I, Cringely | Body Count: Why Moving to India Won't Really Help IT

I, Cringely | Body Count: Why Moving to India Won't Really Help IT "There was a story in the news a couple weeks ago about how IBM was planning to move thousands -- perhaps tens of thousands -- of technical positions to India. This isn't just IBM, though. Nearly every big company that is in the IT outsourcing or software development business is doing or getting ready to do the same thing. They call this "offshoring," and its goal is to save a lot of money for the companies involved because India is a very cheap place to do business. And it will accomplish that objective for awhile. In the long run, though, IT is going to have the same problems in India that it has here. The only real result of all this job-shifting will be tens of thousands of older engineers in the U.S. who will find themselves working at Home Depot. You see, "offshoring" is another word for age discrimination."

Read Ed Yourdon's 1996 Rise & Resurrection of the American Programmer for useful background in this context. I think Yourdon was about a decade ahead of his time, just as he was in his 1993 Decline and Fall of the American Programmer