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Comment by nsainsbury | Hacker News Reader

I was laid off recently along with most of the tech team (Australian company ~ very well known brand). There's a handful of people left, but even they know their time is coming soon.

And this isn't about AI (well, not primarily anyway). It's offshoring, offshoring, offshoring.

IMO, what's taking place now is absolutely transformative and the world economy is in the process of being reshaped. It's not just tech jobs that are being offshored - we're just one of the first/early movers. Many other professional/white-collar jobs (accounting, etc.) are also getting offshored at an accelerating rate. And it's happening all over the western world - it's happening in the US, it's happening in Australia, Canada, the UK, etc.

And unlike previous periods of mass offshoring, I don't think the jobs are ever coming back.

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I'm seeing the same thing in Australia.

These new tech companies/existing companies were not here for the first wave of offshoring engineers many years ago. basically, the product/service degraded and they brought the product/service back onshore.

It's a cycle that will repeat. Product degrades, there will be public outrage, then they will onshore the product to fix the problems caused from offshoring.

Most famously Optus is bringing their network operations back on-shore after a mismanaged firewall upgrade was linked to three deaths from customers unable to contact emergency services https://www.itnews.com.au/news/optus-fast-tracks-network-ope...

IMO, things are different this time (as someone who has been in this industry for about 20 years now) and I don't see these jobs coming back.

For one, many of these companies are now used to their tech teams being remote. The tools, culture, infra, etc. over the last ~5 years has all become remote which lessens the shock of going fully offshore.

Two, many tech teams in the western world are already partially offshored and have been for some time now. I know where I worked, a reasonable % of the team was already offshore in low COL countries (India, etc.). What's happening now is just the expansion of that cost saving after initial testing of the waters was successful.

Three, the quality gap between offshore teams and their western counterparts is now much smaller, and AI will be used to lessen the gap even further (along with just throwing more bodies at each problem which you can do when your salaries are 1/3rd of what they are here).

Four, many products/services now have captured markets with strong network effects, which means they can weather a heavy degradation of services with little to no loss of customers. It's called enshittification, and businesses are doing it now because they absolutely know they can, and get away with it.

I think in the very long term though what will happen is countries like India will actually end up with salaries comparable to western workers, so even though the gap might be smaller, the cost/benefit ratio will change again.

That happened during the last offshoring hype cycle as well. Those Indian developers aren't stupid -- the ones who deliver quality work will soon move somewhere they can earn a salary to reflect that, and it will be comparable to a US/UK/EU salary. Companies who insist on sticking to low salaries are left with the worst people.

I worked with some very good offshore engineers. They all left pretty quickly for a job with double the salary, or moved abroad outright to claim it. The only ones who stuck around were the ones whose poor skills kept them from landing a better job.

It's also great for productivity when your offshore team is a rapidly rotating cast. I remember being in meetings where without any announcement, half of the developers who had slowly started to get to know the project were replaced with new faces who had no idea what they were supposed to do.

It is interesting that a similar thing happened when millions of manufacturing jobs were offshored to China and other low-cost sites. Now it has come to the tech industry, and every other industry where it is possible. It hurts when it comes to us. (Speaking as a person in tech in high COL). I hope we will find other roles as people found when they moved on from manufacturing roles too

Sorry for snooping—if this is about Foxtel, they were also sold to a UK company this year right?

I guess you’d expect some staff turnover, but not mass layoffs.

Yep, sold to DAZN. Who in turn do all their development out of Hyderabad, India. Almost entire tech team locally is gone now with handover done to that team.

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