hyphz wrote: Sooner or later the firms will realise that their own home markets can't afford to buy their products (because without jobs they don't have the money to pay)
Heh - I've been pondering this exact point for a while now. We are outsourcing more and more coding work to India and Bulgaria, keeping only the architectural/management roles in the UK. Architects don't appear out of thin air - they develop from training and years of experience in a developer role. At some point all the Architects die out and there is nobody to replace them. Of course there are the coders in India... who will become architects the moment they clue up and have enough experience, enter the country and put any existing architects out of the market by undercutting them.
For the IT industry in the UK this is a complete death knell if followed to its conclusion.
And of course these developers in India will have to be managed, and naturally this will require team leaders and low level managers on the spot in India to deal with them. Only the high-level managers will be in the UK, the vision that they come straight from university into a high powered management job. Of course, if they falter then I'm sure there will be plenty of experienced low-level managers in India waiting to grow into their shoes...
Mind you this will never happen. If a British company makes Widgets in a factory in the Far East, with a call centre in India, using call centre software developed in India, then it won't take Shareholders long to realise and demand that the whole company outsource! After all, minus funding and revenue, everything else is just cost and should be reduced.
Everyone in the UK will be either independently wealthy (and therefore likely a shareholder causing all this to happen), or in the services business (i.e. waiters, cleaners, etc).
Of course this is a very extreme and bleak view
In practice, this is just one of those stupid management fads that will crash and burn. At my workplace we've already found that you can't outsource software development without it being full of bugs and not meeting requirements. Architects are working long hours recoding and fixing things in order to let management think the whole process is working. Of course, we'll develop formal specification procedures, to try and get roughly what we want. Documents will become larger and more elaborate, pinning all the details down before you can start. You can throw any pretensions to RAD out of the window. Eventually it will become obvious that you can't develop software quickly and relatively bug free without lots of communication. You then bring the whole development team back in-house, probably bringing a few of the India developers in with you. Meanwhile you've kickstarted a whole software development industry in India, so expect to see some innovative new products and companies in a bout a year....
In Oz, the gov'ment keeps telling us how vibrant and healthy the IT industry is, but on the ground it doesn't appear that way at all. I consider myself pretty lucky. I am working for a large manufacturing co. managing their Intra- and Internet. However it is all project management and the "real" work is outsourced, so my background in Internet Publishing & Multimedia is helpful but I suspect a business/management degree would be a better qualification. (Which is why I am doing a crappy MBA at present 
).
. It just wouldn't work.
