Outsourcing SWE work to India and Eastern Europe is already very, very common. I don't know if that has had an impact on the availability of doctors, but in Poland, Ukraine or Belarus you'll find most of the IT workers work in outsourcing. The solution for the tax issue is to either have a subsidiary in the low-cost country or buy the outsourcing as a service from a company that's specialized in this arrangement.
I'm in Europe so this is my point of view for the outsourcing recipient countries. I suppose US companies might outsource to Latin America for better time zone overlap.
It is just anecdotal, but friends and colleagues who did successfully outsource part of their development (and it often also fails), didn't reduce their team sizes in western Europe. On the contrary, it usually meant they were more competitive due to lower costs and could grow both offices in size.
Demand for IT around here still seems very far from topping out, and for every team you have outsourced you also need some support, management and engineering at home.
I think it is very hard to measure the total impact of outsourcing. In single company's case, it might seem that competitiveness increases when you start to outsource, but when everyone is onboard with it, it fades into background. I do believe it could make sense for many things, but the cost function is definitely more complex than changing from expensive coders to cheap ones.
It goes different ways in different places, it's very company context dependent.
My anecdote is that the onshore team was reduced via attrition while the offshore team grew significantly.
There was a management imposed maximum onshore:offshore ratio, eventually the onshore dev team started receiving a very small headcount increase again.
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Outsourcing SWE work to India and Eastern Europe is already very, very common. I don't know if that has had an impact on the availability of doctors, but in Poland, Ukraine or Belarus you'll find most of the IT workers work in outsourcing. The solution for the tax issue is to either have a subsidiary in the low-cost country or buy the outsourcing as a service from a company that's specialized in this arrangement.
I'm in Europe so this is my point of view for the outsourcing recipient countries. I suppose US companies might outsource to Latin America for better time zone overlap.
It is just anecdotal, but friends and colleagues who did successfully outsource part of their development (and it often also fails), didn't reduce their team sizes in western Europe. On the contrary, it usually meant they were more competitive due to lower costs and could grow both offices in size.
Demand for IT around here still seems very far from topping out, and for every team you have outsourced you also need some support, management and engineering at home.
I think it is very hard to measure the total impact of outsourcing. In single company's case, it might seem that competitiveness increases when you start to outsource, but when everyone is onboard with it, it fades into background. I do believe it could make sense for many things, but the cost function is definitely more complex than changing from expensive coders to cheap ones.
It goes different ways in different places, it's very company context dependent.
My anecdote is that the onshore team was reduced via attrition while the offshore team grew significantly.
There was a management imposed maximum onshore:offshore ratio, eventually the onshore dev team started receiving a very small headcount increase again.