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Comment by mancerayder | Hacker News Reader

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?

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>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.

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