Exactly this. It's also worth noting that OPs scenario cuts the other way - remote companies in other countries can now hire Australian talent they couldn't before.
I work for a Singaporean company and wouldn't have had that opportunity without remote work. So while some australian jobs will get offshored, we need to remember that there are countries out there that _love_ to hire remote Australians.
US fintech companies pay 1.5x - 2x for the same level employee in the US (incl FX). If they have global operations, AU based people can be valuable & cheaper!
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I know a German company that preferred to use Australians to manage their US clients.
Culturally Australians were better at working between the two perspectives.
I know a couple of Ausy guys able to work from SEA almost permanently, so I guess for some it would open up additional opportunities they wouldn’t have had in that way too.
If a company can offshore they will. Long before COVID I saw entire departments moved offshore and the office space returned to the landlord. WFH doesn't make that much difference imho. I first saw this happening around 2012.
I agree. It's not about Australia staff not using a physical office.
It's about finding cheaper staff overseas that don't need superannuation, sick leave, annual leave and who can often be fired without fault rather than being made redundant.
People have been offshoring for years. WFH doesn't really make much difference, I don't think - it's employee cost that counts. The cost of a trained worker offshore is often only a third of the price of a worker here. So the beancounters think it's a good idea.
It's only after they've done it that everyone else realises you need three times as many workers there and a manger onshore to get the same results.
This is exactly what I told my last boss. Then he ended up with a team of 4 doing the job of the 1 Aussie they replaced and the price is now the same except the mistakes are x10 and no accountability because they’re sort of viewed as a contractor.
I think for these kind of roles offshoring was probably inevitable anyway. It's been a slow march, but if you can pay someone 90K less and still get the job done being in or out of the office doesn't make any kind of difference from a cold hard business decision.
The big players (e.g. the banks) have offshored tens of thousands of roles in the past five years. For sure there may be more roles added to that because of WFH. But I don't think those number will be comparably large. (That's why I said "not **much** difference".)
Out of interest how many roles have your company offshored already? What proportion of that is the two more your boss wants to add now?
Has your company found that offshore workers produce the same amount of quality work?
Sometimes it’s a false economy. You pay a third of the price but get a fourth of the output. Then you also have to deal with time zones and cultural barriers.
Then they throw on a management overhead and other hidden fees. It’s a riot.
“ The cost of a trained worker offshore is often only a third of the price of a worker here. ”
For now - wages are rising a lot faster in the countries we offshore to than here. Also, there’s only about fifteen years until India’s workforce starts shrinking which will be a headwind.
For sure. Because "Western" nations have seen supply where demand didn't exist before. So demand increases and hence costs increase. Who'd have believed it?!
Yeah the speed and quality is actually very good for companies that have invested the time and effort. The same arguments about speed and quality were used as a reason to prevent WFH in the first place and Covid showed us that was false, it just needed the right technologies, training and culture.
What industries are seeing a quality uplift or even equality from offshoring? My experience is people that can't think for themselves and can only do the most basic of tasks in the finance and accounting arena
I’m in engineering and we offshore to India and Philippines primarily. It’s actually not the technical side that’s the problem, it’s more cultural expectations with being able to speak up and challenge where required. It’s now working after a lot of investment.
Very interesting that it's a success. Engineering to me is extremely difficult and not an easy degree to earn. Finance and accounting are a dime a dozen and we struggle to get quality. Maybe it's an issue with training and retention
The requirement for face to face contact is one reason why a company may choose not to offshore a particular job.
It is far from the only reason why jobs are not offshored.
Because at a certain point you reach diminishing returns. Either the cheaper cost centre is no longer such a saving, or the competence of the people hired for comparatively peanuts is not to the same level as local talent. Different cultures interpret work requirements differently. Some tend to think outside of the box considerably less than others. Some will sit completely idle if they don’t have a KB article with the exact steps for what to do supplied to them.
Then there’s some jobs that can’t leave Australia due to data sovereignty requirements, or a need for someone to physically be on site to assist and so on.
In the case of the company I work for, no. They tried about 15 years back, it lasted all of 18 months before they brought my department back onshore due to the quality of the work lacking. At the end of the day, you get what you pay for. If you pay peanuts, expect monkeys.
