its interesting, during the boom years there were so many people jumping on the bandwagon and frankly earning far more than they were really worth based on what they were producing. you can have all sorts of technical skills and knowledge but if you cant make useful things and sell them and make money then you arent in business. when the crash came, so many incompetent people lost their jobs. people like me didnt. i wasnt the smartest or the best technically: i just made good products in a decent timeframe and people paid for them. simple.
from the experience with my current organisation, foreign outsourcing (to india in this case) isnt the best solution to every problem, its only certain kinds of work that is worth farming out to them and there is substantial local skills and jobs needed to help run these projects as well.
the fact is, if the people who were working all around me several years back in the good times were actually delivering value for money to their clients and customers then we wouldnt be in this situation. information technology failed business in a general sense (though many still are in denial about it) and this is the result. IT is only there to support business and our other endevours. we should never make the mistake of thinking we are more important than the people our technology enables.
I recently lost my job and have a contract to do some sales recruiting, it is a technical product that we sell. We are having a big problem finding candidates, in some markets there have been no candidates. I started asking around and this story is the same, there are lots of jobs out there, but not as many as in IT. There is a local company here offering 2 year employment contracts with full re-location, including a 2 year severance if things fall thru!
That said, people are very leery about just making a move. If they have a decent job, and feel somewhat secure, they are not even looking. I believe big business has hurt themselves with this slash and burn approach.
I'm not quite sure I follow the rational of your statement. My helpdesk has been the crown Jewel of EDS. Never ever ever missed a metric - not once. And have always rather beat them and usually quite handily. Great resolution rates, great first pass.. No matter what they have ever thrown at us - even when they were absolutely positive we couldn't do it, we've done it. Simply put, we are the US Marines of EDS - adapt and overcome. And I'm rather proud of that. The client and the company both thanked us by shafting us. EDS has softened the blow a little for which our local bosses and one fine lady that managed our account should be commended. Our account negotiator actually came in and apologized to us. I felt sorry for the guy because they put him in a position where he could not win - period. When he showed up, he looked like someone who could really use a friend.
Tall and short is, we produced a level of value that the customer was sure we couldn't day after day, year after year - always overcoming. The account has been broken into pieces to be moved a bit at a time to Mexico and it is a disaster of epic proportions in the making. Some of their support services for their core operations has been farmed out to Budapest (who'd have thought of that one). Their workers are constantly calling now saying the functional desk in Mexico isn't helping them, is dumping their responsibility, sometimes outright lying to the customer, etc. On top of that, I got my first call the other day that was sheer disgust and no hiding it. Lady called and had been left a message on her voicemail and she couldn't understand a single solitary word of it.
We aren't talking about delivering value for the money. They are just looking at the money. The value to them didn't matter. They sold out the star performer in EDS for third rate performance at slavery prices. Any way you cut it, they're cutting their throats and ours at the same time and they think they're doing something because they aren't spending as much. The one upside is that the guy that pushed our client and us into this position got fired a while back, though I don't think anyone's saying why. Based on what's happening - it wouldn't be too hard to guess.
I put my life in God's hands at this point. Cause I sure can't see where it's going. But I can see what's happening to my client and my company and I hate it for both of them. Even with the disloyalty they have shown me of late at the top end, I still find it hard to be disloyal to them. Somebody has to stand up and speak up or this crap will keep going on. This isn't about value, its about greed. They had value and dumped it in favor of slave labor in another land during wartime. I don't think one need say much more than that to the older generation who gets the weight of that. To some who are younger and see the workforce as pawns to do their bidding - people who don't have morals because they think morality is bad for business, they don't get it. But they understand backlash and are doing everything possible to blunt the blow of this in the public eye to save face. Companies who outsource now are hesitant to talk to tell the press the truth about it. And the funny thing is, EDS has opened up a branch specializing in "onshoring" now - to offer a solution to businesses burned by offshoring. How poetic is that.. lol. The upshot is that it still depresses the wages paid so that we get the jobs back; but, businesses are still using slave labor to set the standards here. Six of one, half a dozen of another - point and pick your poison it's all bad news.