Posted on 02/03/2006 5:38:32 AM PST by ZeitgeistSurfer
PALO ALTO, Calif. U.S. chip designers are still the best in the world, though how long they can hold that position as India and China continue to produce hordes of engineers in the next few years remains an open question, according to EDA CEOs participating in a Thursday (Feb. 2) panel discussion here.
John Bourgoin, CEO of MIPS Technologies Inc., said U.S. chip designers are unquestionably still the best on the whole, though he added that the degree to which that is true varies by specific applications. But with China now graduating an estimated 700,000 engineers per year, Bourgoin said, the situation is likely to change.
"Within a few years we will see this gap close," Bourgoin said.
Michael Fister, president and CEO of Cadence Design Systems Inc., said that intellectually there is not much difference between engineers in the U.S. and their counterparts in other parts of the world, but that experientially there is currently a big difference.
This is bad news for the U.S., Fister said, because, "It won't take long for some of them to bridge that gap."
Walden Rhines, chairman and CEO of Mentor Graphics Corp., disagreed somewhat. Rhines said that there will always be a shortage of good engineers in the world, no matter how many are produced.
Rhines argued that while U.S. companies have been outsourcing manufacturing in order to take advantage of less expensive engineering labor costs in places like China and India, the outsourcing of design activities has been focused more on harnessing a larger pool of skilled designers. The salary gap between U.S. engineers and their foreign counterparts is already closing rapidly, Rhines said.
The huge number of engineers being trained in China and India will ultimately be good for the whole industry, Rhines argued, because it will result in more good engineers.
Aart de Geus, chairman and CEO of Synopsys Inc., said state-of-the-art design in India is approaching the quality of state-of-the-art design in the West. He said a wave of Indian designers who have lived and worked in the U.S. are also returning to their native country to take advantage of budding entrepreneurial opportunities, which should improve the overall quality of India's design capabilities.
Without mincing words, de Geus also took the opportunity to slam U.S. immigration and H1-B visa policy in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Though he acknowledged that controls needed to be tightened following the attacks, de Geus suggested that the U.S. has gone too far.
"When a country closes its doors to intellect, it's dumb," de Geus said.
Though what passes for optimism in the EDA industry has likely changed following years of anemic growth, CEOs nevertheless sounded an upbeat tone Thursday at the EDA Consortium's annual CEO forecast panel. Though the panel lacked bold predictions of high growth for the coming year, panelists suggested that 2006 could be a comparably good year for EDA.
Rhines said, as he has previously, that 2006 could be a good year for EDA because companies have more R&D money to spend on three-year contract renewals than they did in 2003.
Rhines, who is also chairman of the EDA Consortium, said the EDA industry could grow 6.5 percent in 2006 and an additional 8 percent in 2007. He added that he expects higher growth in future years.
"Life will get much better for all of us," Rhines said.
Rhines announced that panelist John Kibarian, CEO of process integration technology provider PDF Solutions Inc., has been elected to fill an open position on the EDA Consortium's board of directors.
"..as India and China continue to produce hordes of engineers."
"Hordes of" does not equal "top notch".
I've been called in to do "clean up" on some Asian coding jobs, and so far I'm not impressed.
Agreed. "Hordes" doesn't equal "best". But in any large population (e.g 700,000/year), you are bound to get some pretty good ones.
That's one thing that can close the gap.
Intel develops key mobile tech in India
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1555431/posts
And, of course, those 700,000 engineers are all trained to the same degree as are U.S. engineers, and there have been no papers debunking this myth.
Oh, wait ...
As with any knowledge-based industries, quality, rather than quantity, of engineers is crucial. Of those hundreds of thousands of 'engineers' India and China graduate each year, a couple of hundred good ones is all that it takes.
Oops, indstries = industry.
Agreed, I'll guess that the Chip industry, assuming we don't respond to the BeTrayders... will be China.
Meanwhile, the software industry will be in India, again, if nothing is done about the BeTrayders.
BI Vendor CEO Blasts Gates' Position on H-1B No need to eliminate cap on visas, claims Information Builders' Cohen
Q&A by Don Tennant
MAY 09, 2005 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Gerald Cohen, the outspoken founder and CEO of New York-based business intelligence software vendor Information Builders Inc., spoke with Computerworld late last month about the controversy surrounding offshore outsourcing and the H-1B visa program. Excerpts follow:
Bill Gates told an audience in Washington recently that the U.S. needs to get rid of the cap on H-1B visas. What's your position on that?
He's full of it. He says, "I'd hire a lot more American engineers if I could find them -- they're not available, and that's why we're going to China and India." He's going there because it's just cheaper. He can find all the engineers he wants in this country.
A lot of CEOs at companies like yours are saying that they just can't find the people.
That's bull. You know who wants [to get rid of the cap]? The Indian companies. The way the Indian companies work is they have to have a certain number of people here, and a lot more people back there - so they're the ones who want to get all these people in. And they don't even pay them American wages -- they just pay them as cheaply as they can.
But surely you use overseas labor to lower your own costs.
I'm going to put two hats on. With one hat, I say we want to keep jobs in New York City. The other hat says that we want the company to be prosperous, and if I can lower my costs by doing work overseas, the company's more prosperous. But I'm not so sure that's better for the country. How much of your development work is done outside of the U.S.?
We do a little quality-assurance work outside of the U.S. We find it's economical to do the routine kind of QA work [overseas].
What's your response to the unemployed U.S. IT worker who says you should be keeping those jobs in the U.S.?
We have to [do business] economically. It's a real problem. The government is providing us with no help, so we're doing [what we have to do] ourselves.
If you look further down the road, there's going to be a huge drain of IT jobs. A lot of these jobs that go overseas are the spawning grounds for future jobs. So the whole industry's going to move offshore.
What do you want the government to do to help?
[Indian vendors] will bring people into the U.S. cheaply. No! When you [bring people into] the U.S., you have to pay American wages. That would be a minimum standard, for example.
There are a lot of small things that could be done, but I have no solution for how we're going to throttle this in some way.
A lot of people say the education system in the U.S. is failing to provide qualified IT workers. Do you disagree?
That's bunk. Why do you have declining computer science majors? Because every parent is saying, "Why major in computer science when all the jobs are going offshore?" It feeds itself.
And I guarantee you, if it doesn't stop, in a couple years, you're not going to have much of an IT industry here.
Gerald Cohen, founder and CEO of Information Builders Inc.
"Clean up" jobs are never impressive doesn't matter who written the original piece of code.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.