>But you can be sure that competence has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with any offshoring decision and it's all money.
>
>It seems that MBA training forgets to focus even 1 iota on the societal impact of any decision. As the decision-makers make these STUPID decisions they get more $$$ by which to insulate themselves and their families from the effects they cause.

The current economic school of thought has only one way to lower the cost: fire as many people as you can. That shows up on your profits within a couple of months, and you look very good on Walmart Street (this wrong name is a lapsus linguae I once made, and I like it). Specially if you think there's an IPO coming, or you want to make money on selling your shares.

Eliminating red tape, specially in the way banks handle everyone's money, was never an issue. Just fire more people.

>To write off 500,000 offshored IT jobs as "bottom of the barrel" is the ultimate in arrogance, really.

Typical red herring - if you're doing something wrong, give a lame excuse. Everyone will start a noise about how lame it was, and not about how much wrong you've done.

And having seen what the criteria for firing are in some cases, I'd say it comes down to guys who dare to say their bosses are wrong at times, guys who care more about the product than the internal company policy... IOW, they usually fire the wrong people, and keep the wrong people. I've seen my project manager being fired because she sympathised with us programmers too much and therefore saw the errors in her boss's ways - and told him so. She was the first to go. I've had about five PMs on that job, and she was the most efficient.

So... "bottom of the barrel" may be close to truth, but not in the way it was meant. It's often sorted by pecking order, not by competence, when the bottom is decided.