Economic forces overseas could bring offshore development projects back home Ephraim Schwartz, InfoWorld’s provocateur in chief, is at it again this week, stirring the pot with another column on offshoring. If you’ve been following his Reality Check column, you know Ephraim is all over the topic; you may also know that he takes a lot of heat from readers angry about IT jobs — often their own — leaving the United States. For Schwartz, though, it’s just a matter of calling it as he sees it. “Most of the angry e-mails pour in after I’ve simply reported the facts, not because of any opinion I’ve expressed,” he says. “People want to kill the messenger.”Well, hold the pitchforks, folks. Because this time, Ephraim has uncovered a trend sure to hearten U.S. IT workers (see page 8). It’s called “backshoring,” the practice of bringing offshored IT jobs back to the States. Schwartz had never heard the term before. But when the CEO of CRM maker Kana casually mentioned it, at the tail end of a conversation covering just about everything but outsourcing, Schwartz pounced. “I like to think I have a nose for news,” says Schwartz, “and this is news.”But is backshoring a real trend or just a one-time example of a company bringing its wayward development operations back home? Consider this: An unnamed CTO recently told a group of InfoWorld editors that in Bangalore, developer poaching has become rampant. Companies fighting over programming talent keep leapfrogging one another’s salary offers, all to induce employees to jump ship. That practice is inflating Indian salaries and creating an increasingly transient workforce. True, many companies are turning to China, Eastern Europe, and other regions that offer an educated populace with command of English. Ultimately, though, those same economic forces will be brought to bear — raising salaries in markets worldwide. Maybe then, backshoring will truly become a household word.And Ephraim Schwartz will be there to write about it, while ducking all those angry e-mails from foreign workers displaced by stateside IT employees. Technology IndustryDatabases