The Insider Guide to Careers
Insider information, secrets and tips about getting hired and building careers. For employees and job candidates.
Intel used to be a company where software and electrical engineers worked for life. Jobs were based in suburban locations in Oregon where you knew everyone. Cushy, well-paid jobs completed the old American dream. What is happening now is weird. Even as they are investing 33 billion dollars in fabrication facilities in the US with government money, they want to be as lean as possible. They recently announced plans to lay off 15% of the workforce (15000 employees). A strange world awaits employees of the future. Even traditional semiconductor employers do not want employees anymore.
It is a tragedy in the making, though another person may argue that one man’s misery is another man’s opportunity. It begins with plummeting birth rates in developed countries. The solution from their side is to automate, mechanize and do away with manpower. When these countries expanded their populations, they never focused too much on automation. This is why US cars were terrible compared to Japan’s automated production line cars. Now that the birth rates in the West are decreasing, automation is suddenly seen as a virtue. Automation has many names, including AI, ML, etc.
Developing countries have long craved the opportunity to send trained manpower to the West to work in their factories. China, India, Korea and Japan are egregious examples. However, China, Korea and Japan have dramatically improved their economies. Best-in-class companies exist at home. Students and employees do not care if they do not find opportunities in the West after higher studies; they are happy to return to Asia.
India is a country which has been an outlier and an economic wreck in the making. For a long time after independence, successive governments ran the economy to the ground repeatedly. The short-sighted leaders were continuously rewarded for their economic mismanagement by being elected repeatedly. Therefore, no serious reform was ever done. The turning point was in the 1980s when the state of Tamil Nadu privatized engineering education. There was an explosion of engineering colleges across South India, specifically in Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella and Laxman Narasimhan hail from these southern states. Everybody wanted an engineering degree but never thought if there were jobs available. Since the Indian government at that time had bankrupted the economy, the idea was to migrate to the US for jobs.
Even Kamala Harris’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan, migrated to the US from Chennai’s most Brahminical, powerful and orthodox localities. She hails from a family of civil servants of British India who were considered the backbone of the government. Some would term these officers the neo-colonial masters of independent India. The Civil Services stayed intact from British times to the present. Satya Nadella also has the same parental background. It is interesting that the most educated and powerful people in India wanted their children to escape from India. Did Shyamala have a great life in the US?
This flight of the most brilliant minds from India would never last forever. I remember that in 2001 and 2002, almost 70 to 80 % of every engineering college used to study in the US. This number was close to 90% at the IITs. Now, the number is around 2 to 5% in the private engineering colleges and about 10 to 15% at the IITs. The US immigration system has made it specifically tricky for Indians to stay in the US. Indians are the only country where the waiting time for a green card could last for decades. However, Indians rarely voice their thoughts. This makes them great, obedient workers but poor fighters for any cause.
Lately, Indians have thought that studying computer science is the easiest way to become the next CEO of Microsoft or Google. Too many Indians are flooding the Western job market because there are few well-paying jobs in India. While the US needs people who are good in STEM fields, no American student wants to study engineering. They prefer arts, humanities, business and law. It is again the second-generation Indians born in the US who dominate the engineering schools in the US. Ideally, this combination would have been a great fit. The US needs Indian engineers, and Indians need jobs. So what can go wrong?
The win-win situation lasted as long as interest rates were close to zero. Once the interest rates rose, the conversation moved towards ROI. Ideally, the ROI should be much greater than the interest rates. Once productivity and efficiency are under the scanner, the big question arises as to why have expensive jobs in the US. Why not outsource it to cheaper countries? If the company fears technology transfer and knowledge diffusion to future competitors in other countries, why not eliminate the jobs through AI and ML?
In the second paragraph, I talked about opportunities inside the tragedy. This is how I view it. It is easy to be stuck working in a company as if there is nothing to a life outside work. You may be a good worker, but how will you know if you will not do excellent work in another occupation if you never experiment? A layoff is a great time to take a big-picture overview of where you are. It is time to do an audit of your life. The job security of the past is never going to come back. The bank interest rates going back to zero will take one or two decades, by which time the current employees will be too old to take advantage of the situation. Therefore, focus on skills you value and where you can be among the best in the world. Relentlessly build your expertise, even if it means being an independent contractor. The more you learn, the more skills you learn and the more you try to be independent; there is no reason why success will elude you.
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