No, don’t backtrack. A good 80% of IT work is ‘grudge’ work. Most IT orgs are running 80% maintenance/20% new.
Maintenance is defacto grudge work, even if it is skilled. Even within that, there’s a pecking order of “grudge” being the first level service people. That is coming back. Most of maintenance that is going is gone that which remains, remains because of on-shore fears of not being able to touch their IT support or other embedded concerns. Make no mistake, a properly functioning and efficient IT maintenance organization has reduced the positions to a factory assembly line role. that’s grudge, IMHO.
Even then, it isn’t the grudge work getting outsourced anyore, it’s new development work of architecting, designing, building and implementing the new solution.
In fact, the more non-vanilla the major implementation is, the more likily it will be outsourced and done off shore. Almost every major ERP/CRM implementation even when “kept in-house” is 80% outsourced and the majority of it is off-shore. Almost all the custom coding will be done off-shore.
Some like Tata are completely off-shore with an on-shore team of mostly H1-b/H2-bs and others are “hybridized” with anywhere from a 5-20% on shore mix.
