If you have ever heard of oDesk, and the people on there who are willing to do an awful lot of work for a wage level that most people in the first world could never compete with, then you are certainly aware of how difficult it could be to compete against the people that employers can find on that site (and other similar types of sites). While there will always be the top tier of professionals, whose work is beyond mere outsourcing (if only for their superior quality and for their rare quantity), those individuals are by far not the norm. Indeed, for most of the workforce, outsourcing is the stuff that terrible nightmares are made out of, where formerly secure employment disappears overnight.
Of course, there are a great many advantages to outsourcing a lot of the work that we do. For one thing, many kinds of repetitive tasks which cannot be completely automated, such as coding more basic tasks into a website’s interface, can simply be outsourced to a person who is perfectly fine with making about three dollars or so per hour. While that would not buy a sandwich in many parts of the first world, that may actually be a fairly respectable wage in the second or third world, even for the professional services that a trained individual can render.
Of course, there are also a few downsides to outsourcing. For one, there are a lot of flaky people online, and the country from which they hail is almost no matter. While a person who cannot keep to their deadlines will rarely end up keeping a job, for them to keep on freelancing (which is what sites like oDesk encourage) is not so difficult. The nature of this particular beast is that a person can continue to halfway do a job, and employers will simply shrug it off. You could hire several cheap freelancers and still save money.