One of the reasons outsourcing for software fizzled out some compared to manufacturing is because in a factory you don't have "measuring to make sure every angle is correct" because (a) the manufacturing tools are tested and repeatable already and (b) the heavy lifting of figuring out all the angles was done ahead of time. So it was easy to mechanize and send to wherever the labor was cheapest since the value was in the tools and in the plans.
The vast majority of software, especially since waterfall methods were largely abandoned, has the planning being done at the same time as the "execution". Many edge cases aren't discovered until the programmer says "oh, huh, what about this other case that the specs didn't consider?" And outsourcing then became costly because that feedback loop for the spec-refinement ran really slowly, or not at all. Spend lots of money, find out you got the wrong thing later. So good luck with complex, long-running projects without deeply understanding the system.
Alternately, compare to something more bespoke and manual like building a house, where the tools are less precise and more of the work is done in the field. If you don't make sure all those angles are correct, you're gonna get crappy results.
(The most common answer here seems to be "just tell the agent what was wrong and let it iterate until it fixes it." I think it remains to be seen how well "find out everything that is wrong after all the code is written, and then tell the coding agent(s) to fix all of those" will work in practice. If nothing else, it will require a HUGE shift in manual testing appetite. Maybe all the software engineers turn into QA engineers + deployment engineers.)
Any data on that? I see everyone trying to outsource as much as they can. Sure, now it is moving toward AI, but every company I walk into have 10-1000s of FTEs in outsource countries.
I see most fortune 1000 companies here doing some type of agile/planningexecution which is in fact more waterfall. The people here in the west are more management and client facing, the rest is 'thrown over the fence'.
FTE for lack of a better word: they are not employees of the company, they are full-time working for the company; they are employed by some outsourcing place. FTE I guess means employee of the western country and that they are not, but what would be the term? Full time remote worker?
The point being made here is that the biggest software companies still employ lots of programmers but the biggest manufacturing companies don't employ lots of factory workers. I don't think you need data just think about Microsoft vs General Motors etc etc
The vast majority of software, especially since waterfall methods were largely abandoned, has the planning being done at the same time as the "execution". Many edge cases aren't discovered until the programmer says "oh, huh, what about this other case that the specs didn't consider?" And outsourcing then became costly because that feedback loop for the spec-refinement ran really slowly, or not at all. Spend lots of money, find out you got the wrong thing later. So good luck with complex, long-running projects without deeply understanding the system.
Alternately, compare to something more bespoke and manual like building a house, where the tools are less precise and more of the work is done in the field. If you don't make sure all those angles are correct, you're gonna get crappy results.
(The most common answer here seems to be "just tell the agent what was wrong and let it iterate until it fixes it." I think it remains to be seen how well "find out everything that is wrong after all the code is written, and then tell the coding agent(s) to fix all of those" will work in practice. If nothing else, it will require a HUGE shift in manual testing appetite. Maybe all the software engineers turn into QA engineers + deployment engineers.)