The offshoring debate is dominated by numbers with 500 IT jobs having moved to India and salaries becoming 75% lower. Thousands of high-quality graduates come onto the market every year and a 75% reduction to the salary bill for 500 people is a lot of money. Managers have a duty to their company's owners to explore such cost savings because our pension funds depend on it but the headline figures don't tell the whole story.
Here are some considerations that the debate often skims over. Offshoring creates jobs - Take a ten person team (say a project manager, architect and eight developers) and ship them to India and the odds are that you need at least two or three people onshore to support them; You need an onshore project manager to co-ordinate requirements gathering and acceptance testing and someone technical to help introduce the systems to the users' environment such as a business analyst.
