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I don't know how old you are, but if you were around in the early 2000's there was a BIG offshore fear. More and more they were hiring in India and the Philippines and other places. Initially it was the NOC / L1, maybe L2, and in certain areas.

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? Don't tell me Claude. As far as I can tell, these folks make a lot less, and the good ones can easily immigrate to Europe or somewhere else - maybe that has changed. Culturally, you have to often tell them very explicitly what to do and it is not normal to think outside of the box. I doubt that has changed.

So why would we be more afraid than we were in the early 2000's?

>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.

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.

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

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.

Is there? When someone gets hit by a bus you can't just move another team member into that job; you need to bring someone in from the outside. There has to be some level of fungibility for that to happen.

> 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.

> Good managers know how to find, cultivate, and maximize exceptional people, and that's a difficult job

To use a food analogy; this approach may works very well for a boutique upscale food joint chasing Michelin stars. This doesn't scale to the size of, say, McDonald's. At that stage, variability and creativity are a negative, and guardrails are good. You want literate warm-bodies that can consistently follow well-established procedures step by step. When your engineering staff complement grows over 50,000 - it may get difficult to find (and retain) those who are "exceptional".

It's not just about scale either, if you're a content, sole-proprietor hole-in the wall operation, (expensive) exceptional people aren't going to move the needle,and may even be detrimental to your viability.

Exactly. It depends.

I disagree. As a manager you're better off accepting a little lower level of productivity from your best employees if it means you don't have embarrassing, to higher management but also to customers, lapses in productivity.

As in most things, it depends.

Mediocre looks for “one size fits all.”

It’s been my experience, that humans; even ones that share much in common, have many different drivers, strengths, and limitations.

Culture also plays a big role. The US has a culture that encourages individual expression, and that’s one of our strengths (and limitations). We can get very good results, if we encourage individual expression, but it's really hard to manage. Irreplaceable people can add huge value to an organization, but they have to be correctly managed, and the organization needs to be structured to let them add that value.

I spent many years, working for a Japanese company, and their culture is a much better environment for “one size fits all.” In their case, it actually became a huge strength, but their approach would not work in the US.

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.

Fungibility is tangential to the sort of culture shift I'm talking about.

I remember that era. I call AI today Offshoring 2.0 and put up some citations [0]. I remember how it cratered the CS/hiring pipeline for a decade, leading to the competitive frenzy during ZIRP.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47125477

Imo it's almost the other way around.

If you just want mediocre code that technically meets the requirements of a Jira ticket bashed out as cheaply as possible, an LLM can do that, you no longer need to hire a junior offshore to save money

That's exactly it. That's why I don't see why putting up with time zone and cultural differences in work style not to mention communication complexities from these, are worth putting up with versus using Claude code.

Unless... God, what if they decided to use agents to manage their offshore "resources". That sounds like the utopia some are salivating over.

>and the good ones can easily immigrate to Europe or somewhere else - maybe that has changed

Yes, that has changed. Europe and USA are closing their borders for immigrants. And I don't know if that is the reason, but these international offices in India and some South America countries are hiring way more than 3 years ago. That said, USA and Europe are still top-notch in quality of life, no matter what naysayers believe. So you will still have a lot of great talent wanting to move there

Part of the offshore story is why I have way less care for big name journalism complaining about AI job loss or the like.

I remember their cheerful atmosphere about "geeks" getting pushed back down thanks to offshoring

Software engineering work changed. I no longer need to know any programming language. I just tell Claude what I need and it writes it for me.

Right. Are you the offshore worker in question?

And even if delegating thinking to the offshore worker to delegate thinking to Claude ... why would you even bother delegating to them in the first place?

> why would you even bother delegating to them in the first place?

because for entire companies, due to outsourcing, there is no other team to delegate to?

Who's the engg. team who writes the website for Best Buy, Target, eBay, Paypal?

The argument is that with AI companies might reconsider outsourcing / offshoring in the first place.

Hi, outsourced labourer here.

We also got laid off en masse. Well, I wasn't (for now), but several of my friends were months ago already and I'm not seeing them coming back anytime soon.

Laying off people is such an easy thing to do that no matter the region of the world, it's being done.

It seems like companies are laying off en masse everywhere while also hiring en masse in low COL countries. A few of the major corps HQed in my city have announced massive layoffs at the corporate office while relocating the jobs to a new "remote" HQ in India.

I've seen this enough to know where it goes - companies will move mid level jobs offshore, then relocate their "HQ" from a cheap midwestern city to an expensive one, NYC, Austin, LA, etc. Basically, the executives want to live somewhere expensive and cosmopolitan but they don't want to pay normal workers enough to live in those locations.

I think what you're seeing is change for the sake of change. You're friends will probably find jobs as "AI Engineers" at another company who just did a massive round of layoffs.

This seems like a complete opposite of what you'd expect. Why hire a team of mediocre overseas workers to prompt Claude (your characterization), then have to talk to them only at weird times of day, and have a 12 hour turnaround on anything? Instead you could have one or two local devs from your social circle, swing by their desk at 9am and they have the feature that Claude built merged by lunch?

