High-Tech Research Moving From US To China 426
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that American companies like Applied Materials are moving their research facilities and engineers to China as the country develops a high-tech economy that increasingly competes directly with the United States. Applied Materials set up its latest solar research labs in China after estimating that China would be producing two-thirds of the world's solar panels by the end of this year and their chief technology officer, Mark R. Pinto, is the first CTO of a major American tech company to move to China. 'We're obviously not giving up on the US,' says Pinto. 'China needs more electricity. It's as simple as that.' Western companies are also attracted to China's huge reservoirs of cheap, highly skilled engineers and the subsidies offered by many Chinese cities and regions, particularly for green energy companies. Applied Materials decided to build their new $250 million research facility in Xi'an after the city government sold them a 75-year land lease at a deep discount and is reimbursing the company for roughly a quarter of the lab complex's operating costs for five years."
Good job (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what happens when you try to be smart ass and move all of your work load to other countries because it's supposedly cheaper. Good job.
Wait... (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait until the Chinese steal your tech and the government keeps quiet about it. You'll soon discover that reimbursements and deep discounts are peanuts.
Re:Good job (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, all we need is a good CEO outsourcing firm and the transition will be complete.
Hot New Trend... until... (Score:5, Insightful)
America the new 3rd World (Score:5, Insightful)
The decline of the US has already happened. But we're too arrogant or perhaps more ignorant on whats going on. Within the next 10 years, China will surpass the US in everything. The only thing the US still maintains a hold on is the Media/Entertainment industry. Wake up America otherwise we will go gently into that good night.
I wonder what will happen in the long run? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder what the ultimate result of this will be. I know that the US will always need mechanics, plumbers, electricians, retail clerks, warehouse people, office workers, etc, but none of these jobs pay very well (though I have noticed a trend that the price of service jobs such as electricians and plumbers has increased significantly, at least here in Los Angeles, over the past decade). Heck, they've even outsourced customer service at call centers overseas. Will this mean that in the next fifty years, America will just be in the service industry and nothing else? And the kind of service industry, by the way, that's menial and requires little knowledge and effort (like being an office clerk). Will most of the highly-prized work go overseas? Does that mean that people who want to work in those fields will have to go overseas to get work? And if they do, will they be making pennies on the dollar? Would China even allow that? I'd imagine they'd want their own people to be employed, rather than incoming foreigners.
I don't know what will happen in the next few decades, but trends like this scare me. It makes me think about how, in an effort to make more profit, corporations have essentially dismantled US tech and manufacturing, which, for most of America's history, have been the backbone of this country. Heck, you can't even call farmers and ranchers that anymore; we import even our beef from other countries.
Re:Hot New Trend... until... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, but will the move goose THIS quarter's results? That's all that most CEOs care about.
Re:Hot New Trend... until... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, it's insane. China may or may not be as unsubtle as to seize their assets and kick them out, but you can be pretty certain that anything they develop at the Chinese facilities will end up right in the hands of Chinese competitors. And if after that goes on for a while, they do decide to leave on their own, they'll certainly lose all their fixed assets.
Outsourcing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good job (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what happens when you try to be smart ass and move all of your work load to other countries because it's supposedly cheaper. Good job.
It didnt have to be this way - the primary reason for setting up shop somewhere is access to labor. If we had made it easy for the smart chinese and indians to stay here - then research bases would be here and only manufacturing would move. So until immigration is made simpler for smarter immigrants, companies will need to keep going abroad.
If I can get a PhD for $60K in china and $120K in US, it makes sense to stay in the US due to transactional costs, transition costs, problems with chinese govt. etc., but if you make the numbers closer to $180K in US + lots of people bad mouthing you for hiring people on H1Bs.. well....take the whole dept. there.
Saying no to H1Bs etc. does not necessarily get americans hired - it just forces complete departments to be outsourced.Why keep IT here - when you can have the whole thing in Mumbai or Bangalore ?
