Dan: The Financial Times story leaves out one excerpt from the study that you might interesting:

Off-shoring is, and will continue to be, mainly restricted to a very particular type of employment requiring only a set of basic, generic, and transferable skills, rather than those high-level skills that create added value.

Seems to me that their numbers are skewed by the high population of deeply poor people in China and India.

The number of educated people might be tiny, relative to the overall population, but still very large relative to US cities.

The Huggins survey rates Hartford quite highly.

That makes no sense. Hartford is anything but a thriving high-tech region. The job market is sluggish, especially in tech.

Dan, why do you keep pulling out these pathetic marketing documents to support offshoring?

Fascinating look at the underlying forces at work. The future for Europe looks particularly bleak, given competition from Asia, the braindrain, and the influx of antagonistic immigrants with religious issues.

If you look at the regions, the ratings are stacked in favour of the US locations. The US areas are city-sized (i.e. San Fran, New Orleans, Hartford, etc.). In contrast, entire provinces or states in other countries count as regions (i.e. Ontario, Canada and New South Wales, Australia). Ontario is a huge province (roughly the same size as New York, Ohio, etc.) and has significant chunks of rural areas which will suck with this methodology and drive its results down. If you're not comparing regions that are reasonably similar in population, it's a bogus comparison (at least when you compare the US to the outside world, comparisons within the US may still be valid).

Dan,

You know what - the very fact that Bangalore is being compared to SF gives it a win ! SF 1, Bangalore 0 - but Bangalore wins because it is promoted to major league.

Sorry to disappoint, Robert, but India continues to attract high-skilled tech jobs. Oracle is transferring 3,000 engineering jobs to India from... care to guess? Redwood Shores, California (heart of Silicon Valley). Ellison himself has argued, with much evidence and logic, that the glory days of rising software wages and software employment in the US are finished. Sure there will be a few highly-paid jobs, but the Indians have exposed the industry's little secret: programming is not terribly complicated. Most tech jobs do not require big brains and years of hard-won expertise.

This is replicated at the IT industry level. Anyone involved in technology deals for high value-added, highly-paid service vendors like Accenture, Wipro, Bearing Point etc can see that the US firms simply are not price-competitive with the Indian firms. BTW, did anyone notice that Tata is about to outsource thousands of INDIAN-based programming jobs to CHINA?

I wonder what effect the relative tax rates of California, and the Valley in particular, had on pushing jobs out?

"I wonder what effect the relative tax rates of California, and the Valley in particular, had on pushing jobs out?"

Jobs are being outsourced to Canada, AFAIK not known as a low-tax nation.

Canadian outsourcing is waning. When one factors in the social costs and adds to that the dollar's decline, the Canadians aren't significantly cheaper anymore.

OTOH Indian outsourcing is here to stay. It's not just about cost. The major Indian outsourcing vendors--Wipro, Infosys, Tata--are in many ways BETTER at what they do than their US or European competitors. So, even if their rates rise in coming years, they may well continue to take share due to a process and quality advantage.

If you're going to discuss a ranking, please link to the ranking. It's difficult for me to determine if the methodology is sound without knowing where *my* hometown ranks. :-)