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agree. the freelancer / gig economy is dominate by script kiddie / template churner companies in India for whom $2/hr is a good wage. there's no competing with that

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this is a feature, not a bug, of globalization. Work that can be done in cheaper countries is allocated there.

On a related note (and I get negative feedback whenever i say this, but) this is the future of all software developers as i see it. If you can do your entire job remotely, then "remote" is going to get optimized over time.

It does not make sense to spend your time in USA (for example) coding when you can stop at developing the specs and send it overseas to be coded for half the cost or less. Architects dont lay bricks, and brick layers dont need to understand architecture. Accumulating knowledge of many different types of syntax for expressing the same principles is something that is only going to depreciate in value over time.

"Just" sending it overseas to be coded is more likely to end in failure than success, unless you have a lot of experience and know what the pitfalls are (which is a very expensive education). I'm not picking on developing countries; the same goes for big enterprise contractor providers in the U.S. They have no incentive to write stable, maintainable code. Their incentive is to make it just stable enough to not get sued and get it out the door as quickly as possible. An employee that will have to live with that code for several years will focus on maintainability purely out of self interest if nothing else. As to whether overseas firms are able to undercut domestic firms, it's a possibility, but anyone that has dealt with time zone issues and cultural barriers most likely knows what they are sacrificing to get that discounted rate.

Why wouldnt an overseas employee have all the exact same incentives and challenges to maintain their code as a more local remote worker?

I think you are assuming I was implying overseas work to be all short-term contract work but I am not saying anything about the paperwork. The paperwork will write itself such that the relationship between a remote worker and the company is identical whether they are in texas or india. And itll happen that way because of financial incentive to do so

It's already happening. People from NY and CA are moving to Texas and Georgia, and then their salaries are being reduced to adjust for cost of living - but they still make really good money for Texas or Georgia. Maybe those SWE think they are irreplaceable, but what they have effectively demonstrated to the company is that the work itself can be done entirely remote, and so when it comes time to replace them - they will look for a cheap remote worker. Maybe today it is tough to find good replacements in India, Ukraine, etc, but over time (on the order of 1 generation would be my bet) those replacements will be much easier to find over there.

> when you can stop at developing the specs and send it overseas to be coded for half the cost or less.

Good luck with that. Please, do try it and report back to tell us how it went. My prediction:

No matter what you do, the spec will be incomplete, and if it's large enough, it will contain contradictions. The culture of not questioning superiors in many of "overseas" will make it hard to notice and only after substantial time without progress someone will realize the problem. That person or group of people will start communicating with clients and overseas to work out the problems in the spec, accumulating additional overhead. The changes and additions to the spec will render a lot of work already done unusable, so the overseas team will have to start from scratch. Then, they will work on the code, while you will be wondering if they're working or not. If it turns out they do, sooner or later they will provide you with some results. The result is going to be pretty bad, because competent people don't want to work for $2/h, no matter where you go. But you will get some result, and will begin testing it. You will discover a lot of bugs, and then you will have to fight tooth and nail to have them fixed, because nobody will want to take responsibility for the failures. At this point, the project will be a year late, and will have flown past all reasonable estimates in terms of required funding. In the end, you're forced to contract consultants - you'll have to sell your kidney to pay them - who will make the product barely-usable some 2 years after anticipated launch date.

Yes there would be logistical issues if we tried to actualize this future today, rather than allowing it to naturally progress over time as I stated. Foreign culture is irrelevant, as you can bring people in to train them on-site and then let them go back home to work.. or send someone from here over there. Also remote workers will evolve to meet whatever is necessary to make the arrangement work because the financial incentive is HUGE and isn't going anywhere.

the point is that lower cost of living areas will promote remote work to transition there from high cost of living areas over time. The pandemic already showcased this.

Youre right that the end result will probably be worse than what we have today, but that will not stop it from happening. they will figure out how to be good enough

I agree with you in principle but having worked a lot with cheaper contractors overseas, in practice you are often wasting time and money.

yes today. overseas is still behind on raw skill. they will catch up, and SWE does not promote complicated work - it does the opposite. it promotes the simplest code that works, because that makes it easiest to maintain.

I think AI will do a better cheaper job before your vision of the future comes to life.

i like that bet, I was ignoring AI in my observations. The server running the AI will probably be cheaper overseas all the same though

We'll have the benefits of servers hosted locally but all staff will remote in from overseas.

