REPORT SAYS OUTSOURCING FEARS EXAGGERATED
A new report from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) argues that fears of a wholesale migration of high-tech jobs away from the United States are not supported by the data so far. Representing a year's work by a study group, the report predicts continued offshoring of 2 to 3 percent of IT jobs each year for the next decade, but it notes that the number of high-tech jobs continues to grow and already exceeds the number at the height of the dot-com boom. Although the report acknowledges losses to lower-wage markets and notes that the marketplace for technology is tightening, "the notion that information technology jobs are disappearing is just nonsense," according to Moshe Vardi, computer scientist at Rice University and cochair of the study group. David Patterson, president of the ACM and computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said that exaggerated fears of outsourcing have hurt the U.S. market by discouraging college students from pursuing careers in IT, which, in turn, will lead to fewer qualified members of the U.S. IT workforce.
New York Times, 23 February 2006 (registration req'd)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/23/technology/23outsource.html
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