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Comment by randomdata | Hacker News Reader

It seems they failed either because:

1. The businesses didn't know how to handle the workers not being in the office. While a problem in the past, this is now a solved problem thanks to COVID forcing them to figure it out.

2. The businesses tried to hire cheap workers. This is still going to fail, just as hiring minimum wage workers in the US for the job would fail. The workers you actually want charge the same no matter where their seat happens to be located. But I'm not sure that is applicable here as the parent is not talking about cost-cutting, but filling the roles that are no longer filled due to the strike.

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Cultural problems, communication problems, leadership problems.

I’ve been involved in a lot of software offshoring projects. It’s about twice as likely to end in failure compared to onshore software development services.

It has nothing to do with the price. I’ve worked with great devs who were cheap and terrible devs who were expensive. And it’s hard to tell which is which till the project ships or fails to ship.

> It has nothing to do with the price. I’ve worked with great devs who were cheap and terrible devs who were expensive. And it’s hard to tell which is which till the project ships or fails to ship.

Very interesting, thanks!

I worked both as an offshore contractor, and as part of a team with offshore members. I can ensure that #1 is bullshit. You can have the whole offshore team in an office butts in seats all day and meet with failure. Happened many times in the past.

#2 is a possibility. What happens when you do it is that your cheap hires tend to stay for a short time (as they will get better offers later, possibly involving relocation to better countries). You end up with the ones that are cheap for a reason.

Most of reasons for failure is that incentives in between contractors and hiring company is misaligned, leadership have no idea what they are doing, cultural differences, time zone differences, etc.

> You can have the whole offshore team in an office butts in seats all day and meet with failure.

If all the butts are in the same office, you are no longer offshoring. You've moved the entire business.

I don't think that is what anyone here is talking about, though. I certainly wasn't. Offshoring normally implies remote work.

You've misinterpreted their comment. US companies that offshore usually have offices in other countries and these offshore offices typically have stricter RTO policies than the onshore offices. They weren't saying that all of the workers for a given company were in an offshore office, but that the offshore employees were required to be in-office.

Again, offshoring normally implies that there are workers still in an "onshore" office. This has traditionally failed because the workers in the "onshore" office didn't know how to bridge the gap with the workers in the "offshore" office.

But that's not the case anymore. The "onshore" workers are (or at least did for several years, giving the needed experience) also working remotely, so there is no longer an office barrier between the "onshore" business and the workers abroad.

Whether or not the workers "offshore" work together in an office or independently at coffee shops really makes no difference and has nothing to do with the conversation. If you mean the parent misinterpreted what we're talking about – that is likely true. But we're not going to change the subject just because he is confused.

> If you mean the parent misinterpreted what we're talking about – that is likely true.

No, like I spelled out, your response that I replied to misinterpreted the comment that you replied to. What they were pointing out was that the failure rate of offshore work was never due to offshore teams being unable to coordinate due to not being in-office, but because other other problems, such as culture. Also, the user that you replied to was the one who made the upper-level comment that you originally responded to, not the other way around.

> What they were pointing out was that the failure rate of offshore work was never due to offshore teams being unable to coordinate due to not being in-office

Yes, that is what they pointed out, but it made no sense. The only way that could have applicability to the conversation is if you moved the entire business into that new "offshore" office, but then you wouldn't be "offshoring" anymore. You will have moved the business instead. Which isn't what anyone is talking about. The original comment is clearly about offshoring, not relocating businesses.

I expect you are right that the other commenter misinterpreted something and replied based on that misinterpretation. But, no need to change the subject because of their confusion. Especially when, as you point out, they established the subject! If it was good enough then, it remains good enough now.

"Most of reasons for failure is that incentives in between contractors and hiring company is misaligned, leadership have no idea what they are doing, cultural differences, time zone differences"

No-one was referring to moving business and I'm still not sure where you are coming from with that. Moving a contained software business unit of a US based business to another country is not "moving the business", but is often how offshoring works. This doesn't involve moving the entire business, but just a mostly self-contained portion of it. I don't think surgical_fire misinterpreted anything. The quote above from surgical_fire explains their sentiment. Businesses in the US getting used to their onshore employees being remote doesn't solve any of these offshoring issues.

> No-one was referring to moving business

Exactly. So where do you think the statement in question fits?

> and I'm still not sure where you are coming from with that.

Well, you're certainly not going to figure it out if you keep going off on some strange tangent about an entirely separate part of the comment that has nothing to do with the discussion here and which nobody replied to. And, I might add, offered nothing of value as that part said the same thing as the comment posted approximately two hours prior.

But what is your motivation for being in that state? We can see you are purposefully trying to not figure it out. Not only are you not staying on topic, you haven't even asked a single question to try and help your understanding. What is to be gained in acting like an idiot? Just a show put on for the sake of the lolz?

> Again, offshoring normally implies that there are workers still in an "onshore" office.

Not workers doing the same jobs though. Look at how manufacturing was offshored over the past several decades -- for many companies, entire job trees within the US were eliminated. HQ is still in the US, but anything remotely having to do with manufacturing isn't. You have to go really high up the chain in those offshored manufacturing jobs before you see anyone actually interacting with an employee in the US.

> You have to go really high up the chain in those offshored manufacturing jobs before you see anyone actually interacting with an employee in the US.

And how are those not the same jobs...?

There aren't workers doing those jobs in the US anymore. 100% of those close-to-the-actual-manufacturing jobs were outsourced. The remaining people in the US aren't doing the same jobs; they're doing HQ stuff.

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