Offshoring has been a thing for decades. Seriously, Yourdon wrote a doom-and-gloom book about it in the 90s. It was called “Decline and Fall of the American Programmer,” published 1992.

Then in 1996, he wrote “Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer.”

The software industry is extremely fad-driven. During the pandemic, the fad was to hire programmers. That created a lot of busywork and coordination jobs that didn’t contribute to the bottom line.

Then Musk bought Twitter, laid off a bunch of folks, and things kept running. So the trend became “cut the fat.” In fairness, there actually was fat to cut.

Now boards are in cost-cutting mode and fantasizing about AI, so the pendulum has swung back towards offshoring. But that cost-cutting focus is going to lead to stagnation and self-cannibalization. Somebody’s going to buck the trend, have a splashy success, and the herd will trample back in the other direction.

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johnnyanmac 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>But that cost-cutting focus is going to lead to stagnation and self-cannibalization. Somebody’s going to buck the trend, have a splashy success, and the herd will trample back in the other direction.

Yes. But sadly, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

And I feel there's going to be a huge storm to survive first. I imagine many may not even make it to the next shift.

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yadaeno 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s been a thing, but Covid and remote work took away any possible argument to no offshore everything ASAP.

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WalterBright 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As always, free markets are a chaotic system of creative destruction.

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lesuorac 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Then Musk bought Twitter, laid off a bunch of folks, and things kept running.

I'm not sure you can give credit to Musk here. Buying a company and cutting all R&D to "juice" profits isn't his invention. Twitter is really around still in spite of his efforts as opposed to because of them; other CEOs might be doing layoffs but they're also not going out doing sieg heils. As well as he really fired them for fealty reasons and not economic ones.

It should be very telling that Grok came out of X.ai and not X. Ultimately, Musk did have to reverse some of the layoffs although with a bit of slight of hand so that Twitter could release any sort of new products.

	▲	johnnyanmac 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's not "his" thing, but he and a few early layoffs certainly made it trendy to do so. It's a small club, so seeing any "members" take any action is a sign they should follow suit.