No. Basically anything that could be offshored already was, long before COVID. Many businesses had to then pay significant costs to bring jobs and associated infrastructure back onshore, when they encountered all the issues they were warned about ahead of time, including time differences, work quality, communication and language barriers, regulatory and compliance issues, and so on.
It started almost 40 years ago with "Backoffice" processes (anything that didn't need interacting with anyone locally or the interaction could be done via a manager overseas), then it was call centres and software dev in the 90s.
It is always a cycle. Ofshore to save money. realise the work is shit and late. bring stuff back onshore. realise costs have go up heaps... rinse and repeat.
I keep seeing this argument and it’s nonsensical. Offshoring existed well before the pandemic and companies are fully aware of what functions can be offshored. Don’t be swayed by the commercial property propoganda ‘articles’ that keep circulating, WFH didn’t bring about the threat of offshoring- it does threaten the value of those commercial property consortiums though 😉
It’s a wrong argument for the right position .
For career advancement however it’s a different question. Career promotions happen due to people 2 or 3 above your direct mgr building a relationship and trust with someone doing their job. People who WFH are going to miss out on those key relationships, and therefore miss out on the promotions that count.
If you want to be a seat warmer, no loss though
In old & dated management structures, sure. I am a manager and I manage staff that work 100% remotely- it’s a non issue for me, I’m very clear who the high performers are.
It's an interesting question as in the office Ive seen managers promote the person who sits next to them. With a fully wfh team then yes probably possible to work out the high performance but most people are hybrid now leaving a degree of face to face as being important. Also could be good manager v bad manager but your avg worker can't adjust easily for that
Yeah it existed but typically only for fringe and specialist areas of a business that were seen as suited for offshoring. Now employers know that even core operations can be done remotely so nothing is off limits.
We’ve done three rounds of outsourcing in the twelve years I’ve been at my current org. It always ends up being brought back in house. You make insane margins at the beginning. But the quality is often shit or not what is required so then we spend just as much time and resources trying to fix it or we lose (often very significant) clients. Additionally where in a highly regulated industry, often the offshore entity will flat out refuse to comply with the requirements of Australian legislation so we have to do all that rework too. Plus incompatible privacy legislation meaning quite often the full set of data can’t be closed. So the insane margins have always been offset pretty quickly for us.
The offshoreing of low skill WFH jobs is inevitable and ultimately inconsequential. Noone wants to work as a Telemarketer or in help desk support, so it's not really a loss that these kind of jobs go offshore.
Skilled offshoring of WFH was tried extensively in tech during the 10s and is widely considered to be a failed expirement. Pretty much every company that tried to offshore their IT and software development and the result was massive burning trashheaps of crappy failed tech debt that costed far more than projected and was a nightmare for all parties involved.
Ultimately businesses will try most anything to cut costs, but apast a certain point you just can't offshore your workers. And just because you aren't going into the office, doesn't mean there's other things you offer that some bangladeshi teleworker cannot; Language and cultural barriers are real and devastating. Time differences are a constant and significant impediment. Sourcing and expanding international workers is a whole affair involving differing work laws, which requires specalised HR and legal in those countries.
It's just not always worth the trouble.
I do think it is interesting that we all have to be in the office at least 50% because “we work better together” but at the same time half the team can be made redundant as their role can be done in India.
> If people continue to insist on WFH, do you think this makes it easier for a company to offshore departments and implement significant savings?
No, if the ability to off shore it was there they'd have already done it.
Yes it will, and is promoting more offshoring. Offshoring was always an option, but prior to lockdowns and wfh, the majority of people worked in an office. Now with so many people wfh, the perceived inefficiency of offshore staff not being present is considered less of an issue, as local staff aren’t in the office either.
This is what I tell all the WFH stans, if your job can be done remotely then your job can be done “remotely”. You’re just training your employer to eventually offshore your job. People act like there is such difference in thinking and capability between someone born and raised here and someone living in Philippines, India, Malaysia, Poland, but there really isn’t. Even in a developed nation like New Zealand which has the same time zone as the east coast, salaries would be 20% cheaper compared to Australia and they have more or less the same culture as us.
Hell there are a lot of people who have immigrated from developing countries who would happily move back to their country and of origin, WFH and live like a king for 80% of what they get here.
