Guess Who's Hiring in America

A recent Business Week article, Guess Who's Hiring in America, (in June 25, 2007 edition, pg 47) notes that Infosys and other Indian companies are cutting costs by hiring more locals in the U.S.

"The U.S. hiring by the Indians echoes the strategy Japan's auto industry devised after soaring levels of imports sparked political outcry in Washington in December, 2000. "The Indians are doing to the world's IT processes what the Japanese did to manufacturing," says analyst John McCarthy of Forrester Research Inc (FORR). And now, like Japan's carmakers before them, the Indians are becoming major employers in the U.S. as well."

Signs of a new trend starting up. In 1989 a young MBA told me that IBM was defunct as a company and would not exist in five years. In 2002 any number of writers reported that white collar jobs were all going to be offshored. Sometimes we just don't know what the future will hold. We can always count on change to be painful and scary with much collateral damage, and by that I mean nice people suffer when they shouldn't have to, but we can't count on everything always being increasingly horrible.

Maybe usually. But not always.

We are in a state of entropy. Theoretically.