[ams6110]

You can't really offshore swapping out a defective network cable or replacing a hard drive. I haven't looked at how they define an "IT Support Professional" but I'm assuming it's not just answering a phone and following a decision tree and saying "I'm very sorry to hear that you are still experiencing a problem" before each step. Anyone can do that with almost no training.

[gscott]

You on-shore it by hiring H1B visa workers to replace the American ones (example is Disney).

[cube00]

Of course you can, enterprises are already starting to push "bring your own device". Even if you don't do that, you can still move to the thin client model where hardware failure just means asking the office manager to swap your device with a new one from the cupboard.

[icebraining]

BYOD doesn't do away with the problem because the users don't know how to fix them themselves, so they'll still need someone, even if it's a tech at the mall rather than in their office.

[JoblessWonder]

BYOD leads to device management, which leads to IT job security.

[Kephael]

Sure you can, just move most of your computing resources to the cloud and let Amazon manage hardware maintenance.

[sigstoat]

office workers still have computing devices on their desks, keyboards monitors, mice, printers, label printers, scanners, voip phones, switches, routers, access points, sip callboxes on the doors, projectors, access control systems, etc.

maybe the office will finally go paperless this decade, and a couple of those will go away. they'll just be some new IoT fuckery to contend with.

[PascLeRasc]

Let's also not forget that Windows 10 will keep a lot of people employed locally to issue BIOS patches and diagnose BSODs.

[gaius]

An office of freelancers with their own laptops using GMail, deploying an app to GKE, writing Google Docs, etc needs a barista before they need an IT Support person, and Google perfectly well knows this, because this is the world they are striving to create!

Or Azure or AWS I just mention Google stuff because this is their thing