A passage to India Pitfalls that the outsourcing vendor forgot to mention MARK KOBAYASHI-HILLARY, OFFSHORE ADVISORY SERVICES Most American IT employees take a dim view of offshore outsourcing. It’s considered unpatriotic and it drains valuable intellectual capital and jobs from the United States to destinations such as India or China. Online discussion forums on sites such as isyourjobgoingoffshore.com are headlined with titles such as “How will you cope?” and “Is your career in danger?” A cover story in BusinessWeek magazine a couple of years ago summed up the angst most people suffer when faced with offshoring: “Is your job next?” This article, however, is not designed to make the economic case for or against offshore outsourcing. Economists across the world are debating this issue and producing evidence on both sides of the macro-economic fence. What cannot be disputed is that the American IT industry is changing. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1983, computer programmers accounted for 62 percent of all IT jobs in the U.S. with the remainder being computer engineers, analysts, and scientists. By 2002 this ratio had almost reversed, with programmers accounting for just 26 percent of IT jobs.