[Myrddin]

Many companies rushed to outsource to improve the bottom line. The common procedure was to bring in the new outsource team and threaten the current employees. Train your replacement or you won't get your severance. Nice approach. The forced training of a replacement was an unanticipated and unwelcome mandate. The quality of the knowledge transfer was predictably poor.

Companies that realize they have made a major mistake are screwed. They have an inept outsourced team and they have fired their U.S. based employees. No fallback.

Companies that crap on their employees for the sake of improving the bottom line deserve the consequences of a failed outsourcing program. Their former employees owe them no allegiance.

There will be plenty of opportunities to cobble up new businesses in the U.S. to rescue failed outsourcing attempts. Just imagine the joy of digging into code written by people with a limited profiency in English, little or no experience in software engineering and a big ego after graduation with a CS degree.

[frankenMonkey]

Many companies rushed to outsource to improve the bottom line

I've been in the biz for 20+ years, and my take is that the rush to outsource is just another knee-jerk reaction from "CIOs" that have no technical/development/deployment experience. They constantly chase the latest "buzzword" hoping to demonstrate their relevance. As a group, they deserve to be outsourced to the unemployment line.

As an aside, I knew a CIO that, upon reading about "code generators" in some airline magazine, thought we could get rid of all of our software engineers.