I work in Silicon Valley for many years. Like big Pharma, we have our fair share of boom and bust and outsourcing and layoffs, etc. But Silicon Valley is alive and well, thank you very much. Now I am more hopeful than ever that we may see a revival for tech jobs.
American scientists and engineers are better. I know this as a fact because we are doing the hardest product development here. The soft type of works such as test/verification and some light version of development were shipped overseas. Management were pushing them to do more without much success. The trouble is that the Indian or Chinese engineers used to cost one forth of that of a US engineer. It is very hard to be 4 times better than a Chinese engineer who probably work longer hours.
But that has changed in last couple years, the wage in India and China shoot up and I have not gotten a raise for last 10 year. So very soon, it will get to the point the cost ratio is 2 to 1 rather than 4 to 1. At that point a lot of calculations will change.
I think that there is hope for my two daughters who are both im math/science field. But they definitely need to work harder.
