Offshore Lore Revisited

About a year ago I surmised that the impulse to send tech jobs to ostensibly cheaper offshore locales contained a strong streak of corporate boardroom faddishness. Looks like reality is now beginning to intrude on the fad.

Companies are discovering that the promised cost savings are just not there. A survey of corporate IT types by DiamondCluster International found that over one-fifth had stopped outsourcing projects before completion. The outsourced work often disappoints as the depth of foreign technical expertise does not yet match that of U.S. workers.

"My experience with offshore outsourcing is that you can pay very little for a large quantity of unusable code," one CIO tells CRMBuyer.

Plus stacked against the benefit of lower salaries for offshore workers are the added costs associated with time-zone and language differences. Toss in cultural differences—suffice it to say no other workers in the world are as blunt and direct as Americans—and perceived cost savings can melt away.

Offshoring is not going away. But all the jobs are not going to Hyderabad either.