I expect this is a well-known pitfall in outsourcing, but maybe not: For 8 years in the early 2000s, I worked in Southern California for a fabless semiconducto

I expect this is a well-known pitfall in outsourcing, but maybe not: For 8 years in the early 2000s, I worked in Southern California for a fabless semiconductor company, as part of their IT department. This was actually my first job out of college. The IT department was already using outsourcing (to HCL) for pretty much all of their SAP and webMethods development work. That outsourcing eventually extended to more of the sysadmin stuff, to the point where I'd say (anecdotally) 50% of IT (including the few company-employed non-US IT) was outsourced to HCL. Something that regularly happened was, every six or so months, some of the people HCL assigned to us would be moved over to other "projects" (that is, they'd be moved to support other HCL clients). We would then get new people, who would invariably need to be trained up, on both our company-specific stuff and also on general IT learning stuff. The amount of "general IT leaning" training required always varied, but some was always needed. My guess is that HCL was using our "project" as a training ground, and the higher-performing HCL employees would regularly be identified and moved over to more important "projects". I wonder when (not if, when) this will start happening to UCSF? If HCL is smart (and they indeed are), they'll hold off on doing this for at least 18 months, until more UC schools (and/or other entities covered by the UC-HCL contract) get locked in to HCL. I also wonder if this phenomenon has been named yet?