There has been a long lasting discussion about the outsourcing: Why American companies should give the job to the people from other countriesand fire American programmers even when the formers’ wages are lower so the same solution will be several times cheaper?
In fact, they should not. Why should anyone fire his employee when he does the work pretty much well? That is unfair, at least.
Indeed, outsourcing is available on the highly competitive American market. High level of competition is normal as long as you demand quality products and want to keep prices low. Americans are driving Toyota, eating at Del Taco, wearing Adidas. How many of Americans’ everyday things had been through the whole production cycle, from research to design to manufacturing solely in the USA? So, why would businesses not want to outsource IT?
Actually, this is the reason why the “Why should I ever speak to the non-Americans?” sort of claims sound on the LinkedIn like crying sour grapes. This network had been designed exactly to help businesses find each other regardless their location and thus increase the opportunity for mutually profitable cooperation. You can either react on the offshore companies’ offers and accept them or just ignore the letters (or blacklist annoying people), but why claim?
“What type of developer does the client need? The answer is quite simple: the one that the client finds suitable”, as Constantine’s wrote in his post: Both onshore and offshore development have strong and weak sides and so the choice does depend on what is crucial for you. You will have to choose between cost saving and communication through different time zones, cultural differences and corporate spirit, lower hourly rates and strong portfolios, look for relevant expertise and trusted teams etc.
However, you will be pretty amazed when you see how many people prefer to outsource IT solutions to e.g., Eastern Europe or India. They aim to find the smart guys who have the right expertise and offer their services for the lower price.
People and Competition. Talents drive the world and most of the IT engineers are talented. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel and other big companies that rely heavily on innovations need even more brilliant minds who do not only invent but also refine the technology until it turns into a ready product. This is why, big companies offer interns and engineers great packages which little companies are hardly ever to beat. So when you hire an onshore developer you should be aware of higher wages due to big demand on the market.
Moreover, the people who know they can make a fortune with their innovative ideas found own companies and introduce their ideas to non-IT markets (Uber is a nice example here).
Economy, based on ideas and technologies. Any solution needs basic science (for understanding how it works), experience through experiments and you can never guess when and where the next big idea starts. For example, Estimote BLE beacons is a startup of Polish origin; DJI, one of the biggest drone makers is a Chinese startup. One more example is Looksery, a Ukrainian startup that made a real-time service for face effects. Earlier in September Snapchat had acquired it to improve its own service.
Also, not all companies get enough funding and while they are smart they also benefit from the world specialization when the head office is established in the USA or Western Europe, the development team and tech support resides in Ukraine, Poland or Serbia and client support is situated in India. However, people usually prefer not to advertise this fact.
Last but not least, Sergey Brin, Satya Nadella, Max Levchin, Andrew Grove, Jerry Yang – all these people have been either children of immigrants or came to the land of opportunities as adults and helped much to make Silicon Valley the most innovative place on the Earth while contributing to the increase of the standard of living of all Americans.
Can be outsourcing a problem? Is it a risky thing? Sure, this is the reality of the entrepreneurship. However, reputation matters. The general rule is: do not buy the cheapest lunch wrapped as “a special custom solution” and you will be safe. As you could have noticed, many of the top companies’ reviews have four stars for costs. Your task is to find the company that is cheaper on your market and not on its native market.
