Comment by dcastm
1 day ago
I live in Spain. I’ve been in the industry for the last 10 years.
I’ve seen from a very close distance several European companies move a big part of their operations to India. Have had close friends laid off recently and seen them struggle for months to find a new jobs. Plus, I see tighter freelance market these days.
This was unthinkable not long ago.
I've seen that happen at Stockholm companies too.
And then a few years later, when it doesn't work out, I saw them bringing it back.
Outsourcing seems to go in cycles, like fashion
UK companies have been moving IT or other operation functions to India for decades
It's the typical Western management behaviour of knowing the cost of everything but the value of nothing
My former company had the brilliant idea to outsource native app development to india. This was mabye 2015 in germany and they tried to roll out the app for several years. There were severe communication and quality problems. Our company wasted massive time on it, until they finally added a single native app dev and we started making progress. We already had like 30 people in tech department and adding a single position was a fucking joke on the payroll.
Any manager that thinks he can beat the value of a single dev with a random ass sweatshop from india is delusional. The cultural difference is massive, quality and work ethics as well. It's a high friction job for a manager. Well at least if you expect a bit of quality and timeliness.
(Sorry for all indians that do a good job, it's just the sweatshop/agency remote software dev culture simply doesn't work. Even a european sweatshop usually delivers worse quality then inhouse devs.)
I’ve worked with great engineers from India/Pakistan. I didn’t hire them, so don’t know too much about the process of how to find them but they were definitely as good as anyone I’ve seen in Europe.