Discussion
I've been getting a steady stream of these unsolicited messages. The pitch is always the same: “Use your US location to attract clients, pretend to be the one doing all the work, and we'll subcontract for you on the sly.”
Are we looking at a return of old-school offshoring? but now with a sort of Mechanical Turk flavor?
@catsalad @inthehands Large Language Meows
Kind of makes sense. I've been seeing a lot of e-Bay sellers with US addresses who are clearly just drop-shipping from China. Getting around tariffs, I guess?
I've thought often the last couple of years about how the “Fire your developers! Use AI!!” craze feels really similar to the outsourcing / offshoring mania of a few decades ago — and how many of the same problems it shares:
- Cost-cutting shiny thing break management brains
- but turns out generating code was the easy part
- and building cumulative shared understanding is everything
- and shortcuts around that dig you in a hole really fast
- and that hole is full of code that nobody can maintain.
Something in the water, I guess. Something always in the water that once in a while explodes when conditions are right, like algae blooms.
In my experience, at least, it feels like offshoring went through a productive evolution over the years, from
“Just farm it out to a bunch of those third world people who are cheap and barely even exist as humans!!”
to
“We can totally have globally distributed software teams with some people in places with a lower cost of living, as long as we work extra hard to make sure everyone functions as a team.”
That may be a rosy picture that comes from my own limited circles, but…that's the progress I saw. I wonder when / if folks will do similar learning about the current cost-cutting manias.
Several replies suggest this is North Koreans or other phishing / infiltration / exfiltration ops, and…sure? I mean, everything about it reeks of scam. Who knows which particular scam or who's really the mark, but….
What I'm most interested here is that we're in a situation where apparently this kind of “farm it out” pitch is getting traction again.
With the extremely well-founded concern about North Korea, I do want to be careful not to revive all the barenaked racism and xenophobia of the anti-outsourcing arguments from 20 years ago. Not that any replies are doing so yet; it's just a danger that’s lurking here.
Per this conversation in the replies, when offshoring does a faceplant, it’s is almost always about the client company’s dysfunction •first•, the overseas team second, and the innate general properties of people from that other country…um, not at all:
https://hachyderm.io/@skinnylatte/117265404729717952
So let's just stay clear on that. If scammy emails like the one in the OP are actually finding traction in the US, then that's a sign of rot •in the US•.
@inthehands I’m very happy for my friends in Bangalore making SF money, and *that* income inequality is huge. With the fuckery of US immigration I’m not surprised if many prefer a well paid job there vs dealing with the H-1B and 100 year green card situation.
I think we often talk about offshoring from the U.S. perspective but we also need research into how it impacts destination countries. Just like BPOs / call centers in the Philippines.
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Hello , @inthehands
I hope you're doing well.
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