dotNetDave Says… Management Wants You To Teach Offshore Teams

There have been many times throughout my career when management approached a team—or an individual—and asked them to “teach” an offshore team how to do their job. In every single case, layoffs followed. Not once did this end well for the people doing the teaching.

Because of that experience, I now give teams a very direct warning: if this happens to you, start looking for a new job immediately.

One of the earliest examples occurred when I was working at a company in San Diego, California. Management told my team and me that I needed to host online meetings to explain how the API system I had built worked—and to record those sessions. I did what I was told and ran the meetings.

Not long after, the company laid off every software engineer at my level—the highest technical level in the organization—except one. He left shortly afterward. Management then hired a new VP from India to oversee the team. Based on his actions, it quickly became clear that the plan was to eliminate the local engineering staff and move all development offshore. And that’s exactly what happened.

More recently, I saw the same pattern play out again while working on a contract. About six months before I left, management began asking my team to “teach” outsourced developers from India how our systems worked. They claimed this was simply to help us scale and share the workload.

It wasn’t.

Today, that company is laying off software engineers or moving them into different roles and teams.

This is why I now tell developers—without hesitation:

If management asks you to “teach” an outsourced team in another country how your systems or projects work, your job is already on the chopping block. Start looking for a new one now.

Companies justify this behavior as a cost-saving measure. In my experience, it rarely works. Costs often increase, quality drops, delivery slows, and projects suffer. In many cases, the damage becomes so severe that the work eventually has to be brought back in-house.

By then, the original engineers are long gone—and the company is left paying the price for short-term thinking.

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