How do Americans working in tech feel about outsourcing of work to other countries?

34 comments

1. I don’t like it when it’s my job but I also understand that a business wants to maximize their profit and that might mean cheaper work in other countries. But that just means I need to put myself in a position where my job isn’t easily outsourced, which is much easier said than done.

2. Time difference kinda suck but honestly I can’t blame the company. I haven’t met a single non contracted employee that’s smarter than the contractors from India are. It’s actually insane how much they know

3. Time difference kinda suck but honestly I can’t blame the company. I haven’t met a single non contracted employee that’s smarter than the contractors from India are. It’s actually insane how much they know

4. Outsourcing to China is problematic, outsourcing to literally any other country is fine

5. I’m fine with outsourcing jobs where needed. I’m not fine with CEOs and other corporate moguls accuse immigrants of sneaking into the country to steal American jobs while they fire American employees and outsource the work.

6. My friend who works in tech thinks that Indian developers are incompetent and that the tech workers in other countries do not threaten his job security. He calls them code monkeys. Lot of tech industry people have a weird God complex / superiority complex like that.

7. Not too worried about it.

   The code work from cheaper to hire countries is usually absolute garbage.

   The countries where the work is good have more holidays and overtime protection than we do.

8. If we have in demand skills, we don’t care. We outsource menial tasks because you guys are cheaper.

9. It isn’t like we are running out of work to do, even with outsourcing.

10. I work in tech with teammates in Mexico and India. I’m fine with it, they’re competent, fine people.

11. I work on the tech side of federal contracting, so no concerns with outsourcing for my industry.

    My dad was a PM in the Silicon Valley as outsourcing was really taking off in the ’00s, and he had major complaints with not only the quality of work but also the interpersonal dynamics of those teams.

12. Sorry for a long rant but… Outsourcing itself is OK and more-or-less inevitable. But to me the unacceptable part is the massive, open abuse of the H1B (foreign tech worker) US visa process that facilitates the offshoring. The US government should not be actively facilitating outsourcing.

    The short version: most H1Bs visas do not go to what you think of as “tech” companies. They are applied for by outsourcing companies who bring foreign workers, primarily from India, to the US to learn American jobs from American workers. Those US employees are then laid off, and the now-trained foreign workers moved back to their home countries to continue at a much lower wage.

    It used to be 8 of the 10 biggest H1B recipients were Indian outsourcing companies that you probably never heard of, like Cognizant, TATA, HCL, and Infosys, but in recent years US consulting firms have also moved into that space, so those foreign outsourcing companies are *only* 5 of the top 10. Outsourcer Cognizant is #1 in visas, with more H1Bs each year than Google, Amazon, and Microsoft put together.

    Note, this is all illegal – H1Bs are supposed to be used only for finding workers with specific expertise unavailable in the US, not to replace US workers, but the people who process the visas have no legal mechanism to flag obviously fraudulent applications. The process (as I remember it) requires that only an individual US employee who lost their job is the one who can lodge a complaint about specific H1B visa fraud, not the visa application reviewers (or anyone else besides presumably the Justice Department).

    So when companies like Microsoft and Google complain about lack of H1B visas, ignore them. Even without meaningful enforcement a simple visa change – such as “at most 20% of your US employees can be H1Bs” – would free up literally 10s of thousands of H1B visas every year for “real” tech companies and dramatically slow the flow of American jobs offshore.

    [edit: OK, sorry, I guess it wasn’t the short version….]

13. In theory I’m fine with it.

    In practice, I absolutely hate dealing with it because the product is usually shit and the people are very, very hard to work with: between time zone differences and cultural differences, problems take forever to resolve and the resolution is usually less satisfactory than if I was dealing with Americans. It doesn’t matter how much technical knowledge they have if we’re struggling on communicating basic requirements.

    And the worst part is that this situation persists far longer than it would with an equally shitty but more expensive American contractor because upper management has dollar signs in their eyes and *really, really* want it to work out like they promised the investors or stockholders it would.

    There have been a couple individuals in outsourced tech projects who I’ve been happy to work with, but overall, I’m not impressed.

    I don’t feel threatened by it because the outsourced jobs are usually low, maybe mid level stuff plus there’s so much tech work right now that when it does result in layoffs, I’m not out of work for long.

14. Sometimes, the reason for outsourcing isn’t so obvious.

    I worked as a contractor for the Americas headquarters of a beverage company, but the global HQ was in a different country. Anyway, employees had to start tracking their time and describe their duties. It was pretty obvious where this was going: outsourcing.

    A couple of people found new jobs right away. A few months later the official announcement came out. Some people were laid off, some were tapped for training, a few were being kept. The IT manager was out of the loop and terms were being dictated to him, so he quit.

