The reality in which people like me get to do work for US/UK for 4x the salary relative to equivalent work locally, and some of this work is actually cleaning up after folks elsewhere, who being cheapest labor available still got 4x their local salary for this work, and the total is still 4x cheaper than what the US/UK company would pay locally? :).
(I'm only half-joking; in a previous life, I worked on a project with this exact development history.)
The outsourcing market is alive and kicking, and offers a whole spectrum of quality and price. The more to the east of US you are, the easier it is to see :).
> The whole discussion around LLM coding agents feels indistinguishable.
Nah, the difference here is, in outsourcing-to-LLMs scenario, there are no people who do the work and benefit from favorable salary/costs-of-living ratio.
The local QA person could run through 100 or so scenarios a day. The offshore people could do 2 a day. They never improved. The offshore people who are tops aren't cheap.
QA is a whole other story, too. Outsourcing QA is stupid, but even more stupid and short-sighted is not having QA in the first place, and that unfortunately is becoming a norm.
There's lots of false economy going with jobs, too. Getting rid of QA may save you salaries, but the work doesn't disappear - it just gets dumped on everyone else, and now you're distracting much more expensive engineers (software or otherwise), who do a much worse job at it (not being dedicated specialists) and cost more. On the net, I doubt it's ever saving companies any money, but the positives are easy to count, while negatives are diffused and hard to track beyond overall feeling that "somehow, everything takes longer than it should, and comes out worse than it should, who knows why?".
Yes, they were moving in that direction. They centralized the QA team over a suite of probably 15 products, which means no one has any expertise. The QA VP would get mad when QA found bugs because "the dev's were supposed to find all the bugs and the QA was just supposed to just certify the release." The amount of people who don't understand how software dev works in high positions is mind boggling.
They ended up firing all the devs except me and this other guy who gave zero shits and wanted to be a manager. "We" maintained 3 products. Two were pretty standard web apps but one was a full blown decision support system (rules engine) that only I knew. I quit after a few months of killing myself. They paid me a whole lot of money a few years later when they were trying to add features to get a very lucrative government contract.
Are we talking about the reality where the size of the global software outsourcing market is $618 billion and growing? https://groovetechnology.com/blog/software-development/outso...
This is not to say outsourcing can't ever work, but the situations where it does work are much rarer than what every outsourcing vendor would like you to believe.
I bet a previous client's attempt at outsourcing (well into the 6 figures now) is included in that number... yet the expensive onshore devs outsourcing was supposed to replace are still there 2 years later except now they have to also babysit the offshore idiots and fix their messes.
But hey, the vendor got paid, the idiot executive who fell for their pitch wouldn't want to lose face, so it all gets handwaved away as a continuing success and more money gets thrown into the dumpster fire.
The need for companies to get more value out of less spend won't disappear, nor will the comparative advantage of companies in lower CoL areas of the globe. That's two fundamental incentives on both sides that are aligned, driving the market to find the lowest-energy path from here to there. It'll get there, even if it ends up looking strange (like, idk., maybe cutting out management intermediaries but involving a middleman acting as insurance).
That is, if LLMs won't leapfrog it all and end software dev outsourcing before it started to work well.
The thing is how you research, what you expect to get out of it, and what you're willing to pay. There was absolutely a gold rush on bottom-dollar development by cheap overseas developers by management who had no idea how software really worked, and thought they could build a business on cheap offshore development. These were software farms staffed by unappreciated undertrained people from diploma mills. I saw truly shocking things. I saw code written entirely with gotos instead of loops, because the developer had never learned how to write a while loop. The companies spent way more in the long run trying to iterate, ask for changes, and ultimately having to hire higher quality talent for much more money.
I agree with the GP. The LLMs will get better, maybe people will learn that you need an LLM with a skilled developer, or maybe the agents will get good enough to fully drive themselves properly, or maybe just good enough that a non-technical pilot can get good work out of them. Right now, "vibe coding" is largely non-technical people making messy, unmaintainable, insecure code. Some of these are programmers and non-programmers just playing around, but some people are trying to build money-making businesses off this, and it does feel like a very similar situation.
That reality in fact never materialized.
And who cares if it is true? So far programming is one of very few professions when person can set themselves for life in a relatively short period of time. When / if it is gone there will be something else. I have few friends who'd switched to be a handyman. They are doing great from what I see.
If you specifically optimize for it. Most people don't - they specialize and expect to be in their line of work for decades.
> When / if it is gone there will be something else.
