Can you believe it's been a whole decade since CIOs began offshore outsourcing? Small bits of development work went overseas before then, but the practice didn't really pick up until CIOs found themselves short-handed on Y2K code fixes. From that point on, it exploded.
Happy with the work done on Y2K code in India and elsewhere, many CIOs again looked offshore when the economy tanked and they were forced to cut IT budgets. That hit the U.S. IT workforce hard, and IT unemployment shot up above 5.5% in 2003. (But the good news is it didn't kill the U.S. IT job. IT employment rose 6% from a year ago to reach 3.68 million employed this year, more than any other this decade, according to the most-recent Bureau of Labor Statistics employment survey. IT unemployment was just 2%.)
