I've seen this one before (Score 1)

About 6 months ago, I worked for a large US company. They sent out an email saying that over the course of the next year, most of the programming staff would be outsourced to an Indian company. They claimed that existing employees would be rebadged over to the outsourcing firm, but most people know that means that you have to accept a 10% pay cut or you will be shown the door. That announcement had several consequences: 1) The business units that were supported by IT rapidly tried to hire their star programmers into the business units to get them out of the IT umbrella to avoid them being outsourced 2) All programmers updated their resumes on all the job search sites 3) All of the best programmers quickly found employment somewhere else 4) IT support got so bad that the outsourcing project got put on hold because the remaining staff couldn't handle the work (it was already a bad situation with the classic 10% of the people doing 90% of the work and the 10% were the first to leave). I was one of the lucky ones who got out quick. The city we are it only has a handful of programming jobs outside of the company, so once everyone was clued in, the market was quickly flooded and it became really hard to find a position with equivalent pay without relocating. Management at the company has now said they have no plans to restart the outsourcing project, but no one really believes them. Since most of the top tier talent in the city knows to stay away, they will most likely be forced into outsourcing at some point just so they can get any staff at all.