Offshoring has been a thing for decades. Seriously, Yourdon wrote a doom-and-gloom book about it in the 90s. It was called “Decline and Fall of the American Programmer,” published 1992.

Then in 1996, he wrote “Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer.”

The software industry is extremely fad-driven. During the pandemic, the fad was to hire programmers. That created a lot of busywork and coordination jobs that didn’t contribute to the bottom line.

Then Musk bought Twitter, laid off a bunch of folks, and things kept running. So the trend became “cut the fat.” In fairness, there actually was fat to cut.

Now boards are in cost-cutting mode and fantasizing about AI, so the pendulum has swung back towards offshoring. But that cost-cutting focus is going to lead to stagnation and self-cannibalization. Somebody’s going to buck the trend, have a splashy success, and the herd will trample back in the other direction.

Offshoring affects the pipeline. That means once people leave the workforce or get promoted there are no locals who’ve the acumen to take over as those roles are overseas. Now you have to hire them H1Bs because you don’t have locals with the requisite experience. Of course managers wonder why there aren’t Americans with experience to fill those roles …