We're Exporting Jobs to... Milwaukee?

Outsourcing in high-tech companies has become a familiar enough cliché - it's regular fodder for network TV news, and even Homer Simpson's had his 2 cents. So when Jason Calcanis of Mahalo published a list of 17 tips for start-ups and added outsourcing as #18 ;) it was no surprise. But the destination was.


From Calcanis' blog:

Outsource to middle America: There are tons of brilliant people living between San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York who don't live in a $4,000 one bedroom apartment and pay $8 to dry clean a shirt--hire them!

The myth that outsourcing = offshoring is something the media loves to indulge in, but the fact is that anyone visiting an outsource portal (Elance, Odesk, Mturk) will find thousands of Americans competing successfully for contract and task work.

Anyone in the US with time to spare and skills to apply can be a part of this, and they don't have to settle for third-world wages to do it. In fact, the very idea of hourly wages starts to get hazy when people do things like Mechanical Turk tasks in their spare time just to unwind.