Should you be afraid of off-shore outsourcing?

I found this article via SlashDot. It's rather long, but Gina Poole, IBM Vice President of Innovation and University Relations (no kidding!), has some interesting things to say.

I'm not sure the decline in university degrees in computer science represents a negative trend. We really don't need a bunch of marginal performers in the market. True, having fewer new candidates seems to suggest a shortage, but if the quality of newly degreed geeks is higher, then I would be hard-pressed to say there is a problem.

Off-shore outsourcing is a pendulum that will swing both ways. If it works fantastically, which I doubt, then some US geeks will find it hard to get and keep their jobs. OK, that's bad for some borderline techies. They have to work at CompUSA, instead. But more realistically off-shoring IT won't work as well as keeping it local, so in time the pendulum will swing back and there will be less of a fenzy to hire Indian firms to write our mission-critical applications. Instead it will be IT executives out of work, but the net effect is the same.

The key to combatting this "threat" is to make sure you are in a position to offer something of value. That is, don't be a cog. Do something. Contribute. Innovate (yes, there's that word again). If you're just an order taker, then they will find someone else to do it less expensively.