Ask HN: What's the current job market and sentiment like for outsourcing shops?

I'm a CTO of a Series A start-up with open dev roles posted. Right now, my inbox is completely overwhelmed with emails from outsourcing companies offering to do the work. So based on that data point, I'm guessing there is a lot of competition for general outsourced work right now.

Part of this might because a lot of new start-ups got into this space during 2020-2022 acting as a light middleman between overseas devs and US-based companies while not providing much besides facilitating payment. So you have all the traditional outsourcing companies fighting it out with all the newer companies in an economy where spending is way down overall.

All that being said, it seems like great experienced devs in Eastern Europe are still getting snapped up quickly.

As someone who runs a niche dev shop in India (not the kind that you describe though), I have found that new work has been hard to come by since last 6 months, especially for services like ours that are on the premium end. Even the general consensus around my network is the same.

The Indian dev "market" was pretty much commoditized during the pandemic, which prompted us to move our focus away to niche that could still pay premium for high skills and outcomes. It seems that rest of the market hasn't changed much even in this time. I can't speak for the job seekers, but the number of job applicants applying to us have risen sharply over last 2 months or so.

I'm a one-man shop, and it's been pretty hard.

Best work coming my way is always from non-tech companies. Companies whose core skills include tech pay very poorly, ask for a lot and come with the downside that youll be working on their current stack, so you get no choice over what tech to use

I was in Google's partner org for 8 years and recently joined a cloud services company, but one that specialized in product engineering rather than "normal" system integration work. I've found that there's a glut of traditional SI partners, all of whom promise the latest & greatest tech, the most skilled technicians, and the highest CSAT. If you don't know the space, you'd be forgiven for assuming they're all roughly equivalent, but that's not remotely true.

There is a glut of outsourcing shops but there's also a wide gamut of specialization, and it can be difficult to choose the right partner for a given job. Some areas are far more commoditized than others (general cloud migration or general systems administration or general appdev, vs data analytics platforms for specific industry use cases, building regulatory compliant stuff, doing BPO in spaces that require deep domain knowledge, etc. I would never trust Accenture to do product engineering, and I would never trust [insert small generalist SI here] to do business strategy consulting. But even those aren't hard & fast rules.

Consulting and outsourcing shops exist for a reason, and those reasons aren't going away. The market is huge, and although there's been a dip over the past year with the Ukraine war and global macro-economic challenges, everyone expects things to recover and most of the big consultancies have been using this time to both "right size" and refocus to ensure they're ready to help companies of all sizes reach their growth ambitions.

I don’t think people have realised just how much of a knock on effect the drying up of funding is having.

I remember the dot com days. Companies that used to be spending stopped. All the “we’re selling the picks and shovels” and the outsourcing/body shop companies suddenly had no customers. It was horrible.

As a contractor, based in Berlin, I also noticed that since the end of last year the market slowed down.

My only pleasant experience outsourcing to India was a native Android app. I think it helped that the two (young) devs had grown up with smartphones.

It's the same people replying. They're just using chatgpt to make their replies more professional.

I wonder if ChatGPT has resulted in less demand for basic web dev services.