[rldjbpin]

context: i work closely with the "proposed".

people dispute the 1k per seat number. i have seen cases where that is the amount billed, while the actual engineer might be paid even less so.

the point we seem to forget is the local compute available to the offshore team. it might be highly optimistic to assume a capable machine for each dev which might cost orders of magnitude their monthly take home. i have seen way too many guys have simple office laptops from dell/lenovo/hp/etc. with dated ultrabook specs and at most 16gb system memory in Windows. just infeasible to assume that they could get away with local ai.

combined with network complications with some (besides corporate vpn, some may be working at times using a mobile hotspot), combined with corporate policy, it becomes a logistics nightmare to make this happen.

while equally infeasible long-term, the "per-seat" coding assistant subscription like github copilot is the most compatible to this scenario. it is an add-on to the existing software licensing anyways, and might be the most ergonomic in that sense. however, recent times have shown that it's been too cheap and subsidised to work anymore.