Do I still have time to learn... (Score:3, Insightful)
Hey Guys (Score:4, Insightful)
Idiot in Suit #2 - "Uhh, lets move our production to China cuz its cheaper and get rid of all our American employees further hurting the crumby state of the economy instead of keeping them and keeping money circulating in our country."
Idiot in Suit #1 - "Dude,you're such a genius."
Re:But (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess the last region to be exploited is Africa. Is it already too late to start buying land?
Yup. China is already buying and developing land in Africa. (Not kidding!)
However, the development of Africa means the end of the "race to the bottom" and the end of absolute poverty.
Re:Hot New Trend... until... (Score:1, Insightful)
That, or a random chinese company will start production as soon as the bugs are ironed out, competing with the developers.
Re:But (Score:1, Insightful)
I guess the last region to be exploited is Africa. Is it already too late to start buying land?
No, Africa was the first to be exploited. It's where we dragged ourselves out of the ditch and down from the trees. Somalia was once home to the biggest superpower in the world. That doesn't mean we're looking at the decline of the Americans. What you're seeing is the emergence of evil sociopaths. The only acceptable measure is how much of a bonus you are making right now, the plebians be damned. That's not enough to end your country. America's strength was always the "fuck it, let's do it anyway" attitude.
Revolt from England? Impossible. American response? "Fuck it, let's do it anyway."
HTA flight? Impossible. American response? "Fuck it, let's do it anyway."
Atomics? Impossible. American response? "Fuck it, let's do it anyway."
The moon? Impossible. American response? "Fuck it, let's do it anyway."
Remain as the intellectual development centre of the world? Impossible. American response? "Fuck it, let's do it anyway."
Not giving up... my fat @ (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes they are. This is just the s$#T they spin to the shareholders, polititions and the sheeple so the CEOs can get their big bonuses without that much flack.
Re:Hot New Trend... until... (Score:5, Insightful)
their research & assets seized by the government
If this is being implemented properly, everything is rigorously documented, stored centrally, backed up and moved to several other countries every night.
If China or any other government does a hulksmash, then they lose that facility. They start another one elsewhere. Meanwhile, the cost savings are immense due to far lower taxation and regulation. Take that delta from doing the research on 128 and build a contingency fund or simply find an insurance policy to cover the eventuality. The business decision becomes if they can afford the time to re-build the lab or not. If yes, then it's simply a cost issue.
Government shopping is an inevitable consequence of globalization. If fortune's smiling, that will force governments to compete on costs by decreasing taxation and regulation. Corporate subsidies necessarily increase the cost of doing business through passed-on taxation, though the time-delay component may allow smart corporations to surf the 'most-favorable' wave around the globe in front of it.
Re:I wonder what will happen in the long run? (Score:3, Insightful)
America's GDP is already 80% services, the highest in the world for a medium to large country (>10 million people).
That being said, just because x company is moving high-tech to y country doesn't mean that America is losing ground. As China gets richer, they'll be importing more high-tech products; the net effect should support so much high-tech here that it makes up for any losses to China.
To clarify further, yes we import beef from other countries, but that is only because, as people, we enjoy differentiation. We are also exporting a lot of beef to other countries. Those 100 million cattle we have roaming around (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_States) are going to someone's dinner table.
Re:Outsourcing (Score:3, Insightful)
This may have been true 20, even 10 years ago, but its 2010 now. Even though the government still suffers from corruption (what government doesn't to some extent, to be honest), believe it or not, the actual economic drivers in the industry are quite safely and well seated in China's global agenda.
Plus Xi'an subsidized 1/4 of the research lab, that means 3/4 of the cost was out of Applied Materials' pockets, which is still a sizable investment by any means. Unless there is some corruption or loss that costs more than that investment, there is no reason for them to pull out of there any time soon. And a 75-year land lease to add on to that? Sounds long-term to me.
