Speaking from a purely tech perspective:
Outsourcing is one of those things that a fresh MBA suggests because it cuts initial costs so dramatically.
Of course, you get what you pay for. And the most talented labor is paid highly for a reason. Replacing one talented (and expensive) engineer with 3-5 less talented engineers can be a recipe for disaster. Outsourcing usually starts when a company has an opening that they can't find a good domestic candidate for. So they outsource the role to a company in a foreign nation that promises the same quality of work for less money.
It's actually pretty rare that the initial goal is to replace the best engineers with cheaper copies. It most often starts from the inability to find a single candidate that meets the needs of the position.
Lot's of folks talk about outsourcing with the implied assumption that you can find the same quality of labor for a cheaper price. But this is very rarely the case.
Those MBA's dont' know, and their bosses sometimes forget, that long term cheap stable employee's who keep the magic happening are in a way an like an appreciating asset. As long as what they know is in use, they are relevant and probably to costly to replace. Cheaper to buy a new MBA and get a different suggestion.
But will the best talent continue to be geographically clustered? Geography historically dictated educational and professional opportunities so there was clustering and then, arguably an amplification effect from the top professionals being physically proximate and collaborating.
You can argue how much of this geographic advantage erodes with the move to remote, but it seems hard to dispute that at least some of it will go away.
Of course, you get what you pay for. And the most talented labor is paid highly for a reason. Replacing one talented (and expensive) engineer with 3-5 less talented engineers can be a recipe for disaster. Outsourcing usually starts when a company has an opening that they can't find a good domestic candidate for. So they outsource the role to a company in a foreign nation that promises the same quality of work for less money.
It's actually pretty rare that the initial goal is to replace the best engineers with cheaper copies. It most often starts from the inability to find a single candidate that meets the needs of the position.
Lot's of folks talk about outsourcing with the implied assumption that you can find the same quality of labor for a cheaper price. But this is very rarely the case.