Career guide for all non-URM (White/Asian/Indian/Middle Eastern) male engineers:
50: If you are above 50, you are counting your last days at work. Your job can go away anytime and will go away in near future. All the reasons provided below apply even more to you. Cut down your expenses, don’t get into doing any big purchases, plan retirement, look into creating small streams of side incomes, take care of your health. Be mentally prepared for walking out anytime. Get rid of any emotional ties you may have with the workplace and people at workplace, and be assured that you and your work will be forgotten in no time.
<50: If you are in your early forties, you may still have a chance of finding something more stable outside. Start looking for job outside aggressively, even if you have to take a pay-cut, it may be worthwhile. You may find something more stable, and more fulfilling. Besides, it is very likely that you will learn some other skills, get experience, and make contacts that would be more valuable if you have to/decide to change again. If you are in mid to late forties, you are rushing dangerously close to the dead-end. Avoid all big expenses, put money aside for kid's education, make all financial decisions with an awareness that job might go away and finding new job may not be easy. If kids are still younger, seriously consider moving to a place where job opportunities are plenty. Depending on your skills, age and health, you may have one last chance to switch.
<40: Don’t be fooled by your current situation, which may look rosy because of a recent promotion, raise etc. Your salability is high, you have high energy and kids are very young so take the advantage and move into more dynamic job and location, where you can jump from job to job easily. Any more experience in this place would become liability in the environment where workers get blamed for management mistakes. Earlier you move, better for you and your family. URM survey report says that URM 2020 goals are at risk and more so at higher grade levels. Pressure to hire only URM is already there, but going forward, there will be lot more pressure to promote URMs. So there will be fewer and fewer growth opportunities. The chances of merit based advancement would be much less than being sidelined unfairly because of your race, sex and age.
<30: You are young and have entire career in front of you. Plan to get out of Semiconductor field altogether. If you want to stick around for a while, focus on doing only jobs that would give good experience to land a good opportunity outside. Remember one thing: Anything that can be outsourced, will be outsourced. People on this board talk about H1B, but outsourcing is a much bigger problem and no politician is going to stop this loss of American jobs. Consolidation in the industry is already happening and only few big players will be left in a few years. At that time, it will be extremely difficult to find a decent job here. No new startups are happening in semi, with Moore's Law coming to an end, there will be no reason to build new fabs. Companies will have small design teams in India and China and Asian foundries will churn out cheap chips. This will be a dead industry soon, so do yourself a favor by planning to switch. Also, take this as your moral duty to educate engineers younger than you about these facts.