Had this conversation with a recruiter, do you think there will ever be an upswing again?
Posted by paddockson@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 28 comments
Email Response to me asking is the market struggling at the moment:
It’s been much quieter for a couple of years now since the economy started struggling and the conflict with Russia/Ukraine and the middle east.
That has impacted the UK & US economies, so investment has been slower.
AI is playing some part too but not as much as the media makes out.
Lots of companies are looking at ways of cutting costs across engineering teams. Ai is one method but its not as prominent as offshoring.
UK teams are seeing cuts with teams moving to India, eastern Europe, south America etc where labour costs and employment taxes are cheaper.
There is still some good stuff happening across the UK but not as much so it’s a client/company biased market. They’re being very fussy!
PianoConcertoNo2@reddit
Yeah, offshoring/GCCs are the real issue.
Over 30% of Fortune 500 companies utilize the GCC model, and it has tons of money being poured in to it. The goal is for it to just grow and take more western jobs.
I distinctly remember when I was looking for work years ago and seeing job postings at certain companies primarily occurring in the US. A few years later, it’s slim pickings, BUT if you go to the Indian job page - tons and tons of hiring for those positions.
jdeath@reddit
whats GCC
lawanda123@reddit
Idk man, lots of job cuts and stagnant salaries in India too last 3 years
paddockson@reddit (OP)
30% is mental, I did not know that. I knew it was a problem as iv been in the industry 7 years now but not that high. What hope do UK or US devs have when offshore is cheaper?
Appropriate-Wing6607@reddit
Yea that’s thing, offshore with AI a Claude or codex subscription is easily worth any dev other than a team lead or architect that you can pay for waaaaay less.
Alternative-Item-547@reddit
Tale as old as time. Pendulum will swing back
paddockson@reddit (OP)
why so? im curious to understand cause im hearing mixed responses from so many people on the subject
roodammy44@reddit
Offshoring is usually a disaster. I’ve seen it personally kill a huge project with a huge customer and almost kill another. I’ve heard many stories of disaster too.
The best devs in India and other places that are offshored to purely based on cost generally move to the west, or they get US salaries in India which is an amazing deal.
Contractors that work for tiny salaries I’ve seen are swapped in and out of projects monthly, leading to code which is based on zero understanding.
They also seem only interested in doing the task described to them in fine detail and moving onto the next one as quickly as possible. It’s a consequence of agency working. If you learn something about the architecture and realise that things should be refactored to work better, what do you think the agency boss will say? Even if they get paid for it, delay in work is not allowed. So often what ends up is broken code written on top of bad code.
I don’t blame them, if I worked for a tiny salary I wouldn’t care either. I wouldn’t spend my free time learning about system design, and you sure as hell wouldn’t get paid to do it at an agency while on a job like that.
Every decade corporations try to outsource and every decade it is brought back again. The only thing that works is building your own team, paying really well and having the whole product made there.
paddockson@reddit (OP)
I just check IndianDeveloper subreddit and within 2 seconds found a post of them complaining about the opposite, that software ownership is moving to the homeland developers leaving offshore low on work. It all just seems like swings and roundabouts like the above comment said the pendulum will swing back.
This is my first decade in the industry so its interesting to see all this happen in real-time but also kind of anxiety inducing but so many developers i know personally are saying that there are os many similarities to past events (DotCom boom and cloud compute era) that all these new skills will once again just land onto the developers lap.
Although I want to believe that there is a level of anxiety
Significant_Mouse_25@reddit
Yes. It’s cyclical. It moves with generations of managers. Back in like 2005ish we had the great off shoring. India had been dumping huge money into training software engineers and western management saw it as a way to save a lot of money since each Indian dev was like one eighth the cost.
By 2010 that shit was in reversal with the new model becoming something like forty to sixty percent of teams being off shore but kind of managed and tutored by on shore developers.
Since then it’s been a back and forth. New managers come in, think they can save money with mass offshoring, ruin a bunch of projects, bring it back onshore.
Today offshore developers are more expensive than in the past. While cheaper than western ones still it’s more like one third the cost per headcount instead of one eighth. They still ruin projects. There’s still a cycle but it’s not as extreme as the early oughts because of the higher cost now.
When times are bad there will also be more offspring and contractions. Software is often an investment. Something you do when you have cash to spend on it. There will always be maintenance programming but you can keep the lights on most projects with way smaller teams managing multiple projects no problem. New projects are a good times thing generally.
potatolicious@reddit
What everyone else has said, but also to add: the thing that LLMs is best at right now is to replace low-skill engineers. This is actually terrible news for offshore/outsourced development.
The pitch specifically is that a single better-paid local-ish engineer replaces an entire (cheap) team offshore. And from what I have seen this is likely actually entirely practicable.
I don't think anything is set in stone at the moment, and lots may yet change, but I would actually be very nervous if I were part of an offshoring/outsourcing firm right now.
And like everyone else has mentioned: we've been through multiple cycles of offshoring and reshoring at this point. None of this stuff is forever.
paddockson@reddit (OP)
Its a good thing im past the CRUD dev stage of my career and thinking more about system architecture.... I do feel bad for a lot of these juniors and grads though.
potatolicious@reddit
Yeah, the state of LLM-assisted development right now is that it more or less trivializes implementations so long as you have really tight control over architecture and design patterns. If you don't you produce slop that quickly drowns you.
