I want to argue that this is not something that can be avoided. But for some reason I just cannot seem to make myself believe that. I hate to see people anyplace become displaced with their work.

Sun is scaling back its vaunted Silicon Valley engineering group and expanding its facilities around the world to save on costs.

The company said Friday it would grow facilities in Bangalore, Beijing, St. Petersburg and Prague. Published reports said the company isn’t pulling out of Santa Clara but won’t be hiring much more there for the time being.

The ability to quickly hire a large number of programmers in India and other low-cost locations justified the company’s plan to consolidate its worldwide research staff in those places, Sun said.

The announcement follows another outsourcing move the company made recently. Sun said was outsourcing its internal information technology team to Computer Sciences Corp. in a contract worth $360 million.

Such moves have enabled Sun to reduce its staff to about 30,000, from about 43,000 four years ago. [Read the rest]