[StackRanker3000]

I don’t think anyone is arguing that the basic idea of offshoring was invented after the COVID pandemic… But rather that workplaces and workforces geared towards remote working has made it more feasible and accelerated the process

[whoknowsidont]

>But rather that workplaces and workforces geared towards remote working has made it more feasible and accelerated the process

By what metrics?

[hn_throwaway_99]

Is it really hard to understand that the infrastructure for remote work, which I think everyone would agree got a major upgrade during the pandemic, would also make it much easier for companies to outsource software dev work?

Pre-2015 or so, yes, of course there was outsourcing, but it was honestly a major PITA in most cases. Most communication was done in conference calls, very little group video communication, lots of async chats, etc.. Any type of work where you needed a fairly frequent black-and-forth with various team members was rarely outsourced - the type of work that was outsourced was the type that was more likely to have static requirements.

But now, though, there is basically no difference working with a colleague who's working from home in the same city vs. working from home thousands of miles away (as long as there is good timezones overlap). And that is a change that only happened around the beginning of the pandemic, and I've personally seen companies much more willing to outsource because of it, and they're outsourcing a much wider type of work (e.g. brand new dev work that is frequently updated based on usage metrics) than they would in the past.

[whoknowsidont]

>Is it really hard to understand that the infrastructure for remote work, which I think everyone would agree got a major upgrade during the pandemic, would also make it much easier for companies to outsource software dev work?

No, because it wasn't actually upgraded.

Like be honest, the shift into remote work wasn't surrounded by massive tech advances or upgrades. All the tools that existed for remote work had been there, largely in the same fashion and capability, for decades.

So when you say the infra. and tooling has improved, you need to be specific because it's very hard to point to anything that was fundamentally or notably improved in the pandemic around remote work.

It all existed before. It was all used before. If you weren't using it before the pandemic that was by choice, not because it didn't exist.

Everything from our communication software, to developer collaboration tools, to how org's track and manage their employees all existed well, well before the pandemic.

It was a cultural change -- not a technological one.

> And that is a change that only happened around the beginning of the pandemic

I'm not sure what you're basing this on. Especially someone's that's had to work with peers across the globe for 4+ decades -- the tools have always been there.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> All the tools that existed for remote work had been there, largely in the same fashion and capability, for decades.

Trying to be charitable, but that is just complete nonsense. I managed an offshore team in 2007, and I managed offshore devs in 2022, and the experiences were world and away different. You're either totally full of shit or just managed teams on some other planet or something.

[whoknowsidont]

Detail what changed? Because I can't point to anything. And I've been doing this for 4+ decades. A lot of that remote.

So you're claiming things radically changed, and if such changes caused a huge shift in the workforce it should be pretty easy to give some examples, yeah?

Instead of going "you're full of shit", just answer the question at hand and the one that was given to you multiple times.

The fact that it's so easy to do and you just spent way more effort not doing it is a pretty clear indication you are following a narrative, and not facts.

[hn_throwaway_99]

This is just laughably ridiculous. OK, I'll bite though, even though I can't believe anyone is actually this willfully blind:

1. As the other commenter stated, gigabit Ethernet is now standard, and tons of people, throughout the world, have bandwidth to their home that can easily support high quality video conferencing. That just didn't exist 15+ years ago.

2. Group video chats on consumer grade devices simply didn't exist. Sure, in the mid 00s we had some group video conferencing, but they nearly always required dedicated facilities - people weren't having zoom meetings with 10 individuals from their laptops.

3. But perhaps most importantly, since the world is now used to doing everything remote, offshore teams are rarely "the odd man out". Right up until around the pandemic, most companies were culturally based around the office, and structures were set up to support in-office collaboration. Now, though, everyone is used to being remote anyway, like my favorite cartoon showing the difference between in-office, remote, and hybrid software devs - except there is no difference, because they're all on Zoom all the time anyway.

I just honestly can't believe that someone who managed remote teams in 2005 thinks it's the same as managing in 2025, and the plethora of advancements in networking and remote conferencing tech easily supports that.

[alephnerd]

Not OP but a couple major changes that didn't exist in most companies 20 years ago that reduced friction from an organizational perspective.

1. Gigabit internet - video call quality is significantly better than it was 10-15 years ago.

2. Zoom/Google Meets - the attention Zoom gave to UX just wasn't matched by any other precursor. Google Meets is a close second.

3. GSuite/O365 - sharing documents across organizations and being able to search for them successfully org wide has gotten much better now due to tools like Glean

4. Slack - most traditional companies didn't adopt Slack until the pandemic. Before that they were primarily leveraging email

There has been a whole decade of evolution in productivity and DevTooling throughout the 2010s, and the COVID WFH period forced most orgs (especially traditional orgs) to adopt a lot of that tooling.

On top of that, a large number of mid-level managers, engineers, PMs, and even VPs are in naturalization limbo, so it's become easy to find people to end up leading offices back in their home country while enforcing the same standards as back in the US. MS did this in Israel back in the 2010s, and most companies began doing something similar across Eastern Europe and India during the early years of COVID because most companies legitimately were worried it would become a Great Recession level event.