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Meanwhile a lot of big non tech companies here in Italy have been slowly started incorporating full fledged tech departments, realising hiring neograds (not even tech, mostly unemployed people with non professionalising degrees) and training them is proving more cost effective than their history of offloading technological efforts to offshore (mostly Indian) big contracting firms.

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I believe the reason is that Indian contracting houses rotate out their contractors over time, putting the best on at the beginning and then shifting to their worst over time. The cultural expectation is also different, contractor in India is doing the bare minimum to get the work done to bill the hours. Full time employee who has been given a purpose and is grown and nurtured by a business will be deeply loyal.

Hiring neograds/unemployed people is also gaining a lot of traction because Italy’s become victim to an uncontrolled metamorphosis of universities into degree factories, generating an absurd number of people who end up unemployed until their late 30s, also polluting stats and making it look like there’s no way people with PhDs can find a decent job staying in the country. This has brought the government to create countless incentives to hire the unemployed graduates that are flooding the job market without success, making it very fiscally appealing to big corps who often prefer just hire to increase body counts rather than to bring in technical expertise.

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