A big part of the reason it failed for decades is because of the challenges of remote work. It can be difficult to onboard, you need higher documentation standards, more asynchronous communication processes.
Now many people are gung ho on solving these problems to enable wfh. And I personally view that as indirectly solving a lot of the reasons that international offshoring failed.
Even things like challenges with taxes and local labor laws - there are now brand new companies to address exactly that.
In the end the only barriers will be timezones, and even that the aforementioned async flows seek to address.
People keep saying “they tried outsourcing for decades and it failed, it’s a bluff” as if nothing has changed. Lots of stuff changed like improved video tooling. But perhaps the biggest change by far would be the remote first culture people are trying to build. Pre-Covid, every single FAANG company was office-centric to a degree. Bringing in international teams and integrating them would be effectively impossible. Remote first changes that.
Hacker news has so many wfh zealots you won’t even see much discussion around it since people tire of getting downvoted. But worth noting in my experience talking to IC SWE it’s closer to 70/30 preference for remote but based on online convos you’d think it was 99/1.
I personally quit a FAANG job with FAANG comp precisely because my org went remote first. The culture was alienating, the camaraderie was zero, incident management was a coordination nightmare , documentation for onboarding was a mess, and best of all, all my new teammates were Brazilian but since they were contractors they didn’t do on-call.
Management absolutely plans to replace Americans with much cheaper foreigners but there’s still just so much friction with remote-first. The only reason this big outsourcing push might work this time is because of the number of Americans hellbent on overcoming the challenges of remote work and simplifying their own eventual redundancy.
This is factually wrong. The only barrier isn't 'time zones' and will never be just time zones. It's cultural, environmental, political. The way a US-based team builds a product is different from an outsourced team in India which is different from having an actual office and team in India. Trying to get a team in a whole 'nother part of the world operate on a US time scale is incredibly hard because they are going to have different holidays and time off. You may need a product delivered this week, but your key developer in Ireland is off for a week and they have the federal right to do so.
In the United States we have -zero- mandatory minimum paid vacation or holidays. Your employer could require you to come in and work to push a product out. You cannot do that in most other countries.
Like with these kind of remarks I start to wonder how seriously you're aware of with countries and holidays outside of the US.
Can it be a bit of both? Trying to get a everyone to pull in the same direction when more than half of them are in another time zone is such an uphill battle. Even smaller things like trying to resolve CR feedback in a reasonable amount of time becomes a herculean effort when you only overlap for about an hour each day, and all other communication falls into a "We'll see what they say tomorrow" bucket.
Returning to a team that was all (more or less) in the same time zone has been amazing for my sanity.
People have been saying this and it has been happening; it sounds like you may be unfamiliar with how many jobs are regularly shifted overseas: “Since Trump’s inauguration on 20 January 2017 to 31 July 2020, over 308,000 workers have been certified for trade adjustment assistance benefits.” The history of off-shoring manufacturing is also pretty well known. Articles about the US’ resulting woeful lack of manufacturing capacity are easy to find.
Wonder how many people insisting that software jobs in the US are safe from foreign competition drive Japanese cars, use motherboards and top end CPUs designed and manufactured in Taiwan, use South Korean manufactured DRAM, and use other high tech products pioneered in western countries that are now largely engineered and manufactured outside of the west?
That’s why my wife and I live way below our means. To the point where my wife could just stop working and we’d still be fine (we bank her income and more). If our paychecks got cut in half tomorrow it means we can survive.
An employer may prefer to have people in the office, but if they can only hire remote then they may prefer to do it at the offshore rates.
I have been in exactly this situation many times in recent years. My go-to would have been a team of co-located contractors in London. As soon as WFH became the norm, paying 40-60% of the rates in Eastern Europe or cheaper areas of the UK was a no brainer.
You mean just like the other thousand times people said this over the decades?