I think it's time we set this "foreign labor is cheaper" to rest. Having worked directly for the IT orgs of Fortune 250 or larger companies for 25 of my prior 27 years of employment (and those middle two years were when I led half the IT org for a billion+ dollar nonprofit medicaid provider for the state of Kentucky), I can tell you unequivocally foreign labor isn't any of the utopia some people thought it was a decade or two ago.
Can you get cheaper labor than here in the states? Yes, but not by a whole lot. Those places in the world where "cheap" labor once existed have long since caught on; billable rates have skyrocketed in the last five years as those labor forces realize they can actually charge a whole lot more for their talents. Gone are the days you can nab someone from India with a doctorate for 30 cents on the dollar, just to pound out dumb code. The current rate now is a lot closer to 75-85 cents on the US dollar, which is still "a discount" so long as you're ok with the other tradeoffs.
So let's talk about those tradoffs. Your company also ends up in a place where you don't actually own or control the code. Great, you told a bunch of contractors to write your code, but now that code is everywhere on the planet AND when the contract is done, all the people with the core knowledge of how it works are gone too. Oh, so you're going to hire those people to avoid this problem? The Indian government has a lot of requirements on how that must be structured, how your local corporate presence must be licensed and managed, and thus your "discount" rate continues being chipped away. You now have to ship hardware and software to those locations, you now must manage those environments which also means standing up remote IT support orgs for those people. Not every help desk for US-based IT dev shops exists outside of the US, whether you believe it or not. The amount of money, time, and effort to get a rapidly shrinking discount stops making sense at a certain point.
Maybe now you're thinking to use another country for cheap labor instead? Everyone's rates are going up, because there isn't some vast untapped IT resource pool which hasn't already been plundered where the locals haven't also figured out they can start charging a lot more. And ultimately, for what exactly? Why does our NEED for cheap video games REQUIRE wage-slaves? That's a pretty bleak outlook. I'm not sure I'm interested in supporting that model. Society has been built on depressing or enslaving other peoples for thousands of years; isn't there a point where we could possibly stop doing that and let everyone have an equal chance?
But no, because we need cheap things. If our video games aren't cheap, then what's the point of our unhappy lives?!? What will we ever do?!? Who will think of the poor Americans who have decided they need other people's slave labor to be happy and content?? /s
Can you get cheaper labor than here in the states? Yes, but not by a whole lot. Those places in the world where "cheap" labor once existed have long since caught on; billable rates have skyrocketed in the last five years as those labor forces realize they can actually charge a whole lot more for their talents. Gone are the days you can nab someone from India with a doctorate for 30 cents on the dollar, just to pound out dumb code. The current rate now is a lot closer to 75-85 cents on the US dollar, which is still "a discount" so long as you're ok with the other tradeoffs.
So let's talk about those tradoffs. Your company also ends up in a place where you don't actually own or control the code. Great, you told a bunch of contractors to write your code, but now that code is everywhere on the planet AND when the contract is done, all the people with the core knowledge of how it works are gone too. Oh, so you're going to hire those people to avoid this problem? The Indian government has a lot of requirements on how that must be structured, how your local corporate presence must be licensed and managed, and thus your "discount" rate continues being chipped away. You now have to ship hardware and software to those locations, you now must manage those environments which also means standing up remote IT support orgs for those people. Not every help desk for US-based IT dev shops exists outside of the US, whether you believe it or not. The amount of money, time, and effort to get a rapidly shrinking discount stops making sense at a certain point.
Maybe now you're thinking to use another country for cheap labor instead? Everyone's rates are going up, because there isn't some vast untapped IT resource pool which hasn't already been plundered where the locals haven't also figured out they can start charging a lot more. And ultimately, for what exactly? Why does our NEED for cheap video games REQUIRE wage-slaves? That's a pretty bleak outlook. I'm not sure I'm interested in supporting that model. Society has been built on depressing or enslaving other peoples for thousands of years; isn't there a point where we could possibly stop doing that and let everyone have an equal chance?
But no, because we need cheap things. If our video games aren't cheap, then what's the point of our unhappy lives?!? What will we ever do?!? Who will think of the poor Americans who have decided they need other people's slave labor to be happy and content?? /s
Exploitation/employment opportunities is open to debate as we eschew ethics and just look at what's feasible. Once a business plan is drawn up, we can decide whether it's morally objectionable or not in another forum.