Kathy White, of Rural Sourcing, Inc. gets more coverage in InformationWeek’s “Onshore Outsourcing: Made in America.” And here are pricing numbers quoted by Ms. White and a Ciber rep about developer rates in the US: “Rural Sourcing bills about $38 to $45 an hour for programming work. That's considerably less than the $80 an hour that an experienced programmer in a hub like San Francisco could command, but somewhat more than what a company would pay for developers in India, where a good Java coder in a major city gets $23 an hour, according to White and Tim Boehm, president of Cibersites, a new division of systems integrator Ciber Inc., focused on opening application-development centers in smaller cities around the country.”
As Ms. White points out, the hourly is only part of the expense in offshoring:
"People are mistaken when it comes to the true cost of offshore labor," she says. The additional executive hours needed to manage an offshore engagement, as well as travel and other startup costs, must be factored into the true cost of offshore outsourcing. The additional overhead that comes with offshoring puts the price of such work in the $30-per-hour range or higher, she says. "For an additional cost of 5% or 10%, it's very appealing if you can get the work done at home," she says.
The same article says that TCS plans to hire 1,000 people in the US — though “Skill shortages mean he might not be able to fill all the positions. ‘There are only so many individuals that can make the cut,’ [Arup] Gupta, [president of TCS North America], says. Programmers with experience adapting packaged applications such as Oracle and PeopleSoft for use in specific industries, including manufacturing and retail, are in short supply, not only in the United States but worldwide, Gupta says.”
