Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to re: don't worry about job loss.

10 percent?
McFly — (archived)

Gartner is predicting 25% of all IT jobs will be offshore by 2010.

Oh well. That's only 2 1/2 times as many.

RobVG's already alluded to another aspect of this whole thing: people who fill the IT jobs remaining here will undoubted have to seriously lower their expectations regarding compensation. Fewer jobs and lower pay will result in far fewer people looking to IT as a career, which in turn further diminishes the industry.

Programming is only one aspect of IT, but it takes years to become a truly competant coder (learning syntax is the easiest and most trivial part of the process). Why would a young person opt for that path if all there is at the end of the rainbow is a bucket of peanuts? Watch for Computer Science departments in universities nationwide to be dramatically scaled-back as enrollment plummets.

Some people say the IT jobs will return to the US after perhaps a decade or so, but I think that's nonsense because by then there won't be enough trained people here to do the work, and it'd take years to develop those people. It'll be easier for business to leave the jobs in India, even with rising expectations there. That's where the trained people will be.

People who are saying that offshoring is no big deal are pissing on our leg and then telling us it's raining.

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