Bill Schweber, Executive Editor of EDN makes some excellent points in his article "Are we losing our innovation religion?" in the July 7th issue of EDN. The article made me ponder these points: At what point does the US start feeling the ramifications of globalization? Are we already? Might these concerns we are voicing be the same of those of blue collar workers in the latter part of the 20th century? Are the white collar jobs becoming the blue collar of the 21st century? So what takes it's place? Here's what I think. Yes, we the white collar workers in technology fields, are the 21st century blue collar worker. OK, we write code or design circuits instead of running a machine or working on an assembly line. But how much different is it? Sure we get to be creative about it and have a lot of flexibility in what the end product looks like, but we still are building a product using known tools and methods. I equate this to being a skilled machinist. High school grads can be trained in a short amount of time to produce works that do the job. I'm not saying a high school grad has the understanding to architect a multi-tier client server app...oh wait Kazaa was created in large part by high school students. Can a high school student write a compiler, maybe, but not likely. Don't think this is the case? Take a look at domestic salaries offered in software engineering in the last year. I can't say I ever worked on any software project for $13/hour. Yet I still see them on Monster, Dice, LinkedIn, HotJobs, etc. Where does this leave us? What is the next frontier? Biotechnology, MEMS, nanotechnology, gene therapy, aeronautical engineering (read space travel), could be the next career gold mines. Will you see people building self cloning nano robots in their garages? Think about what Jobs and Wozniak did in 1976 an how revolutionary it was and how absurd it seemed that everyone should own one.