You have done enough for your family and now it's your own game

You are 37 and soon you will reach 40. You have sacrificed a lot for your family. Your daughter receives better education than you. What the hell can she complain or you should feel no guilty even you take her to Africa!
You are now tossing a dice between job security and career advancement. You have to make up your decision by yourself and for yourself only, not for your wife or your daughter.
If you can manage the relationship with your current group and boss and don't burn the bridge, you should be able to come back a few months later if things don't work out in S.V. What you should do are:

A. Ask that Asian guy (sorry I don't call Taiwanese Chinese) about his career objective in this company and what you can do for him (not for the company just for him) to achieve that goal. Of course, you should say it indirectly by reminding him how much you sacrificed for him to move up to S.V. You basically observe his personality and his leadership skill and ask yourself if you can see VP-like perception out of him or if he can walk into the conference room and dominate everyone in the meeting including Indians and caucasians. If not, he is still dreaming his own saver to move him up on his career ladder. Forget it. You simply don't have enough time to play his game.

B. We rely on our technical skills to get promotion; however, once your skills reach a certain level, extra more skills will not help you at all. If your job is easy, why don't you invest your time into EMBA or something else?

The bottom line is what your objective in the next 5 years is. As long as you can come back to the current group, you can probably try this position for a few months while keeping your family in L.A. I do have friends who did such a thing for a while. Besides this, he also wants to train his family to get used to it so that in the future, he can apply for road-warrior type job to Asia without family issue. If you consider too much for other people around you, you lose your identity or you work hard to make their life easier.

Image you can move up to Bay Area alone without family around you. You can go to bar at night, meet new friends, and try all sorts of stuffs to gain your personal life back for at least a few months. In the meanwhile, you can reposition yourself in job market and keep looking for new opportunities.

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• good point A/B, practical -deadRiver- ♂ (250 bytes) () 08/19/2007 postreply 12:30:50