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But, if you want to carry this on, I would prefer it be done in private.

If you will permit it, I believe demonstrating in the open by individual example is the most powerful persuasion that exists. I believe there are a lot of others posting to and lurking in this thread who could benefit from a discussion of a concrete situation, because it personalizes the issues and becomes real to them.

This is not about me. I'm here because I believe what happened to me is wrong. I believed it was wrong before it happened to me. And I believe it should never happen to another American. I'm here to put an end to the betrayal of America by whatever means I can with my limited resources. If that means debate upto and including running for office, so be it. If that means other plausible means, so be it. I don't know all the options; but, this was bigger than me when it got to me and will remain so. I am not the focus nor do I want to be. I'm trying to put my money where my mouth is.. which is more than I can say for the treason lobby.

These are all laudable sentiments. The personal testimonial however, is truly putting your money where your mouth is. I want to discuss this in the open because for my own selfish reasons I want to put my own beliefs to the test. I have no idea where an open discussion will lead to. We might, for example, conclude that you have done everything you possibly can, and there truly is no way out; and if it comes to that I will gladly concede you are correct about various aspects of the offshoring issue. However, I am inclined to believe that together we can come up with at least several viable strategies that can give you hope, and by extension, anyone else in a predicament similar to yours the same hope.

Just so you won't feel you are standing on the stage by yourself, I'll share my own personal testimonial out in the open, but with no expectation nor obligation on your part to do the same. I just want you to know that I wouldn't ask you to do anything I won't do myself. Think of it as a confidence building measure.

Back in 1997, I joined up with an IT consulting company, about 300 consultants in the firm. I was leaving another consulting company where I had naively run afoul of departmental politics so corporate life already held little appeal to me. I knew it was politics that was responsible for my poor annual review and not my actual performance because my old company's CEO and the client manager I was with at the time made personal appeals to me to stay, and the COO, for whom the annual review process was his personal pet project, said he made a mistake in my case in his own personal appeal. I left amicably, since it was water under the bridge and the best that everyone could do after all that happened was to learn and move on.

The new company seemed different however, so I gave corporate life another shot. I was the top performing consultant in my division; in the depths of the dot com bomb, I was one out of five consultants in the entire company who received any annual bonus at all, and out of the five, I got the highest bonus. Traveling 50 out of 52 weeks to billable projects and helping the sales and marketing teams with whatever they needed (RFPs, brochures, sales pitches, etc.) helped accomoplish this. My compensation was a healthy six figures, and I flew to so many projects I got lifetime platinum status with American Airlines.

There were warning signs despite all the good news, however.

I expressed my concerns two years before I felt they would come home to roost in the division. I was made technical lead of the division, but only about the time I predicted trouble would really hit the division. I was right. We were losing profitability steadily, and within two months after I was tapped as technical lead we would start bleeding red ink at our current burn rate. I quickly figured out that the previous business managers of the division had simply rode a fortuitous series of contracts and didn't really develop the business side. I got word through back channels that the former business people got my company blackballed by our primary vendor whose products we sell, because of their incredibly poor sales abilities (bugging the vendor for leads until the vendor gave up on us). By this point, the CEO was taking personal charge of the division, we were down to just one salesman, he was tapped as the de facto operations manager for the division, and I had learned enough about sales to know that our salesman only knew how to work inside sales and couldn't create his own leads.

Despite all this bad news, I took a chunk of my savings and invested in myself. At this point I knew bits and pieces of sales and marketing, but needed to put it together into a coherent system. So I signed up for a three-day seminar on marketing, on my own post-tax dime. It was very expensive (think used car expensive), but it delivered the goods. The entire division was shut down only four weeks after I was made technical lead, two weeks after I got back from the seminar, and it was mostly due to very poor management. The company did the business equivalent of strip mining, instead of farming and husbanding the market.

The dot bomb's effects were really getting under way at the time. Despite that, I could have gotten another consulting position because by that time I had started to build a name for myself, having spoken at one of the industry's annual conferences and helped the vendor's engineers on numerous occasions. I've been steadily working towards educating myself on the non-technical aspects of my industry, and since working for someone else seemed about as unstable as starting my own business, I opted to strike out on my own.

I'm not going to paint you a rosy picture. It was scary as hell sometimes. I came close to running out of cash twice in the first year, even though I had set aside a year's worth of living expenses. Got stiffed out of fees by an Indian body shop in our second year. But ever since we've slowly built momentum (cash reserves), and are into our fourth year of operation (five years is usually the startup mortality line, about 90% fail within that period). I've regained my former compensation level and rebuilt my personal cash reserves. And I'll never go back to working W-2 again even if it means more compensation (because I know that without full control, that compensation is only temporary).

The key to the successful transition was to learn how to conduct all aspects of my industry's business, and not just the technical side. But I didn't start this only when I started to see trouble brewing. I started learning what I could about the business aspects over ten years ago. I am hardly a smooth sales or marketing type of personality; but I made a conscious effort to study what it takes to be successful performing those roles. I'm still a wallflower at parties these days, though only private parties; at industry functions I work the room, which for me was incredibly uncomfortable to learn.

What I see in similar between us is that we are technically competent in our areas, but our personal fortunes were at the capricious whim of company management. I outlined with my personal testimonial only one way to counter this situation. Now, I happen to strongly advocate starting your own business as the superior answer to economic instability, but I acknowledge there are other equally remunerative approaches if pure compensation is what motivates you. You already have an advantage in my eyes because you have had some experience in sales. I hope to have a productive discussion with you about your personal situation, and hopefully with some positive feedback from others on this thread we can all find some path out of your current position that you agree can propel you towards the success you seek. And hopefully that will inspire others that have chimed in with stories similar to yours to seek their own paths out of their offshored conditions.