Monday Monday....

It’s 4:45PM. My medium sized project isn’t finished and I need to present it to the customer tomorrow morning. Guess I’m working tonight, which is ok I suppose since Grace has friends coming over. I can hide in my office and turn on the radio and work to my hearts content. I think I’ll have about three hours in which to wrap up the project.

I was talking with a co-worker today about the future of our industry. Like so many other industries, we’re begun to sell our souls to the devil and out source a lot of our manufacturing overseas. I think historically this has been a huge impact for blue collar employees, not so much of an impact (although my programming buddies would disagree) for white collar. Times are changing. China is just starting to come on-line with semiconductor manufacturing. One look inside any Wal-Mart tells us exactly how much consumers will support products manufactured in the US.

I’m not predicting the death of my industry, just the death of large scale semiconductor manufacturing in the US over the next decade or so. Looking at what’s happened in the industry in the past decade is eye opening. The wafer fabs have shut down at a much faster pace than they start up. There may be 50 or 60% less semiconductor companies in the US today than 10 years ago. Ditto for Europe. What looked like a limitless industry a few years back is now starting to look like a four or five horse industry.

My co-worker is 57 and can ride it out until retirement. I have no such illusion. I have 20 years until retirement (if I play my cards perfectly). In reality, I expect to be outsourced from my own industry within a decade if I don’t return to school and pick up a MBA that will give me a bit of latitude to slide out of the technical and into the business aspect of the industry. Having already spent years going to night school for my first degree, I’m hesitant about doing it again. Years slip by in a haze when going to night school. Sure you can take the summers off and relax, but that just adds more time to the overall timeline of how long you’re giving up your life for. Work/eat/school/repeat.

I’ve sufficiently depressed myself enough to go cook dinner.