Ask HN: Why is dev work the first thing to be offshored? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is dev work the first thing to be offshored?

7 pointsJ-dawg6 comments

I'm a web developer for a big consulting firm in the UK. Recently there seems to have been even more of a push towards offshoring and "nearshoring" development work. They are growing teams in Eastern Europe and also in cheaper parts of the UK, as well as traditional offshoring locations like India.

Obviously, I understand the economic incentive for all this. But my question is, why is development always seen as the low-hanging fruit, to be done by the lowest bidder? Other roles like project management, UX design, business analysis etc could all feasibly be done by a person in another country, yet those roles stay firmly in the UK. So why is technical work the first thing to go?

I am beginning to wonder whether being a developer in an expensive country is ultimately a doomed career, at least within the corporate/consulting world.

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I believe we are partly to blame.

As developers, we've spent a long time demanding "leave me alone, I just want to write code!" without taking the time to understand the customers' problems, their constraints, or the business as a whole. We helped convince the project managers, etc that just sending us the requirements is sufficient. Now whether they email the docs to us in the next room or from the other side of the planet, what does it matter?

To fix this, we need to accept that our job is to solve problems not just write code.

We need to understand the customers, their constraints, and how our choices and work affect the business (or at least our product/team). Eventually, most people will realize that code is just one potential solution and sometimes other approaches - better docs, clearer UI, throwing people at a problem - can solve the problem too. We don't have to become experts in all areas, just realize how we and they fit together.

TLDR: Yes, it's because managers believe developers are easily replaceable. Understand the customer, business, and/or industry and you won't be.

I think you're absolutely right. As a senior developer, much of my value to my employer is my ability to talk to product managers and other non-developers about solutions to customer problems, tradeoffs in the design of the software, etc. An offshore developer would not have the same knowledge of the product and its users, or the incentive to build that kind of close relationship with the non-technical staff.

Also, this variety in the kind of things I do at work makes my job more interesting than it would be if I just spent every day doing nothing but programming (although sometimes I do just want to write code all day).

It's because bad code is a long-term cost, not a short-term cost. So lay businesspeople will decide from the following:

A) Pay $x and get y features. (I don't know this or don't care, but this is good code that is inexpensive to maintain.)

B) Pay 0.5 x $x and get y features. (I don't know this or don't care, but this is bad code that is expensive to maintain.)

Even if the businessperson knows that bad code is expensive, they rarely understand how much more expensive it is. And almost all executives are incentivized to sacrifice long-term gains to achieve short-term gains, so even if they knew, they'd rather kick the can down the road.

Being expensive anywhere makes you a target. Sometimes the threat is far off, sometimes it's immediate.

Just remember, as the CEO and HR are encouraging you to have passion for your company and work, they are always trying to figure out when and how it will make sense to replace or get rid of you. It may just be in the back of their minds, but they'll check on it regularly, and when it becomes feasible it'll be done.

"Being expensive anywhere makes you a target."

What CEOs frequently forget is that "expensive" isn't absolute - it's relative to the value you provide to the company. If I cost $200K per year but make the company $1M a year, I'm a much better deal than someone who only costs $50K but only makes the company $100K per year.

Of course, some CEOs wouldn't be able to figure out how much money a developer actually puts on the company's bottom line.

I think everyone had made some very good points here, but I think it can be summarized from what I've seen. Engineering is essentially a black box for a lot of companies. It's hard to directly measure the amount of money engineering brings in or saves vs the actual cost. This goes in hand with what caseysoftware said with understanding business but its more than that. Its about quantifying it in monetary terms for the business. Lets face it engineering is expensive from developers to infrastructure.

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