>Not only did it not spread to engineering, but even the L1 and L2 were terrible. I worked in some large environments where working with those offshore folks was universally viewed as a nightmare.

>Now, what has changed?

We did.

The sorts of strongly hierarchical/rank based and "follow the process to our obvious demise" type workplace culture that is normal in big companies in the US today would be the punchline of a derisive joke about government/union/academic employment in 2006. Back then there was a HUGE culture gulf between an office in the US and an office in Bangalore or Manila because they ran that way but the office in SF or Redmond or whatever didn't. But in the past 20yr there has been a push to treat people (more than we already did) as replaceable cogs, do everything by committee, divy up responsibility, escalate everything, follow the process when the process and the big picture conflict because it's "not your station" to think about those things, etc, etc.

You can blame it on academia and MBA schools, you can blame it on the culture that we imported with the H1Bs, you can blame it on regulatory posture fanning the flames of all this, IDK, I tend to blame them all. But it absolutely happened. And now that we've incurred the cost of running that way just by virtue of our workplace culture changing there's a lot less operational cost to onboarding an offshore team.

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duttish an hour ago | parent [-]

To semi-quote a higher up at $dayJob, at BigTech, talking to his directors: "If your engineers aren't fungible you're bad at your jobs".

Everyone should just be a small cog in a big machine.

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laughing_man 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

But that's just good management. You can't have your organization struggle because someone gets hit by a bus or quits suddenly.

	▲	ChrisMarshallNY 5 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> good management I'm not sure I'd apply "good" as a modifier. Being generous, maybe "mediocre." Good managers know how to find, cultivate, and maximize exceptional people, and that's a difficult job. I have a feeling that LLMs are going to drastically improve the baseline quality of software. The top end will always require exceptional human involvement, but it will look different.
	▲	duttish 31 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Hm. To me there's a difference between handling the bus factor: make sure several people on the team knows about things, and fungible engineers: can move engineers between products.

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ffsm8 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

yeah, most large employers think like that.

it remains to be seen if thats going to be the way in ~10 years after the dust has settled.

i suspect those middle managers will try to fight tooth and nail to hold onto that status quo, because it leaves them with all the power.