Friday, December 12, 2014

Vijay Govindarajan and Gunjan Bagla — 3 Myths about Engineering Talent in China and India

These three myths no longer reflect reality. Companies increasingly rely on engineering talent in China and India to drive product development across a wider range of new products and for a wider range of markets.
China and India don't yet have the depth of the West but they are quickly building it and between them they dwarf the West population upon which to draw. It's just a matter of time unless they increase salaries to the point that their ex-pat begin to return to their native lands. In fact, that is already happening as both countries advance and some are willing to take some cut in nominal pay to life in their own culture without actually taking much of acute in real terms since the price structure is lower, compensating for the lower pay scale.

Harvard Business Review — HBR Blog Network
3 Myths about Engineering Talent in China and India
Vijay Govindarajan, Coxe Distinguished Professor at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, and Gunjan Bagla is Managing Director of Amritt Inc.

1 comment:

Dan Lynch said...

Microchip, Microsemi, Synopsys, Teradata, Texas Instruments, and VM Ware are among the companies to state their second largest R&D teams are located in India or China. Some companies have more engineers in India than in the United States. Without the Asian teams these companies would be unable to design new products anymore.

True that many high tech industries are moving offshore (contrary to some MMTer claims, there is nothing that requires high tech to stay in the US).

Untrue that companies would be unable to function without foreign engineers. American engineers are just as smart as Indian and Asian engineers (and visa versa). And there is no shortage of American engineers.

Though .... America is losing knowledge when it outsources entire industries. It may take only 4 years to get an engineering degree, but that is just a learner's permit. Developing in-depth engineering expertise in a particular industry is a lifetime endeavor. If for the sake of argument WWIII broke out and we needed to move manufacturing back to the US, it would take some time to ramp up, both physically and knowledge-wise. That may bite us in the butt someday.