Bosses of IT companies frequently go head to head, slagging off each other's products, strategies, ethics and so on. It's just marketing BS off course so, as with Gary Rhodes and Jean- Christophe Novelli arguing sugar basket versus brisket, you treat it with derision or are entertained, depending on taste.

Last week, however, an unlikely dispute occurred as Bill Gates and Gerald Cohen, boss of business intelligence firm Information Builders, took very different sides on the question of H1-B visas, the system controlling immigrant workers in the US.

Gates stirred the pot at a recent round-table by saying visa capping is comparable to the behaviour of a state-controlled economy and by insisting that US technology companies needed access to skills unavailable in their own country.

But last week Computerworld published a rollicking interview with Cohen, the so-called Grandfather of Silicon Alley. Cohen gave Gates's view a rare old roughing up, suggesting Gates was more interested in getting skills on the cheap and disputing the lack of local talent.

Somewhere between these two poles, the truth probably resides. Your ability to write Java or dot-Net code is certainly not a function of being born in Bangalore, Boston or Bristol. It's more likely the result of your political and educational system and in this the US and UK have underperformed recently.

For the US, where IT is a key industry sector, Gates's desire to recruit from abroad is understandable but here in the UK, where technology is the engine of the commercial sector but not itself a huge part of the indigenous economy, the need is less acute.

There's no easier way to wind up an unemployed UK programmer in their fifties than talking about a skills crisis. There are thousands of people who could fill roles were they offered better retraining options.

Nobody doubts that India and other countries offer a deep, cheap labour pool. The question for the UK is whether we want to grow our own skills or buy in. It is a sensitive one in terms of ethics: should UK firms employ locals or go abroad to compete more effectively?

It's a three-pipe problem and one that is not made any easier by the attitudes of successive governments towards retraining. If UK companies could target a larger, native pool of requisite skills they would be less inclined to look elsewhere. After all, offshoring may hit a lower price point than is possible with local staffing but soft benefits such as team-working and lasting relationships may be more difficult to achieve with an offshore partner. Also, many are finding that the much-vaunted lower prices haven't materialised. Analyst firm Meta Group last year found that offshore savings are about 15 percent, compared with the 40 percent companies hope for.

Patricia Hewitt, showing her accustomed joyful disbelief in what lies before her, said the idea that offshoring costs UK jobs is "a myth". It's anything but. So what are the options? Protectionism doesn't work and just encourages mediocrity - witness Leyland cars. Instead, the new government should invest heavily in retraining so that the UK has attractive job candidates that make the decision to go offshore harder to justify. It should accept that embracing offshoring as an economic inevitability is lazy, short-term thinking - and we deserve better.