Wait till they realize there are high-quality devs in SE Asia, South America and India. That remote job can be done by anyone, anywhere. Literally.

Some industries may have regulatory protection, but I don’t think it’ll be long before others start mass-outsourcing the kinds of jobs people thought were safe.

Some already realized that. For USA companies, the problem with Asia, India, and even East Europe is timezones.

I used to work at a US company that had offices here in Mexico and had a GREAT QA team in India (despite the hatred they get here in HN, Indian techies are GOOD! ) .

The TZ problem is what ended up fracturing the relationship between the teams . Us/Mexico teams synergy was just great, while Indians were generally disconnected.

But yeah, US and Canada companies that turn to LatAm do get an "unfair advantage". I'm slowly but steadily trying to help this happen. Sorry?

> For USA companies, the problem with Asia, India, and even East Europe is timezones.

I've seen more of a mentality and attitude problem than timezones. Often these other offices are just treated as 2nd class citizens without enough context to act.

> that turn to LatAm do get an "unfair advantage"

My company has been trying to do this (pay top percentile latam salaries) but it’s just been a larger grind to find decent devs than when we were advertising US salaries. “You get what you pay for” seems to be at play for us.

I imagine remote work can give you some edge but we’re trying to get 2 devs for the price of one and it’s really hard. We’re probably losing money on all the time wasted (you get a ton of applicants at lower price points).

I think the timezone issue is being mitigated - I’ve found Indian devs (only picking them out because of direct experience) were generally already working odd hours to at least give US overlap, but I think asynch tools will continue to get better and make it less of an issue. Probably doesn’t work in a five person startup where you need a lot of direct/constant communication, but especially in mature companies, I think the timing issues are very solvable (where they haven’t already been addressed).

Agree on the quality - there were some devs we worked with who needed more hand-holding, but a majority were very capable.

I’m currently negotiating legal terms for a B2B SaaS contract with a US-based Fortune 100 company, and the legal work (which normally is done by US lawyers) is outsourced to India.

They may not be fully accredited lawyers but they sure do know their way around the law as well as any other lawyer we’ve negotiated with.

Offshoring is nothing new, it's been happening for at least a decade in earnest, of course far more for manufacturing. Even if you just count since the start of the pandemic, companies have now had 3.5 years to figure this out. Where is the mass-outsourcing?

It’s coming with higher quality candidates. For a long time, off-shore devs were uniformly mediocre and generally made things harder. I think that has been changing over the last decade, and is changing faster with more and more high quality online education.

Thinking that there will be a switch-flip moment (or that, because there hasn’t, there won’t be) is, I think, a limited view.

Average American devs just aren’t enough better, or won’t be soon, to justify the massively higher cost, and I think the push from a lot of devs around remote-first policy has forced employers to figure out timezone/asynch issues.

I will say that I’m really guessing about 3-5 years from now. Happy to see other perspectives!