Transcript
Matthew: Let me ask you very tactically. Rates, then regions. What are you seeing? Are rates going down, going up? And then what regions are you seeing actually be more advantageous?
Maruf Ahmed: For my technical talent that we are placing, I have not seen the rates go down, actually. I think there is still competition. I am seeing AI specialists, AI engineers having far higher rates and far higher demand. We have been in the business long enough to know that when SAP and ERP systems came, we used to have SAP developers asking for 400 bucks an hour, 500 bucks an hour. It was not unusual at that time. Now it has come down to closer to a hundred bucks, which is steady state. So we are seeing rate inflation on AI savvy, AI specialists, forward deployed engineers, whatever you call those roles. But the standard roles that we place, whether it's a developer or not, we are not seeing the rates come down. What I'm seeing is less of a demand for more of the junior level positions, because people are starting to figure out whether they need those people or not, or how many of them they need. But I'm not seeing a wage depression from my point of view.
Matthew: When you've seen these other waves, was it the same thing? Were junior developers what was getting hit the hardest? Or how is this transition different?
Maruf Ahmed: No, because in those, there were new technologies out there where people who were specialists were in higher demand and they were commanding a better rate and they had the ability to pick and choose, but the foundational level work still had to be done and somebody had to do it. In this particular case, the difference is that the AI is starting to do some of this foundational work.
Matthew: What about regions?
Maruf Ahmed: From our perspective, because we are global and we are more than just one dimensional providing resources in the US, we are consulting with our clients when they're looking for the work to be done, saying, okay, how should the work be designed? What we saw the last two years, there was a lot of demand for near shore work. A lot of demand for let's go to Mexico, let's go to Brazil, which is similar time zone but cheaper in cost and easier to travel to. A lot of that we saw the last couple of years, as companies were under cost pressure but still wanted to work in the same time zone. We didn't see the similar growth that we saw about 10 years ago, where there was a lot of offshoring, going to India, where the time zone is different, and you just bulk send the work. We haven't seen that. We are seeing more of a hybrid, that people still prefer US talent, but they like to augment it with near shore talent.
