Ian - sorry to hear about troubles

Vince - nope, its not b/c they (management) weighted price implication on final product. I seen that over past few years few times, and its NEVER about how much it will cost to final customer. Its all about - how much we can charge those suckers while paying as little as possible to our workers. And what can be cheaper than shoving shit off to some oversea country with very low salary?

Allow me to roll things back in time a little bit. Living back then in Russia, I used to work for Sun back in 90th, when Sun was nearly pioneering outsorcing of IT (except for Motorolla & Ireland, but its different story), and entire thing was supervised PERSONALLY by former Secretary of Defense, whatever his name was , in father Bush administration. We been paid beans in comparition to what guys being earning here, but eventually salaries did grow to certain level, where it was darn competitive, as more and more companies started to flow in, searching for good brains and cheap labor. Demand defined certain level, where it wasnt as cheap anymore. So eyes were moving to Israel, but then nearly 60% income tax (yeah and we are whining about taxes here... but then Russian has fixed 13% ) forced them away, and then to India...

Then end of 90th and 2000 - $hit hit the fan, and all hell broke loose. Whoever was in IT by that time can remember TONS (literally) of chineese and indian "programmers" that all the sudden flooded market with their fake or very poorly baked BA in CS. To much of my disgust there been certain portion of russians who were after those "easy" money too. At that time i was here and i had to work with certain numbers of them - was fucking horrible. Net admins who had no freakin idea what they doing, programmers that cant think behind textbooks or not aware about very trivial algorithms and principles.. But there was overblown demand, and so salaries were skyrocketing (friend of mine, really good sysadmin used to make 200+K/year on his contracts back then), and management did increase their salaries as well to not allow simple workers to get more than..

Then bubble bursted. First wave of flushing took some of good people, but mostly took lots of garbage with it (our company was employing then, and i had to review some of resumes and do some of hiring inteviews.. So i know what it did look like - yickes). Then second and third waves - money didnt flow in much, contracts were tight, but most of big cheeses tried to keep their salaries on same level (and still do) but removing workforce instead.

Then idea of outsorcing came in play again, and of course "someone know someone who had positive experience with outsourcing it to India" - and all the hell broke loose. In my company - we had that lovely experience back in 2000, so we know better now, but lots of "management" out there still see it as valid business solution to keep overblown salaries for themselves and hire 100 people in Kalkutta to make job as 10 people will do here. But it doesnt work that way - there must be some good companies there, but i seen only ones that SUCK big time.

So hang on there, guys. My believe is that in the end of current financial year most of companies will go back to hiring local people and small software companies, as they will count losses from that "smart" outsourcing.