    The new folks from India showed up and most were really cool. Their manager was slick… slimy and political. One of them didn’t get his passport in time, so I was asked to stick around for a few months.

    Remember those job justification reports? One of the problems is that they only allowed 40 hours of info, but everyone worked 50-60 hours most weeks. So the new guys were not prepared for that.

    They were incompetent. One of my duties was flipping tapes for the data backups. They were supposed to send me an email of which tapes to pull and which tapes to put in. They never got that right. Some of that data was required for regulatory reasons.

    The client decided to sublease one of their buildings. I kept asking for a plan about the data closet before the new tenants moved in. The day before we lost legal access to that closet, I sent my handler an email: at 6pm I’m going into that closet and pulling everything. I’ll stash it in the warehouse until you give me further instructions. That caused a panic: what about the services on those machines? I replied by forwarding the 36 emails where I’d asked for a plan.

    As I prepared for my replacement to arrive, an old client of mine called and asked if I was available so I moved over to that gig for a while. After a few months, I was asked to return to the beverage company to take on duties that were not covered by the outsource company. In the time that I was away, they made a mess of pretty much everything. And someone got a copy of their contract: outsourcing was much more expensive than the old staff had been. That’s why the IT manager was kept out of the loop. He would have brought attention to that. So, why did the global HQ make this move?

    It allowed them to change how the labor expenses were reported on the financial reports.

    Even though the cost was 30% higher with way less getting accomplished and a lot more down-time, it looked good when the execs wanted to split the company and sell off our portion.

    The brain-trust that came up with this idea, also tried to load all of the corporate debt onto our portion. The judge who approved the split caught that and forced them to carry the debt on the new parent company. The execs were pissed!

    Then, after years of freezing hiring and using contractors, they decided that they were paying too much for that and cut over 3,000 contractors at once. Then they were surprised when many of the employees quit because they were expected to do the jobs of several people with systems that didn’t work and for not nearly enough pay. I was one of the lucky 3,000.

    I still keep in touch with some of the people who I met there. Of the hundreds of people in the Americas HQ when I started, only 2 remain with that company. Everyone else moved on. They were purchased by a hedge fund in San Francisco and I was offered a permanent job, but ended up turning it down for a different offer, around 3 years ago.

    Anyway, is hard to say that outsourcing was really the problem here. Seems to me like bad management was really to blame. But, it did bring some things to my attention. I know a lot of people complain that offshore talent isn’t any good. That’s not always true. I worked with some brilliant people from India. And I genuinely enjoyed getting to know some of those people. Not all of their people are top shelf, just like any American organization. And it was really wild to me that offshoring was so much more expensive. People think that is a cost-cutting measure but that’s not true at all. I’ve heard similar issues with China, Mexico, and Philippines. They often have attractive starter prices, but if you want good people, they’re going to cost a premium.

15. I mean from a strictly macro economic stand point outsourcing is good because it allows for inflation to be controlled and allows the USA to specialize in higher value products. For example the parts the USA manufactures for the iPhone are way more valuable than what China adds to it. And with recent full employment creating macro economic conditions not seen cine the 1990s it should offset inflation.

16. I used to be against outsourcing and off-shoring, but now I’m OK with whomever does the job, just as long as they do it properly and we can communicate efficiently. What I don’t like is calling Tech Support and when we can’t understand each other so we spend 10 minutes asking, “what?” That’s why I opt for Live Chat, bc it’s much easier. They can understand me, I can understand them, we get solutions.

17. I’m mostly okay with it. It’s a big benefit for the global economy, and you can typically hire a full team for the wage of one American.

    It’s hard to watch your neighbor try to pick up the pieces of their lives after a mass firing due to offshoring though.

    Controversial- After moving to the Midwest and hearing/speaking to people it’s easy to understand the how voters hold a grudge against democrats for NAFTA. I say that as a moderate btw. (Yes I’m aware it was bipartisan and supported by the GOP but Clinton was the president and we all know that’s all Americans care about.)

18. There is a lot of outsourcing in my industry but I’m not worried. The main target for outsourcing are the earlier, less profitable steps and for my specific function the quality isn’t quite comparable to what US companies offer.

    We’re a global economy, there is a global market.

19. I work for a very large tech company, and tbh it doesn’t concern me and I’ve never heard anyone complain about it. The US is and likely always will be the epicenter of our operations, and we have a large employee base here that typically has the best paying and most technical jobs. For those, they usually want US university-educated people or to bring people over on H1-B visas (highly skilled workers) and stuff like that. If you’re a Pakistani or Indian tech expert, they’re probably bringing you to Seattle or the DC area, not the other way around.

