Re: Overseas Job Migrations - one industry's perspective

Brian G. Moore wrote:

> I am particularly interested in Rich Lemert's view on this article
> he's talking about, for two reasons.  One, well it is an interesting
> topic and I don't have time to read the article :)  But two is that
> Rich has in the past been mostly on the pro-free-market side of
> things.  This is something that could (and perhaps is) affect him
> directly.
>  
 Forgive me if this is a repost. I had a problem posting last night, 
and I'm not seeing
my response.

 You're right, Brian, that this is something that could potentially 
have a direct impact on
me.

Some background:

 The company I work for is currently the largest EDA company (in terms 
of market
capitalization) in the world. It's headquartered in Mt. View, CA (near 
San Jose), and
has sales and support offices throughout the world. Major R&D centers 
are in Mt. View,
Hillsboro, OR, and Durham, NC (where I am) in the US, and in Taiwan, 
Shanghai,
and Hyderabad (India). These are the ones I'm most familiar with, at least.

 Like many of the companies quoted in the article I cited, our foreign 
offices are where
they are in large part because that's where our customers are. The 
world's largest "free-play"
fab (meaning they _only_ manufacture IC's, they don't do any of their 
own designs) is
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in Taiwan. The world's 
second
largest free-play fab is in Singapore. And while a lot of semiconductor 
design is still
carried out in the US, India and China are rapidly becoming major design 
centers.

 It's also true that if you look only at direct salary and benefits 
costs, Indian and Chinese
engineers are less expensive than western engineers (I'm going ahead and 
including Europe
here). However, their productivity is also significantly lower. While 
there are many
exceptions to the rule, the Indian engineers in particular don't want to 
take the trouble
to understand the tools their working with. They would often rather be 
given a set of
cookbook procedures and told when to apply them. The programmers in Taiwan,
on the other hand, are generally pretty sharp, but they aren't as 
'aggressive' as Americans
when it comes to finding out what our customers want and need. It turns 
out that at
my company, China and India get the more mundane assignments, while the more
creative and challenging projects are carried out in Taiwan and the US.

 Bottom line - I thought the respondents in the article pretty much 
nailed the situation
(at least insofar as my limited perspective permits me to comment).

Personal Impact:

 I am directly affected by the overseas development centers by the fact 
that I interact
with people in Taiwan and India on a regular basis. I am _not_, however, 
impacted in
the sense that my job is going overseas. For one thing, I'm not a 
programmer. I'm
currently supporting a major US foundry by helping them develop the 
technology files
our tools require so their customers can verify their IC designs. (At 
the moment, my
position essentially receives direct funding from the customer, so I'm 
not as dependent
upon general revenue as a lot of people are. However, this is also a 
fairly unique
arrangement within the company.)

 This is not to say that I haven't had an interesting time, lately. 
When the merger occured
18 months ago, the group I was in was considered by the new managers to 
be overstaffed.
As the one with the least tenure, I was the one "given the chance to 
explore new
opportunities." The people I had worked with, though, were favorably 
impressed
with me (even though my electronics background is one course in the 
subject), so when
the project I'm working on was being developed, they pushed hard to make 
me a part of
it.

 (As a side note, the company just had another lay-off about two weeks 
ago. However,
this is more of an effort to re-align their resources so that their in 
better balance with
customer demands. Nearly everyone who was laid off will be given first 
priority - from
what I've been told - for any of the positions currently open that they 
apply for. In
many cases, though, it will require moving to a different office and 
moving to a different
product. In some cases, this is still fallout from the merger. There 
were a few areas where
both companies had competing tools, and they've finally reached the 
point where they
can discontinue the weaker one.)

Personal Opinion:

 (This is probably the part Brian has been waiting for.)

 I'm not strongly pro-globalization, but I'm not against it, either. To 
me, it's a fact of life
that needs to be dealt with. We can impose all the tariffs we want and 
create strong
global unions, and it won't change the fact that labor in other 
countries is cheaper than
in the US. The only viable, long-term strategy that makes any sense, 
IMO, is to figure out
what our strengths are as a country and to push them as hard as we can. 
There will
be significant disruptions to different parts of our society, but that's 
been true of every
innovation (think buggy-whip makers, for example).

 Instead of wasting our energy fighting the changes, we should be 
focussing our efforts
on helping people make the transition as smoothly as possible. For those 
few who cannot
make the transition (i.e. too close to retirement for re-training), 
maybe we should consider
setting up a few "feather-bedding" jobs like they had in the railroads. 
(When they went
from steam engines to diesel locomotives, the railroad unions got a 
clause in the contract
that said firemen - the people that shoveled the coal into the firebox - 
could retain their
jobs as long as they wanted. This despite the fact that there was no 
work for them to do.
As I understand it, some of them spend twenty or thirty years riding the 
rails doing no
useful work.)

Rich Lemert