Page "Software engineering" Paragraph 16

The initial impact of outsourcing, and the relatively lower cost of international human resources in developing third world countries led to a massive migration of software development activities from corporations in North America and Europe to India and later: China, Russia, and other developing countries.

This approach had some flaws, mainly the distance / timezone difference that prevented human interaction between clients and developers, but also the lower quality of the software developed by the outsourcing companies and the massive job transfer.

This had a negative impact on many aspects of the software engineering profession.

For example, some students in the developed world avoid education related to software engineering because of the fear of offshore outsourcing ( importing software products or services from other countries ) and of being displaced by foreign visa workers.

Although statistics do not currently show a threat to software engineering itself ; a related career, computer programming does appear to have been affected.

Nevertheless, the ability to smartly leverage offshore and near-shore resources via the follow-the-sun workflow has improved the overall operational capability of many organizations.

When North Americans are leaving work, Asians are just arriving to work.

When Asians are leaving work, Europeans are arriving to work.

This provides a continuous ability to have human oversight on business-critical processes 24 hours per day, without paying overtime compensation or disrupting a key human resource, sleep patterns.