    On the other hand, many jobs that don’t require advanced degrees or security clearances or stuff like that are in certain African/Asian countries. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that: they pay far better than the average wage (from what I’ve seen), but still provide a cheaper source of labor that allows our prices to be lower. They aren’t really competing with tech jobs here; quite the opposite, the US doesn’t have enough tech workers to fill all the slots in many cases. I don’t expect my company or any other to not fill positions because there aren’t enough Software Engineers or IT people in the US to fill their demand.

20. I don’t care if someone is from another country, just as long as they can actually do the job. I have had good experiences and bad. The company I currently work for chose a horrible contractor in, well I won’t say what country. The company execs are happy because they are paying them very little money. But the employees are completely incapable of doing the job. They take 10 times longer to finish each work item. And than we in the US still have to spend hours fixing their issues.

21. I work for a global company and we contract offshore teams from time to time to work on special projects or to add headcount quickly when needed. Right now we have one branch of our tech team in India and one very small branch of our client support in the Philippines through BPO vendors.

    Our offshore tech team is in India and they rule. Working with them is a lot of fun and the products they churn out are usually pretty high quality.

    Similarly, the two headcount we have in Philippines are awesome, we’re considering adding to that squad. We needed to throw bodies at a volume problem on short notice and this team came through for us. We may ramp them back down once we are caught up, but in a pinch it is a great maneuver to supplement the in house team (which is almost 30 people).

    90% of our staff are full time employees in our various international offices.

    I have had mixed experiences with other offshore teams where the output quality is poor or ineffective or inefficient. But I have those problems with teams in-house sometimes too.

22. A friend of mine who works in IT would practically foam at the mouth when talking about people in the US on h1b visas, who he felt were driving down pay rates for people like him. Ironically, he had a great deal of contempt for people who objected to their industry wages being driven down by illegal immigrants, and even mocked them with the line that “thur takin our jerbs!”

23. Not too worry. Most high profile with high level of competitive secrets will still stay in the country

24. I’m not a really big fan.
     

    Often times the company low balls them paying them nothing and we get back a shitty product that I have to deal with.
     

25. I want America to be fully self sustaining with a working backup network to keep ourselves running should the supply chain fail again

26. To summarize and agree with much of what I’m seeing on this thread:

    * No one has a problem structurally with outsourcing or interpersonally with international workers. We know it’s an inevitability.
    * There are major workflow constraints due to time zone and occasionally cultural/miscommunication issues
    * The work product and deliverable are often for shit
    * A major burden is put upon the domestic US workers to overcompensate for the structural failures of the outsourcing model. Monetary compensation or deadlines frequently do not take this into account. The result is overworked employees, an inferior product and bad morale.
    * Companies royally fuck H1B workers and treat them like serfs and it makes everyone feel uncomfortable

    What I haven’t seen here:

    * Experienced domestic workers are at an advantage if they can effectively manage the model. Someone with long term experience who knew how it was in the “before times” are more highly valued because they know understand the code/delivery factory mentality.
    * Younger workers with better functional experience are more valuable if they can manage the model. Management identifies and grooms the “up and comers” and “keepers” but there are fewer domestic workers overall. These workers will be less technical than the experienced workers and the model will eventually be cemented in place. This is not necessarily a bad thing (see bullet #1 above).

27. Tech work has been getting outsourced for decades and the industry is still stronger than ever in the US. The issue is that the US market is the most lucrative and it’s very beneficial to have people who are part of and familiar with that market doing the development.

28. I get tired of all the calls trying to sell me outsourcing. Not something I’m interested in doing or managing. I’ll keep my very productive local guys.

29. I think theres a perception that outsourced work is a gamble. You get it cheap, but it results can be unwieldy and communication and cultural difference create the potential for frustration.

30. I’m cool with outsourcing positions that are difficult to fill with local workers.

    That being said, due to remote work becoming more prevalent during COVID, my company has replaced half of our local engineers making a total of $400,000 per year with contractors in India making a total of less than $100,000 per year. For management, it was a financial decision. For us, it has been hell.

    As one of the remaining local engineers, it has been painful to watch my former coworkers and friends lose their livelihoods due to greed. It is also scary to wonder if I’m next because I’m expensive.

31. You get what they pay for in tech, if they want shitty code that has no documentation or readability that’s their problem and I probably wouldn’t want to work for them anyways.

32. I manage a team consisting of 4 US-based employees and 12 abroad.

    It makes sense for the business because we charge clients based on the hours of service provided, so the cheaper the labor, the higher the profit.

    Where it doesn’t make sense is really in any other way. We have to deliver results from that labor, and in practice those results come primarily from the 4 people in the US and myself.

    I can ask for new people, but that’s a major time investment for training, plus no certainty that their replacement will be any better.

33. My friend works IT support and knows most of his competitors are not American and work for much less.

34. If they are good at what they do I am thrilled. Often that’s not the case. There’s more than enough work in tech to go around.