Re:Sure sure (Score:3, Insightful)
Hah! (Score:5, Insightful)
So you think Google is the rule, and not the exception? Most modern corporations have the will to skirt US law to sell to countries like Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and so forth, despite trade embargoes. US companies helped themselves and Hitler make a killing during WWII. (A guy named Prescott Bush [nhgazette.com] even got in some trouble for it.) The US and her corporations armed Indonesia [fas.org] in the genocide of the East Timorese, right through the 90s. We are still responsible for 70% of the arms sales in the world [nytimes.com], all manufactured by US corporations.
So, no. As long as the Chinese government is paying cash, corporations will ignore everything else. Just like they always do.
Hell, US investment in China skyrocketed after Tiananmen Square, because China proved they were willing to kill their own citizens to maintain order while they opened China up to "investment" in the Special Economic Zones. Meanwhile, Cuba is under an embargo because it's a communist state? I think we can all see the true value system of the American corporation. Just be glad you're on this side of the equation -- for now.
Re:Good news if it results in less regulation (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait, wait, wait. How is the free market winning a great thing in and of itself? The only way that is a great thing is if people benefit. You are asking people to give up all benefit, and calling that a win. Your self interest is pretty damn obvious here.
Your post in a nutshell: "You lazy, greedy bums, do more for me for less or I'm moving to China!" Sounds like YOU are the one who needs some competition. I can't wait until we start outsourcing managers and CEOs and people like you get shown that you are not, in fact, special and unique snowflakes. There's a million guys in China who can do a manager's job ten times better than you, for a tenth the pay.
As for me, I'm going to use whatever tools I have at hand, including political and social tools, to promote my own self interests. If the free market won't help me, fuck the free market. I'm in it for me, not the Free Market. All the parasites who want to make a buck off of me can go hang, you aren't as special, you aren't as smart, and you aren't as talented as you think you are.
Western and Eastern educations are not equivalent. (Score:5, Insightful)
I hear this a lot, about how the Chinese and Indians are supposedly so much smarter than Americans, Europeans, Australians and the Japanese. Having worked in industry and academia with them, I can tell you that it's a load of bunk.
The education there is very different from that of Western nations. Since they have so many people competing for comparatively few spots, they resort to various aptitude tests to try and weed out people. The people who succeed here are the ones who can memorize huge amounts of otherwise useless information, and regurgitate it at will.
Anyone who has worked in advanced R&D is aware that just knowing a huge amount of facts isn't of much use. With the Internet and computers making information retrieval trivial, memorizing huge amounts of information really isn't as beneficial as it may have been.
In R&D, the main factor to consider is how inventive and innovative a researcher is. That doesn't come from being "book smart". It comes from being able to think flexibly and creatively. This is a trait that is encouraged in the academia of the West, but denounced and suppressed in the East.
Take software development. Sure, Indians can rattle off all sorts of near-useless data about class hierarchies and method signatures and algorithm runtime complexities (you know, the sort of stuff the rest of us would just search for online or in a book). However, ask them to perform a task that requires some innovation, trial-and-error or critical thinking, and they're totally lost. That's why so many software projects developed in India by Indian-trained developers fail so horribly.
Re:Sure sure (Score:5, Insightful)
What a bizarre statement. All countries are going to need more electricity, how does that justify abandoning the US?
China is investing heroic amounts of money in infrastructure and power generation because they want to keep their economy growing.
They are the second largest energy consumer (behind the USA) and are projected to double their energy requirements over the next twenty years.
Considering that India (which is right next to China) is the other country that has explosive growth projected, why wouldn't you move your company to Asia? I mean, there is literally no metric in which China and India will not be outbuying the USA when it comes to power.
Re:I wonder what will happen in the long run? (Score:0, Insightful)
you have that right, the US will lose on 'thinking arts' and be forced to return to physical things; stuff that *cannot* be done remotely.
if I had kids going to college, I would NOT have them be training for 'thinking jobs' like software engineering, electrical engineering, mech (etc). people who work with their hands will *never* be out of work if they're any good.
but 'thinkers': that is being shifted to india (english speaking country, mostly, really helps this) and then when that has run its course, to other countries. no one 'owns' their position for too long, its how nature is, afterall.
