Offshoring: Why the US still needs engineers
Published: 30 Jun 2004 15:10 BST
Vivek Paul occupies a unique vantage point in the controversy roiling the technology industry over offshore outsourcing.
An American citizen, Paul also is a native of India and chief executive officer of Wipro Technologies, one of that country's largest IT service companies. Many American techies are increasingly bitter about the pickup in the stream of IT jobs from the United States to India, arguing that the trend threatens to erode job prospects in the nation's high-tech sector. At the same time, however, members of the Bush administration and a number of economists argue that the natural flows of capital can't be artificially stopped at the borders and that outsourcing is essential to improving corporate productivity.
Paul, who became a US citizen in 1991, recently spoke with CNET News.com about the growing fear in many quarters that offshore outsourcing will undermine US tech leadership.
Q: What is your response to people who fear the US is losing its technology leadership because of offshore outsourcing?
A: That is really befuddling, because the US is only securing its technological competitive advantage. [Look at] patents that have been written by Indian software engineers in Wipro. The individual engineers get the credit; the ownership is the customer's. So in some sense, US technology companies are racing out ahead of their global peers to tap into the intellectual base that is in India. If the US were to repel it in some way, it would create its future competitor. By embracing and directing it, the US has pre-empted competition.
But if some of the programming jobs that are lower-level jobs go to an Infosys or Wipro -- in application development, application and maintenance type work -- how are you are going to get the expertise that will later lead to higher-level jobs?
That has a built-in assumption [that] there will not be enough jobs left in the US to fulfil the indigenous graduating engineering base. That is not true. If anything, the number of engineers graduating in the United States is dropping. As (General Electric CEO) Jeff Immelt said, the US graduates more sports therapists than engineers. In some sense, the US is filling that gap with imports of people. In other words, people are flowing to where the work is -- immigration.
I think that it is perhaps too jaundiced a view to think that the US economy would not generate as many jobs for engineers as there are engineers. We have got a dropping number of engineers, a growing economy and already the gap is being filled more by immigration than by local demand.
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