Comment by keeda

Offshoring wasn't really limited... looking at India as the largest offshoring destination, it is in the double-digit billions annually, about 5 - 10% of the entire Indian GDP, and it was large enough that it raised generations of Indians from lower middle-class to the middle and upper-middle class.

A large part of the success was, to your point, achieved by recruiting highly skilled workers at the client and offshoring ends, but they were a small minority. The vast majority of the workforce was much lower skilled. E.g. at one point the bulk of "software engineers" hired didn't even study computer science! The IT outsourcing giants would come in and recruit entire batches of graduates regardless of their education background. A surprisingly high portion of, say, TCS employees have a degree in something like Mechanical Engineering.

They key strategy was that these high-skilled workers acted as high-leverage points of quality control that were scaled to a much larger force of lower-skilled workers via processes. As the lower strata of workers upskilled over time, they were in turn promoted to lead other projects with lower-skilled workers.

In fact, you see this same dynamic in high-performing software teams, where there is a senior tech lead and a number of more junior engineers. The quality of output depends heavily on the skill-level of the lead rather than the more numerous juniors.

Re: Anthropic, I think we're conflating coding and software engineering. Writing an entire JS runtime is not just coding, it's a software engineering project, and I totally agree that AI cannot do software engineering: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46210907