Replies

offshoring is not a fad, US companies are re-doubling their investments to make it work.

So YOU say, but then how much do you really know? I'm one of the people who makes these decisions, and I have a lot of experience with offshoring, as do my compadres. In a word, it is useless for any but the most brain-dead work. Yes, we tried it because in theory it made good commercial sense. In practice, the overhead is difficult to justify for anything but loss leaders, and all the development that matters will stay in the US for the foreseeable future. Development in cheaper parts of the US is definitely price/brain competitive with anywhere else on the globe in the final picture.

The "investments" are not entirely what they appear. If you aren't a drone and offer real value on the engineering side, your job is safe for the foreseeable future. The bottom feeders in the US engineering market will likely be pushed out in many areas though. Once you move your engineering away from expensive places like Silicon Valley (or California in general), Americans give very cost effective bang for the buck. In the final tally, exporting to better States has proven to the be the best route. Even though we have assets and facilities all over the world, all our engineering is done in places like Florida, Texas, and Nevada, and it is actively being MOVED to these places. That is what the future is going to look like. Commie States are going to die, and the better ones of the bunch will thrive because they still comprehend what a reasonable business environment is. We'll invest in America, but America has to give us something to invest IN.

So am I. I am not just blowing smoke here with uninformed opinion. I am posting based on what I see happening at work every day.

Its not just "bottom feeder" jobs.

In fact, here is what I see: Yes, the first waves of offshored projects may well have been "bottom feed"; maintenance of legacy systems, etc. And many of those did not demonstrate cost efficiencies, mostly because the company likely still retained the employees who were maintaining those legacy systems anyway.

So now, the approach has shifted: all new projects go offshore, don't staff in the US for them. Don't burden the offshoring process with having to ride the learning curve of transferring an existing system to them. Let them start with a clean sheet of paper, own a new program from start to finish. The US based staffing contribution to the effort comes from system engineering and testing; write the requirements for the offshore developers and test the product they produce. For now at least, once the offshore folks get more experience, they will do that work also.

Article after article is posted here about what is happening, don't tell us jobs are being exported from California to Florida! All these articles about the phenonmenal growth in the Indian IT shops, are you claiming they are all lies? And that's just the start, other areas are moving to: HR, accounting, medical techs, anything that can be done by a person at a desk with a computer is being offshored.

This process is just beginning, alot of people think its just a sudden surge in a fad that will pass. It's not.