Today it's an "all or nothing" game. You either design the iPod or the latest bottle for "premium water," collect a mid-six figure salary or work three different patchwork jobs.
Due to the rapid change in technology, my career today is absolutely nothing like I imagined it would be just 10 years ago. The technology I use today to do my job would have been stunning to me 10 years ago. I can get my work done from any corner of the globe just so long as I have a reliable connection to the Internet (which is rapidly becoming a given across the world).
I run a department of about 45 people. Just a few months ago I was in Albuquerque, NM - about 2,500 miles away from my branch office, and yet I had instant two-way access to all my employees with Nextel/Sprint phones and through my laptop, I had access to every application that I use daily from my Boston area office. From the viewpoint of my employees, I could just as easily have been in my office down the hallway as my business trip was totally transparent to them.
One can only imagine how different things will be 10 years from now!
Getting back to the factory jobs, it is my belief that all of this fuss over factories moving overseas is a moot point due to the rapid advances we are about to see with robotics. Within most of our lifetimes (if you are under 40), nearly all production will be fully automated. So corporations taking advantage of "cheap labor" overseas is a temporary thing. Soon enough, engineers will feed a program to a factory computer and products will be produced from raw materials untouched by human hands.