Just thought I'd weigh in here.

I am in the I.T. industry. Although my current job is not in danger of
being off-shored, the type of job I do certainly can be.  It is up to me
to make sure that I stay current and fresh so that I can change jobs if
necessary to something that isn't being off-shored.

Not that long ago, people were shouting about the end of the United States
because all of the agriculture jobs were disappearing.  Some of them were
going overseas, but mostly a lot of them were being lost do to large
company conglomerations.  Well, people realized agriculture was shrinking
and they innovated and we became a manufacturing society.  We became the
best manufacturers in the world.

After a while, other countries started copying the US and we started
losing some manufacturing jobs.  People shouted that it was the end of the
US because we were losing all of our manufacturing jobs.  We innovated, we
re-trained, and we started working with technology.

For a while there, people said that computers would destroy the US
workforce because computers were replacing the work that people had been
doing.  How could the average guy compete against the speed and efficiency
of a computer.  Well, we innovated, we learned, we retrained, and now a
lot of people are making a living by working with computers.

We are just in the next phase of this whole deal.  It is part of the
evolution of our economy and of the human race in general.  The US is
excellent at innovation and exploration.  Our lower tech IT jobs are being
off-shored, so we will move on to whatever the next innovation is.  Please
don't ask me what that is.  If I knew that, I'd be heavily invested in
it.

Face it, compare the number of agricultural jobs in the US today to that
of 80 years ago.  We've adapted.  Compare the number of manufacturing jobs
in the US today to just 40 years ago.  We've adapted.

If low-end IT jobs are leaving the country, than maybe getting into that
kind of work here now isn't the best plan.  If you are in that line, like
myself, adapt or make yourself very indispensable in your current place of
employment.

Things change, that is nothing new.  It has been happening throughout our
history.

Later.



 -- Blue skies.
Dan Rossi
Carnegie Mellon University.
E-Mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel:    (412) 268-9081


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html