I see outsourcing as a...
Several things I've learned being in the SAP space:
1. Development is generally outsourced on most projects, and the majority of the time, the effort is mismanaged, unclear, unorganized and steeped in errors.
2. Service level agreements are not designed or defined in clear and concise manner over 50% of the time.
3. The major emphasis is on cost savings. Companies delude themselves constantly by thinking they'll see cost savings, but this is too frequently not the case. Companies refuse to do any homework on this by researching companies that chose to outsource to save, but instead backfired and resulted in wasted time and having to constantly tune and fine tune their offshoring effort. The saying, you get what you pay for, holds true here.
4. India is enjoying a renaissance and major boom to their economy brought on by IT and I think this is wonderful. India has a huge over population and massive poverty and broken infrastructure, but it also has a massively huge braintrust. Tons of educated people to supply to willing companies in the US. The impact to US IT professionals is, to a very, very large extent, at our expense.
5. We have already given away our technological edge. US companies are the ones doing it though the "IT Giveaway Program," with the H1-B visa allotments, but that's small taters. The real abuse is through the intracompany L1 visas that large US companies use to the hilt! There are no limits to those numbers, whilst there are caps placed on H1-B visas. They're not abusing it, because it's perfectly legal. It should be cut while our economy is sluggish though.
6. Politicians turn a deaf ear to us (complainers) while immigration law and business lobbies in Washington, DC exchange dollars by filling coffers for political campaigns.
An immigration attorney asked me one time, "What's the matter with you? Do you have something against a person coming here to the US to make life better for themselves and their families? My response was, "Well, yes, I suppose I do. If it's at the expense of taking jobs away from Americans at a time when the economy is way, way down, making them train their offshore replacements (or no severance), company leaders in the US telling congress that there are not enough educated IT workers (which is bull crap), well, yes, I think American workers should get the benefit of the doubt, don't you?" I'll discuss his response another time.
There should be a rule/law that says, ok, if you want to displace US IT workers for offshore workers because it's cheaper, then all the folks in the corporate suite will be required to give up their incomes by 90%. Why 90%? I think it's a fair trade for taking away a bunch of family incomes completely, don't you?
