Offshore Outsourcing -- Trends and Fallout: Part I

by Ed Yourdon

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that offshore outsourcing is the hot new thing in North American and Western European business organizations. Actually, it's not all that new -- at least not in the IT field: since the late 1980s, if not earlier, American, British, and German companies have been outsourcing some development and maintenance projects to India and other low-cost countries. Indeed, after my first visit to India in 1989, I found the situation so significant that I hustled home and wrote Decline and Fall of the American Programmer. As the IT industry boomed throughout the 1990s, critics delighted in calling me thickheaded and flat-out wrong, but now it appears that my predictions were simply premature.