Because in any decent sized organisation, the speed at which code is written has never been the bottleneck (even if management thinks that it is.)

Internal turf wars, endless meetings to get “alignment” and pivoting on management’s latest whims are what slows feature delivery.

> swing by their desk at 9am and they have the feature that Claude built merged by lunch?

At the scale where hiring overseas workers make sense, there are atleast one PM, QA people, Ops - likely teams, not just one person per, involved. No one is releasing a feature to prod by lunch.

The workflow you propose is a very good representation of SMBs and they are behaving as you have proposed - hire one or two local devs from Austin, call them over Slack and release to prod by lunch.

So yes, this is happening, just wanted to point out that the "overseas workers" workflow is at a different scale of operations.

>Instead you could have one or two local devs from your social circle, swing by their desk at 9am and they have the feature that Claude built merged by lunch?

Because the amount of skill it takes to do that is not commensurate with a salary high enough to afford living in SF.

Then won’t cost of living in sf drop?

eventually but the large share of a person living in SF are their state+city taxes, various fees like parking and rent. Those are not going down overnight but jobs are being lost faster than that.

If it really takes no skill to prompt Claude, then the execs can just do it themselves. Why have someone do it 12 hours later with a language barrier?

The talent pool in India has always trended towards mediocre. Highly skilled candidates do exist of course, but in a sea of diploma mill graduates they are extremely hard to find.

Companies have decided that a mediocre employee with Claude is now good enough, especially at the offshore price point.

Basically this, and it will get extremely worse. These regions will greatly benefit in the near term.

However, the mediocre India talent pool shouldn't be expected to drive Claude very well. The impact to companies will be devastating once they realize that in about 6-12 months when they finally notice they have to deal with the piles of garbage that were created. This isn't a dig against AI. If the existing talent pool cannot understand the engineering aspects of what they are doing today, then giving them AI will make it even worse.

This is overall correct. Just a nit: openai/anthropic don't have much of an engg presence in India. But yes for all of big tech.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic have significant customer engineering: architecture, integrations, evaluations, and production deployments in India. It's kept under wraps because the current administration doesn't want their "We need to win AI" to be overshadowed by "but our money is going to India again!" concerns with voters.

The U.S. is having its midterms - it closes tomorrow - and the next two years are pivotal to who wins the senate for the next 4 years. Having it leaked that billions of dollars of domestic AI spend is going to India is going to sink the GOP.

OpenAI has large offices in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru. Anthropic is rapidly expanding their Bengaluru office to Mumbai.

India is an extremely large market - there are 4x more people in India than in the U.S, so it's a huge TAM but most of them don't read or speak English so there's a tremendous localization challenge.

India is undergoing a fundamental shift in their economy. They used to be a culture that used to save money before they spend it. Recently I saw a large group of Indian visitors by the Golden Bridge taking pictures and asked them how they could have afforded to save for the trip given the current explosion in prices.

They hadn't saved money - they had taken out loans for the trip. Everyone of them. Apparently their house help earns as much as a teacher in Nonalva, Mumbai (I might have got the city wrong but it sounded like that)

They also focus their students on STEM and are having a tech. hiring crisis (so talent is really cheap). Every engineer speaks atleast 3 different languages, including English and even more local dialects.

Adjusted for cost, the above average Indian engineer assisted by Claude is insanely more valuable than an average engineer from SF assisted by Claude. It's like DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 vs your average US frontier model.

As I said in another comment, $180k/yr doesn't go very far in San Francisco specially if you want to have a family but I won't be surprised if you could retire in India after working on $180k/yr for 2-3 years.

Every market has an upper threshold of costs parties are willing to bear and San Francisco passed it where there's now active demand collapse. Companies are voting with their wallets and people in San Francisco are paying the price.

> but I won't be surprised if you could retire in India after working on $180k/yr for 2-3 years.

I don’t know what you picture when you think of India but a median 3 bedroom apartment in Mumbai costs about $400k and in Bangalore it’s $200K. And these won’t be the desirable neighborhoods nor newer apartments. After taxes on $180K after 2-3 years, you’d mostly be able to afford a tiny rented apartment for a few years but that’s it.

I am very aware, being indian myself, and have broad knowledge of the tech ecosystem here. Openai/anthropic in india is mostly sales. There is not yet research/engineering roles beyond that.

> but I won't be surprised if you could retire in India after working on $180k/yr for 2-3 years.

Irrelevant, but just for information, you could provided you're willing to live in a relatively rural area.

Nope. None of what was written has anything to do with the actual on the ground reality.

Theres coders across the country being laid off.

OpenAi and Anth have sales and government relations/policy roles that open up in India.

Engineering talent is being reduced everywhere, and being replaced with AI, especially with outsourcing.

Everyone has gotten a boost in effectiveness because they're using the same multiplier. No one really cared before how bad some developers were because they were likely cheap, onshore or offshore.

> The highly skilled will continue to get hired but the median worker out of San Francisco is being replaced

What does highly skilled even mean nowadays / with Claude Code?