I’m curious why this meme is so sticky. In the early 2000s people were also panicking that all the software jobs were going to India and never coming back. It was so pervasive it made the cover of Wired magazine, but it never happened. Why is this time different?
The reason it never happened wasn't that MANY jobs went off-shore (they did) but that the pace of this paled in comparison to number of new jobs that were opening up on-shore. Now that we are seeing demand stall on-shore this is going to hit the front more-so than before. Many layoff news later come with "oh by the way, we also hired x,xxx people off-shore. I think has generally been overblown but I think it is a thing if someone actually wanted to run "America First" campaign and actually mean it, to outlaw or make off-shore development cost-prohibitive. I work on a project in a company that employs now about 1k people and over 40% of that workforce is off-shore. Just about every colleague I have (DC metro area) that works at another joint is in the same spot (or much worse, like CGI etc which doesn't even have developers on-shore anymore...)
Maybe it did happen, but the expansion of broadband internet, and then mobile broadband internet, caused an enormous demand for additional and different types of programmers that was unable to be satiated by people outside of the US.
Remote coordination tools are no longer utter dogshit.
Sure, but there's no getting around how terrible it is to communicate and coordinate between PST and IST. One of the divisions I currently work with operates in a model where the "drivers" are all in the US and there's a large IST-based team that "executes". It's ... not great, and nobody on either side of the equation likes it. And all the people involved are very smart! But it really does matter, and we're seeing a lot of things move far slower than initially thought.
Why are people so focused on India when it comes to outsourcing?
US dev salaries are so much higher than the rest of the world that basically you could hire anywhere in Europe and still save most of the cost per person.
You could go to LATAM if you want the same timezone.
On the corollary, salaries of capable Indian developers have certainly caught up to most Western countries, so that you wont be saving much per person.
It "never happened" only in aggregate, which is sometimes irrelevant and always hard to see for an individual employee who's worried about their individual career. IBM had 150,000 US employees in 2000 and 50,000 today.
>Why is this time different?
The humiliation of all of the disastrous failures has been lost to history and PMC are once again bullish about their cost cutting genius.