For a while, it seemed that employers were more excited about outsourcing IT labor than kids ever were about Beanie Babies. This would obviously concern all non-management IT workers, especially programmers, who were probably the most highly-outsourced labor of all. Thankfully, the seemingly unstoppable tide is waning.

Check out the article: IT Labor Boomerangs Back Home.

Certainly, it has to be acknowledged that any form of outsourcing incurs additional costs, so the cost savings are never as high as they are predicted. Combine this with the numerous hurdles of offshore outsourcing and you’re saving nothing.

According to the eWeek article linked above, just such a conclusion has been reached by many large companies who had initially decided to offshore outsource and have since retracted and brought the work back home at supposedly a higher cost. They are willing to do this because the supposedly higher cost is all up front in contrast with the hidden costs of offshoring.

Unfortunately, this kind of thing happens when appreciation is lost for a particular skill or line of work. Many companies do not appreciate how involved many positions in the Information Technology industry are, concluding that they can be mindlessly outsourced. IT is not about typing in some information, hitting the “Compute” button, and waiting for the computer to spit out the product. A great deal of sophistication and mind-numbing detail goes into most industry-level computer work. So until such a “Push in the reqs, crank the lever, and spit out a widget” system is created, I would hope that local employment will always be available for us programmers.