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I personally prefer to contract, so that is not an issue for me. My experience has been that during that last part of the 90's rates ran up pretty nice. My opinion is that this was due to 1) dot.com bubble 2) Y2K (non) apocalypse 3) greenspan ginning up the economy due to fear of Y2K.

After the crash, rates came down quite a bit, and it was much dicier. Over the past year rates seem to be back up to late 90's rates.

The fact that manufacturing goes overseas does not imply that design/engineering will follow. I think design/engineering is going to be somewhat focused in the target markets.

"The fact that manufacturing goes overseas does not imply that design/engineering will follow."

I disagree. It isn't going to make sense to have R&D on one side of the world and manufacturing on the other, particularly when engineering talent can be added for a fraction of the domestic cost offshore. There is a whole "ecosystem" that has to be in place for manufacturing to thrive. That support environment is increasingly going offshore. It is becoming increasingly difficult to envision the trend reversing, because the USA is losing the whole infrastructure that has to be in place for manufacturing to flourish.

These engineering jobs that Cisco is adding in India are not an isolated incident. As A. Pole has pointed out, Cisco believes that China will be the leading area of the world for information technology sometime between 2020 and 2040 and they are making plans to be a Chinese company by that time.

Take a look at the latest cell phones:

Japanese technology
Taiwanese design
Chinese manufacture

What's the American role? Branding and distribution.