> "These higher skills have become commodities, said Catherine L. Mann, a global finance professor at the Brandeis University International Business School who

> "These higher skills have become commodities, said Catherine L. Mann, a global finance professor at the Brandeis University International Business School who studies the outsourcing of jobs. The programming language “C++ is now an international language,” she said. “If that’s all you know, then you’re competing with people in India or China who will do the work for less.” This was the most interesting part of the article to me. Ruby on Rails is relatively obscure. Scaling web sites is relatively obscure. I bet there is a latency, probably inversely proportional to market size, between when a specialized tech skill is originated and when it has disseminated sufficiently that it can be outsourced. So, there can be a simultaneous shortage and surplus: a shortage of talented developers working with recent technology, and a surplus of talented (and otherwise) developers who are only familiar with older technology.