Woodie's Opening Speech

[Chris Hibner]

I thought the speech was great. And YES, it applies to me. Our company (as well as most others) is really shipping as many tasks overseas as possible. We work with a number of contract houses in India and China, and we just opened our own engineering facility in Poland in order to hire engineers at a fraction of the cost that we can in the US. If we want to still have technical jobs in the US, we have to have some sort of competitive advantage over people in other areas of the world. Much of what Woodie said was right on the money as far as I'm concerned. I'm glad FIRST is addressing it head-on and out in the open rather than skirting around the issue.

Everyone needs to remember: take your studies seriously. When you're in college you need to remember that in order to be employable, you need to beat out (by a large margin) other people from around the world that want to do your job for much less money. Study hard, learn a lot, and learn to be creative. We can't afford to let college and high school be party time.

Too many people think that they are entitled to a great standard of living. It's going to be an awfully hard smack in the face to these people when they realize that the entitlement is gone - it's time to start earning it. If people wait until it hits them before they get motivated - it's too late.