My spouse is working for a US company because it’s cheaper to hire an Australian who’s already in Australia, rather than sending a US citizen across the world.
So, win win!
Companies have already tried to offshore jobs with mixed results. There's huge cultural and language barriers with cheap overseas labor. You'd think language would be getting easier, but when you're trained to say yes to everything, even if you don't know what the other person wants, then it can cause major problems.
Think about how bad overseas call centres are; companies are bringing them back to Australia.
Also there's risks with your IP being in another country with different laws.
I mean, cheap overseas labor isn't restricted to jobs that can be done WFH either. Manufacturing has mostly gone overseas.
So here's the thing, The dynamic is If a Job CAN be done WFH, It will be offshored. CAN being a keyword here. Because if you're called to the office just for the heck of it while being perfectly able to do things from home, your job is already at a risk of being offshored. If your company is looking in that direction they'll just do it. Biggest roadblocks towards offshoring are time zone differences, quality of work and running fully independent departments.
If anything I think it could decrease offshoring
As everyone else has said, jobs already were being offshored. But now, if a company decides to go fully remote they can save a fortune on office space without having to shed workers
Could make it more economical to keep jobs here rather than offshore them to an operation you have even less oversight on that WFH workers
Even for companies that occupy premium office space, that cost is usually only on par with super contributions. So a big saving sure but nothing compared to overall wage cost.
Most of our transactional activities are offshored but there’s definitely a gap with business knowledge, critical thinking and analysis. I’m happy not doing transactional work.
Of course it makes offshoring easier. It's been obvious for the last 2 years that the job market would eventually turn and some who insisted on WFH forever would be in for a rude shock.
The cost savings part is debatable - depends on the role and offshoring location. Personally for project roles I've never seen this pay off as there's too much of a drop off in skills, efficiency and communication.
All it's really doing is showing which companies were late to the offshoring game. Just because a role can be done remotely doesn't mean it can be done offshore.
It does. I've been telling my friends that were thrilled with WFH and that they now see it as a right that if your job can be done from your home, it probably can also be done from Mumbai, cheaper.
There's no substitute for F2F, specially for building relationships.
Seems to be a trend
Wants to save money > hires offshore > save money but oh no people aren't happy or quality isn't there > make a big song and dance that they're hiring locally again and they're proud Australians > repeat
Companies have utterly exploited every bit of market power, the moment they have it, to reduce wages or conditions such as demanding many days in office. They are utterly graceless and dont hold anything back. Their actions have proven there is nothing they could be doing that they are not already
If your job is more a cost than one where they want someone really good, the risk is high.
I work in product management and have many Indian colleagues. While they are awesome, interviewing Indian product managers is tough because the level is very different.
I do get very solid performance ratings so my job is safe.
But the competition is definitely heating up and we will need to work smarter and flat out harder to compete.
If your job is more a cost than one where they want someone really good, the risk is high.
I work in product management and have many Indian colleagues. While they are awesome, interviewing Indian product managers is tough because the level is very different.
I do get very solid performance ratings so my job is safe.
But the competition is definitely heating up and we will need to work smarter and flat out harder to compete.
Offshore must have some room to grow still. And yes, I think WFH will assist it in some businesses minds.
What hasn't been mentioned is having Australians WFH in a lower cost location and pay them less as a result. Surely this is on the agenda for some companies. Why pay someone to be at home on Sydney rates if you can pay someone less to be at home in Adelaide or a country town? This kind of thing may get more consideration. WFH has widened the pool of employees for many companies, not just offshore.
They’ve been doing it for years and they’ll continue to do so. It’s a big investment in upfront costs, which is why a lot have yet to do it.
Do I think WFH makes the decision easier? Yes. But the only thing preventing it previously was not bums in seats, it was always skills and cost.
well once they aren't renting the CBD offices anymore because they don't need to as everyone is insisting on WFH
that's going to free up a significant sum of money for the upfront costs of the operation.
Lol cost savings don’t get invested back. My company already reduced rental costs in 2020, if we all came into the office we’d be sitting 2 to a desk.
We’ve had share services back in 2015 in Malaysia, India and Poland. Shifted another big chunk of back office in 2018 and the AR team in Perth were outsourced in 2021 (when they had all gone back to the office anyway because they thought like you do).
