Are American high tech workers obsolete?

[Hewitt Tech]

Recently, like at least one other participant on this list, I took an early
retirement package from the new HP. I've spent about 25 years working in the
computer industry and consider myself to be a fairly experienced, highly
skilled systems engineer. A bit more background: I came to the United States
at the age of 21 having met and married an American. I served in the
American military as a foreigner (including a secret security clearance) and
gained employment at Digital Equipment Corporation in 1979. The rest of my
career, has been spent working in various capacities, hardware, software,
QA, development, management, support engineering.

Like a lot of folks leaving a big computer company I have noted the extent
to which American companies have been replacing domestic workers with H1-B
program employees or simply shipping the jobs off-shore. Last night I
watched a segment on "The News Hour" (PBS) which featured a conversation
with Thomas Friedman who had just returned from a trip to Sri Lanka and the
Indian sub-continent. Tom described the extent of the success of Indian
companies at both out sourcing and setting up call centers for large
American companies. He cited Dell, American Express, GE amongst others who
had moved their call centers to India. I also have friends working at major
out-sourcing companies who talk about the pressure being brought by major
American corporations to move their engineering support operations
off-shore. Given that some of the products that have been out-sourced are
vital parts of the computing infrastructure (middleware and critical OS
components), I frankly question whether this is a good idea given the noise
in the press about 'cyberwarfare'. One other interesting commentary was a
recent one by John Dvorak. Dvorak said that he has noticed that most
American teenagers don't have summer jobs. He also noted that in Silicon
Valley, "Grey hairs" are now being hired over younger workers. He said "The
grey hairs have been out of work so long that they'll now work for much less
than they wanted before".

maddog in his "Front Porch" interview mentioned that a bullet item in his
standard Linux presentation describes the adoption of Linux as 'inevitable'.
Can we say the same about domestic high tech jobs moving out of this
country? We have already moved most manufacturing to China and other low
labor cost countries. The powers that be have been telling America's young
people that they should look to their future in the "knowledge industry". Is
there any point in them spending 100's of thousands for an education in
Computer Science? Will we all be saying "Do you want fries with that?" and
if so, who will be the consumers that the nation's economy depends on?

I'd like to hear a discusion. It's been my experience that many if not most
engineers are just slightly to the right of Atilla the Hun in terms of their
politics. They seem to take a "Survival of the fittest" approach to these
problems. The idea of labor unions (and I know there are plenty of arguments
against them) are heretical to them. Thoughts?

-Alex