Lumpish Scholar's Journal: Outsourcing watch: Silicon Valley must die to survive

According to an article titled "Silicon Valley must outsource to survive," offshore outsourcing is:

... Silicon Valley's future, says job outplacement expert (read: "consultant looking to make money off this trend") John Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.... "It is a matter of survival for these firms, especially those in the information technology sector where the company's highest costs can be payroll. One venture capitalist even told our researchers that it would be virtually impossible to start a new IT or software company in Silicon Valley without offshore outsourcing," Mr. Challenger says.

Warren Weiss, general partner at Menlo Park-based Foundation Capital, told Challenger researchers, "There's no way you can have a Silicon Valley company without outsourcing. You simply cannot make the numbers work."

That's echoed by Venetia Kontogouris, managing director for Trident Capital, based in Westport, Conn., with offices in Palo Alto, who said to Challenger interviewers, "It is far too expensive today to start a technology business in Silicon Valley without outsourcing."

Morons.

Do they think Silicon Valley was built around a cluster of existing venture capitalists? That it's a mecca of cutting edge marketeers? The natural hub for top flight executives?

Silicon Alley is a high-tech haven because of its huge population of great techies. It was born of students from great schools like Stanford and Berkeley, then grew in a positive feedback loop, startups begetting and attracting more startups. I sadly agree, the Valley's gotten so expensive, it'll be hard to sustain itself.

The answer, though, isn't to outsource engineering but leave everything else there. The VCs, the executives, the sales and marketing guys who today outsource the tech jobs, could be the next wave watching their own jobs disappear from this part of the world. It'd be ironic, but not very rewarding; if they can no longer afford McDonalds, what happens to programmers reduced to working there?

They think they're selling the techies down the river. Don't they know they're on the same barge?