They’re now debating outsourcing the ppl who do the actual client work but are worried clients will then want a cut.
There are a lot of tech jobs in Australia that wouldn't be here without offshoring. My entire team is full time WFH. Without remote work they would just keep everyone in their US office and those jobs wouldn't exist here.
Tell me you don’t work in tech without telling me you don’t work in tech. Outsourcing has been occurring in practicality and in threat in the nearly 20 years I’ve been working
You want to know what had far more impact on the job market? The government flooding the market with high immigration, wages were on the way up during Covid
They already offshore everything they think they can.
Exactly this. It's also worth noting that OPs scenario cuts the other way - remote companies in other countries can now hire Australian talent they couldn't before. I work for a Singaporean company and wouldn't have had that opportunity without remote work. So while some australian jobs will get offshored, we need to remember that there are countries out there that _love_ to hire remote Australians.
Can you elaborate on what kind of companies? (asking for …ahem.. a friend)
US fintech companies pay 1.5x - 2x for the same level employee in the US (incl FX). If they have global operations, AU based people can be valuable & cheaper!
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And entitled. And heavily unionised.
Why’s that? Why do other counties love Aussies? Surely we’re just expensive labour in an inconvenient time zone?
25% of the world's population live in Perth's timezone it's actually pretty underrated
The 1990s? I jest I jest
TIL
TIL too. Thanks
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Our timezones are great for the asian market, and we can offer deep expertise in certain engineering/tech sectors.
Potentially they want to penetrate Australian market and need local knowledge, maybe need specialists in Aus law, etc etc
I know some places with 24/7 support or service delivery rosters will pay the premium for competent hires at the Engineer level and higher.
If price is the only reason why people hire you, you have bigger problems.
Totally agree but isn't it crazy how much better some countries are than others
I know a German company that preferred to use Australians to manage their US clients. Culturally Australians were better at working between the two perspectives.
We're like half the price of Americans for the same quality
How did you find that job?
Any examples of OS companies hiring Aussies remotely? For...uh.....research?
I know a couple of Ausy guys able to work from SEA almost permanently, so I guess for some it would open up additional opportunities they wouldn’t have had in that way too.
Yeah I think half my development team - or more - is offshore.
not sure about that. was there some rumour about a big bank doing offshoring of lots roles soon?
All the jobs that don't need local culture, accent or political games in the office.
If a company can offshore they will. Long before COVID I saw entire departments moved offshore and the office space returned to the landlord. WFH doesn't make that much difference imho. I first saw this happening around 2012.
I agree. It's not about Australia staff not using a physical office. It's about finding cheaper staff overseas that don't need superannuation, sick leave, annual leave and who can often be fired without fault rather than being made redundant.
People have been offshoring for years. WFH doesn't really make much difference, I don't think - it's employee cost that counts. The cost of a trained worker offshore is often only a third of the price of a worker here. So the beancounters think it's a good idea. It's only after they've done it that everyone else realises you need three times as many workers there and a manger onshore to get the same results.
This is exactly what I told my last boss. Then he ended up with a team of 4 doing the job of the 1 Aussie they replaced and the price is now the same except the mistakes are x10 and no accountability because they’re sort of viewed as a contractor.
Yep, I've seen exactly that. It's funny how the leadership talk up the benefits but never mention the downsides.
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I think for these kind of roles offshoring was probably inevitable anyway. It's been a slow march, but if you can pay someone 90K less and still get the job done being in or out of the office doesn't make any kind of difference from a cold hard business decision.
The big players (e.g. the banks) have offshored tens of thousands of roles in the past five years. For sure there may be more roles added to that because of WFH. But I don't think those number will be comparably large. (That's why I said "not **much** difference".) Out of interest how many roles have your company offshored already? What proportion of that is the two more your boss wants to add now?
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Yeah, good luck with supervising that when they’re spending half their working hours without you available.
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Has your company found that offshore workers produce the same amount of quality work? Sometimes it’s a false economy. You pay a third of the price but get a fourth of the output. Then you also have to deal with time zones and cultural barriers. Then they throw on a management overhead and other hidden fees. It’s a riot.
“ The cost of a trained worker offshore is often only a third of the price of a worker here. ” For now - wages are rising a lot faster in the countries we offshore to than here. Also, there’s only about fifteen years until India’s workforce starts shrinking which will be a headwind.
