[extragood]

I am convinced that the WFH movement is responsible for the recent offshoring trend.

Before 2020, it was fairly uncommon to work remotely and most employees were expected to physically come to the office. You would relocate if you got a job in another state, and employers had to go through a painful visa process to access foreign workers or set up expensive international satellite offices.

The great WFH experiment kicked off by the pandemic concluded that no productivity was lost, so many employers realized that they did not actually need to hire domestically at all. Everyone can be remote and work from wherever. LCOL in the US is still extravagant compared to many other regions, so a top engineer can now be hired for pennies on the dollar. I think there's a very good chance that tech salaries in the US have begun to and will continue to equalize with the rest of the world as a result.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I definitely agree with this. In addition to WFH, consumer-grade Zoom/Meet/etc. got good enough right around the pandemic (just before really) where it made off shoring really feasible. I've especially seen an explosion of offshoring to Latin American and Eastern Europe. The time zones make things much more workable than, say, India or China.

[extragood]

Yep. My previous company almost exclusively hires in Latin and South America now. The interesting thing to me is that it hasn't affected the executives themselves yet. If employees from one region work just as well as employees from another for other roles (or at least cost to performance is favorable), then it seems hypocritical and counterproductive for them to insist on US-based execs. The vindictive part of me hopes that it catches up with them next.

[wait_a_minute]

That will change once legislation gets passed requiring remote workers who are not located in the same country to need to go through the work visa process. The outsourcers are shooting themselves in the foot. Once the law drops and they cannot bring over the cheap remote labor due to visa limits, they will end up with skeleton crew teams that cannot maintain the spaghetti systems that are being built.

[zeroonetwothree]

They could just use a contractor as an intermediary. This doesn’t seem like it would be effective.

[wait_a_minute]

Legislation could easily be crafted to block even contractor firms from circumventing the requirement. Either way, someone remoting in from abroad would have to get a visa. This will solve the problem. It's definitely coming, because to work domestically they'd need a visa...so doing the work remotely is not an exemption to that.

[keeptrying]

True. WFH was the real trial of offshoring especially to similar time zones.

Also it took the risk off the CEO plate that remote might fail. Further the market is rewarding them for it now.