks. But the key diff between studying math and comp sci is that for many years (and still to this day, really) programming paid extremely well and therefore attracts the gamut of people with genuine interest or talent for it to people who are only in it for the money and couldn't program a fizzbuzz without AI assistance, and everyone between.
Well sure, mere exposure doesn’t create skill. But the point I’m getting at is that without it it’s harder to get good at programming, and it’s likely increased significantly for people in poorer countries over the last couple decades. So some, maybe not all but enough, gained the ability to learn how to code the way westerners of previous generations were able to.
I suspect but don't know how to validate that it's the Indian firms overselling the savings. They could get extremely competent people by charging 60% of a western salary, paying 40% and pocketing the difference. Instead, they lowball those numbers to the point where their teams are stretched thin and don't know what they're doing, yielding bad results that are on par with all the other Indian firms doing the same thing. If capitalism worked as advertised, somebody could found NonGarbageCorp, set more realistic expectations around cost savings, attract the most competent technical remote workers, deliver great things and become immensely rich. But it would take a serious investment of capital and time to establish a reputation while western firms suspect them of secretly being GarbageCorp32849327, so the people who could pull off NonGarbageCorp just launch GarbageCorp32849327 instead.
I work with plenty of programmers from Latin America who make a third of what American programmers are paid, speak fluent English, and work harder with better code. Can't imagine it's a trend that will slow down.
Yea one of the best devs I've worked with were Latin America. TFW a guy living in the mountains an hour away from Santiago knows Kafka and AWS better than everybody else
I don't think I've seen them work harder though. They were all very strict about 40 hours and were very aware of the class dynamics of boss and worker. Americans who have drank the Kool aid and obsessed with job titles and career prestige worked the hardest in my experience, closely followed by Chinese workers
It's a similar story with South Africa, which is why I think the US wants to get a deal that exempts US companies from certain labour laws and taxes, with a focus on affirmative action laws and policies, called BEE (black economic empowerment), at least as a media narrative. You have a lot of people that have been educated in STEM at local top schools and universities who are already integrated into "western culture" and use English as a lingua franca, who would do almost anything to work for a multinational corporation based in the USA, given the high levels of unemployment and youth unemployment (30% and 50% respectively), and the uncompetitive nature of South African industry on the global market. They could pay them a third or a quarter of what these high level workers earn in the US and they'd still live like kings and queens in South Africa. The "lucky ones" can even get to immigrate to the USA!