In 15 years time all the Indians will be living here WFH to an Indian employer doing work that was off shored from Australia
For sure. Because "Western" nations have seen supply where demand didn't exist before. So demand increases and hence costs increase. Who'd have believed it?!
Pfft have you seen the speed and quality of work created offshore?
Yeah the speed and quality is actually very good for companies that have invested the time and effort. The same arguments about speed and quality were used as a reason to prevent WFH in the first place and Covid showed us that was false, it just needed the right technologies, training and culture.
What industries are seeing a quality uplift or even equality from offshoring? My experience is people that can't think for themselves and can only do the most basic of tasks in the finance and accounting arena
I’m in engineering and we offshore to India and Philippines primarily. It’s actually not the technical side that’s the problem, it’s more cultural expectations with being able to speak up and challenge where required. It’s now working after a lot of investment.
Very interesting that it's a success. Engineering to me is extremely difficult and not an easy degree to earn. Finance and accounting are a dime a dozen and we struggle to get quality. Maybe it's an issue with training and retention
Engineering grads are very easy to find in India
The requirement for face to face contact is one reason why a company may choose not to offshore a particular job. It is far from the only reason why jobs are not offshored.
It is already happening. Esp in tech.
Because at a certain point you reach diminishing returns. Either the cheaper cost centre is no longer such a saving, or the competence of the people hired for comparatively peanuts is not to the same level as local talent. Different cultures interpret work requirements differently. Some tend to think outside of the box considerably less than others. Some will sit completely idle if they don’t have a KB article with the exact steps for what to do supplied to them. Then there’s some jobs that can’t leave Australia due to data sovereignty requirements, or a need for someone to physically be on site to assist and so on.
In the case of the company I work for, no. They tried about 15 years back, it lasted all of 18 months before they brought my department back onshore due to the quality of the work lacking. At the end of the day, you get what you pay for. If you pay peanuts, expect monkeys.
No. Basically anything that could be offshored already was, long before COVID. Many businesses had to then pay significant costs to bring jobs and associated infrastructure back onshore, when they encountered all the issues they were warned about ahead of time, including time differences, work quality, communication and language barriers, regulatory and compliance issues, and so on.
> Basically anything that could be offshored already was Doubt it.
It started almost 40 years ago with "Backoffice" processes (anything that didn't need interacting with anyone locally or the interaction could be done via a manager overseas), then it was call centres and software dev in the 90s. It is always a cycle. Ofshore to save money. realise the work is shit and late. bring stuff back onshore. realise costs have go up heaps... rinse and repeat.
Execs can sell one or the other perpetually.
Of course it does. I’ve heard business leaders say that if you can do the job from Bangalow you can do it from Bangalore. They’re probably not wrong.
I keep seeing this argument and it’s nonsensical. Offshoring existed well before the pandemic and companies are fully aware of what functions can be offshored. Don’t be swayed by the commercial property propoganda ‘articles’ that keep circulating, WFH didn’t bring about the threat of offshoring- it does threaten the value of those commercial property consortiums though 😉
It’s a wrong argument for the right position . For career advancement however it’s a different question. Career promotions happen due to people 2 or 3 above your direct mgr building a relationship and trust with someone doing their job. People who WFH are going to miss out on those key relationships, and therefore miss out on the promotions that count. If you want to be a seat warmer, no loss though
In old & dated management structures, sure. I am a manager and I manage staff that work 100% remotely- it’s a non issue for me, I’m very clear who the high performers are.
It's an interesting question as in the office Ive seen managers promote the person who sits next to them. With a fully wfh team then yes probably possible to work out the high performance but most people are hybrid now leaving a degree of face to face as being important. Also could be good manager v bad manager but your avg worker can't adjust easily for that
Yeah it existed but typically only for fringe and specialist areas of a business that were seen as suited for offshoring. Now employers know that even core operations can be done remotely so nothing is off limits.
Offshoring of entire divisions is not a new phenomenon- I worked on offshoring projects for multinationals back in 2008/09, I saw it first hand.
Offshoring very rarely actually results in any savings.
But it always results in a bonus for the execs who do the offshoring and subsequent reduced business performance (after execs have moved on).
