OT: American job skills & offshoring

[Bob George]

I've been enjoying the "offshoring" discussion. I just wanted to add 
some observations I had on the "job skills" thread in these post-dot-com 
years.

After joining a hi-tech outfit in 2001, I made an investment (>$7K) in 
some Cisco equipment to hone my skills. After getting my certifications, 
I found my self with some (then) expensive equipment that was gathering 
dust. I decided to contribute back in the form of an open Cisco 
self-study lab. I put my little pod of routers up on the 'net, complete 
with web pages and remote access under Linux control. I assumed there 
would be others like myself who were hungry to develop their skills, but 
might be lacking the resources to purchase equipment. I also set up a 
distributed BGP routing lab (Cisco + Zebra) with a couple of other guys, 
linking our pods into a larger collective.

After mentioning it on a couple of lists, traffic started to pick up. At 
first, I didn't think much of the fact that the vast majority of 
visitors were from overseas. Well over half were from India and 
Pakistan, but I had visitors from locations as diverse as Europe and 
Africa as well. I assumed these were people bent on bettering themselves 
to be competitive in their local markets. It was only after several 
months that it dawned on me that many of them were angling for jobs with 
outsourcing outfits or H1B visas. One fellow IM'ed to proudly announce 
he had landed a job doing tech support for Gateway, then proceeded to 
ask me a number of Windows troubleshooting questions. I routinely 
fielded questions about how to get into American universities, and where 
to find work.

For the most part, the foreigners were self-starters, and thanked me and 
proceeded to beat on the gear at all hours. By contrast, the relatively 
few Americans that visited tended to be Cisco Academy kids chasing 
high-school credit for entry-level certs. Some who were out to develop 
skills for job advancement spent as much time chiding me for not making 
the interface more user-friendly (Cisco's IOS is NOT), or for not 
developing an elaborate reservation system so they could block out 
equipment and not risk equipment being in use when it was convenient for 
them.

This isn't as much a commentary on the state of the Amerian technical 
workforce as on how aggressively and methodically the foreigners jumped 
in and exploited an opportunity that I'd (unwittingly) provided to go 
after such jobs.

I've since moved, and the lab has been offline since June, 2003. I've 
accumulated more routers, and am trying to open it up again. However, 
given my increased awareness of offshoring, I'm torn between wanting to 
give access without conditions, or possibly limiting access to US 
nationals. I don't have any answers yet. (Moving briefly on-topic, I 
could use pointers to some code to determine country of origin for an IP 
address.)

Am I undermining my fellow Citizens by allowing access to all? (I 
considered a modified user agreement damning the visitor to starvation 
and misery if the skills were used to land jobs displacing American 
workers, but that doesn't see right.) Is this an issue with open source 
and similar initiatives in general? Witness India and China making 
aggressive strides towards "non-American" software based on open source. 
Or is this just the reality of where things are heading, and warning to 
KEEP looking for the next valuable skill set?

And finally: Would anybody on this list find any use in access to such a 
lab?

- Bob
   Only questions, no answers