Strategies to Mitigate Outsourcing Risk for Software Engineers

Great question! My honest answer -- ignore it. You cannot control what a company does and the same answer applies regardless of whatever the company is doing to cut costs -- become a rockstar engineer with all the awesome resources on Taro.

If you ship high quality work consistently, strive to become really talented in your niche, and are nice to people, you will be unstoppable

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While it's true that companies might be outsourcing some roles, I've also seen companies be reluctant to outsource roles because of quality concerns, especially for long-term projects with large impact. If you need to eventually refactor their code or hand hold someone, they can end up being a net negative for the company. Of course, this isn't true across the board because you can have the same issue with onshore software engineers as well.

Companies usually mitigate the risk hiring offshore engineers into roles where they can speed up the code development of a project, but less so with making higher level decisions. So, if you can up your experience in leading larger projects from start to end, you may be able to shield yourself better from this.

A lot of the larger tech companies have return to office policies which is also a sign that there is something special about being able to work within the same proximity as your teammates that can't be replicated remotely. In my experience, it's a lot easier to hash out a complex problem in person because you can resolve any issues immediately rather than waiting until the next day(s).