Not sure about SF arrogance but the whole “Your job is going to get outsourced to India don’t get into IT/Software Dev” thing has been around since the 90s. It’s 20 years later and the job market is better than ever, salaries are better than ever, and a lot of companies who fully embraced the IT outsourcing trend are realizing it actually hurt them in the long run. Short term it helped but now they have lost their market place edge they once had. Also worked with a company who outsourced all their call centers to Eastern Europe from Scotland and other Northern European countries, their customers hated it.

Not against outsourcing it’s gotta be a mixed bag. You’ll be extremely slow if you have to wait until tomorrow to get any answers.

If you know what you are doing by building an organic team in a foreign country, you can still get real bang for the buck. If you try the traditional outsourcing model by offloading shit to a 3rd party, you will get hurt.

Managers who know what they are doing are typically a lot more expensive than software engineers who know what they are doing. So the only reasonable way to outsource software engineering is to also outsource the corresponding management, and management don't want to do that.

Agreed. There’s no way you can get away with not having a global team unless you’re a small company operating in a small market.

The company I work for now has a team in India and the difference in skills is night and day compared to my last job. The turnover is much much less as well. I suspect they pay better and don’t rely on scummy 3rd party “coach you to pass the interview but have no real experience” providers.

Outsourcing to India didn't work very well due to cultural differences.

Communication was very hard, even when language wasn't a problem.

People afraid to say they didn't understand something and trying to wing it with tragicomical results. People not raising issues until after something exploded not to offend you.

I think outsourcing to Russia has some good potential but the level of English is still nowhere close, even in the new generations. Eastern Europe is more promising but English is a bit hit or miss. I see plenty of outsourcing to Eastern Europe from the UK. Similarly, I see more and more outsourcing to Latin America from the states.

Europe is much closer to the States: if you outsource to the UK or Northern-mid Europe you get English speaking people who will act similarly to US employees. Sure you won't save 11/12 like in India but you will save a good half compared to SF, with the only hassle being the timezone.

I think we haven't seen the last of outsourcing.

distributed working is a totally different thing than outsourcing. We are talking about companies having more options for their mode/base of operation and talents. We are not talking about corporates sacrifying quality control by adding layers of managerment in other countries in an attempt to abstract away the development process.

The parent comment said displace place jobs just like Chinese manufacturing did to US manufacturing.

I'll be downvoted to hell for this.

I'm from Europe, I've worked for several SF based companies (some hired, some through acquisitions) and can confirm that , despite there are some really, really smart people there are also a lot of people that have no clue what they're talking about, as in most places you have a mix of it. But almost all of them are incredibly arrogant and most have an incredible tendency to take decisions based on what's important for their CV and there career and their podcast and their YouTube channel than for what the company or the problem at hands needs. I'm not sure I'm taking again a job for a west coast based company.

Also Americans don’t realize the scale of transformation that is going on in places like India and China. As far as making consumer web apps goes India is increasingly the place where unicorns emerge every week and some companies operate at very large scales. Thanks to the internet knowledge is spreading quickly and remote work is a booster.

The gap in terms of knowledge and networks is closing with places abroad.

And then the managers that cut cost jump up or over the ladder out of the department, and the next person deals with the smoking wreck of the situation, and they insource everything again. Then two years later, the cycle repeats.

The counterpart of this is that initially, the outsourcing group brings their A-team to bear, in order to win the deal. Those folks are generally as good as the people that they replaced. Six months later, those top operators are shifted to the next deal, and the C-team takes over, and then churn and attrition reduces it to a D or F team in short order.

This isn’t a zero-sum game where 1 remote job gained equals 1 local job lost, though. Demand for good engineers still exceeds the available supply, in my experience.

Rather, I see remote work as a sort of leveling of the playing field. As the location advantage is diminished when it comes to compensation, the pressure starts to gently push everyone’s comp toward the median. Highly paid people might see some downward pressure but the underpaid people will start to see some upward pressure.

Silicon Valley jobs aren’t going away, though. In-person will always be in demand.