The executives decided that a programmer is a programmer is a programmer and they could give any programmer an assignment with any system, whether the programmer had experience with that system or not.

in the world on its engineering staff, and they have specific backgrounds. They can't just be swapped in like interchangeable parts, without a loss.

Fortunately for them, these PhD's have other options and will take them. But for future Boeing airplane passengers, it's not so fortunate.

Boeing is banking they can hire younger engineers and achieve cheaper labor costs (purely salary and possibly lower benefits if they have a two-tier system), "smarter" guys/gals because they are younger and therefore more recently out of university and they expect they can work them more hours because they are younger, get more productivity out of them and they won't get sick or cost as much in health care and time off including vacation.

Study after study has shown these are false assumptions. I agree that a workforce should be diverse. You do want younger workers coming in with new ideas, workers from other industries and other companies, etc. But you also need people who know your industry, your customers, your competitors, etc.

While I worked at Worldspan as well (a software and solution provider to airlines, travel agencies, etc.), I now work at a company that serves the same industry.

The company was also assuming that moving software development to India was going to save them lots of money. My experience, and I work with them every day, is that there was likely an immediate drop in initial outlay for man days of development work but what has come back is lack of quality, re-work, etc. At the same time there is no loyalty with these offshoring companies. As soon as you get a few programmers, business analysts, quality assurance staff, etc. knowledgeable about your products, code base, processes, etc. they jump ship for more money.

As a result the man day cost for programmers in India has skyrocketed. They are still likely cheaper on a purely man day cost basis than programmers in the U.S., Canada or Western Europe but the other factors mentioned above are still at play.

When companies dive for the botom of the pool it spells disaster for the domestic economy. U.S. worker productivity has gone through the roof. But that isn't enough. The greedy shareholders want more, more, more. And so companies continue to hatchet their way to the bottom. I don't think they are going to find the pot of gold they expect.

"Not everything of value can be displayed on a balance sheet."

Far too many have forgotten this.

somethings willing to work for less

Back in the early 90's when George Allen became Governor of Virginia he came up with this neat little plan to gut the VDOT by offering buyouts to all of the employees with 20+ years on the job. His theory was that VDOT was bloated and that the buyouts would cut the budget in half. Well about a year goes by and suddenly VDOT realizes that they have a real brain drain problem because all of their senior engineers had taken the buyouts and were now working in the private sector. So now Virginia has to pay almost twice as much as it did for engineering work because it had to be outsourced instead of being done in house. This is what happens when politics gets in the way of practical thinking. Makes me worry about flying whatever the next generation Boeing jumbo is.

do the work, except as much higher paid employees of those private consulting firms .