Global outsourcing has caused great concern among American jobseekers and jobholders alike. Many major American corporations have begun to outsource their work to "offshore facilities," meaning offices in foreign countries like India. While the trend seems to be continuing strong, there remains a place for the well-trained IT person.

"A company could outsource to India or where-have-you, to get about the same IT job done for a much, much cheaper price," says Moncarz. Experts say that one American employee can cost five times as much as a trained employee in India, and consulting costs can be cut by three quarters by using Indian consultant companies.

In 2000, General Electric's CEO, Jack Welsh, announced that GE would outsource 70 percent of its work, and that 70 percent of that work would go to offshore facilities. The sluggish economy has caused major hirers of IT, like Internet and electronics companies, to outsource to other countries since then.

The number of companies outsourcing offshore is not known, because many companies are reluctant to admit the practice. However, according to the ITAA's latest study, 22% of the large IT companies surveyed admitted moving work overseas. This is three times the number of non-IT companies that admitted moving work overseas.

Dell Computer, Texas Instruments, Philips, Hewlett-Packard, and Bank of America have sent key functions, research, and engineering jobs to India. Companies like IBM and Intel have been outsourcing to India for decades. Microsoft's Senior Vice-President, Brian Valentine, urged department heads to hire offshore in a summer 2002 presentation. And, in November 2002, founder and chairman Bill Gates announced that Microsoft would invest $400 million over the next three years to expand its activities in India.

Many South Asian countries have a low-cost of living, low salaries by American standards (e.g. $5,000 for a starting IT engineering salary in India), and an explosion of Asian college graduates (e.g. the Philippines, which produces 380,000 college grads each year). These factors have begun to reduce American IT salaries and entice more U.S. companies to continue the offshore outsourcing trend. Forrester Research predicts that at least 3.3 million white-collar jobs and $136 billion in domestic salaries will be lost to lower-cost countries by 2015.

Backlash has begun against the perceived outsourcing of American jobs. In December 2002, the New Jersey Senate unanimously passed a state bill that would bar all government contracts from being outsourced to foreign countries or workers. Connecticut, Maryland, Missouri, and Wisconsin have been considering similar bills. Groups like the ITAA have been against such bills, fearing that they may be anti-trade in nature.

Another reason for backlash has been the problem of security. Many Americans are afraid of having their personal information being sent overseas, while piracy and viruses are already such a problem here in America.

Despite the outsourcing trend, excellent IT jobs for qualified American workers continue to exist. "I've been hearing for over 10 years that programming is going to become a minimum wage job, because there are all these people in India who are willing to work for nothing. And I haven't seen it happen," says Johnson. "And I think the reason is that, to be good and effective in a company, you need to have domain knowledge. There just aren't that many pure programming jobs. You need to know who the customers are, and you need to be able to adapt what you're doing for the customers. If you get into a situation where you have a pure programming job, then shipping [the work] off to India is a fine thing I guess. But, I haven't run into very many pure programming jobs."