There's nothing discriminatory about it, it's the same if you outsource things within your own country except the price is higher. Contractors have a totally different way of working because they're not really interested in the long term of a project beyond being retained. If they code something in such a way that causes an issue that takes time to fix later then great - more hours we can charge the client for.

Outsourcing abroad is more difficult because of cultural differences though. Having worked with outsourced devs in India, I found that we got a lot of nodding in meetings when asked if they understood, avoiding saying no, and then it became clear when PRs came in that they didn't actually understand or do what they had been asked to do.

More important than cultural differences is timezone differences. Communication and collaboration is harder when you only have a couple hours of overlap between your working day and their working day. Much harder if you have no overlap at all. This isn't even a feature of outsourcing - it's a challenge for any globally distributed team.

It can be but it depends where you're based to start with - in the UK I've heard of people outsourcing to for e.g. South Africa which is only two hours ahead.

Certainly there are competent engineers in every country, but I think what they are referencing is that back in the 90s and 2000s there were a lot of fears from US engineers that they would be replaced by less expensive engineers in other countries, which was attempted by some companies. Ultimately a number of these efforts failed to work well for the company, due to communication barriers and time zone differences.

Every job in the world is discriminatory if you take the less potent definition of the word. That's why we have job interviews, to explicitly discriminate. I presume you mean "discriminate in a bad way" but given the context I have no idea what that "bad way" is. Outsourcing has costs outside of just the up front payments, that isn't a secret and it has very little to do with technical expertise. Most software driven companies don't fall apart because of poorly implemented algorithms, they are more likely to do so because the humans have a difficult time interfacing in efficient ways and understanding and working towards the same goal together.

You can't just expect people from other countries to communicate as effectively as people who grew up right down the street from each other. Yes, it's objectively discriminatory, but not for hostile reasons.

It’s not discriminatory at all! Or even the point OP is trying to make. Taking a significant number of jobs and outsourcing them overnight will quickly result in running out the talent pool in said country. It’s shortsighted and stupid because it assumes that there is an army of developers just sitting around standing by waiting for the next western tech company to give them high paying remote jobs. A large portion of that talent pool is already reserved by the biggest corporations.

Build up to it and foster growth in your overseas teams and you’ll do well. Thinking you can transform your department overnight _is_ a great way to boost your share price, cash out on a fat payday and walk away before your product quality tanks.

> So no other country in the world can write code as good as wherever you are from?

I didn't say this -- I think it's your take. Even more -- I'm such an "outsource" software developer who is working for US and EU companies. My take is that overusing outsourcing in the long term, you can lose local education because "we can just hire from ... so why do we need to teach ours?" -- I saw it already, even on an "in-country-scale" level.

It’s not about the ability to write code, it’s about the ability to communicate ideas back and forth. Even just a few time zones is a real issue let alone any linguistic or cultural issues.

GP sounds shortsighted on first take, but consider how outsourcing is good and cheap for the companies, but in the long run creates huge unemployment pools in the original country.

Negative consequences can also be social, no-one is saying that it's, say, lowering of product quality.

Modern development is not as much about writing "good code", but just as much about good communication. There is a very real risk of losing good communication when outsourcing.