In a few weeks, four of our best developers will be leaving their offices in India and traveling to a client’s headquarters to do some development work.  It’s a simple thing that happens every day, everywhere.

It’s called consulting.

Which is why it hit me like a ton of bricks when I was reminded, by a well-intentioned friend, what this is called when an Indian company does it.

“Oh right, body shopping.”

It doesn’t matter whether your team has worked on high-profile projects and gained valuable, specialized experience in their niche.  If they come from a third-world country, you’re just shopping bodies.

A few decades ago, Y2K fears lead to the employment of hundreds of Indian programmers at Western companies.  It’s easy to understand how our terminology for global work evolved during this time.  Indian salaries were a low fraction of Western pay; and Indian companies lacked the wherewithal to challenge Western thought on their fledgling industry.

But why have these terms stuck?

These words were never fair definitions.  Yet even if you assume they were justified, our industry has evolved far beyond the days of searching for 2-digit date fields.  Indian companies handle critical business processes and lead R&D efforts for the Fortune 100 set.  So why do we allow the persistence of outdated terminology that cheapens our profession?

Are we waiting for Thomas Friedman to write another book?