It is imperative, of course, that the concept of outsourcing not be conflated with off-shoring which is the practice of sending IT jobs overseas. These two things are completely unrelated. Outsourcing often means sending work to a company down the street or at least in the same country or region. Off-shoring means going to a distant country, presumably across the ocean. It is off-shoring that has the bad reputation but sadly people often use the term outsourcing to incorrectly refer to it which leads to much confusion. Many companies use internal staff in foreign markets to off-shore while being able to say that no jobs are outsourced. The misuse of this term has made it easy for companies to hide off-shoring of labor and given the local use of outsourced experts a bad reputation without cause.