Blue collar jobs have been moved to offshore with a little uproar, and offshoring of white collar jobs in IT have received not much fret publically either. Clearly, common folks are losers and multinational companies are winners in this deal. The only slight consolation in all this is that may be third world countries can use this to help boost their living standards and undo brain drain that has been effecting them.
Nevertheless, IT professionals are paying for this and will continually pay. It resulted in not only loss of jobs, but the overall working environment in most organizations has become pretty bad with long hours and a little pay. Many consulting companies are resorting to sweatshop mentality of offshore companies because they think that is the only way they can compete. Smart engineers are betting on innovative technologies that can boost their productivities such as Lisp, Ruby or Smalltalk and using agile methodologies that focus on test-driven incremental delivery and meets customer’s expectations. But that only give you so much headstart because offshore companies will catchup. It’s true that most offshore work is grunt work than innovative, but that will change also. The only advantage companies can have is to hire real good people who are 100x times more productive and that may give them some breathing room. Many studies show that onsite person is at least twice as productive as offshore. However, in most companies decisions are made by suits, who think they cannot miss offshore train and trend will continue in that direction.