U.S. Programmers at Overseas Salaries

BW Online | December 2, 2003: "Rather than send IT work to India, a Boston startup sought locals at the same money. The result: plenty of applicants -- and a lot of questions

It's the great unanswered business-economic question of our day: How do we replace the hundreds of thousands of information-technology, call-center, paralegal, and other jobs rapidly exiting the U.S. for India, Russia, and other low-wage countries? The main answer that the so-called experts put forth, without a lot of conviction, is that we'll create new 'high-value' jobs to replace those leaving the U.S. What are those jobs? No one seems to know.

In the meantime, the matter of overseas subcontracting appears to have become open-and-shut. If you're an executive with half a brain, you can come to only one conclusion when tallying the differences in costs between hiring computer programmers in the U.S., vs. India or Russia. These days, the jobs are going to Indians and Russians. "