I'll let you into a little secret.
I've been a software contractor for nearly 30 years. Christ, where did the time go?
For much of that time, I had more side hustles than main hustles. In fact, my little software ventures often made three or four times what I earned from my actual contracting work.
And a lot of that involved offshore development teams.
Good Lord, did I earn that money.
It was lucrative. Very lucrative. But I swear, it was some of the hardest money I've ever earned.
I distinctly remember nearly launching a telephone through my monitor when a developer in Mumbai confidently informed me that PHP couldn't make a SOAP call.
PHP. Couldn't. Make. A. SOAP. Call.
I think I aged about seven years that afternoon.
I've had code delivered that made me question whether the person writing it had ever actually seen a computer before. I've had entire features built that bore only a passing resemblance to what I'd asked for.
And, to be fair, I worked with some genuinely excellent developers too.
But the reason we put ourselves through all that was fairly straightforward.
It was cheap.
You traded money for management headaches. Sometimes it worked beautifully. Sometimes you wondered whether becoming a shepherd in the Scottish Highlands might be a more rewarding career.
Anyway, fast-forward to 2026.
My LinkedIn inbox is STILL absolutely stuffed with messages from offshore development companies.
You know the ones.
"Hi Stevie, I noticed that at Helmworks you are doing some exciting work in software development..."
Noticed.
It's ALWAYS "noticed".
No, you didn't, you cheeky sod. You've bought a list and fed it into LinkedHelper. 😂
"We have an excellent team of highly skilled developers who can help you scale your engineering resources..."
And every time I read one of these messages, I find myself wondering:
Who on earth is buying this service now?
Because the entire economic argument has changed.
I've spent the last year building an agentic software engineering operation. The amount of work I can now get through, and the quality and speed with which I can get through it, would have been absolutely unimaginable even two years ago.
The whole reason I once hired offshore teams was to get more engineering capacity at a lower price.
Well, I've now got that. And I don't need to manage twelve people across three time zones to achieve it.
Of course, I'm not suggesting every offshore developer is suddenly redundant. There are brilliant engineers all over the world, and genuinely good engineering expertise will always have value.
But the old model of selling inexpensive extra pairs of hands?
Blimey. I wouldn't fancy trying to sell that in 2026.
And I do feel for these businesses. Many spent years building an entire industry around a perfectly sensible economic proposition.
Then along came agentic AI and rather spectacularly kicked the legs out from underneath it.
So I'm genuinely curious.
Who's still buying small offshore development teams, and what's the business case?
Because from where I'm sitting, the economics look rather different these days.
Or am I missing something?
And please, for the love of God, don't send me a LinkedHelper message saying you've noticed this post. 😂