Job Bleeding Continues

As has been chronicled on these pages, technology concerns from Accenture to Yahoo have moved much of their design and development to the Bangalore technology center. India's Silicon Valley™ has gone from being basically a technology support call center to burgeoning design and development center. It now produces everything from basic business software to semi-conductor design.

India has many advantages over the U.S. when it comes to consideration as a place to conduct all manner of technology business. India produces approximately 2/3 more engineers and computer scientists than the U.S, and this highly competent workforce is available to employers at as little as one tenth the cost of their American counterparts.

India is especially attractive to U.S. firms as the vast majority of high technology workers speak English. I found the following in a Goldman-Sachs report.

"In the next decade, as many as six million jobs might be sent to India and other nations by US companies in search of lower costs and a tech-savvy, English-speaking workforce."

"The shift of North American technology jobs to low wage countries like India cannot be stopped because not only are Indian companies a third of the cost, but they actually are better," said Pradeep Sood, president of Indo-Canada Chamber of Commerce.

I am in the process of compiling a report detailing the American 'brain drain.'

The peril here is that the world's second largest country in gross human numbers, and the highest in desirable human capital is entirely capable of absorbing every technology job at less cost and equal skill.

One can only believe that as India's technology sectors grow, more and more of the young will be drawn into engineering as a field of study compounding this troublesome trend in the future. Remember, India has a very young population, and can grow its engineering base organically, whereas the U.S.'s supply of engineers is in decline. Both in real numbers, and as a percentage of the population. Our population growth comes largely via immigration, and these people are largely laborers. Successive generations produce higher numbers of technology workers, but this path has a low trajectory.

I have a lot more on this phenomenon, but as noted above, I am going to compile it and present it as an overall picture of the displacement of the American technology worker, and the acceleration rates of these trends.

On Edit: NYT Performs Nice Analysis on Manufacturing. Call it "The China Syndrome."