Мысли о нелегкой американской судьбе, из которых можно сделать вывод, что будет только еще хуже.

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.”