Paul Cantrell
I've been getting a steady stream of these unsolicited messages. The pitch is always the same: “Use your US location to attract clients, pretend to be the one doing all the work, and we'll subcontract for you on the sly.”
Are we looking at a return of actual offshoring? but now with a sort of Mechanical Turk flavor?
Paul Cantrell
I've thought often the last couple of years about how the “Fire your developers! Use AI!!” craze feels really similar to the outsourcing / offshoring mania of a few decades ago — and how many of the same problems it shares:
- Cost-cutting shiny things
- but turns out generating code was the easy part
- and building cumulative shared understanding is everything
- and shortcuts around that dig you in a hole really fast
- and that hole is full of code that nobody can maintain.
Something in the water, I guess. Something always in the water that once in a while explodes when conditions are right, like algae blooms.
Paul Cantrell
In my experience, at least, it feels like offshoring went through a productive evolution over the years, from
“Just farm it out to a bunch of those third world people who are cheap and barely even exist as humans!!”
to
“We can totally have globally distributed software teams with some people in places with a lower cost of living, as long as we work extra hard to make sure everyone functions as a team.”
That may be a rosy picture that comes from my own limited circles, but…that's the progress I saw. I wonder when / if folks will do similar learning about the current cost-cutting manias.
Paul Cantrell
@peter
The space before the comma is how you know they’re serious
Peter
@inthehands Hello , Paul Cantrell
Paul Cantrell
@BlueDot
In a properly functioning economy, I assume that would be the case. I have no way of knowing, of course, since “properly functioning” is such a wild hypothetical.
BlueDot
So, if I'm pretending to do the work, then it's my reputation taking the hit when the work is low quality, right?
Paul Cantrell
Several replies suggest this is North Koreans or other phishing / infiltration / exfiltration ops, and…sure? I mean, everything about it reeks of scam. Who knows which particular scam or who's really the mark, but….
What I'm most interested here is that we're in a situation where apparently this kind of “farm it out” pitch is getting traction again.
Jonas Geiler
@inthehands
same here, got like 2 or 3 of those in the past year...
Paul Cantrell
@jonasgeiler
And here I thought I was Very Special
Paul Cantrell
@jonasgeiler
Oh, 100%, multiple other versions of this email have even said so (“I was reviewing your GitHub profile”…sure, buddy)
Jonas Geiler
@inthehands
I use specific emails for all the places on the internet to track where spam comes from, and I'm pretty sure it's coming from the Email on my GitHub profile, if that's any help
Paul Cantrell
With the extremely well-founded concern about North Korea, I do want to be careful not to revive all the barenaked racism and xenophobia of the anti-outsourcing arguments from 20 years ago. Not that any replies are doing so yet; it's just a danger that’s lurking here.
Per this conversation in the replies, when offshoring does a faceplant, it’s is almost always about the client company’s dysfunction •first•, the overseas team second, and the innate general properties of people from that other country…um, not at all:
https://hachyderm.io/@skinnylatte/117265404729717952
So let's just stay clear on that. If scammy emails like the one in the OP are actually finding traction in the US, then that's a sign of rot •in the US•.
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.