I think this misses the forest for the trees. Working with ChatGPT is eerily similar to working with offshore Indian devs back in my enterprise days. Productive if guided explicitly but if let run wild there's lots of WTF moments.
LLMs are likely to replace outsourced devs because your employees that know the context can use LLMs to do what offshore devs did before.
How many of those wtf moments are simply from not “being in the room when it happened?” Most enterprise software is riddled with wtf moments demanded as one compromise or another.
Request: “manual step X should not be part of the automated build script”
Fulfilled as: build script is now split in two. X is still done as a manual step in between. Rather than prompting and waiting for it to be done, the documentation and scripts no longer mention X.
Part poorly written requirements, part implementing under pressure, and part lack of engineering discipline.
The main issue is catching stuff like this early enough to course-correct. Differences in time zone, language and cultural norms can make that a challenge, all of which LLMs have the advantage in.
There's always wtf, why did we add this feature, but at least in my experience, once a week or so I run into something in this category. Me: "AI, please cleanup/refactor/improve this thing" AI: "Roger that! I deleted the file so now it's perfectly clean" ... insert W.T.F.
Same but I have seen it try and change my tests because it decided that it’s code was correct and my tests were incorrect.
I saw it’s thinking tokens said something along the lines of “I have implemented it correctly but the test is failing. I’ll update the tests so the pipeline passes”
There are developers outside of your country that are talented, speak your language competently, and willing to work for less pay. There are plenty of reasons to believe that such devs will increase in numbers.
My last job was a mix of on shore and off, and we had about a 40% success rate on the offshore compared to roughly 85% onshore in terms of people working out, but also a fairly small sample size.
Latin American countries have become more popular for offshoring lately as you can get cheaper than US rates but still have the same or similar time zones.
Because if I want a low-cost, low-quality dev, and Claude fills that role better than an outsourced dev, such people will "decrease in numbers" due to supply and demand.
Perhaps my point wasn't clear. The article suggests humans are needed. So does the person here I responded to. Someone has to tell the LLM what to do and verify it.
Outsourced can be anywhere and when you're referring to US, anywhere else is cheaper. Commonwealth devs for example are at least 20% the cost of a US dev. That 20% more than covers the cost of access to a frontier model that this dev could drive.
Thinking of LLMs in human units is super strange and if you wish to consider the economics you have to also account for the lowering of barriers to entry.
My point is that current-year LLMs are a better replacement for low-skilled developers than high-skilled developers. For example, if your mental model in 2016 was that you would have a senior engineer write a specification, and have an outsourced team in India implement the specification, in 2026, an LLM replaces the outsourced team in India, not the senior engineer. As a bonus, everyone is now in the same time zone, and there are no language or cultural barriers.
Frontier models are pretty good at executing on a spec when all the decisions have been made already. The author reached the same conclusion. It's the agency that the humans bring that ties it all together, which is still required. Doesn't sound like you disagree.
I think where were missing each other is that the human agent can also be outsourced. Not all outsourcing involves rote tasks and the lowest skilled workers. The difference between the mean US senior dev salary and everywhere else is large enough to cover a manageable LLM cost. So there's no reason why a company looking to cut costs need stop at the lowest rung to makeup for LLM expenditure.
Outsourcing comes with significant costs. One of them is that it takes time to communicate with the outsourced team. For example, if you want to talk to someone in India, you might have to send an email that they read the next day, because they're almost 12 hours separated from you. So exchanges that would have just been 15 minute chats with a US-based developer turn into multi-day back-and-forths. If you are hiring someone to be the architect of your system, don't you want to be able to talk to that person? That's why even the most outsourcing-obsessed companies usually did not outsource architects.
Another issue is that there are cultural barriers. People in India or elsewhere may say "yes" when they really mean "hmm, probably not" because saying no to a superior could be considered rude.
If you replace a big team with a small team and LLMs, you are actually saving money overall because LLMs are much cheaper than humans. But you may actually need more skilled humans than previously, not less skilled ones, because they need to be able to manage a large volume of code being generated. LLMs are not good news for outsourced developers. They are the opposite: a cheaper substitute for the grunt work that they had been providing.
You don't have to convince me, I've experienced what you're describing. I'm just being realistic with the options decision makers have.
Simply put, if you want frontier models at API prices, you can make up for that expense by hiring non-US talent. Many who have a good command of English and are willing to overlap US hours. There's plenty in LatAm alone. Whether or not that's a good choice for a business isn't relevant to the point I was making.
Where you appear to be stuck is that you think outsourcing is only workers with poor English who do grunt work. It's a rather myopic view of the situation to be polite.
