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Comment by ActionHank | Hacker News Reader

I think that businesses are emboldened now because they believe AI will bridge the gap that couldn't be bridge in the last great offshoring.

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What gap? People all around the world can speak English, and write code. The US didn't need AI to push all manufacturing to China. You're getting outsourced. This is normally where unions step in, but not in this country.

It's a cycle.

The US is expensive, so offshore. Offshore projects are more expensive because they never work, so come back to the US.

I've lived it twice now. We’re in the middle of my third cycle.

Expect this cycle to be perm. The infrastructure, education and language barriers are completely gone now. This is my third cycle too, and its different this time.

In 2006 the Indians would randomly cut out, couldn't be on video (phone only) and had major language barriers, and they would join in their evening.

Now in 2024 you're on their schedule. Believe me, those people are not staying up late for your 3pm call. Wake up at 5am every day to keep your job, you have 3-4 hours to work with them.

Honestly to biggest issues I've had with overseas devs and managers (mostly India) is the lying and misrepresenting which is cultural.

Honestly the biggest issue is time difference. If US corpos were strategic they would have invested in Latin America and build huge talent pools there. Same time zone, same culture same holidays, same language with big portion of the US population.

Last go around my client used Brazil. Worked for a while until there was a major system outage and it turned out they didn't have the skill set to actually solve any problems.

The gap between experience, domain knowledge, and legacy knowledge. If you've ever worked in a large org that has been running for a few years these can be significant gaps and they are usually filled by having access to someone in the office to answer questions.

Work ethic and trust culture are big ones as well. Though admittedly some leaders love the "yes boss" vibe of overseas devs, even if they are lying to your face.

You just pointed out all manufacturing migrated to China. Unions couldn't stop it (they probably accelerated it). So what would an IT union do?

What I'm seeing is that previous off shoring was mostly done with contract orgs. I'm seeing direct hiring this time. I guess for more control.

This will still fail I think, for the same reason contracting did.

The churn is real and any offshoring hotbed ends up with a lot of competing between big companies for talent which then drives the prices up and motivates people to jump companies more.

The issues we saw were more about quality. I know churn is bad for that, but I think the problem was more related to lack of oversight and vetting. This might improve that, but I'd probably bet against it.

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