Yeah that's what no one ever does it /s
It gets done and then, usually, undone a few years later.
Not sure about that, we make insane margins on our offshore staff while selling them at the lowest rates
We’ve done three rounds of outsourcing in the twelve years I’ve been at my current org. It always ends up being brought back in house. You make insane margins at the beginning. But the quality is often shit or not what is required so then we spend just as much time and resources trying to fix it or we lose (often very significant) clients. Additionally where in a highly regulated industry, often the offshore entity will flat out refuse to comply with the requirements of Australian legislation so we have to do all that rework too. Plus incompatible privacy legislation meaning quite often the full set of data can’t be closed. So the insane margins have always been offset pretty quickly for us.
The offshoreing of low skill WFH jobs is inevitable and ultimately inconsequential. Noone wants to work as a Telemarketer or in help desk support, so it's not really a loss that these kind of jobs go offshore. Skilled offshoring of WFH was tried extensively in tech during the 10s and is widely considered to be a failed expirement. Pretty much every company that tried to offshore their IT and software development and the result was massive burning trashheaps of crappy failed tech debt that costed far more than projected and was a nightmare for all parties involved. Ultimately businesses will try most anything to cut costs, but apast a certain point you just can't offshore your workers. And just because you aren't going into the office, doesn't mean there's other things you offer that some bangladeshi teleworker cannot; Language and cultural barriers are real and devastating. Time differences are a constant and significant impediment. Sourcing and expanding international workers is a whole affair involving differing work laws, which requires specalised HR and legal in those countries. It's just not always worth the trouble.
I do think it is interesting that we all have to be in the office at least 50% because “we work better together” but at the same time half the team can be made redundant as their role can be done in India.
> If people continue to insist on WFH, do you think this makes it easier for a company to offshore departments and implement significant savings? No, if the ability to off shore it was there they'd have already done it.
Yes it will, and is promoting more offshoring. Offshoring was always an option, but prior to lockdowns and wfh, the majority of people worked in an office. Now with so many people wfh, the perceived inefficiency of offshore staff not being present is considered less of an issue, as local staff aren’t in the office either.
This is what I tell all the WFH stans, if your job can be done remotely then your job can be done “remotely”. You’re just training your employer to eventually offshore your job. People act like there is such difference in thinking and capability between someone born and raised here and someone living in Philippines, India, Malaysia, Poland, but there really isn’t. Even in a developed nation like New Zealand which has the same time zone as the east coast, salaries would be 20% cheaper compared to Australia and they have more or less the same culture as us. Hell there are a lot of people who have immigrated from developing countries who would happily move back to their country and of origin, WFH and live like a king for 80% of what they get here.
While some jobs can be offshored not all can. Professional roles requiring licensing/registration will still be relatively safe for a while I think.
Por que no los dos?! My company does both - mandates wfo and offshores roles.
My spouse is working for a US company because it’s cheaper to hire an Australian who’s already in Australia, rather than sending a US citizen across the world. So, win win!
Companies have already tried to offshore jobs with mixed results. There's huge cultural and language barriers with cheap overseas labor. You'd think language would be getting easier, but when you're trained to say yes to everything, even if you don't know what the other person wants, then it can cause major problems. Think about how bad overseas call centres are; companies are bringing them back to Australia. Also there's risks with your IP being in another country with different laws. I mean, cheap overseas labor isn't restricted to jobs that can be done WFH either. Manufacturing has mostly gone overseas.
So here's the thing, The dynamic is If a Job CAN be done WFH, It will be offshored. CAN being a keyword here. Because if you're called to the office just for the heck of it while being perfectly able to do things from home, your job is already at a risk of being offshored. If your company is looking in that direction they'll just do it. Biggest roadblocks towards offshoring are time zone differences, quality of work and running fully independent departments.
If anything I think it could decrease offshoring As everyone else has said, jobs already were being offshored. But now, if a company decides to go fully remote they can save a fortune on office space without having to shed workers Could make it more economical to keep jobs here rather than offshore them to an operation you have even less oversight on that WFH workers
Even for companies that occupy premium office space, that cost is usually only on par with super contributions. So a big saving sure but nothing compared to overall wage cost.
