Outsourcing fears exaggerated

A Newsweek/MSNBC article discusses the evolving relationship between US and Indian Tech Companies. The article states, "Americans once feared their jobs would be shipped to India, but the backlash was overdone. Now everybody's winning."

More from the article:

What happened to the outsourcing backlash? It has been muted by the fact that India didn't suck Silicon Valley dry after all. Actually, U.S. tech employment is growing. There are 17 percent more tech workers in the United States today than back in the bubble days of 1999, says a new study by the Association for Computing Machinery. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that the U.S. economy will add 1 million tech jobs over the next decade, a 30 percent increase. "Everyone was worried about the offshoring bogeyman," says Moshe Vardi, an author of the ACM study. "But the big whoosh of jobs to India never happened.'' Indeed, that gush slowed to a steady stream once American companies realized it's tough to set up shop in a country with bad roads and a patchy power grid. Lately, American consulting firms that once predicted runaway growth in outsourcing to India have been slashing their estimates by half or more. Now American companies are hanging on to the high-skilled work that requires face-to-face interaction, while everything that can be done "over the wire" gets shipped offshore.

Those involved in the IT field in the USA, especially those involved in education cannot repeat such reports enough. There seems to be the misperception among some that IT is not a viable career choice for students. This reports and others show a very different picture. What was especially striking to me is the report that there are "17 percent more tech workers in the United States today than back in the bubble days of 1999". To be sure, offshoring is a reality, but it is not the whole picture, and the IT job market in the USA is looking more and more promising...