I would advise kids today not to bank on the 'thinking arts' to keep them in work and paying the rent. I say this sadly but I've seen things change too much over the past half century or so.. the world truly has shifted and the US is no longer what it once was ;(
prepare yourselves and study a real physical occupation and not one that is 'virtualizeable'. you will lose that fight, guaranteed (we in the west simply cannot compete on the world scale in terms of our cost of living vs theirs).
No business, all pleasure (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Western and Eastern educations are not equivale (Score:3, Insightful)
With the Internet and computers making information retrieval trivial, memorizing huge amounts of information really isn't as beneficial as it may have been.
So you're saying we should all put links to Tiananmin [wikipedia.org] on our web pages, so we get a competitive advantage from being able to look thing up easier?
Re:Hot New Trend... until... (Score:4, Insightful)
Seizure of intellectual property doesn't mean you don't have it any more, it means so does your competition, thus greatly reducing its value.
But then again, it's a two-way street, since the risk of hitting IP roadblocks by others is less, in fact you can profit from their IP.
I think it will be interesting to see how this plays out - whether vigorous IP enforcement helps or hurts the economy overall.
Re:Good job (Score:4, Insightful)
If we had made it easy for the smart chinese and indians to stay here - then research bases would be here and only manufacturing would move.
Exactly. I'm all for extremely easy immigration for skilled workers. I am however against letting in unskilled people - no, it's not because I think I'm better than them, it's because we already have more than enough poor people that we don't need to be importing any.
Another way to stop outsourcing and actually have IN-sourcing is to drastically cut (possibly even eliminate) corporate taxes. The US has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world (15%-39% for Federal taxes and 0%-12% for State taxes, so potentially a 51% corporate tax rate) and it's a known fact among economists that it's harming the US economy. If we cut corporate taxes so that we were lower than average, then it would provide great incentive not only to keep jobs here but also for foreign companies to move their operations to the US. Combine low corporate taxes with easy immigration for skilled workers and you have a perfect recipe for a booming economy.
Re:But (Score:5, Insightful)
HTA flight? Impossible. American response? "Fuck it, let's do it anyway."
Atomics? Impossible. American response? "Fuck it, let's do it anyway."
The moon? Impossible. American response? "Fuck it, let's do it anyway."
On all those points, you're wrong. While there have definitely been skeptics saying "this is impossible" on every one of them, those people were of all nationalities, including Americans. At the same time, visionaries - also of all nationalities - were working on solutions to those problems. Sometimes American ones happened to be the first at something, sometimes it was someone else - but for practically any invention, by the time someone claimed a "first", a few more people elsewhere in the world were in final stages of developing the same thing as well.
Specifically, Americans were first to build nukes because they've gathered most and brightest scientists from all over the world to work on this problem. Americans were the first on the moon because the USSR got overstrained by the Space Race, and pretty much dropped out. Americans were even not the first [wikipedia.org] to perform a powered, heavier-than-air flight.
Of course, one could just as easily assemble a similarly meaningless list with a few points that would demonstrate how the USSR was an "intellectual development centre of the world". I shall leave drawing far-fetched conclusions from that as an exercise to the reader.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:War (Score:3, Insightful)
What was Lenin or Stalin's quote: "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we hang them"? or something to that effect.
Looks like its happening in an economic sense. I fully expect that China will eclipse the US as the most influential superpower in the world, sometime in the next decade or two. They seem to have the initiative, the resources and the willingness.
Re:Good news if it results in less regulation (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not just let you own slaves? Or some nice child labor?
More likely we need to stop allowing the import of goods made using these tactics. That would level the playing field by bring them up to our level rather than us stooping to theirs.
Re:Good job (Score:4, Insightful)
For some reason, corporate America seems to disagree. There's nothing better for raising levels of production than keeping everybody so hungry they'd work long hours for little pay and no benefits. This is what's driving our "race to the bottom" and innovations like "the right to work". The working class has gotten a little too well-off and high and mighty and now it's time to take them down a few pegs.
