Is the offshoring of programming jobs a good thing or a bad thing, on balance? Why?

Answering from a more personal point of view, as a career programmer it has been worrisome at times to see increasing offshoring. But it hasn't actually turned out badly. Offshoring has helped the company I work to survive financially and even expand in size. Also, after offshoring grew for a few years, it became harder and harder to hire good people in India; there isn't an endless supply. Also, those Indian co-workers are now long time associates and I'm happy for the prosperity it has brought to their country. In a way, arguing that a company shouldn't employ people in India is about equivalent to arguing that we shouldn't hire anybody in Alabama or in the next town over.

It is an interesting question. I have the impression that the pendulum is moving back to more onshore ... I worked for 5 years in the IT department of a large pharmaceutical company, lots of offshore developpers, big teams, large budgets ... However, what I see is that we tend to onshore again a lot of functions. Two main reasons were driving this: budget: the offshore model (especially the Indian one we were working with) is not so cheap anymore. This was one of the main reasons why large IT departments went offshore, but we see that all the costs around this are exploding. business understanding: very hard to get this one running, understanding the reasons of business needs, especially in BI and CRM, made us lose lots of time. For pure support we are keeping the teams for now, for development were business reasoning is important, we tend to onshore it almost completely.

Of course it has its pros and cons. A lot of issues are connected with money, But in order to overcome them, you need to follow one tip. It's generally not recommended to pay anything in advance (well, unless you have checked your contractor company enough thoroughly to trust them). Instead you'll have to agree on how payments will be carried out, but pay only for the hours that your contractor has spent on the project, and you have a result of their work in return - the result you are satisfied with. This is the way you can move along the software project, milestone by milestone. http://mobidev.biz/blog/hiring_at_freelance_marketplaces_6_things_to_remember.html

It's a good thing for consumers, both in the US and elsewhere. We get to enjoy the benefits of potentially cheaper software (both in business and for individual use) because of the outsourcing of programming work. That's obviously not so great for the programmers who were making high wages, at least in the short term.

I would say the experience gap that occurs might be a negative.  So students here with programming degrees may not get the experience they otherwise would with higher demand in the states. [Arguably offset by their ability to now be a project manager, which may be a bummer if they wanted to really be a programmer] However, that does theoretically keep programming prices in check in the US [although arguably outsourced programming is a different product than US based services].

Good/Bad thing for whom (for the US or the world) ?  By what metric (economic or environmental) ? For humanity, in general, it has definitely raised the overall standard of living of the average human, at an overall environmental cost to the earth. If labor can be allocated more efficiently (like other resources such as capital, raw materials etc. ) to produce goods and services, then that improves the GDP of the world, and raises the overall standard to living.  This reallocation of resources can be economically beneficial globally, but detrimental locally.

As long as we have nations, it is a bad thing to off shore all manufacturing. No knows when their country will become the next international pariah. A country had better be able to stand on it's own, particularly WRT food production and the industry necessary to ensure means of production. If a government fails to provide economic security to the people, then it needs to be tossed. Capitalism is economics, not a way to govern.

It's a global race to the bottom. I can see no good in it for anyone other than the portfolios of the rich. Sure, the US outsourcing to country X is bad for US workers but increases quality of life for country X. UNTIL country Y comes along and undercuts X's prices. Now X is SOL as well as the US. And on and in it goes until human beings are essentially slave labour who should be grateful to be fed a bowl of gruel once a day. I have no objection to spreading work around more fairly, but it has to be based on something other than "where can we get the cheapest labour this month."

If you are building a software product that is going to be the key revenue generating source of your business, and you are going to spend most on software development, look for an good team. Onshore or Offshore does not matter. Offshoring does come with communication barriers, however, the agile process does makes it a lot easier. I would recommend interviewing the team and engaging with the right ones.