An offshoring tidal wave to come?

A recent InformationWeek article offers a dizzying statistic about the scale of offshoring over the next decade.

The story says a forthcoming report from research firm Gartner predicts 30 percent of IT jobs in the United States and other developed countries will be "offshored" by 2015. That compares to less than 5 percent of those IT jobs being sent offshore now, according to the story, which was published Thursday.

Despite the prediction that a major portion of tech work will flow abroad, a Gartner analyst is quoted as saying she doesn't believe offshoring will result in a net loss of IT jobs in the United States. Critics of shipping high-wage work to lower-cost countries are concerned about job loss in the United States. "There are a lot of people who are currently programmers who could transition to higher-level positions where you need to be close to the customer," the publication quotes analyst Frances Karamouzis as saying.

Karamouzis also apparently agrees with the argument that improvements to machine automation are a bigger threat to traditional tech jobs--a point made by consultant and blogger Richard Samson. She predicts the effect of automation and productivity gains on IT job displacement will, by 2015, be six times greater than the impact of offshoring, according to InformationWeek.

There's also a gem in the report for techies who've wished executives had to feel the sting of outsourcing just as much as grunts in the trenches. Karamouzis says multinationals could soon be looking to emerging markets for CIOs and CEOs, according to InformationWeek. Gartner predicts that by 2015, 30 percent of the world's top CEOs will be from countries other than the United States, the story says.