Yup, this is much more likely to lead to more offshoring than companies hiring more American workers. Which also means that communities in the US with a large amount of workers on visas will also suffer.

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joshheitzman 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Offshoring it hardly new. Take Microsoft for example. They offshored heavily over 20 years ago. Allow more immigration or the jobs will be offshored is an idle threat. Companies have done tons of offshoring and reshored many things after it didn't work out. More or less immigration isn't going to move the need on offshoring much either way.

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samtp 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Of course it's not new. And of course it never really stopped. But there is a new incentive for execs to give it a much bigger push given all the recent remote work tooling and when they now think a programmer is just monitoring AI output. So why not pay the monitor SE Asian wages rather than US wages.

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joshheitzman 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The trend is away from remote work though. So much more stuff is hybrid then it was a few years ago. SE Asian wages means a 12 hour time zone difference and that carries a real cost on efficiency (I personally experienced this at two companies). Future poorly thought offshoring attempts will go just as badly as they have in the past. If anything AI makes it worse, since each individual dev is responsible for a bigger slice of the output they need to be in the loop on business / customer needs and significant timezone differences make that harder.

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AdrianB1 30 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Real example: my company is US based, top and middle management is in US, some middle management and lower in Europe, managing workers in India and Manila. Same scheme with Costa Rica, but managed directly from US.

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bottle_roket 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What about Central America?

	▲	joshheitzman 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Plenty of offshoring to both Central America and South America has occurred in recent years. It was a somewhat untapped offshoring location, but that no longer seems to be the case.

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bingohbangoh 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A key difference is that at least one isn’t competing for limited housing with offshoring. That is the number 1 driver of the affordability crisis atm.

I’m a fan of the YIMBY types but we aren’t building enough annd, until we are, it’s a problem to put more people where we already have little housing!

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Daishiman 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The post-Covid offshoring is looking quite a bit different though.

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joshheitzman 3 hours ago | parent [-]

How so?

	▲	andrewl-hn 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		For starters, compensation is almost entirely location-based now. Situations where a person lives in cheap city / country but paid close to US rates were never common, but in last 5 years or so they disappeared almost entirely. Moreover, every company seems to know about local rates, they all source this data from the same sources, so if you're job hunting they all give you the same offer. And, since there are so much competition for positions companies are very reluctant to bid on candidates, and most offers do not allow negotiations. Even if paying you slightly above market would still save the company quite a lot of money they don't do it. So, situations where you receive the same offer from multiple companies, and all of them are "take it or leave it", became pretty common. I haven't been on a job market for a long time, but this is what I hear from people around me.

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vrganj 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Offshoring to India is an idle threat due to radically different work cultures and expectations.

Offshoring to, say Poland or Portugal on the other hand...

	▲	joshheitzman 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Offshoring (form the US) to Europe, especially eastern Europe is not new either. The newish offshoring location was Central America and South America, but those have been tapped as well. For example see https://theenterpriseworld.com/offshore-development-centers/ where they are listing well established locations for (US) offshoring.

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newtonianrules 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Then let them already. Relocate all the work to India. I’m tired of US companies threatening everyone with job losses. Just fucking do it already.

	▲	amsjunior 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They already are.

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cryptonector 15 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm old enough to remember when people gnashed their teeth about the U.S. taking talent from abroad being 'brain drain' that hurt those countries. Which is it? We want to take the rest of the world's best and brightest and screw those other countries in the process, or we feel bad about that and don't want to do that?

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janalsncm an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ok, let’s say it leads to 60% offshoring and 40% hiring more Americans.

That 40% is a win for Americans. It means more new grads will be hired instead of losing out to “experts” from TATA to copy and paste from ChatGPT. Our vibe coders will be home grown, corn fed.

The argument works no matter what you think the breakdown is, 70/30, 80/20 etc.

	▲	finolex1 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's not so simple because it's also a drop in demand for american goods and services. Fewer taxes paid, less consumption, etc.

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zergrush 18 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No, that is the incorrect take. Offshoring isn't easy or cheap. Especially when Trump is basically trying to get companies to hire American workers by any means.

It is risky to invest in offshoring when the outcome isn't guaranteed to save you money.

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HoldOnAMinute 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"Suffer"? It might help bring home prices back down to reality.

For the first time in my life I'm seeing high-income earners as a big drag on society.