Good Indian design and consulting Engineers seem pretty damned rare. Even ones with a Masters degree or PhD seem to be barely able to keep up with a typical Midwestern Farm College Engineer with a 4-year degree. Of course a large part of the problem with consultants is the language barrier, which they can’t be blamed for.
In terms of research Engineering, I can’t speak from experience. Anecdotally, however, I hear that Indian Engineers do much, much better at R&D.
Just speaking as someone who has interviewed, hired, and fired, more than a few Engineers.
Everyone can’t be white-collar workers. We can’t import all or a majority our goods and still be a strong country. I can definitely see in my area of Virginia that there are a fraction of the manufacturing jobs that used to be available. People go to work now a the Wal-Mart or Wal-Mart distribution center, distributing Chinese goods. Good for the Chinese, not so good for us.
The US still has technical innovation, investment/banking, culture, and tourism to offer. We just need to get the manufacturing back.
But HOW? In order to bring back manufacturing, we need to lower costs. We can cut labor/safety standards, cut wages, or automate. None of these options seems like a good deal for the American worker.
There once was a time when technology developed here would end up becoming products manufactured here so our manufacturing base moved up the food chain from t-shirts to microchips. Now the only stuff we seem to manufacture is military stuff.
For example, there was a time when the back of my iphone would not have read Designed by Apple in California. Manufactured in China. It would simply have read made in the USA or made in China.
Are we comparing Indian engineers freesh out of school to American engineers fresh out of school? Is there something about the indian engineering curriculum that makes them better at R&D at the same time there is somethign about the American engineering curriculum, taht makes them better at design and consulting?
In other words if you hired a dozen indian engineers along with a dozen Big 10 engineers (with Inidan accents) out of college at your engineering design and consulting firm, would the American trained engineers have an advantage over the indian trained ones or is the gap attributable to the early work experience avaiable to American engineers versus Indian engineers?
No less an authority than Andy Grove, one of the founders of Intel, has spoken out against outsourcing. The number 1 objective for government, from his perspective, is making job creation their top economic priority. Our focus seems to be entirely on maximizing shareholder value, with a skewed perspective of business that sees nothing but costs while overlooking benefits. To be fair, not all of the benefits are tangible or easily translated into a financial statement. But it’s arrogant to think that the rest of the world is going to do all the hard and dangerous work while we sit in offices designing and managing everything and reaping most of the profits.
Sometimes I feel like people learned about the broad outlines of comparative advantage in some undergrad econ course, thought it sounded reasonable, and decided to shut their brains off forever after. Anyone who still buys the notion that embracing unrestricted free trade and eliminating all duties and tariffs provides an unequivocal benefit to the average American worker, blue or white collar, laborer or professional, is deluded.
I’m comparing new hires mostly - we interview very, very few experienced Indian Engineers (or American ones, for that matter), since so much of what we do is highly specialized.
I think most American Engineering curriculum focuses more on team approaches, design, and working outside the box. While the Indian Engineers are certainly bright enough, their curriculum seems to be more oriented towards research. I mean, when I look over CVs, I’ll see that Indian Engineers with a Bachelors (or equivalent) will have maybe a third more higher math classes than an American Engineer - which is pretty much useless in that most consulting/design Engineering rarely needs more than Calc 1. American Engineers will have a broader balance between thermal/mechanical classes, whereas Indian schools seem to allow the students to specialize much more highly. It also seems to me, anecdotally, that an American Engineer’s Bachelor’s project (where they do one) is almost always a practical, working device or analysis of a real system - whereas an Indian Engineer’s project will be entirely theoretical, looking more like a Master’s thesis. For example - an American Engineer may do a Senior project on designing and building in the shop a new suspension arm for a Formula SAE car - whereas an Indian Engineer may do a Senior project (or equivalent) on “use of LaPlace Transforms to model nonlinear heat transfer in an ideal soda can.”
Another thing is cultural - the consulting Engineering my Engineers do requires a lot of direct client contact. They need to be forward, and politely aggressive in pursuing people and data at the power plant. If I tell an American Engineer “go to coal handling and find the belt speed of all the conveyors”, the American Engineer will go and knock on doors and chase people down until they find the answer, and then, after they’ve exhausted all options, they’ll walk down the yard and record the speeds themselves with a tach if they have to. Whereas the Indian Engineer will tend to avoid interpersonal contact, and will try to measure the conveyor speeds first - which is amazingly hard if the coal handling system doesn’t happen to be running while they’re there…then they’ll ask one person what the speeds are, and if that doesn’t work they tend to sort of, well, give up. Part of it could be language difficulty, as I mentioned, and that’s understandable - if my employees have language issues, I cover for them. Hey, I’ve worked on and managed projects in more than 20 different countries, and I know what it’s like to be standing in mud and trying to explain “equivalent forced outage rate” to a smirking French maintenance supervisor. But generally it seems to be an excessive amount of polite deference which causes them to give up too soon, which is not what is needed for many “boots on the ground” Engineering jobs.
My understanding is Chinese manufacturing isn’t ‘that’ much cheaper than US manufacturing in a variety of areas, and the cost difference is constantly shrinking.
The cost of labor in China and India is raising. The workers are not stupid and they can see the kind of money going to the top. China has work stoppages and union activity. It will be their future.
Indian and Chines engineers do not have the huge background that Americans do. We have been developing manufacturing processes and products for generations. You do not walk in at the end and understand how we got to where we are. There is something lacking.
I have worked directly with engineers from many countries. The closest to our abilities were the Japanese but they seemed to miss a practical viewpoint , leaning toward technical answers. We wanted them to built a small assembly line. They calculated the requirements and submitted a proposal. We told them the line was too flimsy to last long under the heavy conditions it would face. They argued that the math said it would be OK. We said we had gone through the process many times and it did not work. We had built them like that before. We learned better. We used to have frequent battles with them.
No, sir; the UNITED STATES is the sole and only driver of the U.S. trade deficit.
No, I would not, because I am aware of the facts.
Blaming the USA’s economic woes on a trade deficit is essentially akin to someone running up his credit card debt and then blaming the fact that nobody stops him from shopping.
The difference is, though, that the credit card companies can and will bankrupt you to get what they can and convince everyone else to make their payments. But China et al. can’t do this to the USA. China needs the United States to remain a strong and solvent economy, or else they lose a customer that makes up a huge proportion of their exports.
OK, so you are saying there is a qualitative difference between how engineers are trained in India and how they are trained here. Do you think these differences justify the stark pay differences between America and India?
It nothing like that. An economy is nothing like someone’s personal finances no matter how much easier it is to explain it that way. If China were engaging in the same level of free trade that we were then sure, a trade deficit will even out and reverse itself over time. Not so if you engage in tactics like the Chinese.
Much like a parasite needs its host at least until it can survive without the host.