How do you spell "irony?" "I-N-D-I-A..."

Indian workers are protesting against a so-called injustice I and many of my fellow IT-ers (current and former) are quite familiar with: outsourcing.  Reading the article it appears they are concerned at the moment about plans for India's national reserve bank to outsource IT needs to a private company, not necessarily out of the country, but its also clear from rising salaries across the board in India that moving IT work out of the country to somewhere that still wears the title for "crappy third-world country."

I've been predicting this ever since the outsourcing trend started taking hold here.  Its a fad, mainly; many companies outsourcing IT and development work are finding the quality of the work produced to be less than adequate, poorly documented, hard to maintain, and that managing teams on opposite sides of the world--and the clock--is a dicey proposition at best.  More than a few companies are finding it to be a workable solution at least in part to a tight budget, but just as many are bringing work back home from what they consider to be a failed experiment.

For those companies that do find it to be a workable proposition, a new problem is arising.  India's software economy has been undergoing the same sort of rapid growth and change that the US economy did during the dot-com boom of the 90's.  So many companies are looking for new talent that salaries have risen far out of proportion to the rest of the economy.  As a result, the economic benefits of moving operations to India is rapidly dwindling, and companies are looking for new ground to take over India's spot. 

I have to confess I read about new developments in this area with a certain degree of glee, not unlike a high school geek who's watched his mousy girlfriend blossom into a supermodel only to be left holding the bag while she runs off with the high school quarterback before prom and shows up at the reunion ten years later forty pounds overweight with a passel of kids in tow, married to an unemployed Al Bundy-wannabe whose greatest accomplishment was the Hail Mary pass that won the regional championships his senior year.  I never lost a job directly to outsourcing, though I did have enough trouble finding work because of it that I switched careers altogether, returning to school to finish the bachelor's I abandoned during the dot-com years with the intent to go into medicine. (Its hard to outsource sticking a needle in someone.)  The jury's still out on that move--nobody drags a four-year degree out like I do--but in the meantime there's enough work coming back stateside that I'm considering a full-time return to the workforce to pay the bills in the meantime.

Take heart, my Indian brothers.  This too shall pass.