I happened on an article being hosted by Wired News today entitled Outsourcing Report Blames Schools. Here are a few choice quotes:
"Companies aren't outsourcing only in order to obtain cheap labor; they are also looking for skilled technology workers that they increasingly can't find in the U.S.," said Matthew Kazmierczak, senior manager of research at AeA, and one of the authors of the report.
Noting that roughly 50 percent of all engineering, math and science degrees awarded by U.S. universities now go to foreign nationals, AeA researchers also called on the federal government to give green cards to all foreign nationals upon their graduation with master's and Ph.D. degrees, in an effort to keep these people -- and their skills -- in the United States.
This tends to underline my theory that the current move to "offshore" high tech jobs is because we're suffering from a reverse "brain drain". We've trained up enough people from other places in science and technology that they now feel they can comfortably return to wherever they came from and participate in sizable technical communities there.
Perhaps the only advantages that remain with the United States are very stable political and physical infrastructures, and, a relatively fluid social structure that allows you to get a better life even when you aren't from the right family, ethnic group, or part of the country (though these factors still are influential.)
*sigh* The United States seems determined to become a nation of lawyers and MBA's that will LOVE to give you a cost/benefit analysis associated with crossing a street and be willing to sue someone if a car comes within two feet of a pedestrian attempting to cross. No one is willing to go to school to learn how to build new things, however. We all love playing computer games, but, we don't want to learn how to create them. That would involve learning about things like MATH and SCIENCE which we all know are just way too hard and uncool for most people to be interested in.
Wow. Bitter, much? About this, yeah, a little.
said drgeek
on 2004-03-25 at 1:37 p.m.
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