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Except thats not what happened? There wasn't a great offshoring by companies. Its been driven by return to office mandates, not due to offshoring of jobs.

This has everything to do with executives exerting control because for the first time in a long long time labor had managed to make small gains

What we are seeing now is reduction of the workforce because cheap capital is less freely available.

The question remains whether future hiring will be changed.

It’s entirely possible that local jobs will face the pressure of low cost global remote workers and what pools of workers will be sought for remote workers.

      > "I've worked with fantastic engineers from Argentina, Poland, Ukraine, etc. and since everyone is on Zoom anyway, them being remote makes no difference".

If so, why do companies constantly demand increases to the H1B quota? Why do you need to bring developers into the US as H1B and all we're doing is Zoom meetings anyways?

Leverage.

If they get fired they get shipped right back to their home country.

They can abuse the hell out of them, make them work exceptionally long hours or under insane pressure and demands, and absolutely get away with it because the employee has extremely little recourse. They can't complain.

I don't think this is entirely true. Generally the positions in low cost areas are low-pressure work. Infra, internal tools, etc. You still want your top talent nearby and in office.

We're talking about H1-B tech workers.

And infrastructure is low pressure? Damn I wish my blood pressure knew.

Yes, top talent at these companies include h1b. And yes, infra is low pressure. If the engineers don't do an amazing job, or the timeline slips a little, it's a minor hiccup. If your product is mediocre, or ships late, you risk losing everything. You don't need top talent for the former, you do for the later. And you prefer to have top talent working next door, for various reasons.

When infrastructure automation goes sideways at a large company, especially a large company with tens/hundreds of thousands of VMs goes sideways, or large network infrastructure changes, it is not a fun day.

Millions in damage can happen very quickly, and not even from the tech outage, but potentially loss of Operational Technology for Real Businesses and Orgs that do things.

Think about chemical manufacturers, or large manufacturing plants. Think about shipping ports and airlines, and railways. Think about Internet Service Providers, hell - think about Starlink, they were just offline for a botched infrastructure change. I'd say that had some major impact around the world.

Infrastructure is not about managing an App, it could be about managing thousands or tens of thousands of apps, and potentially for decades.

So yeah, sure. You're right. You don't need talent to run infrastructure, I guess.

Millions in damages can happen very quickly though, so, maybe... Think about it. I know a lot of software engineers that I wouldn't trust to run my infrastructure changes.

Sorry but you are vastly overestimating how difficult infrastructure is in 2025, and how much difference you'll see between a high cost engineer and a low cost engineer. These are not areas that companies are competing on.

You're misunderstanding in several ways.

MANY of the H1-Bs in the US workforce are not super talented. What they are is cheap and won't say no to mistreatment. The system is being massively abused, and has been for a very long time.

Second, you think I'm talking about app infrastructure. For like one app.

I'm talking about infrastructure changes that risk bank transactions. That shut down shipping ports, or prevent cross-country train movement. I'm talking about infrastructure management that when it goes sideways, billions of dollars of goods are stuck in port and the stock market starts getting worried. I'm talking about infrastructure changes for oceanic network equipment. Most people aren't dealing with that, but many are.

Also if you don't think inter-industry competition includes labor cost and efficiency, then I don't even know why we're having this discussion.

Engineers at a company are generally going to be of a similar caliber, regardless of background. Less prestigious companies will have less impressive h1bs, but they will fit right in.

There may be some industries with difficult infra projects, but as you admit, that's not most projects.

And of course I think they compete on labor cost and efficiency. That's why they often send the infra team to low cost areas. Not every task can make maximal use of talent. The amazing PhD engineer demanding 500k won't make better coffee than a college dropout asking 40k, despite the potential for the espresso machine breaking down mid shift or accidentally dropping rat poison into everyone's coffee.

Charitably, because the developers they wish to hire want to be in the US. Uncharitably, because it's an excellent form of leverage and control

As a "remote work booster" who has been remote since 2015, I have absolutely no problem with a company hiring engineers and other staff in other countries at a lower rate, as long as they're hiring people who are competent. Some of my most enjoyable work experiences were on fully remote teams that crossed numerous national boundaries, because we were focused on competency above all-else. In many cases, it didn't even save the company money (good people cost a lot, regardless of where they happen to be located).

