Sidebar: Costco Aims to Avoid Offshore Dependency

ComputerWorld
Retailer Costco Wholesale Corp. uses offshore development but is still hiring lots of programmers internally. Don Burdick, senior vice president of information systems at Costco, said last week that he has about 60 vacancies for developers with RPG, .Net and Java skills on his programming staff, out of a total of 250 positions. The underlying philosophy at Issaquah, Wash.-based Costco, which had revenue of about $48 billion last year, is "that our own employees do it better," Burdick said at the Gartner outsourcing conference. He added that Costco typically promotes from within when higher-level IT jobs open up, because it wants to retain the business knowledge that workers have accumulated. more..