If offshoring were that easy, American and European companies would have been doing it already, as it's a great deal on paper, why wouldn't the companies jump at the opportunity to get engineers for 30% of the cost?

However, the experienced reality repeatedly doesn't live up to the promise.

Look, I'm not gonna argue on the pros and cons of offshoring, I'm just telling you the reality of what's happening where I live. Obviously, not everything can be outsourced 1:1 with massive savings and get same quality, but businesses don't care and more and more work is offshored now, whether you want it or not, especially in times of economic downturn when labor cost becomes more pressing and execs can show savings so they're taking their chances whether it pays off in the future or not we'll see.

Nobody would risk disrupting smooth running operations by introducing offshoring to save a few pennies, when free money was raining from the sky, but now that money is getting tighter and covid opened the doors to accepting more work done remotely and less work done in sync face to face, then offshoring is now a lot less risky and off-putting than in the past.

Plus, unlike the Indian offshoring scare of ~20 years ago, besides the remote work thing, offshore labor is a lot more skilled at IT task now. There isn't that massive gap anymore, where only Americans or Germans new how to write SW, and the eastern world only knew to make sneakers and do call support. Thanks to STEM universities, access to good education sources, FOSS and self learning, people outside the west can code just as good but at a lower cost when you keep the same hiring bar and don't just pay some offshore middleman consultancy for the cheapest labor.

And the proof is in the pudding as most big tech companies have large pools of workers in India at this point. You can say all you want, that offshoring isn't gonna work because of quality or culture or whatever, but it sure seems like it is working for them, and I don't think this genie is going back in the bottle.

They have been offshoring for decades. We go in cycles of execs asking “why the hell are we paying these entitled Americans so much when Indian will do just as good for peanuts?”, then offshoring, then realizing it doesn’t work that well. The next guy comes in and the cycle repeats.

However, the second an IT union gets established they’re just going to say the hell with it, India ain’t so bad.