Offshoring, such a friendly little word

As an aging geek one of the things that concerns me is maintaining employment until I'm financially able to retire (which I figure will occur about the time I hit 90). The main threat to that is the flight of jobs to countries where blue collar programming labor is cheap. It really goes beyond programmers, of course. Any work that can be done at the end of a wire is a candidate for being migrated somewhere cheaper.

In a way this mirrors what happened to the steel industry and the garment industry and probably others that I can't think of at the moment. As a coworker has pointed out to me, though, those migrations were offset by an increase in higher paying, more skilled jobs. What we're exporting now is the higher paying skilled jobs and leaving behind only things that need a physical presence. Like flipping those burgers or greeting at Wal-Mart.

It wasn't supposed to be this way!