IT pros aren’t, as a rule, knee-jerk opponents of offshore outsourcing. Some, for example, are earning their livings (or at least scraping by) as outsourcing contractors—in some cases, in near-shore locales, such as Canada. Others sanguinely embrace offshoring as a particularly challenging consequence of free trade—or wanly acquiesce to it as an ineluctable force of global capitalism.
The upshot, then, is that IT pros are surprisingly nuanced in their objections to, or support of, offshore outsourcing.
Even many offshore dissidents acknowledge that there’s sometimes a compelling economic case to be made in favor of offshoring, although they vigorously question its logic on other grounds. It doesn’t help, either, that outsourcing as a phenomenon—and offshore outsourcing, in particular—are linked in the public imagination with cost cutting, so much so that—rightly or wrongly—the desire to reduce costs is frequently cited as one of outsourcing’s most important drivers.
This has many IT pros crying foul.
