Soft skills can banish offshoring threat

Programmers need to work on their people skills if they want to avoid plummeting pay rates caused by overseas competition, a new salary survey suggests.

Pay for basic application development has fallen 17.5 per cent in the past two years as businesses increasingly outsource programming work to lower-wage economies, according to US analyst and consultancy Foote Partners.

But demand is high for technically literate people able to communicate effectively with customers as well as technical staff, and those capable of coordinating globally dispersed teams of programmers.

This is reflected in Foote's finding that rates of pay for project management have risen by an average of 14.3 per cent since 2002.