Today I made a day trip to Bern which is the capital of Switzerland. It is smaller than Zurich, though. I met a company colleague there and he guided me through sights of that nice city. We also had chats about every day life, IT and so on. One thing got my attention while we were talking about how there is a lot of discussion about moving jobs to China and India.

His opinion was that it isn't that big issue in Switzerland because swiss companies somehow favor companies using swiss labor. Also the real benefits of outsourcing have turned out to be marginal. I think there are maybe two different motivators to move IT-development to developing country. First is the cost saving and the other one is lack of skilled people in domestic labor market.

The lower cost of software development is not really as simple matter as it seems. Skilled professionals know their value and when there is demand for such skills salaries tend to raise. Naturally it takes time to catch up but this affects anyways. Language, culture and working style differences are affecting as well being physically far away. Setting up an ad-hoc meeting is impossible so details need to be specified beforehand. However, several companies are investing on this and apparently some of them are getting some extra under the line because of this.

But I haven't seen too many articles describing how offsourcing has changed life in the target country. Even though the salary is low in wester scale but it is way above average there. It also brings a lot of know-how. I am rather curious to see what is the role of South-America and Africa in this offsourcing.

For example, Kenya is taking action to improve its Internet connection. Setting up an industrial factory takes years and requires plenty of capital. However, developing software is totally different. Workstations are cheap, it is possible to use free software tools and it requires some bright minds with education. I have no clue what is the potential hiding there as Africa is not just one war ridden, hungry and AIDS carrying country. Maybe offsourcing is something that helps to improve life there.