lokiuk
LE

An excellent synopsis Toastie, of the current situation.
The current situation.
A year or two down the road however there is this scenario. Fred gets urgent email sent to him and his team at 5pm, calling them all for a Zoom meet the next morning with HR at 9am. At the meeting the HR director reads out a statement, Fred hears words like "efficiencies", restructuring", "current economic climate", "redundancy packages".
Next morning at 8am, Dinesh rolls out of his bed in his apartment in Bangalore, charges up his laptop and starts his new job.
It won't happen to every job, but as I have said many times before, if you can do your job from home, there's a good likelihood someone in India can do your job just as well from his home for a tenth of the cost.
We are in a transition phase at the moment, but we'd be kidding ourselves if we didn't realise that as well as those expensive offices our employers are currently offloading, there are a lot of other costs they are figuring out that they don't need to pay.
Been there where a whole department were being outsourced to India, I was just a contractor who had been doing IT for them for a number of years
They wanted a handover, and manuals written to guide the Indian chaps
I did everything asked of me and happily walked away, I had a long commute from North Wales down to Kent and was glad to be able to end the contract without any bad feeling
Unfortunately a couple of years later I was being pestered to come back, of course I was working somewhere else by then thankfully
I can only imagine things haven't gone well to try and drag me back, although really I just feel sorry for the permies who lost their jobs there