Flashback: After Taking A $10 Billion Bailout, Goldman Sachs Announces It Will Outsource 1,000 Jobs

[sendero]

27. Every big company will outsource every job..

... they possibly can and some they cannot.

I work as a software engineer for a company that mostly maintains and improves legacy code for a certain sector of the economy. Most of the code is quite complex, filled with technical debt and not easy to work on even if you are on shore.

Several years ago a new VP of development was hired and his first meeting was to explain how we were going to take on some "offshore partners". This guy was clearly brought on to outsource as much of the development organization as possible. He made several promises about the nature of what was to come (time zones, which products would never be outsourced, etc) that were found to be empty promises in short order. Folks in middle management were on board with the idea saying (later proven to be idiotic, I already knew) "sure these guys can't perform as well as our onshore developers, but they only make $10 an hour".

Several year story long shortened, 90% of these teams FAILED. They could not do the work even after a year of experience and "training". The VP who was brought in resigned or was asked to leave. At this point there are still a couple of small teams doing the easiest stuff, even so they don't do a very good job.

The ONLY ONLY ONLY reason my job isn't in Bangalore is that they could not find people who could actually do it. But they are not going to stop trying, you can count on that.