I’ve seen a number of outsourcing project failures. The two things they all had in common were that the organizations in question were terrible at managing projects but they blamed the developers for management’s inability to plan or make decisions, and they were trying for unrealistic savings – it wasn’t enough to save 30-50% on salary, they wanted 90% even if that was below the market rate for those skills even in India.

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.