Comment by rafiki6 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rafiki6 | Hacker News Reader

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Offshoring has been tried and only succeeds under very specific circumstances and with very specific conditions. For one, not all engineering talent is created equal. You'd be surprised at how important language and culture are to succesfully building a technology product. So it's not just a few more levels of difficulty. It can sometimes be completely insurmountable to hire good quality talent overseas, especially if you don't know how to go about doing it, don't understand the culture of the country you're hiring from or it's business practices or don't know how to properly structure and manage your projects which is difficult enough as it is with local talent.

Besides, this assumes that "WFH" will be normalized which I doubt will happen. It will be forced on us, but workplaces are social places just as much as they are places to do work.

Beyond that, this all assumes that SARS-COV-2 is a true epidemic of proportions we haven't seen since the Spanish flu which, despite all the alarmist media, isn't likely. It's good to take all the right precautions, but we aren't living in the early 19th/20th century anymore.

We have modern medicine, proper hygiene, and a much faster rate of information transfer than we ever have before.

> Beyond that, this all assumes that SARS-COV-2 is a true epidemic of proportions we haven't seen since the Spanish flu which, despite all the alarmist media, isn't likely.

Media aren't alarmist enough. They don't understand how exponential growth works. Will this epidemic kill as much as the Spanish flu in absolute sense? Probably, especially if you factor in all the deaths from other causes that happened because the hospital system was DDoSed. In relative sense? Maybe not, there was ~4x less people back then.

> It's good to take all the right precautions, but we aren't living in the early 19th/20th century anymore.

Exactly. 19th and early 20th century would fare better. Yes, the virus would kill more of the infected people. But it also wouldn't travel as far and as fast, and wouldn't be damaging national economies so badly. Or threatening the food security of so many people (both in absolute and relative terms).

> We have modern medicine, proper hygiene, and a much faster rate of information transfer than we ever have before.

We also have just-in-time supply chains and lean philosophy of "cutting out fat" - i.e. any spare capacity in the system that could help with a crisis. Modern medicine won't do much if you use it all up in a week, and more won't be coming for another couple of months if at all. Faster information transfer won't help you if you have barely enough doctors to staff hospitals at regular load, forget the peak load during a pandemic (and note that many doctors will catch it and go out of circulation).

This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. Blindly assuming exponential growth will actually hold is downright excuse for panicing thinking. Exponentials inevitably breaks once it reaches a limiting condition. Which is well before "infects literally everyone" when there are sensible measures taken to minimize contact made.

"Infects literally everyone" is 7 billion people. If it infects 0.1% of that, it's already going to be extreme.

Obvious limiting factor would be local saturation. Problem is, we're shuffling population faster than ever before.

No, I see no reason to not expect the virus to ride the exponent into millions of cases. I guess we'll see if I was right in less than two weeks.

EDIT: On top of that - arguably, it's not the virus that's most dangerous right now; it's the healthcare system overload and the disruption to the supply chains (and the economy in general) it caused. Not going to take bets on that, but I feel somewhat positive that these secondary effects will lead to more deaths than the COVID-19 itself.

That's exactly it. Exponential growth can only be cut short if proper containment measures are followed. If not, infection rates will look like the S curve of popular technology adoption rates, where it only tapers off when nearly everyone has been infected.

Offshoring is a matter of perspective. From most IT orgs the current situation is exactly this: software and services are made by integrating stuff implemented by suppliers in foreign countries and foreign language speakers (mostly english).

I do think it's puzzling that SV companies don't do more offshoring to eg European countries where SWE salaries are so much lower but lots of talent exists and there is a dearth of interesting product companies.

But would it really be bad for SV engineers? Maybe it would just make the SW market hotter, just like the mainstreaming of open source boosted paid SW work instead of hurting it.

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