The mostly arrogant, largely charmless quotes in the March 7 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle from various Silicon Valley CEOs regarding the new offshoring phenomenon may be in part framing the question of offshoring as either a completely good thing or a completely bad thing.
In fact, most of the current offshoring is not offshoring at all, but rather simply international hiring. True offshoring, seen widely in the clothing industry as an example, entails sub-contracting to legions of local companies who may or may not pay good wages, may or may not provide humane working conditions, may or may not exploit child labor, etc.
Silicon Valley companies seem to be more enlightened in that they are creating real company jobs with good wages and benefits by local standards. So, a Cisco employee in India, for example, may make far less than his or her fellow employee in San Jose, but as I read it, is still a true Cisco employee nonetheless.
If this is not the case, then shame on me for being duped and shame on companies who are, in fact, exploiters.
Beyond that distinction, though, it is difficult to appreciate CEO-level comments that are focused merely on price and shareholder value. The slightly ungrammatical common wisdom, "you get what you pay for," will no doubt win out in the long run. Today's glib statement that "getting great talent at 20 percent of the costs...is about doing what's right to have a good company" may well turn into tomorrow's sorrowful lesson that doing what's right for the company usually means doing what's right in pursuing the best of the great talent, even if that talent comes at a premium.
I also find it hard to believe that management at today's Silicon Valley companies, which often seem fixated on an almost mindless command-and-control, "stay on message" mentality, will find it easy or profitable to manage a workforce that is halfway around the globe in countries far different from the U.S.
International hiring in the past was usually focused on serving local customers in regions outside the U.S. But the vision behind today's offshoring is not that of setting up international offices to handle business in those localities. Rather, its odd insistence is that core operations, once reserved for headquarters, will now somehow magically be improved dramatically with a Mephistophelian trade-off between wages and location.
The idea of creating great employment opportunities in countries that are trying to hop on the economic up-escalator is appealing to the libertarian, globalization mindset common to Silicon Valley. OK, I'm in agreement with that. But, I would encourage top management to think things through thoroughly, examine all the parameters before fully embracing the offshoring fad, and remember that their companies were hardly built by them alone, but by the highly skilled, hard-driving workforce that has made Silicon Valley, not Bangalore or Shenzhen, the world's technology leader.
Pursue a mass movement of jobs to other countries to aggressively, too coldly, too unwittingly unconscious of what made your company great in the first place, and you may find that CEO jobs are fungible, too!
8:34:32 PM 
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