I work in the software industry and have a lot of friends who got their
degrees in mechanical, civil, electrical, and chemical engineering. They all
weathered the past three years better than my other friends who had "leisure
arts" degrees, but they've all also gone down more of a management track.

In IT, what I see is that core engineering is still being done here, but
grunt work that involves relatively little local-area expertise is slowly
moving offshore. The real losers in this case are the marginally-skilled
people who were just capable enough to get into IT, and because of the
relative shortage of people were enjoying relatively high salaries (e.g.
60-80k in New England) performing relatively straightforward jobs.

However, I think for every ten companies that talk about doing it, there is
maybe one or two that actually go for it, and the wage differentials
everybody talks about (e.g. $5/hr for an Indian engineer) never pan out. For
instance, if you want to employ 20 engineers at a call center in India,
you'll need to run your own fiber optic lines or get a satellite dish, and
have an electrical generator that can run it all when (not if) the local
power station browns out. Quite a few companies have seen offshoring blow up
in their face.

Does anybody remember the days when computers were going to put us all out
of a job? Well, I guess they did eliminate the need for so many telephone
operators and clerks, but overall white-collar employment is quite a bit
larger as a proportion of the population than it was 50 years ago. Something
tells me we'll survive this latest scare too.

Best,
-cwk.