Living in Seattle, I meet a lot of people in the software industry. Of course there are a lot of Microsofties around, but there is also Boeing and a number of other companies that have been built around the two local behemoths and the Internet. Anyway, I frequently hear concern from my technical brethren about the effect that offshore outsourcing will have on their (and my own) careers.

I have generally taken the point of view that offshore outsourcing will take jobs away, but that the kinds of jobs that are taken will be specialized. For instance, large development projects can be outsourced with a healthy margin in cost savings, but as you decrease the size of a development project, the overhead of offshoring starts to cut into the margin. Ultimately, this leaves plenty of healthy opportunities in the domestic software market.

However, there are other ways to look at the situation. When looked at from a different vantage point the effects of offshore outsourcing can be seen as very positive for the U.S. economy.

People in the US are looking at it as a job issue. They are not economists and therefore, they don’t necessarily see the whole picture. What’s going to happen is that offshoring is actually going to benefit US businesses even more than India [The Economic Times].

I think this is exactly right. Our focus on these types of problems is so narrow. It is really hard for human beings to truly appreciate the full interaction in connected networks like the world economy. As such, we are very poor at predicting the outcomes. Instead, we see "software development jobs lost to India" when we should see "U.S. companies save billions of dollars on software investment and invest that capital on economic growth." This can only be a good thing for the U.S. and will ultimately create more jobs than it displaces. 6:06:59 PM    comment []  

Doc Searls and David Weinberger on the ten mistakes we can stop making with regards to the Internet [World of Ends]. 5:38:44 PM    comment []