techies finally going thru their own "deindustrialization"

  • SoyViking [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I work in tech and have worked with offshore developers on a few projects. The quality of their code has been all over the field, from a clusterfuck of indecipherable spaghetti code to good well-structured quality code. A reason for some of the code being low quality could be that these developers are doing piecework and need to rush through projects to make a salary, without having the thing to do quality work. The big detriment to using offshore devs is not the quality of their work. You see crappy code from western devs as well. The big problem is the friction in communication that comes from the language barrier and from being in different time zones.

    • NaturalsNotInIt [any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Big reason for poor quality code from offshoring is brain drain. Historically, the best engineers in India got poached to work in the West for higher wages, so those offshoring companies were stuck with a less talented pool to begin with, then add in the fact that they are competing on cost (I.e. rushing jobs) and you get that result.

      This is changing as people in countries like India, Russia, China, the Philippines, etc. are more likely to go home after a short stay making $$$ in the West, or they're just less likely to come to the US in the first place because quality of life in the Global South has gotten better and better in the past 10-15 years while it's stagnated in the US while the gap in wages gets smaller and smaller.

      Eventually, US companies won't even be able to exploit global South labor via offshoring, and then they will be in big trouble because no one wants to move to Stanky Yankee land, and no one here knows how to do anything.

    • Multihedra [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      I’m back in school with a bunch of Indian dudes, and communication is 100% a thing. It sucks that it is, what should be nothing more than benign social friction with immigrants feels different in a hostile society.

      The one guy I’ve been talking to seems pretty cool, but I’ll get these texts from him occasionally that are a bit rough, it really seems like the language barrier does not help our interactions lol

      Not that it’s super bad or anything, it’s just that we have frequent, minor misunderstandings and sometimes need several back-and-fourths getting on the same page

      Totally cool and normal… for cool and normal people. But when all that yappin takes place on the company dime :porky-scared-flipped: