The Truth About Offshoring: Why Tech Jobs Are Disappearing for Good

Hello world.I’m an unemployed, ex–Big Tech engineer with twenty-five years in the software and technology industry. That sentence alone would have felt impossible not long ago. And yet here we are, living through another wave of mass layoffs across American tech an era where résumés pile up, inboxes stay silent, and explanations are reduced to slogans.One of the most common refrains I hear is simple: it’s offshoring.Now that I have time, an abundance of it, I’ve been sitting with that claim, turning it over carefully instead of reacting to it emotionally. What follows isn’t a hot take. It’s a reflection shaped by decades inside the system.Offshoring Comes in WavesOffshoring in tech doesn’t happen all at once. It arrives in waves, each with a peak of enthusiasm and a valley of regret.I entered my career during one such peak in the early 2000s, when companies aggressively shifted software development to lower-cost countries. In my experience, that almost always meant India. The logic was straightforward: software was expensive to build in the U.S., talent was plentiful elsewhere, and code was code. Or so we told ourselves.As a consultant in the years that followed, I found myself working inside the aftermath of that decision. The codebases left behind were often catastrophic, vast jungles of copy-and-paste spaghetti code, barely documented, impossible to extend, and riddled with bugs. Many applications limped along, more fragile than functional.Worse, when issues arose, it often felt as though the offshore teams supporting the systems didn’t truly understand the code they were maintaining or perhaps had never been given the space or incentive to care deeply about it.By the mid-to-late 2000s, the pendulum swung back. Companies slowed or halted offshoring efforts and brought work onshore again, quietly acknowledging that cheap code can become very expensive over time.Why Was the Code So Bad?This question haunted me early in my career. Mathematics doesn’t change by country. Engineers don’t become less intelligent when they cross borders. In theory, software quality should be roughly equivalent everywhere.Over time, I realized the issue wasn’t intelligence. It was friction.Time ZonesTeams separated by half a world rarely overlap meaningfully. Collaboration collapses into tickets and emails. Context gets lost. Nuance disappears. Projects devolve into a “throw it over the fence” workflow with each side doing its piece in isolation, hoping the other can make sense of it later.LanguageEven when offshore engineers speak excellent English, subtlety often doesn’t survive translation. Requirements lose precision. Assumptions go unchallenged. And sometimes, asking the right question feels harder than simply saying yes.CultureIn more hierarchical cultures, junior engineers may be discouraged, explicitly or implicitly, from speaking up. Problems get noticed but not surfaced. Uncertainty is masked as confidence. Work proceeds anyway, and the consequences appear downstream, where they are far more expensive.None of this reflects a lack of talent. It reflects systems that punish curiosity and reward silence.The Pendulum Swings AgainBy the mid-2010s, offshoring returned, this time with more sophistication.In 2015, I worked on a large enterprise re-platforming project for an automotive client. There, I met an offshore architect, let’s call him Abby, based in Gurugram, outside Delhi.I was wary at first. Experience had trained me to be. But Abby quickly dismantled my assumptions.He was brilliant. Deeply knowledgeable. Tireless. He understood the platform better than I did, despite technically reporting to me. To maximize overlap with U.S. teams, he worked until 10 or 11 p.m. his time, every weekday. Eventually, U.S. management began to expect this level of sacrifice from everyone offshore.Abby was paid roughly one-sixth of my salary.And yet, his cost of living was nowhere near as low as I had imagined. Cars, utilities, food, nearly U.S. prices. Housing near the office was so unaffordable that his family lived hours away. During the week, he shared a tiny apartment with coworkers. He saw his wife and child only on weekends.He worked weekends too.He told me about suffocating smog, brutal heat waves, floods, wild dogs, and constant environmental stress. I didn’t fully believe him, until years later, when I visited the same area myself and saw it firsthand.Once, during a dengue fever outbreak, I watched fear consume him as he worried about his child’s safety.And yet, he considered himself lucky.Unequal TermsAbby and I were men of equal worth. Of comparable skill. Of shared pride in our craft.But we competed on profoundly unequal terms.Over my career, I’ve worked with offshore engineers across India, Latin America, China, and Eastern Europe. Many are my friends. All are trying to provide for their families, no differently than American engineers.In the last decade, many of the old barriers have fallen. Collaboration tools improved. Companies built parallel offices abroad. Offshore engineering quality rose dramatically. Today, many offshore engineers are true peers to their U.S. counterparts.Which brings us to the uncomfortable truth.The Real IncentiveOffshoring was never about quality.It was and remains about cost.Offshore engineers are still significantly cheaper than U.S. engineers. Unless something drastic changes, offshoring will continue and likely accelerate.I’ve thought hard about what could stop it.Regulation can protect certain sectors, but it raises costs and slows innovation. Poaching elite offshore talent strengthens companies but worsens competition for domestic workers. Tariffs invite retaliation and risk splintering global tech ecosystems. Waiting for work to return via automation may succeed but as manufacturing taught us, automation brings work back without bringing jobs.Each solution carries a heavy price.Who Wins?I don’t see a magic button. I don’t see a clean fix waiting just beyond the horizon.What I see are capable engineers, onshore and offshore, competing desperately for scraps.In a more just world, they wouldn’t be rivals. They would be brothers, building together instead of being measured against one another.The true winners are easy to identify.Capital wins.If you own it, the line goes up. Stock prices rise. Human cost fades into abstraction. As long as the graph climbs, everything is considered fine.Maybe that’s all that matters now.Thanks for reading. If you’re morbidly curious enough to walk this path with me, I write and talk about these topics regularly. And if you choose to support the work, thank you. Truly.We’ll chat later. Get full access to AsianDadEnergy's Newsletter at asiandadenergy.substack.com/subscribe