> [The boss] wrote that the "
post ascii, dammit !-)
> tremendous challenge" the information technology sector faces from
> inexpensive offshore competition, centered in, but not limited to
> India, makes it "impossible" to ignore the trend. The company - an
> IT consulting firm of some size - "must develop a response."
<snip>
> The response in the works is an "onshore alternative" to the
> "offshore challenge". <snip> Turns out that the master plan is to do
> two things:
> One.) Import H1-B visa talent from India and pay them low, low
> wages.
> Two.) Form partnerships with Indian software services firms so labor
> intensive work requiring many programmers will be outsourced to
> them.
Is this "response" a Trojan? (horse, that is :-)
The myth of offshoring is that electronic communications (from videoconferencing to email) obsoletes facetime. The reality is that ya gotta have meat on site for all but the most {trivial, completely spec-able} projects, esp when coder and customer vary significantly in culture or communication style. That's why employers fight so hard to get no/high technical visa quotas--it allows them to (optimally) cycle offshore personnel into customer space, or at least to have members of the same team on both ends of the electronic link.
Onshoring members of the offshore team also allows one to train one's replacement at minimal cost to one's (soon-to-be-former) employer.
Test this hypothesis by (the tricky part) determining, for each "imported talent"
* is s/he a member of an offshore partnership?
* what proportion of his/her time is spent receiving transfer of
skills from "local talent"?
> The folks who come here on visas will be forced by economic
> necessity to live in [cramped] conditions, work absurd hours and
> hope against hope that their employer will not weary of them.
And the mass of the self-described-left business observers on this list will continue to deprecate the problem. (Due, I suspect, to a tendency to equate opposition to labor importation with racism.) This will fortunately assist in maintaining the electoral powerlessness which several other list members seem to regard as a badge of honor, an irrelevance, or both.