Awkward political question

[F._Schubert]

Frankly said, I'm really biased pro-sharing, otherwise I wouldn't post here. And I don't think of 'helping' as a selfles deed either.

Being myself in a 'high-cost' country, the outsourcing is a potential thread discussed with other technicans/engineers/scientists/managers even from the customer side. It is of our own interest to keep the job we make a living of. And in my industry there is a massiv movement of production lines and fabs towards asia at the moment.

But lately I had to travel a lot around the glob as part of my job, and hence I've seen the conditions for technical work in such places (haven't been in the US so far, but seen some of the 'better' places in asia). I don't think that it'd be easy to do my job in these countries. They really miss the pool of highly-skilled, motivated, proud, well-paid, honoured, highly trained technical professionals (electronicians, reasearch assitants, mechanics, ...). They do have brilliant scientists and software developers in these countries, yes. But if you have to deal with hardware/equipement/machinery, it takes more time to get things done there, I wasted some when I did installations of equipement there and was waiting for cooling water to be installed. Much more money is wasted when things break down and a production line is waiting for an service engineer to be flown in, while here some phone calls would enable the skilled technicans to fix the problem in some hours.

In addition to this technical-economic impression I have, I also have a more personal approach. We are not bound to the job we do now (the company you work for can change the specialization, you could get a diffrent position inside the company or move to a diffrent company). My own job profile is changing a bit towards internal training, so my skills developed by helping in the forums are channeled economically. Your forum profil might help you as well if applying for a new job or if you are moving into consultant buissines.

Similar to Ben's bosses saing about the 6 steps, my father was telling me the 2 ways of making a technical career:

a) become indispensable (you are the only one who can do it)

b) get your work documented so well, that the new guy can do it. You will be rewarded with a new exciting project.

Felix