this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
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Outsourcing is realistically often a tool to get mass, not for cost.
There's a reason so many people went to coding boot camps, there was a huge demand for developers. Here in Germany for quite a while you literally couldn't get developers, unless you paid outrageous salaries. There were none. So if you needed a lot of devs, you had the chance to either outsource or cancel the project.
I actually talked to a manager about our "near shoreing" and it wasn't actually that much cheaper if you accounted for all the friction, but you could deliver volume.
BTW: there's a big difference between hiring the cheapest contractors you can find and opening an office in a low income country. My colleagues from Poland, Estonia and Romania were paid maybe half what I got, but those guys are absolutely solid, no complaints.
Except "mass" is not useful by itself. It's not a chair factory where more people equals faster delivery, just like 9 women won't deliver a baby in a month. I wish companies understood this.
You're oversimplifying things, drastically.
Corporations don't have one projects, they have dozens, maybe hundreds. And those projects need staffing.
And that's the core of your folly - latency versus throughput. Yes, putting 10 new devs in a project won't increase speed magically. But 200 developers can get 20 projects done, where 10 devs only finish one.
Opening an office is a completely different thing; there is an enormous difference between offshore contractors and offshore employees. That much, I'll agree with.
In the US, though, it's usually cost-driven. When offshore mandates come down, it's always in terms of getting more people for less cost. However, in most cases, you don't get more quality code faster by throwing more people at it. It's very much a case of "9 women making a baby in one month." Rarely are software problems solved with larger teams; usually, a single, highly skilled programmer will do more for a software project than 5 junior developers.
Not an projects are the same. Sometimes what you do need is a bunch of people. But it's by far more the exception than the rule, and yet Management (especially in companies where software isn't the core competency) almost always assumes the opposite.
If you performed a survey in the US, I would bet good money that in the majority of cases the decision to offshore was not made by line managers, but by someone higher in the chain who did not have a software engineering degree.