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In focus
- The end of Vietnam’s low-cost coding pitch
- Who’s investing with whom in India
Hello reader,
I have a friend here in Hanoi who used to do PR work for a local IT outsourcing company. He thinks how the firm marketed itself was strange, to say the least.
My friend says the company’s biggest advantage was clearly its access to hordes of young, talented, and most importantly, cheap developers. This helped the firm win contracts with clients worldwide.
Despite this, the company’s marketing and communication materials went to great lengths to avoid even insinuating that bang for your buck might be the best reason to employ it. In fact, he was told to present the firm’s offerings as “premium,” even though its own website screamed the opposite.
This was before the explosion of generative AI, but it’s safe to say the leadership at that company was a little ahead of the curve. Competing on price alone wasn’t a viable long-term strategy then, and it’s even less so now, as our top story explores.
As guest writer Thanh Pham, CEO of Saigon Technology, argues in his piece, AI is doing to offshore dev pricing what it’s done to plenty of other markets: commoditizing the baseline. When a junior developer’s hourly rate competes against tools that write boilerplate for free, “we’re cheaper” isn’t a differentiator.
Read on to find out what he reckons should replace price as the pitch.
Peter Cowan, engagement editor
Top Story
Why ‘cheaper’ no longer wins dev deals for Vietnam
Image credit: Ulla
Pham says engineering leverage is the new differentiator for development firms like his. While AI can be used to spit out code faster than any human could hope to, it can’t ask the harder questions, like whether a new feature is needed at all or if it will work smoothly with legacy systems.
Stop prompting. Start delegating.
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