You appear to be assuming that frontier LLM models will be more expensive than outsourced developers. That seems like a crazy assumption to me. Even with current prices of about $1000 a month, that's still just $12,000 a year, which you cannot live on, even in Eastern Europe. Maybe some people in India could live on that, but probably not the people you want writing your code.
yes, every idea's guy that is pumping out SaaS slop as a last ditch effort to avoid a permanent underclass will get priced out of SOTA subscriptions and have to hire cheap offshore developers again. there are a lot of idea's guys. people with no capital and no skills, but ideas.
but for OP's use case, people with some capital and many skills who need additional help, AI is solving a problem in a way that was not solvable before, while improving on coordination abilities and coordination velocity. Offshore developers do not come back into play here.
"offshore Indian devs" are no slouches. They have access to the same GPT models and likely cost a tenth of the median US salary. Businesses are always looking to lower marginal cost. They will hire 1 software architect in US to write specs and 10 software developers in India to babysit 100 agents.
This is short-sighted. The problem with offshore Indian devs is the communication friction/overhead. You're 9 hours offset, with people who have decent-but-not-great English skills and wildly different cultural priors. If the product people/decision makers are in the US, you're getting a ~50% savings to suffer all those issues, while the cost of tokens remains unchanged. That 50% savings doesn't look very impressive when you're taking a 20% productivity hit from comms friction and crossed wire, and 35% of your total cost is from tokens anyhow. Then it comes out to be a very marginal savings, at the cost of a VASTLY worse hiring experience and VERY high variance of outcomes.
Offshore Indian devs make sense when you can have a large Indian division so you can amortize communication infrastructure/process management over a lot of heads, and you're building for international customers so you're not paying an English -> X tax inherently.
Obviously this is just anecdotal but over my 20+ year career I've worked with a lot of outsourced teams in India and my experience has nearly always been that they require a frustratingly specific degree of direction to product anything of quality.
Just recently I asked a dev there for a POC of a feature with decent specificity and ended up with about 8k LOC of spaghetti. I re-wrote it later in a few hundred. This is about in-line with my career experience.
I've had a few standout devs there but it does feel like a lot are putting in the bare minimum or are just working really far outside of their abilities.
"They will hire 1 software architect in US to write specs and 10 software developers in India" is exactly what everyone said was going to happen in 2004 as software engineering outsourcing really started to gain traction. Malcolm Gladwell's The Earth Is Flat basically made the argument that software engineering in the US was going the way of manufacturing.
And outsourcing certainly became a thing though not in the way everyone predicted. There are far more software engineers in the US today than there were in 2004.
Why do you need a mid career software developer to babysit ChatGPT? Why don’t you just use an American intern who’s paid half of what in Indian developer is paid? You just can’t take the people who do your plumbing and get them to design your water treatment plant. If you want someone who really knows what they are talking about, and that’s what you need where an AI fails, then you are just going to have to pay what someone at that level asks.
I work for a global corporation. We have offices in India. For the technical professionals I deal with the wage differential is maybe 30-50% and is actually quite a bit less than the cost of living difference. My personal experience is that there is a tendency for them to massively inflate their qualifications and level of experience to a point that Americans would call fraud. The only kind of people who think this is a good idea are people like Larry Fink, and I would attribute his motives to greed and malice, probably an equal parts.
What evidence is there of the quality of Indian devs specifically?
One signal I'd expect to see, for example, would be success in programming competitions. Here's the list of winners of the IOI competition [1] - India has won 3 times.
Meanwhile, Turkey has won 4 times, Estonia has won 5 times, and Vietnam has won 22 times!
Why should we suspect that there are more or better developers in Indian than in any of the countries that has produced more winners??
Programming competitions are not the same as real-world engineering, plus these countries have way more people trying to use these competitions as a gateway to good jobs.
Also, many good engineers emigrate to higher-income countries given the chance, and almost none will imigrate to low-income regions. The consequence is some sort of brain drain.
> Programming competitions are not the same as real-world engineering
That's true but irrelevant. Nothing is "the same" as anything else. My question was, what evidence is there that offshore Indian devs are of high quality. One expected signal with be ...that they demonstrate their programming skill.
> these countries have way more people trying to use these competitions as a gateway to good jobs
That's ridiculous!! You're claiming that Turkey, with a population of under a million, has "more people trying to use these competitions" than India, with a population in the billions????
> many good engineers emigrate to higher-income countries
Okay, but the claim was, "offshore Indian devs are good" - that cohort (i.e. the ones INSIDE INDIA) excludes the cohort you're talking about (emigrate to higher-income contries).
So, unless your point is, "yes, I agree with you, there is no evidence that offshore (still in India) devs are of high quality, and the reason is that the good ones emigrated" I think this statement is irrelevant.
Not because all Indian devs are bad (this is of course absolutely not true), but most of the good ones are either no longer in India or working in India but for something more prestigious and interesting than an offshoring shop
Yes, but this is a strong argument against Indian offshoring purely for cost reasons if you're a half-decent company in North America or Europe that could attract decent local engineers if you tried
LLMs are likely to replace outsourced devs because your employees that know the context can use LLMs to do what offshore devs did before.