Taxes

the various census reports in the early 90s based on the 1990 census indicated that the jobs were likely going in any case. I remember being in HK in the early 90s and reading a newspaper article that did somewhat of a compebreastive analysis of the ability of India in the outsourcing market vis-a-vis the Chinese province right across from HK.

Part of the early 90s reports said that half of all technical Phd graduates from cal. insbreastutions were foreign born and had some probability of returning home at some point in the future. What happened was the presence of all those foreign born technical experts helped sustain the internet boom that took off in the later half of 1990s. That boom created quite a strain on dataprocessing skill base.

It also happened to correspond with a major dataprocessing project bubble involving Y2K remediation of core legacy business processes. Since a lot of the dataprocessing skill base was being siphoned off to the internet boom, many corporations were forced into outsourcing the y2k remediation of their core business processes. At the time, a lot of industry viewed it as not very attractive career track ... since it had a specific end (and the internet explosion was obviously going to go on forever).

The issue was then that the internet boom faltered soon after the y2k remediation projects finished. You now had a bunch of internet gurus competing for jobs with people that had worked on y2k remediation ... and a lot of these jobs were buttociated with the long term core business processes (which had been around before the internet boom, around during the internet boom, and around long after the internet boom). Who had a lot of the skills to deal with these long term core business process systems? ... the companies in India and China that had earlier taken the Y2K remediation work (that lots of people weren't interested in). The business relationships built up as part of Y2k remediation projects (as well as skills acquired) served these outsourcing companies well afterwards (helping accelerate a lot of other outsourcing).

The other point made was that the half of the skill base that had contributed to making the internet boom possible (i.e. the foreign born technical experts) ... where now finding that returning home was starting to look a lot more attractive ... aka whole industry activities were moving out of the country.

In the early 90s when we were doing some technical recruiting at cal. univ., we were finding that the ONLY 4.0 students were from foreign born countries. In the mid-90s, I saw stories about a significant number of these foreign born students were on gov. scholorships (from their native country) and that they were expected to graduate (preferrably w-4.0), enter various critically identified industry jobs ... and after a period of 5-10 years ... return home, bringing skills back with them. I was told about some areas in major us corporations that had whole departments (in specific areas, one such cited was optics; aka optical computing, fiber-optics, lasers, etc) totally staffed by foreign born individuals that had been on (their native gov.) funded scholarships and expected to return home at some point.

I got bits and pieces recently of somebody reporting economic analysis (on Bloomberg?) that included some numbers about current engineers-technical graduates. The numbers that I believe were China was graduating something like 400,000, Russia was graudating something like 300,000 and US was graduating something like 20,000.

the issue for possibly at least the last 20 years wasn't if it would happen, but when. the compebreastion created by the internet boom and y2k remediation (happening concurrently) helped make it sooner rather than later (since companies were being force to ship y2k remediation work, for core business processes, overseas, in part because so much of the us computer skills were being siphoned off into the internet boom; this in turn laid in place the outsourcing business relationships ... that would normally have taken much longer to evolve).

past postings commenting about outsourcing y2k remediation work laying much of the business groundwork for continuing outsourcing activity.

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