Whether you like it or not, the offshoring of IT projects is here to stay, so get over it. If you can't get over it, get out of IT. But before you head for the exit, think about what you'll be missing.

• Over 70% of all IT projects fail in some way. Three-quarters go over budget, are delivered late, fail to meet functional requirements, or become financial black holes with no hope of ever recouping the money invested.
• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) products are widely deployed in the U.S., yet roughly half of the companies that have purchased these products view their ERP implementations as unsuccessful.
• Forty percent of IT projects fail to achieve their business case within one year.
• Over 30% of all IT projects will be canceled before completion.
• Only 16% of all software projects are completed on time and on budget.

This should tell most people that it is next to impossible to succeed in the field of corporate IT. Maybe the people working in the industry are all idiots. Or perhaps it's just that the people in charge have very different expectations for these projects than the people working on them.

The problem is that the people who make the decisions at major corporations know next to nothing about IT - and have no desire to learn. The guy running a Fortune 500 company - who thinks that learning to send e-mail and use a browser is a major intellectual accomplishment - is the same guy who approves $100-million infrastructure deals.

Many of them will tell you that they don't want to know the details; they just want to know when the project will be completed and how much it will cost. I have a friend who runs a company. He has often said that "The biggest problem with computer people is that they don't listen." He has no interest in the details, either.

Corporate America has decided that IT costs have gotten out of hand, and the magic formula for solving the cost-containment challenge is to offshore as much as possible, as fast as possible. For someone who doesn't want to know the details, this idea is at first glance pure brilliance. The programmers work for 20% of what American programmers make. So what if they make a couple of mistakes; they'll make it up on the volume.

Offshoring is a fad. Like any fad, it seems like a good idea in the beginning, and people ask why no one ever thought of it before. Microsoft thought of it years ago, and indeed has been offshoring a substantial portion of their code writing since Windows 95 was written.

Microsoft's operating system and Office products are riddled with security flaws and coding mistakes. Considering that they currently have about $48 billion in the bank, you have to wonder what happened. What happened? Profit - not quality - was the Number 1 priority. Microsoft can afford this because they don't absorb the true cost of ownership of their products, their end users do.

The rules for corporate IT are different, and the people in charge all want to be like Bill Gates: super-successful and sitting on a mountain of cash. But these are the same people who don't want to know the details of their IT projects.

A corporation doing a one-shot project will never be able to do as well as Microsoft at writing code. Writing code is Microsoft's core business and the guy running the company wants to know all of the details. The second flaw in this line of thinking is that these smaller corporations cannot push off their cost of ownership to third-party end users; they are the end users.

The successful 21st-Century IT professional in the U.S. will be an on-site troubleshooter first, and an IT specialist second. Remember, corporate will not want to know the details; they'll just want to know when you can fix it, and how much it will cost.

Though it may not seem so right now, things are about to get much better for U.S. IT workers.