Automatisation is the future

After 15 years working in IT as a system engineer, I've seen the evolution from the good old days to off-shoring and near-shoring.

Cost ...

it is the most important word in the IT business.  That is what we are for a business and the goal is to reduce the cost...  In the good old days, money was no issue.  I worked for a bank where an investment of 2 million euros was made solely based on the discount that the supplier was giving...  Did we really need hardware of 2 million euros?  Not in the least, the biggest part of the hardware was just collecting dust in the years to come...
During that time, the cost that is called: 1 FTE was no issue.  The only problem companies had was finding the right people, and once found, the numbers were not important...

One day, the idea grew that there were people everywhere in the world and that there are computers everywhere in the world, so statistically speaking, there are some people everywhere who can use a computer...  From that idea, off-shoring was born.  There were some problems like the language.  Try to understand some Indian guy in the middle of the night spelling some flemish URL ... hell!
Some other problems were "understanding the customer".  Some HP guy once told me that he got a call on a Saturday morning from India telling him that the website from Mr Ing was down...  ING is one of the biggest international banks in Belgium.  They thought some tennisclub website was down or something.  In reality, the whole ING bank was down!
Another important problem is knowledge.  I can understand that Indian guys are also very smart in computer stuff, but not all of them...  Companies think they can just pick someone from the streets of India, asking them to spell Linux and if they are able to, just give them a contract.  So, a lot of these guys have no idea what they are doing...
The list of problems just goes on like the time difference, other customs, ...

Ok, the solution to this was: near-shoring.  Don't look too far, maybe some of the problems will disappear if we are closer to home ... they didn't ...

Now, for the first time in 10 years, I see an evolution in the opposite way.  I also see opportunities.  Tools like jenkins, puppet, ... they give us the opportunity to drastically increase our efficiency.  I think we need to focus on showing the IT world that we can have a big advantage over *-shoring because, we have the knowledge and the expertise to create a new way of working...  If my sense of the future is correct, I think this will save our jobs.

But, as always, time will tell.