Magwa read very good x-rays.
Posted on 03/02/2004 3:55:47 AM PST by ZeitgeistSurfer
As corporate America becomes increasingly comfortable with offshore development, it's sending substantially more sophisticated IT work overseas. Companies such as Google Inc. are turning to foreign workers not for their willingness to work for lower wages but for their technological prowess.
Google is advertising for highly skilled IT help at its recently opened research and development facility in Bangalore, India. These employees will be involved in all aspects of Google's computer engineering work: conception, research, implementation and deployment.
"Bangalore is the so-called Silicon Valley of India, and there is a large pool of talented software engineers there," said Krishna Bharat, Google's principal scientist.
R&D is core to most companies. They guard it carefully, and their brightest people work on it. But as offshoring becomes increasingly commonplace, companies are moving up the value chain, using foreign workers in ways that make them a more integral part of the corporate identity.
Silicon Valley venture capital firms are encouraging start-ups to send their product development work overseas, said Marc Hebert, a vice president at Sierra Atlantic Inc., a Fremont, Calif.-based outsourcing firm that specializes in R&D. While Google was explicit about talent rather than cost being the driver of its offshore move, most companies are equally keen to tap the lower wages, which enable them to hire more people to bring products to market faster.
Hebert said that although idea generation and funding are still coming from the U.S., more and more of the R&D work needed to actually bring a product to market is being done offshore. "That's the really interesting trend," he said.
What that means for the future of Silicon Valley and IT development in the U.S. is unclear. But while overseas firms are hiring, the IEEE-USA said last week that the 2003 U.S. jobless rate for computer scientists and systems analysts has reached an all-time high of 5.2%.
The Asia Connection
Although the number of R&D jobs that have moved to Asia doesn't yet approach the number of low-end IT jobs that have moved, such as those in programming, the gap is bound to narrow, said Bob Hayward, an Australia-based senior vice president at Gartner Inc.
"There's a certain amount of inevitability about it," Hayward said, noting that the highly skilled Asian workforce and the leading role taken by those countries in developing cutting-edge services and technologies, such as broadband Internet access and flat-panel technology, have attracted the attention of U.S. IT vendors.
Just in the past three to four years, U.S.-backed investments in Asian R&D operations have increased dramatically, Hayward said. He noted that those investments have soared while IT vendors, faced with a global slowdown in demand for their products, have held back investments in other areas.
Several of the largest U.S. IT vendors started building R&D centers in China in 1998. Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp. have opened facilities in Beijing. Intel has 40 researchers; Microsoft has 200 Ph.D. candidate interns and 170 researchers.
Some governments provide economic incentives to attract U.S. companies to invest in R&D operations in their countries. In Taiwan, for example, foreign firms can deduct 35% of their R&D investments from the income tax owed by their profit-making operations.
Still, some IT development work can be done only in the U.S., said Richard Brown, associate vice president of marketing at Via Technologies Inc. in Taipei, Taiwan. For example, the design and development of Via's PC chip-set products is done in Taiwan, but the company's CPU and graphics-chips products are designed by teams in the U.S., reflecting the dominance of the U.S. in those product areas, he said.
'Big Picture' Question
But the trend is clear. About half of the IT R&D done by Stratex Networks Inc. takes place overseas, some at its New Zealand subsidiary, and some in India. That has included development of a network configuration tool, said B. Lee Jones, vice president of IT and CIO at the San Jose-based company.
Jones has eight data centers to run on five continents and offices across 22 time zones. Like many U.S. IT executives, he wonders about the big picture: the long-term impact on the U.S. as more work is shifted offshore. But Jones said he believes the U.S. will remain dominant in IT.
Though he has some hesitancy about moving high-level work offshore, along with a desire to keep core development in the U.S., Jones said that "as the comfort level goes up and we are able to take advantage of having comparable quality for smaller prices, people will naturally migrate there."
Lemon is the IDG News Service correspondent in Taipei.
YYYYAAAAAYYYYYY TEAM! We're becoming a second-rate technological innovator! YAAAYYYYY! Free Trade is the answer to (all of the rest of the world's) problems! America will finally be humiliated and made into a third-world country! YAAAAAYYYYYY TEAM!
Boy, that GW Bush is the best thing that ever could have happened to America, huh? Now if we can only get a few more H1-B's over here, export a little more technology, and coax a few more illegal aliens to come here, then we'll finally be there!
After decades of second-rate education in every subject except "self-esteem" and how to use a condom properly...you expected something different to happen?
If this is true, could this be illegal (assuming the Indian doctors areen't licensed to practice medicine in the US)?
I know that I'll be asking questions the next time I have x-rays taken.
Well, you've got a point there, FRiend. But what about the rest of us who have educated ourselves? Are we all destined to live in the squalor as America devolves?
I think that was a rhetorical question.
Magwa read very good x-rays.
Then maybe we won't get the GD'med little box with the GD'med little red x. >:^(
I believe the word you're looking for is "juche."
Naw, I prefer to listen to Texas_Dawg. He tells me we'll all be sports-team owners.
Haha.
The Maytag boxes hold up better than the Whirlpool, but you need to pick out a good overpass early before all the good ones are taken. The ones around here for I-95 are very nicely constructed, and the climate is mild most of the year.
I couldn't find that word, until I looked in the Indian-English dictionary:
| Ju·ché n. pl. Juché or Ju·chés
|
| Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
Exactly.
Sometimes languages have similar words. The Indian word is the one I'm most worried about.
If you're over 50, Walmart prefers friendly middle-aged greeters to surly teenagers.
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