| There are many angles to this, I'll just look at one in the hope that it helps. > I hope it's not "the company is declining because the company moved talent to countries where developers are cheaper" We probably agree the cost of developers varies considerably in different locations. Companies operating in markets where local developers are expensive (I work near London for example) sometimes decide to outsource development to locations where it is much cheaper (e.g. India). What I have seen (admittedly just anecdotally, not carefully studied and subject to bias) is a correlation between companies that don't value high quality software development and companies that are happy to dump a substantial part of their development efforts on cheap developers overseas. Such companies don't care about their existing team - developers who are expensive but have built the software and understand it, and are to some extent understanding the end customer (often filling gaps left by product managers in smaller organisations). They just see their development team as a huge cost that needs to be reduced. Or they have trouble hiring locally. When the daily rate of developers overseas is substantially lower, the company also doesn't care about those developers. They will want to outsource the least creative and satisfying work to them. They want to just fire and forget: "here's the spec, go and build it". Lower productivity is less of an issue if the "resources" are cheap. I'm over simplifying and I'm sure some companies try to work more in equal partnership but you get the picture. Also, the move to outsourcing is often done suddenly; it's more like wielding an axe than an organic growth or shift in development model. Companies don't tend to invest in overseas developers as individuals. In my view it's not great for either set of developers, or for the customers of that company. Perhaps when done right it can be more beneficial and I hope things will improve overall. |