There will be something else for young people who are just starting. If you're 20 years into a career and then your line of work disappears overnight, of course you can switch to something else - and enjoy your entry-level salary while competing for jobs with people who are 20+ years younger than you and have no meaningful costs or obligations yet.
Also, on what you're optimizing for. If, like many, you're looking for a job that makes sense, for instance (e.g. working to develop technologies or research that you think can change the world for the better), you're probably never going to strike that particular gold.
I think we will see something similar with LLMs. There will be areas where it will deliver cheaper and faster. There will be areas where it will deliver nothing but disaster. It'll change the industry but not eat it alive. The folks talking about fully autonomous coding on the near horizon are dreaming.
The first one is definitely happening with the LLM bubble where companies really want to pretend that the hard part of the job isn’t understanding what to build and how to do so maintainability.
The second one is going to be more interesting: I expect LLMs to put downward pressure on wages in a lot of places but also for smarter companies to realize that nothing short of true AGI is going to replace the need for people who can actually understand what the customer needs. If I’m right, this will swing the pendulum back towards specialists again – the seagull guys who come in, declare that their favorite framework will solve everything, and leave are more vulnerable to being replaced by an LLM than someone who knows how to code but is also bringing actual business-relevant experience and judgement which an LLM can’t have.
But that's just a continuous variant of the discrete-sounding claim that programming will get eaten by AI soon. After all, the "actual business-relevant experience and judgement which an LLM can’t have" is mostly not related to programming - and the better LLMs get at coding, the less value will the programming parts of the skillset have; take it to the limit, and it's just saying the managers and sales people will stay, while software developers will be gone.
Basically, I’m saying people should stop expecting to get six figures for being able to run create-react-app and deploy a container. The analytical and social parts of the job are where I predict LLMs to make fewer inroads because they require non-generic understanding.
That's a fair take. I do wonder though, how much will those "analytical and social parts of the job" be paying - I imagine you might no longer get six figures for that either, because high tech salaries are fueled by absurd growth of the industry, which manifests in a large part in software that's basically just {framework du jour + basic-level CRUD, that hasn't changed much in 30 years + branding}, and that kind of software I expect to get eaten by LLMs entirely.
Even with cookie-cutter app coders out of the way, the remaining software engineers might see the number of jobs implode, crashing salaries for some time, until (maybe) the growth restarts around new kinds of software, kinds that'll be in high demand and not something that can be made by a few "analytical/social" people herding LLMs. I'd normally say this won't happen, but rather that the software economy will slow down, stabilize, and get boring like everything else - but then, so much of software is driven purely by advertising, and advertising is a negative sum game, so surely they'll invent more bullshit jobs for us.
Oh no, now I love LLMs.
We're not there yet, but I don't see anything preventing us from getting there in ~5 years.
(Remember: 5 years ago, SOTA in this space was letting a genetic algorithm poke at an AST and hopefully maybe arrive at a trivial program solving a small algorithmic problem.)
Like some of the other responses, I'm baffled by your comment. Have you not seen what's happened in the past 5 years or so?
Yes, there was an outsourcing craze to India after the .com bubble burst in the early 00s that largely failed - the timezone, cultural differences, and lack of good infrastructure support made it fail.
The past 2 companies I've worked for offshored the majority of their software engineering work, and there was no quality difference compared to American devs. The offshore locations were Latin America and Europe, so plenty of timezone overlap. The companies are fully remote, so what difference does it make if the dev is in your same city or a thousand miles away?
I think offshoring has absolutely put downward pressure on US dev salaries in the past couple years.
There's at least the crucial difference that you had devs in both western countries and traditional "third world", where the 90s view of offshoring was throwing whole processes abroad and only keep "heads" in-house while the remote teams/companies would deal with all the execution, making it inherently difficult to deal with production monitoring.
PS: to your point offshoring to India has become more common but Indian companies are also not that cheap, so we're past the initial framework. Perhaps the same way outsourcing production to China used to be about sweatshops, when it can now be about unrivaled expertise at a cost.
It's about those agents being (mis)used in the very specific blind faith approach of "vibe coding", not least due to the hype merchants and grifters picking up the phrase and running with it shorn of the original cautionary notes about it being useful for bringing a bit of fun back into non-serious coding.
Criticizing the idea (and conflating it with the wider field of LLM coding agents) without understanding that original context is not really any better.
Vibe-coding <> LLM coding agents, which - when used properly - are brilliant for use in serious code and are here to stay.