For Americans sake I am happy to hear this for now. However the quality of work overseas will get better. Hungry people have no choice but to get better or starve.
And so does the quality of our work, let me tell you. We're still learning how to build complex software architectures. And with the emerging dominance of N-tiered software architectures, things are getting quite complex indeed.
Americans *can* compete. Americans *will* continue to compete.
It's in the nature of the beast. Software dev isn't like making shoes -- you can't teach someone to hit this nail every time. It's extraordinarily complex. It takes creativity, thinking outside the box, a certain kind of mind. Every piece of software that gets built is partially a 'research and development' project.
Things that Americans excel at -- individual thinking, creativity, ideas like this are nearly unknown in China and India. Their cultures actually punish individualism.
My friend, I see it every single day. Americans *are* better than their off-shore counterparts. Companies who have off-shored their work are bringing back. I've had 2 offers of consulting work to clean up behind off-shored projects in the last year (both of which I turned down -- my current contract was just more interesting work).
As I would expect. Call Americans what you like, but it ain't bragging if you can back it up. And we can, and do, every single day.