If offshore outsourcing is causing U.S. IT employment (as some claim), then why did the Yoh Index of Technology Wages report released today (http://news.yahoo.com/s/zd/20060206/tc_zd/170810) find that "Hourly wages for tech professionals hit a record high during the fourth quarter of 2005"? Obviously there is more here than meets the eye.
The report goes on to say that "since the fourth quarter of 2001, wages for high-impact technology professionals have risen nearly 11 percent". This provides even more backing to what I've said in this forum before. The main cause of the tech bubble bursting and the unemployment in IT from 2001-2004 was caused by the excesses of irrational overinvestment by Wall Street and venture capitalists. Offshore outsourcing was scapegoated as the reason becuase it was much easier to understand and pushed more emotional buttons. But this thin rationale is showing more and more holes by the day.
Outsourcing did cause some jobs to be lost (mostly heads down programming jobs). And as we've seen from the U.S. job data in earlier postings, it also caused even more higher paying management jobs to be created in the U.S. The data shows that the U.S. is stronger becuase of outsourcing, not weaker.
But what kind of boring newspaper headline would that make?