As a current employed professional in the industry I found this to be an interesting article. First let me stated that I was hired as a QA Analyst/Tester for my current employer. I then went on to be the Infrastructure Engineer with 90% of the workload being tech support. The fact that I am trying to enter the Networking Arena and have also notice that more and more these positions are in deed looking for end user support as well seems to be a moot point during this economic time. Nonetheless I do have to state that support techs should not be outsourced completely, but to those organizations that do choose this route they must keep in mind that if their support is outsourced there should not be no internal employee with these skill sets since eventually the users will most likely go to the individual who is internal vs. the outsourced help desk. I know this of first hand. What concerns me the most is that outsource companies get usually paid more for the support service and are used less when there is an internal staff that can be addressed first. Not to mention that if you have a great customer service background it usually makes the help desk look bad in comparison to the approach that is being used between the techs. By the way my current employer does outsource the help desk at twice the pay that I make and I address 90% of the user technical issues. My two cents...