These protesters are just going to accelerate outsourcing. If companies can't get the benefits of in-office Americans and are forced into having a remote workforce they might as well get them for 1/4 of the price from Central and South America.
Where can I find these mythical Central and South Americans that are "just as qualified as US engineers" and 1/4 of the price?
I keep hearing about them, but the only devs I've met who would match that description were very much charging US rates.
I agree, the end game for remote work for non-specialists isn't an obvious positive for those in HCOL countries
The issue here is that, while code is easy to write for these tasks, the hard part is understanding the requirements and engaging with stakeholders.
There's a good level of business/domain expertise required. Of course, someone else could do that and just the coding part could be offshored. But at that point how is that different than the US analyst/offshored programmer business model of the 90's?
We worked for companies that had a lot of extra cash but didn’t want to hire for these roles out of stubbornness. We were basically there to clean up messes and attempt to build/handoff AI backed solutions to off shore teams… the generalists just were not good and were drowning in work.
We even assumed that in a few cases we were typically not talking with the person on teams and instead got a random employee of their own consulting place. Face to face meetings were RARE.
I guess my point is that people working these “quarter of the price” roles are not great and the companies hiring them aren’t trying to build anything of quality.
Healthcare companies trying to get their piece of the govt money without providing any real value
The market has otherwise already decided their shitty approach didn’t work.
This was all a fully predicted outcome of international free trade. US-based manufacturers simply can't compete with unregulated labour pools of people willing to work capably in toxic and dangerous conditions for most of their waking lives just to survive. It's the same reason we have to import enormous amounts of agricultural labour.
Depending on your political leanings you may take this as a cry to deregulate labour, or to increase tariffs. The status quo however dooms most domestic manufacturing to be noncompetitive.
On-shoring, in-sourcing, are the trends, from a country perspective anyway.