The company I worked for 15 years ago outsourced QA to save money. It was sold as paying $15 for a 4080 video card. When they opened the package, instead of a 4080, it was a brick. The salt in the wound was when they realized they overpaid 3x for a $5 brick. If it wasn't for vendor lock-in (they being the vendor), they would be dead.
The local QA person could run through 100 or so scenarios a day. The offshore people could do 2 a day. They never improved. The offshore people who are tops aren't cheap.
There's an art to outsourcing, and - even worse than with LLMs - it's not something you can ever just do and forget, because without active management, you'll eventually end up wasting money and time while getting nothing in return.
QA is a whole other story, too. Outsourcing QA is stupid, but even more stupid and short-sighted is not having QA in the first place, and that unfortunately is becoming a norm.
There's lots of false economy going with jobs, too. Getting rid of QA may save you salaries, but the work doesn't disappear - it just gets dumped on everyone else, and now you're distracting much more expensive engineers (software or otherwise), who do a much worse job at it (not being dedicated specialists) and cost more. On the net, I doubt it's ever saving companies any money, but the positives are easy to count, while negatives are diffused and hard to track beyond overall feeling that "somehow, everything takes longer than it should, and comes out worse than it should, who knows why?".
>Outsourcing QA is stupid, but even more stupid and short-sighted is not having QA in the first place, and that unfortunately is becoming a norm.
Yes, they were moving in that direction. They centralized the QA team over a suite of probably 15 products, which means no one has any expertise. The QA VP would get mad when QA found bugs because "the dev's were supposed to find all the bugs and the QA was just supposed to just certify the release." The amount of people who don't understand how software dev works in high positions is mind boggling.
They ended up firing all the devs except me and this other guy who gave zero shits and wanted to be a manager. "We" maintained 3 products. Two were pretty standard web apps but one was a full blown decision support system (rules engine) that only I knew. I quit after a few months of killing myself. They paid me a whole lot of money a few years later when they were trying to add features to get a very lucrative government contract.
The local QA person could run through 100 or so scenarios a day. The offshore people could do 2 a day. They never improved. The offshore people who are tops aren't cheap.