Are American high tech workers obsolete?

Hewitt Tech hewitt_tech at attbi.com
Tue Aug 13 13:21:27 EDT 2002


I think that same argument applies to software development to some extent as
well. But the bottom line is the bottom line. Business's motto is "cheaper"
and the social costs aren't anywhere in the equation. To make matters worse,
the logic for out-sourcing is very compelling. The downside to this is that
if the feds are right and there is a cyberwar coming, in some measure it
will have been enabled by critical pieces of software finding it's way to
places where the people don't have our interests at heart (and no I don't
mean to impune any particular group).

I do believe that open source is a good counter measure to some of this.
I.E., if everyone can see into the sources, then it's a lot harder to
compromise the software. When proprietary middleware finds its way to some
place where nefarious people might want to do something nasty, that code is
still black box to the end users. You have no way of knowing that the code
might have been compromised.

-Alex

P.S. I did find the 'trojan' planted in SSH an interesting developement. I'm
using Cygwin on my Windows 2k box and I immediately started checking the SSH
code that came with it to see if it had been compromised (it hadn't).

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew W. Gaunt" <quantum at lucent.com>
To: "Hewitt Tech" <hewitt_tech at attbi.com>
Cc: <discuss at gnhlug.org>
Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2002 12:44 PM
Subject: Re: Are American high tech workers obsolete?


>
> It's my opinion that system adminstration is more than working with
> computers. There is a social/human interaction component of working
> with your customers and delivering what's best for them. You might
> even want to go to lunch and have a beer with them. When administration
> services are remoted to far off lands in differing time zones, this
> is largely lost, resulting in diminished level of service and commitment.
>
> One gets what one pays for.
>
> --
> ____    __
>  | 0|___||.  Andrew Gaunt *nix Sys. Admin., etc.
> _| _| : : }  quantum at lucent.com - http://www-cde.mv.lucent.com/~quantum
>  -(O)-==-o\  andrew at gaunt.org - http://www.gaunt.org
>
>
> Hewitt Tech wrote:
> >
> > I don't see any compelling reason for system admin jobs to stay here
either.
> > Once a company's systems have been made remote capable, then practically
any
> > admin function can be performed remotely. The irony in this is that
American
> > management has resisted the idea of technical folks working remotely
(from
> > home for instance) but now embrace outsourcing with enthusiasm.
> >
> > -Alex
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