Here in the US, we call this "The Free-Market System" and it's the ideal system if you own a corporation. If you have to work, it's somewhat less ideal.
No not exactly... (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all China is robbing the West blind intellectually. They are breaking into computer systems left and right, stealing anything not nailed down, and bringing all that IP back home. Popsci or Popmechanics had an excellent article about how the Chinese are doing this for anything ranging from helicopter engines to night vision chips. Secondly China is drawing as much big industry to their country as possible. They want us to setup factories, show them how to do the work, and in the end they know all of the ins and outs of how we became such a production powerhouse and they will have a trained workforce. They will have the facilities on their soil, they will have the workers, and that 75year lease is worth exactly jack shit if they decide one day they would politely like you to leave NOW. Third China is buying up our debt like crazy and it won't be long before they can begin to exert all sorts of "pressure" on our country - we're mortgaging our future in more ways than one! Fourth China is undercutting big industries like telecom and networking in order to get their eqioment sown all over the place - and often managed by their employees. Lets hope they never flip the switch! Last but not least China is taking the lead in manufacturing "green" power like solar and wind. This is in many ways the future and while it's true they need power badly by taking the lead in this and drawing companies to setup shop there on their soil they effectively OWN it all should they decide to take it. China is the last place I'd want to place any sort of advanced chip fab that's for sure!
Whether we realize it or not we're mortgaging our future. CEO are worried about the next quarter's profits and not worried about building a strong company for the long term. They see short term gains by moving their IP overseas and that bumps stock prices - and in turn their bonuses. Even if they totally screw up they have ensured golden parachutes that provide them with plenty of money - scre everyone else.
Yes, this sounds awful paranoid but I do not see the Chinese as benign by any stretch. They police their citizens with draconian laws, the censure their press and internet, and they have a history of taking the long view - something we sure as hell aren't doing right now! We're building a house of cards...
Re:"free traders" (Score:5, Insightful)
I was with you until you put all the blame on government.
Re:Applied Materials has always looked to Asia (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a little more complicated than that, but I hear the sentiment loud and clear.
US education has suffered under a series of bad ideas over the last couple of decades, and the Christian Right is just the latest blow.
We've weakened our standards --even in some cases eliminating old criteria-- driven in part by the 60's- and 70's-style liberal (sigh, and I am a liberal) idea that it was more important to encourage as many children as possible, rather than tell some kids, "Look, you're going to struggle with this, but you're going to learn it to level X. Once you've gotten to X, we may decided to put you on track A, B, C depending on how you're doing." Some schools do this, but seem to do it badly or only partially, or focus on the gifted kids rather than cracking the whip on the other 95% of kids (who aren't stupid, but just need to work their asses of to get certain subjects done.)
We've pegged all sorts of things --accolades, funding, pay-- to test performance (No Child Left Behind and it's ilk were just the latest version of this) and so teachers, schools, districts, even entire states lowered their standards or in some cases just cheat (surprise, surprise.) And, perversely, when standards of whatever quality are not met the same management is left in place, with the same teachers, and resources are what are changed (== lowered.) Who's crackpot idea was this? (And, no, I'm not Bush-bashing, since he was not in fact the originator of it and it has, so far, seemingly been taken by a wide variety of people as 'on the right track.')
The idea that schools are funded by property taxes / local district revenues is so deeply buried in the "American Way of Doing Things" that I don't know that I've even heard this mentioned in the last 5 years as the huge source of problems that it is. Adjunct to that is the very American idea that quality of education is not a right or requirement; we have a public system of education that is in many ways similar to private education. And the parents in 'good' districts fight tooth and nail to prevent funding from going to 'bad' districts, for obvious reasons; state and federal funding that goes to schools is the first to be cut; and poor schools get hit disproportionately by the above, NCLB.
