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Comment by aplummer | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure that sells it, because I don’t think offshoring and outsourcing is feasible…

The flip side is that if remote work is absolutely the same, then offshoring and outsourcing are also.

Why have your employees work remotely in a city 100 miles from their original office at 80-90% of the cost when you can have them be 1000 miles from the office at 30-40% of the cost.

If you find employees in Central and South America they would also be in the same timezone.

We just have twenty years of experience that any initial cost savings generated by outsourcing are illusory and come due with interest on the back end.

I agree that has been the case but I don't think it is a certainty that it will continue to tbe the case. Certainly many immigrant workers in IT do good work and are well paid. Why could they not do the same thing from their home country?

Depends what you're outsourcing. We outsourced manufacturing and those cost savings were certainly not illusory.

A lot of communications type work suffered from outsourcing due to language barriers and poor connectivity and poorer skillset from workers in other areas of the world (or even the US). That may not always continue to be the case.

I'm guessing the top 10% or 20% of workers do not need to be worried since they can provide so much value that outsourcing is not worth it. But if you're in the bottom 4 quintiles, I would be wary.

> We outsourced manufacturing and those cost savings were certainly not illusory.

Sure they are. The expertise and factories to build a lot of components are no longer in the US, which has a ton of knock-on effects in the economy - job loss, decline, etc.

That's a hidden cost that offsets whatever cash savings were experienced on the front end.

Those are societal costs, not costs for the company making the decision to outsource or not. A company taking into account those societal costs while others do not will end up not being able to competitively price their products.

Good argument for government imposition of external costs via taxes, regulation etc.

Not only did we lose the ability to manufacture things locally which has impeded our ability to innovate in certain fields, many companies were wiped out by new overseas low cost competitors who took the expertise they learned from our training in the initial outsourcing.

Essentially for short term gain for some, entire companies were destroyed.

So there were heavy costs on the backend.

Why does every vendor I deal with still do it, at least for support?

Cognizant and TCS and Infosys and the like have this market on lockdown, and nobody cares that the experience is terrible because it's just a cost center.

Moving 100 miles is one thing. When you move countries/continents, language, work culture & social norms needs to be taken into account, even if the timezone is the same.

It shouldn't matter who I am, but I say this as someone who immigrated into North America after having worked several years in South America. There are real barriers to collaboration that prevent outsourcing from being a silver bullet. They don't make collaboration necessarily impossible or difficult, but these barriers need to be taken into account.

Offshoring and outsourcing can be a nightmare. It doesn't have to be though. I've seen at least one example that works very well.

Of course it was less about cost and more about the ability to quickly provide additional resources, and it was done with the upmost care to make it still feel like one team, but it doesn't have to be a nightmare.

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