'04 The Issues: Is Your Job Going Abroad?

That's why outsourcing to India has exploded during the recovery. It jumped 60% in 2003 compared with the year before, according to the research magazine Dataquest, as corporations used some of their profits (not to mention tax breaks) to expand overseas hiring. That translates to 140,000 jobs outsourced to India last year. Vivek Paul, president of Wipro, one of India's leading outsourcing companies (it handles voice and data processing for Delta Airlines, for instance), says its service business grew 50% in the last quarter of 2003. "Companies that are emerging from the slowdown are beginning to invest some of that in India," he says. John McCarthy, author of the Forrester Research landmark study that predicted 3.3 million jobs would move overseas by 2015 (there are about 130 million jobs in the U.S. today), says last year's gains in outsourcing didn't come from new companies jumping on the bandwagon. The most dramatic changes came from outsourcing dabblers who finally made a commitment and now allocate as much as 30% of their IT budgets offshore.

Another factor speeding things up is the development of an industry devoted to making outsourcing happen, thanks to entrepreneurs like Randy Altschuler and Joe Sigelman. Just five years ago, they were junior investment bankers at the Blackstone Group and Goldman Sachs, one in New York City, the other in London. During one particularly long night of proofreading PowerPoint slides and commiserating by phone about finding yet another error courtesy of their companies' in-house document service, they had an epiphany. They would find a better way of doing that work. This was at the height of the dotcom boom, and everyone they knew was trying to figure out a way to Silicon Valley. These two had a different idea. They would go to India, set up a team of accountants and desktop-publishing experts and persuade investment banks in New York to outsource their confidential financial documents and client presentations halfway around the world.

The entrepreneurs' families, not to mention Silicon Valley's venture capitalists, "were looking at us in a crazy way," Sigelman says, especially when he relocated to Madras. Five years later, as it moves into more complex work, OfficeTiger, with $18 million from British investors, plans to increase the number of its employees in India this year from 1,500 to 2,500 and more than triple its U.S. work force, from 30 to 100.

GETTING LEFT BEHIND

Billy Johnson of Altamonte Springs, Fla., is convinced that one of the tens of thousands of new jobs in India should be his. Johnson, 41, was a programmer for WorldCom when the company imploded in the wake of a massive accounting scandal. After six months of looking for a programming job, Johnson realized that the work he knows is exactly what outsourcing companies do best. "I spent $5,000 of my own money to become an Oracle [enterprise software] developer," he says. "Nobody's hiring Oracle developers." For a while, he believed it was just the economy. A lifelong Republican, he believed that when the Bush tax cuts kicked in, the jobs would follow. "I feel like I've been betrayed," he says. "I keep hearing about jobs being created, but I don't see them."