Ironic phrasing, as in my experience the steelman argument in favor of these companies is "The customer is really bad at thinking through their own requirements."
I guess it’s the least worst option we’ve found. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t need any guardrails at all though.
Late stage capitalism is a scourge for humanity.
That is an ideological creed, not a fact. It might be true, but you're just smuggling in your priors with no evidence.
But if you’ve ever worked with the public, you know there is almost no cultural onus on nontechnical people to properly hire or contract technical people for technical tasks.
So…no: The market isn’t very good at this - yet.
This stuff is all contracted or subcontracted to these sorts of companies. You don’t need technical geniuses. You need good enough at the lowest cost.
Consulting companies, especially the largest ones, are known to employ more hacks than competent folks - because they can. (This is the “lowest cost” you mentioned.)
Just read the stories here about the big names.
Succeeding in not being sued - most of the time - doesn’t mean you’re doing good work or good business.
2. Circular agreements - you get them to sell your goods/services in the region of their home country
3. These count as "Services" on the P&L and provide massive tax advantages to the company because these aren't treated as labor costs.
This may be from an old context in my brain since I worked with some of those companies, so those reasons may have changed or impact may have with various regulations, etc.
Good luck trying to get a 6 person shop with a full calendar of other-customer work to suddenly prioritize a show-stopping bug that's only affecting you.
What was it good for? Well, often it was prompting a person in a low-cost location what code to write. He would pick it up in his timezone and implement it overnight, and present findings/questions as a response.
The problem is, coding has made implementation super cheap. It is now so cheap you have to compare it to the cost of dealing with someone in another timezone, who does not have the same cultural context on the problem. They also can't ask you clarifying questions while you're asleep. AI wins against the offshore guy, on both money and context.
Who does it help? Amazingly, the experienced onshore dev who thought he was going to be unemployed past 40. This person is now able to implement several things concurrently, has experience in making technical decisions, and has local cultural context.
So - definitely agree with your general thesis.
It's really palpable, developers in these orgs just stopped caring about the quality of their work.
Each one of these distractions can blow the mental context of a developer for hours as well - so not only do they get very, very little time to actually "program" - but the time they do get, is now mostly trying to get back into "flow" , re-establish a full mental context of the project, etc... So - that 5% is likely a huge over-estimate of the amount of "productive" time a developer has, as a good chunk of that is just recovering from the bullshit that the company inflicts on them so they can go heads down and actually start doing "work" - realistically I bet if you watched your average developer at a big FAANG - they spend substantially less than 2% of their time actually heads down coding productively.
This is a pretty stupid thing to do, btw, as whatever isn’t AI will just be offshored, which reduces government and social security revenue and closes a pipeline to get smart immigrants, who tend to vote Republican.
In the age of AI coding, what is the point of outsourcing your programming to TCS, Wipro, et al? These consultancies are not building groundbreaking innovative stuff, they're building the drudgery enterprise software to handle taxes or business intelligence tools. Things that are perfect for AI (don't get me wrong, AI is perfect for a lot of other types of coding too).
Or is it that outsourcing is cheaper than AI tokens?