Here's a talk I'm seeing at a lot of conferences - something to address the widespread worry about offshoring of IT sector jobs. Personally, I'm skeptical of governmental programs to "address" the "problem" - this is nothing new. Take textiles, for instance. Between the 18th and 21st century, that industry moved from France to the UK, on to New England, then off to the US south, on to Latin America, and now to Asia. In all that time, there have always been high value textile jobs in all the "losing" areas.

I also wonder about the supposed gap between comp sci graduates and the job market; in general, the market tends to solve those problems by itself. Put another way, I'm wary of solutions that chase ill defined problems. The bottom line is, costs in the IT sector are dropping inexorably, as they have in other industries that have globalized. There's no way to get around the existance of highly trained, rapidly industrializing populations in places like India, China (etc).

Also, I wonder if one of the problems isn't the uptick in demand for credentials before hiring into a development position. When I got into the business in the late 80's, it was quite common for people to get into software development who did not have software related degrees. I certainly didn't; most of the people who worked where I first worked didn't have software degrees either. Good comment from a professor in the room on this: no one has a shared understanding of the term "software engineering", if you go across university departments, industry, etc.

Here's a good consensus - the difficulty arises in attempting to have developers over there (wherever the offshoring location is) and the managers here (US, UK, wherever). The difficulty is that there are communication difficulties that add huge overhead to such projects. Project management in general is bad in the software field; adding a large communication disruption into that already poor discipline just makes things worse. IMHO, the companies that ought to worry are software development firms (like Microsoft), who will, over time, find that new firms in India (etc) will be at least as effective as they are, but with lower costs. The company that isn't actually in IT, but has IT needs won't be nearly as impacted.