> Matt wrote:
>
> > Management realized that there is a
> >difference between the quality of work coming from India versus
> >in-house talent.
>
> Hmm, why should Indians be any less able to do good work than
> native-born Americans?
>
> Doug
Because the capital is not as easy to move as people think it is. For a technology that is supposed to allow things to spread out, there is an awful lot of geographic consolidation. For example 111 Eighth Avenue is where a massive chunk of New York City's Internet (TCP/IP) connections flow through. There's not just consolidation to Manhattan in the tri-state area, there's consolidation to ONE BUILDING in the tri-state area. It's a special building (a block long, power generator on the roof, floors can handle several tons of weight) and has been carrying this sort of data load for a long time, mostly x.25 connections before the 1990's. If you go out to the San Francisco Bay area, it seems like much of the data connections run along Kifer Road in Sunnyvale. And things are even more consolidated for the equipment of the Baby Bells. If it's a problem to make connections cross-town in Manhattan, the problems of going to Bombay are even more so. If this wasn't the case, these jobs would have already moved, and the employers wouldn't have lobbied to have 195,000 workers on H1-B visas come into the US (the bill to raise that cap originally co-sponsored by Kerry and Lieberman).
As some people here said, a lot of outsourcing moves have backfired. When I worked on Wall Street, I purposely sabotaged operations that they began out-sourcing to India, to decent effect. Not that they needed much of that, a lot of what they were doing was ill-fated to begin with. I suspect call centers and the like will be outsourced, followed by certain types of programming. They're slowly building up the capital infrastructure over there and jobs will move over there with that, with them bringing labor into the US in the meantime.
I should also note that there really is not much of an IT workers association that is doing data collection and printing reports on how bad things are. More likely is well-funded employer organizations like the ITAA who see a perpetual labor shortage (and who are now saying the turnaround is right around the corner - they're almost like a joke out of old Wobbly cartoons). There was a report a few months ago that IT wages had fallen for the first time in a decade however.
Lance