Outsourcing of tech jobs and the tech job market
Outsourcing of tech jobs is not something new. Companies have been doing outsourcing for decades. The outsourcing of jobs in the recent years has become much worst as companies try to save as much money as they possible can. Many US companies are outsourcing tech jobs to companies in Brazil, India, Vietnam, Malaysia, etc. This is taking a huge hit on the US software job market (as well as first world countries like Canada and the UK) for locals. A job market where it is common to apply for one thousand roles and only get a handful of interviews.
A company owner in the US may want to build a piece of software that would require 5–10 developers over the course of 3 years. Would you rather hire 10 US devs for millions of dollars or hire 10 developers from low income countries for 10–15% of the price? The answer is pretty obvious, but try explaining the obvious to frustrated unemployed developers in the US (or developers in high-income countries). A lot of computer science and software engineering forums and subreddits have turned into nationalistic mis-information hubs to maintain the narrative that western developers are more expensive because they are of hire quality. This couldn’t be further from the truth. You would think that this unearned arrogance stops at the United States, but no! Even in “UKJobs” subreddit, this narrative still persists that one developer from the UK can do the work of an entire offshore team. I mean, if the UK developers are that good, why do we not see high quality apps, games, start-ups, open-source projects and such come out from that region?
The mis-information campaign that western developers are on is to put as much rhetoric online discrediting developers from low income countries like India, Mexico, Brazil, etc as much as they can. The lies that they perpetuate is that US devs and devs from other high-income countries (which they refer to as first world devs) and technically superior to their low-income counterparts (which they condescendingly refer to as third-world devs). Many of such rhetoric can be found on various sections of youtube and reddit (mainly the “cscareerquestions” sub reddit). Their coping mechanism is that these companies that outsource all their dev roles to low-income countries will later face the consequences of technical debt and bad code which will eventually make these companies crawl on their knees and beg the great “first world software developers” to come help them fix their rotten code base for 10x the salary. Never in my decades of experience have I seen so-called developers so out of touch with the reality on ground.
The truth is that developers from high income countries are only expensive because their lifestyle costs more. When you hire a developer from San-Francisco in California, you are not paying for their talents, you are simply paying for their high cost of rent, food and other necessities. That developer living in San-Francisco isn’t necessarily better than a developer living in Utah, but he/she just requires more money to live. So hiring a software developer in a high-income city or a high-income country just feels like bad strategy.
If we put aside the cheap rhetorics and ask, are US devs actually better than devs in these other countries? As someone who has worked for over 25 years in the tech industry (mostly in the US and Canada), building various complex pieces of software and working with various devs in different parts of the world, as well as different outsourcing teams, I will say that devs are pretty much the same all around the world. In fact, there is usually more hunger, passion and humility from devs in Vietnam and India compared to the so called “first world devs”. You will find devs ranging from extremely bad to fantastic in every country on the planet. Online education in technology has ensured the dissemination of technical software knowledge to those willing to put their head down and work.
Putting offshoring aside, what about the impact of AI on the job market?
What about AI and what impact does AI play in the current job market and in the near future? I have written in the past about the generative AI hype. I am still not convinced that AI will replace developers, certainly not the LLM models we have today. I do think that AI will make developers much more efficient and productive. This might lead to a slight decrease in demand for new junior developers.
Aside from outsourcing and AI, one factor that isn’t talked about is the fact that a lot of software already exists. A lot of tools that need to be built have already been built. Can you build more? sure, but a lot of businesses and clients will just go with the already existing product. Looking back at the previous decade of tech, there were still lots of mobile apps and web apps to be built. Even desktop utility apps like video editors, photo manipulators, game engines, digital audio workstations, data visualisation tools, etc still had vacuum to be filled. These days, the vast majority of users have gravitated towards one particular tool and when you make your own video editor, the question is what does it do that iMovie and davinci resolve cannot do? A lot of users would rather just get an extension plugin for a software that adds to the functionality of the software rather than learn a new software with a new workflow. This has made less need for software developers as fewer software are being written (especially from scratch).
So what can developers in high-income countries do to maintain their jobs for the next decade? I personally think that outsourcing will continue because it is just the logical choice for the companies in high-income countries to seek quality developers abroad for a fraction of the cost. Given the lack of regulations and restrictions, companies will keep offshoring. This will result in decreased or stagnated salary in western countries and will further worsen the “take it or leave it” attitude by tech companies in the west when it comes to seeking local talent. I’ll suggest that developers start to wear multiple hats and consider low cost of living areas within their own country. These steps should be made slowly over the coming years to help reduce the risk of redundancy of “first world devs”.