Comment by xienze
2 days ago
> And now since WFH has become the norm in the US, employers are realizing there’s no need to pay to keep employees in the U.S. and outsourcing to significantly cheaper locations instead.
“Whoa we can do this cheaper in another country???” is not a new phenomenon. Companies have been trying to do this for literally decades at this point. The reason so many jobs still exist in the US is because it doesn’t end up working that well. I’m not _that_ old and I was around at IBM for two separate rounds of “outsource-it-to-India-no-wait-bring-it-back” and IBM was and still is very keen to ship everything overseas.
I’m not saying it won’t eventually stick, but I think it’s important to dispel this notion that WFH made everyone have this sudden epiphany that US workers aren’t necessary anymore. It’s been going on for ages.
The work force abroad has caught up a lot though. Online learning has made it much easier to improve skills and their English has also improved. And since everyone has become more used to remote work, communication is also much better now. One reason a lot of outsourcing efforts in the early 90s failed was also because the Indian teams weren't properly kept in the loop.
I was doing remote work with indian offshore teams in 2020 and they were abysmal
5 years won't change that lol. tata is still going to suck, the difference is now there is TCS in LATAM. same for cap gemini, cognizant, hcl, etc.
I’m talking about the 2000s and 2010s though.
It goes in cycles, often depending on the business focus at the time.
Right now (and back then), primary focus was on cost. Got to juice those margins somehow, and it isn’t going to happen by opening new markets (probably!).
When outsourcing is less envogue, it’s usually because there is some big growth opportunity and they are trying to get things moving as fast as possible. That tends to require higher end (but more expensive!) staff working in closer communication with management/execs.
It’s the difference between trying to improve margins on an existing product, and trying to grow the top end of a new product.