This is a combo that heavily favors seniors and is practically a laser-guided munition aimed directly at juniors.
tevs__@reddit
Software engineering is about communication, not writing code. You can offload the coding to another country, but after 18 months the roadmap is exhausted and the communication between engineering and product is strained. Engineering start building engineering solutions to problems instead of product solutions, and product lose sight of what engineering can and can't do, and propose ridiculous things.
A few enormous failures, and everything is brought back on shore.
This isn't an IT thing. My wife works in marketing, every 18 months her CEO is changed for one who favors outsourcing for delivery and one who favors onshoring for delivery. They keep flipping from in-house to contractors and back again.
FrenchCanadaIsWorst@reddit
I mean there is a minor upswing in demand right now for AI devs. Tech is a progress driver, if we ever “solve” tech than the economy would flatten dramatically
Internal_Outcome_182@reddit
If by AI devs you mean crud developers integrating AI models.. it's not. If by AI devs you mean AI/ML engineer also nope.. amount of people needed to develop is really low.
paddockson@reddit (OP)
Iv seen a few AI engineer, researcher, etc etc jobs out there that pay senior SWE rates but my worry with that is once the investment hype ends will those jobs still be there or will they land on top the laps of the SWE?
The lands scape seems to volatile to me right now its making me think twice about a move
DeterminedQuokka@reddit
Find a different recruiter? I haven’t experienced this at least in my inbox the market is back. And all my friends with experience are having the same experience.
It’s the juniors suffering. And the remote market from post covid is snapping back to normal.
sp-watson@reddit
Yeah I was made redundant from a large US tech corp a few weeks ago and they citied AI - but actually they only got rid of expensive employees (US, UK, etc). Indians, which made up most of the workforce anyway, were not particularly affected. Others I know have told me a similar story.
And now I have found it hard to get an interview and when I do they seem to have higher standards then the last time I was looking (3 years ago): Show any slight weakness in the areas they are recruiting for and it's "thank you, goodbye".
Leading_Yoghurt_5323@reddit
I think there’ll be an upswing eventually, but probably not back to the 2021 “hire everyone with a pulse” era , companies got way more cost-conscious after that.
strawberrywithtwors@reddit
The market was truly dead for about a year, I think in 2023.
It feels healthy again for me - lots of reach outs from recruiters with a variety of roles.
It’s just not like the 2021 bonanza when everyone and anyone could get a job. And it’s also no longer feasible to spend 6 weeks in a bootcamp and become a “developer.” The jobs that exist now are generally going to people with experience and qualifications.
paddockson@reddit (OP)
This is what im hoping for, I became a dev just before the big boom in 2020 and i was able to grab real world SWE experience but im now trying to re-develop my career to be a system architect and design system rather than code them and lead teams. Im hope il get that deeper knowledge in how i can be truely good at that over the next few years.
burger-breath@reddit
My experience with off shore teams (within the same company mind you, not WITCH or anything) is that it’s where good things go to die/get worse. Even critical services just go into zombie mode and progressively degrade. Sending asks to these teams (feature requests, collaboration opportunities to solve problems, even bug reports) is just a black hole. Maybe it’s just my company, but the difference is striking (and sad).
UXyes@reddit
This has been my experience with offshoring four different times across three companies in the last 20 years. It doesn’t ever work but the siren call of paying Pennie’s on the dollar for work is too much for the c-suite to ignore, even if it results in worse long term costs.
obelix_dogmatix@reddit
People are blaming offshoring. That is not any more of an issue than it was a decade ago. Layoffs have been happening in India too, but it is convenient for people to ignore that. I do believe the way companies like Infosys or TCS exploit H1-B should have been banned years ago, but that isn’t causing the current job market issues either.
I think it is a combination of a drastic shift in corporate culture where layoffs are the new normal, reeling back from the over optimism from 2020-2022, and a drastic increase in stock growth expectations.
markekt@reddit
Anyone who experienced the post Covid market as their first major market event should seriously temper their expectations that they will ever see that again. That period was insane, and what we are experiencing now is a long hangover from that high. All the new grads talking about switching careers is a good sign that the correction is underway, which is necessary, but unfortunate for those that started school then the market was red hot. Same happened to me in the 90’s. Started school when $70-$80k was achievable for a new grad. Market popped while I was in school, and first job was $34k.
intertubeluber@reddit
Not sure if you did, but don’t ask macroeconomic advice from a recruiter. The Russian invasion of Ukraine had no basically impact on the US economy and even less to do with tech hiring. Not sure which Middle East war the recruiter is talking about but it’s also irrelevant.
I can’t speak to the landscape in the UK but can share my thoughts on the US market. I don’t think it’ll ever return to the incredible market of previous years. A few big factors stand out.
I don’t think any of that will reverse. Anecdotally in the US and in my tiny bubble, I’m not seeing an uptick in outsourcing.
Again no idea what’s going on in the UK.
SnooStories251@reddit
It will come an upswing, but that will be in emerging markets. Ai in farming, cultivation, production etc.