When you start offshoring engineering work you can expect to see a drop of quality and that's exactly what's been happening here. In the short run, money is being saved but what about the long run? We will start losing customers over this and then what? Shortsightedness will be the end of this company.
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It's a race to the bottom. Everyone has known this for years.
The issue here isn't the off-shoring, that's a symptom of the bigger issue. The main problem is the lack of accountability and cyclical nature of of the executives. They get paid a fortune for short-term-results while everyone else has budgets cut and work off-shored. Dedicated people then try to jam their fingers in the holes in the dy-e to prevent quality dropping, but this can only go on for so long until these people run out of fingers.
When this happens, people realize the talent they had has long gone - and so are the executives. You then have to bring talent back in-house, which takes time and costs a fortune. Long-term, it's a loser as your name is now permanently marked in the industry.
yep, @akdy nails it
Offshoring has been shipping knowledge for a few decades now - inexcusable shortsightedness for quick profit.
I am not even sure so much more of this purported traditional quality premium will remain for long in the onshore locations, as the decadence of the West is now damaging engineering just as it has achieved the devastation of philosophy, critical thinking and fact based reasoning, a damage below the waterline which will only became apparent when the whole ship goes down, it is only an illusion to imagine that engineering or IT can somehow be isolated from the societal damage.
Small beacon of hope, the so called offshore locations are now reversing the trend and confidently taking over as the new elites. If you've not noticed yet, look around and look up - to the executive floor, and see if you can spot a trend - who they are and where do they come from... I am only concerned that while they are clearly better positioned at stopping this civilizational damage, they don't seem to want it for some reason.
Offshoring is good for us. We would not be able to compete if we were not to have offshoring. Everyone is doing it and this drives prices down.
Quality is the wrong focus here. Think big picture.
The #1 reason for consulting is to provide job security for the executive suite.
Your focus should be to survive the projects: baffle them with bu-----t using awesome powerpoints that your minions or colleagues have toiled overnight to prepare, avoid the catastrophic project failures by pinning it on your colleagues, network like crazy to get on early projects to siphon the budget, with great locations, ridiculous vapor titles ... ding ding ding.. promotion. Rince repeat.
frankly we were never experts in engineering and everyone is offshoring. so, it's a must as you'll never be compeative if you are not doing it. the trick is to do it in a way which retains quality and, on a few products, i've seen us do a good job. if you connect to the offshore team well you have a fairly good shot of doing a decent job. developing anything here in the us is super expensive and i just do not see us doing much of it in the future. look at faang, they are shipping more and more stuff offshore as well.