Parents aren't held responsible and responsible parents have little to no interaction with the school or resource support from the school unless they want to go to the (somewhat extreme) of being a "PTA mom". And teachers aren't given the base-pay and incentives to work 6- or 7-day weeks, often 12 hour days to make enough difference in kids lives where they get the kind of recognition for being "one of the good teachers." (Another perverse trade-off, where there is this common but rarely called out template where "good" teachers are good because they sacrifice themselves to the job, to their kids. But why don't we expect e.g. you to sacrifice yourself to your job?) Then there are "those" parents: not every precious snowflake is a star. Some are just average. Average is called average for a reason.
Mmmm, oh, did I mention the number of "single subject" teachers (math, chemistry, physics, etc.) that have been cut or replaced because those teachers are/were more expensive than general teachers?
And NONE of that even begins to touch on the pervasive (still, even in the age of /. :>) attitude that being smart is bad, speaking up is bad, displaying knowledge is bad; scientists and specialists are weird and not quite 100% trustworthy, etc. Sure, it's 'cool' amongst some adults, and there is a general techno-lust that has developed since the 90's (or even 80's), but that is certainly not the same thing.
So, yeah, the Christian Right heaping it on is a kick in the balls, but it's not the downfall. What is different about it is they are openly and *specifically* hostile to some scientific results (tough certainly not all), and the scientific framework in general. That is scary, and politically dangerous. But I think it remains to be seen whether they are the worst threat or merely the most annoying.
economist (Score:2, Insightful)
I love how economists back in the 90's described the process of outsourcing as moving on to "bigger and better things" , to having an "information economy" where we would do the high tech research and software and yada yada yada. Now you see what's really happening.
Re:Good job (Score:3, Insightful)
Here in the US, we call this "The Free-Market System" and it's the ideal system if you own a corporation. If you have to work, it's somewhat less ideal.
I was the CEO of a corporation. Guess what? I still had to work. And I made less than I do now working for someone else.
Re:Good news if it results in less regulation (Score:3, Insightful)
You're hilarious. There are already many places with no environmental, labor, or safety regulations in the world, why don't you just go there instead of trying to make the US one of them? I know why, because those places are shitholes. Ayn Rand is precisely the same thing a communist worker's paradise - both are illogical fantasies; beyond that the differences between them hardly matter.
You know who is internationally competitive? Germany. They export more than the US does on about 1/4 the population. All by doing the opposite of everything you advocate.
Re:Outsourcing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Research? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Western and Eastern educations are not equivale (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone who has worked in advanced R&D is aware that just knowing a huge amount of facts isn't of much use.
I've heard many researchers say they get plenty of students (from here and overseas) that are good at knowing lots of facts/techniques/methods/etc., but fall on their face when you try to move them into original research.
The education there is very different from that of Western nations. ...they resort to various aptitude tests to try and weed out people.
Isn't that what we do here as well, though? You have a hard time getting into grad school if you can't get a good score on the (mostly) multiple-choice GRE, you have to pass a lot of classes early in grad school that can be passed solely by memorization....and we somehow expect that filtering process to produce people that are good at thinking imaginatively to solve hard problems.
Re:Western and Eastern educations are not equivale (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, we are not talking of Indian and US education. We are talking of US educated PhDs in India. They cant get Green cards or H1Bs easily in such a climate - so they go back.
Lets see - the average number of caucasians in any science or technology PhD program is low - most are asians. So I guess they have the critical skills to ace the US education system without their 'critical skills'.
So lets see some of the key things you point out:
1. Software development fails due to lack of critical thinking amongst Indians - so lets see MSFT projects routinely used to fail when indians were almost rare on msft campus. Cant blame that on Indians. Software projects in general fail quite a bit not because of programming but due to lack of project management skills.
You cant compare the average programmer who comes here to do crappy ERP consulting or Java programming with 'innovative researchers' here in the US.
2. Anyways lets see - what does the average Slashdot reader do ? programming for businesses to process orders ? sell stuff on the web ? How many are actually doing anything innovative ?
