They still want some Americans in the tech sector. Their responsibility is to work with the team working abroad (at different hours, requiring you to be in the office before sunrise so that you can conference with them while they are still at their office), to be a fall guy when “the team” is behind schedule, and to communicate with the mid-level managers (and above) at meetings so they don’t have communication problems with persons with Indian accents.
I have actual experience in this and can say its not as you describe. Usually the onus is on the Indias to conform to the US work schedule. Yes accents are difficult at times but not an insurmountable hurdle. We never predicated our project schedules to anything going on in India. Thats a management problem in the US not some defect w/ the foreign workers.
The biggest problem Ive seen is lack of competence. There are VERY few that are truly technically excellent and even fewer who are motivated to excel. The later just isnt part of their culture. In the end it makes the end product iffy at best. That said, if you carefully manage whats going on the outcome can be OK.
In the end the problem of displaced domestic s/w engineers is home grown. Poor management is the root of it.
Absolutely spot-on analysis! I'm a senior-level engineer with a focus on Microsoft technologies, but I've been increasingly called upon to perform networking, storage, and Linux roles, proving that the "Swiss Army knife" approach is the best way to stay employed in IT. I may be working on my Microsoft certifications, but I know my way around a Catalyst switch and a Bash script as well.
That said, I feel like many of these outsourced IT people are less skilled than their counterparts. Many contracting agencies have formed skillset libraries where resources can print out cheat sheets for common troubleshooting of technologies they might have to support. The reality is that most agencies are shelling out a lot more for extended support with Microsoft, Cisco, and Red Hat while the contracting agencies are raking in big bucks for these cheap laborers who don't actually know anything about the systems they support.