I have never seen any evidence that remote work increased offshoring, and it makes perfect sense why that would be the case. Almost all offshoring done by large companies is a /cost-cutting measure/, it is absolutely not about trying to find the best people regardless of where they are. Most of that off-shoring is to lower cost employees (regardless of competence, or in most cases incompetence) who work in an office in another country. RTO + Offshoring is a combo made in hell (but beloved by corporate executives) and basically nonexistent in remote-first companies.

Outsourcing has been happening since the late 90s and back then there was already chat and global conferencing with software-defined phones.

The global job market remains the mostly same: top talent gets paid top dollar globally. A lot of first-world markets command a particular premium and incentivize immigration. Some people will not move no matter what but will still get very high salaries.

A lot of offshoring fails. The offshoring that works isn't newsworthy and nobody hears about it. A lot of software that gets shipped is crap.

This is a bit naive. Why are the same companies that do RTO starting to replace SWE in the US with counterparts in India/Poland/Romania?

Why isn't the company there already? America is not the cheapest nor friendliest place to run a business and if there's cheap labor in a foreign country that could substitute for us why not move the business there?

Or alternatively, why are there no foreign startups built with this cheap labor competing with our employers?

Because that's where the owner class is.

Sorry I thought we were talking about the software industry.

It's software. PP&E doesn't matter. If you want the role of the "ownership class" there's a link at the bottom of the page you're looking at just for you.

EDIT: Can't reply right now but you're arguing my point for me.

Top talent in low cost areas are not significantly cheaper than in high cost areas, but they offer far greater risk. Most companies want to keep the core product work, where they're competing hard, near themselves.

You realize there's also a lot of racism and xenophobia that plays into this too, yeah?

It's easier for some to care less about people that don't have the same accent or clothes or common background.

And the US has a lot of financial liquidity.

Hence, you'll get a lot of people starting companies in the US while the ICs are remote - also where many of the buyers are likely to be of your product.

The premise of your argument relies on the idea that engineers are commodities, and any engineer is easily replaced with another engineer for similar results.

Unfortunately (for you), some engineers are just better than others. The right engineers on your team can make or break your company. It can mean the difference between being first to market with innovative game changing solutions, or putting out a shitty product filled with defects and poor design choices.

And experience has consistently shown that the best engineers tend to be American or American educated.

So yea, you can hug your fantastic offshore engineers tightly and treasure them. But the fact is if they are as good as you say, they should easily be commanding higher salaries that justify the kind of ROI they bring to a company. Why go cheap on the salary for an engineer who could 10x your revenue? If they're not being paid those high salaries, then you're exploiting them. And worse: they can easily be poached by competitors who offer to pay them twice as much as you, leaving you with the problem of finding new hires again.

>Unfortunately (for you), some engineers are just better than others.

Yes, and most of these engineers are not in the US and are cheaper than engineers in the US.

The only reason engineers in the US have jobs is because employers, for one reason or another, believe that in an office environment under their constant supervision, workers work more efficiently.

When they stop believing this, engineers in the US will not work remotely, they will lose their jobs.

IME, the best engineers are in America because they have mobility and America is where they choose to be. If you pay someone a big chunk of money in their locale, in the kinds of places cheap enough for companies to be eager to hire there, the first thing they do when they have enough money is leave and move to a HCOL area. And the HCOL areas have a high cost of living because they are desirable.

We're already seeing this in manufacturing. The Chinese middle class developed and now manufacturing moved to Vietnam and India.

Offshoring is just exploiting temporary cost of living arbitrage opportunities. The market is going to naturally fix this as other countries develop and as the skilled labor relocates.

> The right engineers on your team can make or break your company.

Wholeheartedly agree with that.

> And experience has consistently shown that the best engineers tend to be American or American educated.

I call total bullshit on that one. I agree the culture of many Americans and American companies (e.g. taking ownership, more comfort with risk-taking/failure, willingness to speak up when things go sideways, etc.) contributes a great deal to American companies' success, and I've seen some instances of other cultural aspects being a direct negative - for example, I worked with some great engineers in India, but they would often tell me everything was going great right up until a deadline, when they'd then let out all the problems - there was clearly a cultural aspect at play that prevented acknowledging problems early.

But when it comes to raw engineering chops, it has not been my experience that American engineers are any better. Sure, many of the best engineers would come to the US because the potential rewards were greater, but we're seeing the impact of America's (or at least the current administration's) newfound distain for foreigners.