Another in our McJobs™ series

IBM reportedly to outsource programming jobs overseas

Responding to a Wall Street Journal article that cited internal documents describing plans to relocate thousands of programming jobs overseas, IBM on Monday said it expected overall hiring to increase in the United States.

The company declined to comment on "internal presentations or projections," but said that any growth in application services jobs in India, China and Latin America would be attributed to winning new contracts.

"We expect our hiring next year in the U.S. to equal or increase over 2003 levels. In fact, on a percentage basis, our forecast is for hiring across the Americas to outpace the hiring in the rest of the world," the company said in a statement.

The Wall Street Journal article, which appeared Monday, described plans to shift 4,730 programming jobs overseas. The job changes within the company's Application Management Services group were to be felt in Southbury, Conn., Poughkeepsie, Raleigh, N.C., Dallas, Boulder, Colo., and at other sites around the country.....More

People wonder why I am skeptical of the future economic success of this country. As I've tried to elucidate on these pages, the economic woes of this country are trending downward. Real income growth is dead, the baby boomers are on the cusp of retirement, and our workforce is largely un-educated in relation to the types of tasks that current and future employers are demanding.

As a tail-end baby boomer, I've twenty plus years until retirement. My personal situation is pretty secure. Many of my current and past colleagues have been directly effected by the trend toward outsourcing of IT jobs.