Will your CIO miss you if the HTML/JS/java stuff you are doing is done by some other dork in another part of the world ? I dont think so - esp. if it is done at 1/3rd the price and with limited benefits and 6 day work weeks.
For those of you who are truly 'innovative' - there is nothing to fear.
3. 40% of NASA/MSFT/GOOG etc. are asians (chinese + indians + koreans etc.) - now remember these are from the small population of the students who happen to be chinese and indians. So I guess these chinese and indians are not 'critical thinking' challenged.
4. Superiority complex is unfortunately akin to shooting yourself in the foot. You may think you are the critical thinkers and the innovators - but remember, indians/chinese and most 3rd world people are much hungrier for success. This is the windows vs Apple model. Apple may have been cooler - but Windows takes over by sheer numbers.
2 billion to 350 million. You would need to be 3-4 times as innovative as the rest of the world to survive :) - that is assuming like 800 million of the Chindia population is a complete waste. The reason India and China did not have much to show in patents was cos they cost $3-$4k even in small countries. Now the patents from Indian research labs are piling up!
Bye bye average American programmer!
Re:Western and Eastern educations are not equivale (Score:5, Insightful)
Outsourcing to a highly profit driven company works a lot like the way the USSR rocket program used it's German staff.
Here's how it worked. The experienced German staff were put in a team with a few Russians that knew nothing but the basics. After a while the Russians in the team would be competant, and then they would suddenly be posted elsewhere and there would be new people in the team that knew nothing but the basics. After a while there was a very large pool of Russian staff that knew everything the German staff knew and it was no longer considered worthwhile to continue to feed the German staff.
I suspect the only outsourced developers the above poster met were the ones that he was training while being told that they were working for him. The answer is not to look at the bottom of the pile but instead at published papers and products. The two countries the above poster implies are full of dumb heathens of inferior race have civilian nuclear power programs twenty or thirty years ahead of what Westinghouse etc in the USA can do, and they did it with less cash.
He's forgetting that outsourcing is often about milking the client as much as possible while spending as little as possible and not about a successful software project.
Re:Western and Eastern educations are not equivale (Score:1, Insightful)
Wait, so you're saying our educational system DOESN'T revolve around the memorization and regurgitation of facts?
What country did you go to school in, exactly? Because there is absolutely no way that it was the United States. They resort to aptitude tests? You mean like SOLs and SATs?
Re:But (Score:1, Insightful)
Econ FAIL
Re:Western and Eastern educations are not equivale (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good job: Buying your future (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good job (Score:3, Insightful)
Didn't the US just drop $750 Billion into banking. I bet any day now they'll produce some spectacular product that will revitalize the American economy.
Variable interest rate loans + the bundling of them as derivatives was the spectacular product that revitalized the American economy.
Clinton had the tech bubble, Bush had the mortgage bubble, and Obama is going to have to do it by building those old fashioned 'market fundamentals' (or be screwed).
Re:"free traders" (Score:2, Insightful)
I was with you until you put all the blame on government.
The federal government has failed miserably to regulate interstate and international commerce in the interests of American citizens. Our population is poorly educated, misinformed, and tricked. Sure, the corporations are the force behind this-- but the governments are their puppets. The governments share the blame for failing to do what they were created for, the people fail for not caring, and the corporations succeed in every way possible. I don't hate corporations. I love the idea of America; not the perverted America we have today.
Re:Western and Eastern educations are not equivale (Score:4, Insightful)
I've heard many researchers say they get plenty of students (from here and overseas) that are good at knowing lots of facts/techniques/methods/etc., but fall on their face when you try to move them into original research.
Thus the definition of intelligence re-emerges. In fact very intelligent people are rare both in the West and China. This shouldn't surprise us.
The first step is to realize we have a problem. We keep living in this denial dreamland where the Western world is somehow smarter and we're just giving off our "low end" jobs that are mere rote, and keeping the "smart stuff" for ourselves. We're not any smarter, and those low end jobs are what built us.
