Ok n rf... I will admit before I go any farther, this is a rant ;) You have hit the nail on the head. The one that puts me over the top. I am going to refer back to my first rant over CCIE numbers. hehehe. The part where Corporate America oughtta go hang out with the Nazis in S.A. When is enough, enough? NAFTA brought about the demise of the labor sector (as far as assembly line workers, and more menial tasks that employers did not want to pay minimum wage here to do). The spin was that higher tech jobs would be available. Well we had a nice run for about 8 years. Now the higher tech jobs are being farmed out to "off-site" locations. I can almost picture a bunch of poor souls locked in a NOC and having to ask to go to the bathroom like they do in the Mexican plants run by a few rich guys hired out to American interests. All in the name of $aving money. I haven't checked but I doubt Caterpillar passed on the savings when they moved their production facilities to Mexico.
The way things are going the only jobs left will be food service and nurses. The only problem is nobody will be working to afford either one of the services. I changed career fileds in the mid-to-late nineties hoping I would be able to hold on to something worthwhile. I chose networking. It turned out to be an addiction. I love doing this stuff but un-employment sucks! In retrospect nursing would have been a better choice, but hey the market wasn't to good for them either back then. Will American companies EVER realize they have a commitment to keep this country strong. After all, if no one is working who will buy their services? I know you are not the cause, only the messenger. So please forgive my rant. Mark -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of n rf Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2003 1:39 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: Technology, Certification, Skill Sets, and Looking [7:70816] > > The dark side is that technology changes, and has a way of > becoming more > appliance like, meaning that what as skilled labor yesterday is > out of the > box tomorrow. Thin about it. All you folks who are AVVID > experts and > therefore in high demand. How long before AVVID is nothing more > than another > PBX, and routers self configure for QoS? Think the telco > employee who drives > the truck and installs your DSL is making 100K? not likely. There's an even more ominous trend afoot and what is ironic is that network engineers may be actively sowing the seeds of their own destruction. One of the holy grails of networking is to foster telecommuting and virtual offices - the idea was that through ever cheaper and more reliable bandwidth which enables ever more powerful and complete networks, you may never need to step foot in your office - you can replicate your entire office from your house using videoconferencing, unified communications, remote control of complete systems, and so forth. Sounds great, right? You don't waste time in a rush-hour commute, you can work while still watching the kids, and in short the quality of life of your employeer's improves dramatically - so there's no downside, right? Uh, well, not exactly. Virtual-offices sounds great when you realize that it frees you from geographical barriers until you realize that it also frees your employers from geographical barriers too. Specifically, employers can now hire workers from anywhere in the world, and we all know exactly what they're going to do - they're going to hire guys who are a hundred times more skilled than you but are wiling to work for a fraction of your salary. Guys from India, China, Russia, and places like that. Instead of hiring a bunch of high-priced American network engineers to run your NOC, you can just hire a bunch of guys from India on the cheap to watch over your network remotely, and just hire an American cable-monkey on minimum wage to do all the physical stuff like checking cables and racking gear. Or let's say you need a complete network design. Again, why hire an expensive American network designer when you can just send your design requirements to China and get back some well-done Visio's and router configs, and you can videoconference/whiteboard/IM your remote designer and hash out all the details to your heart's content, all for cheap. Sure, that might seem harsh, but surely you can see that if companies can use these tactics to save money, you know they will. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not a Luddite and I'm not a nativist. Truth be told, a lot of those guys from India, China, and Russia are smarter and work harder than many Americans. All you have to do is go any American high school and remark on just how lazy and unmotivated the kids are today. In this new global economy, service-oriented work is going to go to wherever the sharpest, cheapest, and hardest-working minds of the world happen to be. That's the way free-market capitalism works. Message Posted at: http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=70953&t=70953 -------------------------------------------------- FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