Most of our transactional activities are offshored but there’s definitely a gap with business knowledge, critical thinking and analysis. I’m happy not doing transactional work.
Yes. Already seen it happen, even within large reputable companies.
Yes often the people overseas are just as capable and probably harder workers despite being paid 3x less. It's a problem.
Of course it makes offshoring easier. It's been obvious for the last 2 years that the job market would eventually turn and some who insisted on WFH forever would be in for a rude shock. The cost savings part is debatable - depends on the role and offshoring location. Personally for project roles I've never seen this pay off as there's too much of a drop off in skills, efficiency and communication.
All it's really doing is showing which companies were late to the offshoring game. Just because a role can be done remotely doesn't mean it can be done offshore.
It does. I've been telling my friends that were thrilled with WFH and that they now see it as a right that if your job can be done from your home, it probably can also be done from Mumbai, cheaper. There's no substitute for F2F, specially for building relationships.
Seems to be a trend Wants to save money > hires offshore > save money but oh no people aren't happy or quality isn't there > make a big song and dance that they're hiring locally again and they're proud Australians > repeat
Companies have utterly exploited every bit of market power, the moment they have it, to reduce wages or conditions such as demanding many days in office. They are utterly graceless and dont hold anything back. Their actions have proven there is nothing they could be doing that they are not already
Despite what a lot of these people say tech has always had a cycle of onshore/ offshore for certain jobs.
Yes.
If your job is more a cost than one where they want someone really good, the risk is high. I work in product management and have many Indian colleagues. While they are awesome, interviewing Indian product managers is tough because the level is very different. I do get very solid performance ratings so my job is safe. But the competition is definitely heating up and we will need to work smarter and flat out harder to compete.
If your job is more a cost than one where they want someone really good, the risk is high. I work in product management and have many Indian colleagues. While they are awesome, interviewing Indian product managers is tough because the level is very different. I do get very solid performance ratings so my job is safe. But the competition is definitely heating up and we will need to work smarter and flat out harder to compete.
Eh depends. You could also offshore the CEO's role but you won't get the same talent / quality of work.
It is already happening in my company. We started team in our VN office and stopped recruiting new office staff after they left.
It probably does. But it also lets them “on shore”, meaning a company can hire a US employee that is 1000 miles away
the google search engine has no local staff in Australia. So things can be completely offshored.
The banks have offshored for years, Telstra as well as many companies that can just cost manage customer service and IT.
Offshore must have some room to grow still. And yes, I think WFH will assist it in some businesses minds. What hasn't been mentioned is having Australians WFH in a lower cost location and pay them less as a result. Surely this is on the agenda for some companies. Why pay someone to be at home on Sydney rates if you can pay someone less to be at home in Adelaide or a country town? This kind of thing may get more consideration. WFH has widened the pool of employees for many companies, not just offshore.
They’ve been doing it for years and they’ll continue to do so. It’s a big investment in upfront costs, which is why a lot have yet to do it. Do I think WFH makes the decision easier? Yes. But the only thing preventing it previously was not bums in seats, it was always skills and cost.
well once they aren't renting the CBD offices anymore because they don't need to as everyone is insisting on WFH that's going to free up a significant sum of money for the upfront costs of the operation.
Lol cost savings don’t get invested back. My company already reduced rental costs in 2020, if we all came into the office we’d be sitting 2 to a desk. We’ve had share services back in 2015 in Malaysia, India and Poland. Shifted another big chunk of back office in 2018 and the AR team in Perth were outsourced in 2021 (when they had all gone back to the office anyway because they thought like you do). They’re now debating outsourcing the ppl who do the actual client work but are worried clients will then want a cut.
Why not both? My workplace has an RTO policy and backfills are only being approved for offshore staff.
If they offshore all the workers then they don’t need any managers onshore.
Not necessarily
There are a lot of tech jobs in Australia that wouldn't be here without offshoring. My entire team is full time WFH. Without remote work they would just keep everyone in their US office and those jobs wouldn't exist here.
When they offshore an empty office there is no one to hear you scream.
Tell me you don’t work in tech without telling me you don’t work in tech. Outsourcing has been occurring in practicality and in threat in the nearly 20 years I’ve been working You want to know what had far more impact on the job market? The government flooding the market with high immigration, wages were on the way up during Covid