Why Most Pakistani Software Houses Are Still Stuck in Body-Shop Mode Scroll through any ranking of Pakistan's top software houses and the same phrase keeps appearing: staff augmentation. Seventeen thousand-plus IT companies later, most of Pakistan's software industry is still selling engineering hours at a discount rather than building anything it owns — and the incentives keeping it there are stronger than most founders, myself included, like to admit.

Abstract

Look at almost any list of Pakistan's top software houses published this year and a pattern jumps out immediately. Devsinc: "operates primarily on a staff augmentation model." CodeMiners: "specializing in staff augmentation," pitching engineering talent at a fraction of US and UK agency rates. Clutch.co's own rankings of Pakistani IT services are dominated by firms whose core pitch is dedicated engineering teams rented out by the month. Pakistan now has more than 17,000 active IT and IT-enabled services companies, according to the Pakistan Software Export Board, and 300,000-plus software professionals feeding them. The overwhelming majority of that capacity is doing exactly what it did a decade ago: providing vetted developers to extend someone else's engineering team, for someone else's product, under someone else's brand.