Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the flowers gone?
Girls have picked them every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
-- Pete Seeger
Joe Leahy reports in the Financial Times that the decline of skilled technical employment in the U.S. is a self-created problem. Quoting representatives of Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTSH) and Infosys Technologies (INFY), major technology outsourcing firms, Leahy says that the U.S. is falling far short of turning out enough technology and engineering graduates from its universities.
India produces 600,000 BS engineers every year; the U.S. only 84,000. About 70% of Ph.D. candidates in the U.S. are foreign students. Many of them remain to become permanent residents and citizens, taking positions in such places as Silicon Valley and NASA. U.S. natives are chosing not to compete for these lucrative positions.
We are doing it to ourselves.
The outsourcing firms report difficulty in hiring the technical people they need to hold positions actually located in the U.S. Infosys says it wants to hire 1,000 people a year here, but "it is a struggle".
Cognizant has 88,000 domestic positions and has had import foreigners to fill about half of them, in spite of having 57 recruiters here scouring the country for qualified people.
We are doing it to oursleves.
For years we have heard stories about scientists and engineers earning advanced degrees and then going to Wall Street to make mega bucks in "financial engineering." Instead of building things of economic utility they have been developing things that expand leverage to ridiculous extremes and diversify the risk to the extent that it can bring down the whole world. Not only have we lost the services of many people who might have invented the next microelectronic marvel or medical physics breakthrough, we have allowed them to develop Frankenstein monsters.
We are doing it to ourselves.
Where have all the flowers gone? We have picked them, every one... and we haven't planted any more. We are doing it to ourselves.
Disclosure: No positions.