Re:Western and Eastern educations are not equivale (Score:3, Insightful)
Aptitude tests are different than memorization tests. Aptitude tests are what is given in the USA (SAT, GRE, GMAT etc) as standardized tests.
This is a popular belief. There are plenty of past and active Indian researchers who have published and publish good papers, or Indian researchers in large companies who work on very innovative products. So, citation needed please for your beliefs.
Re:Western and Eastern educations are not equivale (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't disagree with the characterization. However I've very painfully seen and felt what the american educated management structure can do to the most amazing, talented, and hard working engineers. It is not pretty.
We as a country have dropped the ball, and have rested on our laurels for too long. The jig is largely up. The talented refugees are doomed to a life of migrant labor, wandering from one tech company to the next, eking out a living for a few years before that outfit is either shipped overseas or driven into the ground by round after round of buzzword bingo spewing MBA jerk wads.
Re:No not exactly... (Score:1, Insightful)
Robbing the world intellectually.. Stealing IP..
Oh sweet Jesus will you people stop already. If it were up to you, people would not only have to "re-invent the wheel" on every single occasion, but they would have to do it with something that doesn't base its circumference to PI.
Intellectual property is a myth that's holding people, as whole, down. Libraries would never be granted their status in an environment like this. You and your like are toxic to progress and wellbeing of the human civilization.
Once I get certain knowledge, by whatever means it is, it will influence my concurrent decisions and you can not claim to be the sole owner of that information anymore. What is it in your infinite greed that makes you think otherwise.
This is not aimed solely on the parent.
Re:Western and Eastern educations are not equivale (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is not the Indians, it's the Indian education system and the IT bubble in India.
I've worked with plenty of Indians in the UK and they're as good as everybody else: there's plenty of true hackers types (in the good sense of the word) out there that happen to be Indian.
However, my experience with our in-house teams based in India and with developers from Indian consultancies placed at the client in the UK is that they have a very high number of mediocre developers (and even some exceptionally bad ones). Note that what's common with these two is that hiring decisions are taken by Indian companies/divisions in India.
I've recently read in The Economist (the January 31st one, I believe - paper magazine, no link, sry) that a company in India has examined the ouput of Indian universities and concluded that only 12% (not fully sure about the number, around this value though) of the engineers trained every year by Indian Universities is actually competent enough to work in technology with a Western Corporation.
I've also had discussions with a friend of mine about this (who happens to be Indian) and our conclusion is that in India too many people go into IT because it pays well (not because they're any good at it) and that most of the better ones have emigrated from India.
Re:Good job (Score:3, Insightful)
I didn't say "unskilled" workers, I said "hungry" workers.
They benefit from keeping workers poor, not keeping them unskilled.
Re:Western and Eastern educations are not equivale (Score:2, Insightful)
I think the problem might be the way Indian consultancy companies are run. I've had European clients who weren't much good at producing things themselves but were still much better than the average Indian consultancy company they outsourced too. What was interesting is that when they brought the Indian developers over to Europe they were effective. Put them back at the Indian office and they were dreadful again. Visiting Indian companies showed why - the people seemed to be OK individually but they had loads of problems they couldn't resolve and no one in management seemed to be interested. So their productivity was awful.
Now you need to be careful here - the world is full of fucked companies. Still it was noticeable that all the Indian outsourcing companies I went to all seemed to be more fucked than the European clients, who were perilously close to fuckedville themselves.
Re:Western and Eastern educations are not equivale (Score:1, Insightful)
As an Indian working in US for 15 years, I have seen a lot of Indian and American incapable of doing any original thinking. Also seen quite a few amazing and sharp thinkers. Intelligence and original thinking isn't a western only trait. Yes- The Asian mentality sometimes inhibits display of this trait but it doesn't mean it doesn't exits. Americans are very good at talking and using new buzz words in their vocabulary. Most Asian are not. It doesn't mean they aren't smart.