I suspect you've never been a technical liaison to an offshore team. I believe your vision is to replace all satisfying work with soul-crushing work. If all your work is done by people who don't want to work there, including the supervisors, then what kind of quality can your company expect?

>I believe your vision is to replace all satisfying work with soul-crushing work. If all your work is done by people who don't want to work there

I am hesitant to believe what I think you are implying here. Do you think everyone in cheaper countries would prefer to live in more expensive countries? Even if provided a stable income far above everyone in their area?

I also dont know what would be soul-crushing? It's doing what we do here, just over there.

Yeah, so the details really matter here. A lot of people hear "In country X they live on $2 per day," and think that you can experience the same standard of living in that country as you do in the US. But that's really not the case. Even in places that enjoy a relatively high standard of living, while things like food and rent are cheap, all the things that are imported from the developed world cost exactly the same, and it just means that people can't afford them. Everyone may not want to live in America, but they all want to have the luxuries we enjoy, and which are enabled by American salaries.

But standard of living isn't really the reason someone would be miserable at work -- the real thing that makes this a bad arrangement is loss of agency, both for the off-shore contractor, and for the supervisor. This is where I accused you of not having done this before, because in my experience, and several friends' experiences, working with lower-paid, lower-experience software teams is extremely frustrating.

As others have pointed out, coming up with specs is a frustrating and unsatisfying process, and is akin to writing code, except that you don't actually get to run the code and see the fruits of your labor. Because of your working arrangement, the people actually making the product don't have the agency to take ownership of its architecture, and instead you get a whole bunch of copy-paste. If you push back and say, "no, this isn't what we agreed to," then they push right back and say that your requirements are unreasonable, because they don't have the expertise to architect the project right.

But suppose you decide you don't care about architecture, because that's what expensive people do, and you're hiring cheap people, then what's the harm? They can do things their way, even if it's less efficient, right? Except that now the team living with the bad architecture is responsible for fixing all the inevitable bugs that come up, and every time a bug is "fixed," another bug pops up somewhere else, and you, the supervisor/customer, are now responsible for all of it. You can keep filing the bugs, but you can't fix them yourself. Or maybe you can fix them yourself, but you can never improve the overall design, because your decisions will always be overridden by the copy-paste brigade doing the "real" work.

It's a world where all the code bases are awful and nobody gets any job satisfaction.

I think you're right about the state of leveraging over seas labor today, but the gap is so large between life over seas and life for SWE in USA that I have no doubt that a middle ground can be found to put SWE in USA out of a job once overseas experience reaches a satisfactory threshold. There is a lot of negotiation to be found between $2 and $50 per hour.

If nothing else, Land Price will be a big driving factor. If both sides have equal budget for commodities and investments, overseas wins on home budget.

>off-shore contractor

this does not need to be a contract arrangement. The person hired overseas could be hired indefinitely to support the product, with typical transition plans in place. same as today with local workers.

>coming up with specs is a frustrating and unsatisfying process, and is akin to writing code, except that you don't actually get to run the code and see the fruits of your labor

We might be operating with different levels of "specs". I am not saying you need to tell them exactly what to write.. it would be the same as a manager talking to a subordinate at a tech company today. You tell them what needs to be done and they have the skill and autonomy to do it.

I agree that this arrangement does not work with low-experience overseas workers. However, the point I am trying to make is that I think overseas experience will catch up way faster than the local need will become more complicated. So even if local employees maintain a lead in skill and experience, overseas does not ever need to catch up to them - they only need to catch up to necessary qualifications. Local people can offer more, sure, but this is a field that discourages over-engineered solutions. That implies there will be significant diminishing returns on all the extra skill local employees provide.

Again, this is not the case today because the lower experience workers are not just lower experienced but too inexperienced in general. Some time in the future they will still be lower experience, but they will be experienced enough. the only question is when, which is a gamble, but i think soon. On the order of 5 - 20 years would be my bet. It already happens but is a rare exception to the rule - so that timeframe is how long for it to become a common occurrence.

I love it when people come to me because their big spender investment in bottom dollar software they splurged for on fiver is failing and they're in panic mode. Like what did you expect performing an act of labor exploitation, a working machine? Loyalty?

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