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High-Tech Research Moving From US To China
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that American companies like Applied Materials are moving their research facilities and engineers to China as the country develops a high-tech economy that increasingly competes directly with the United States. Applied Materials set up its latest solar research labs in China after estimating that China would be producing two-thirds of the world's solar panels by the end of this year and their chief technology officer, Mark R. Pinto, is the first CTO of a major American tech company to move to China. 'We're obviously not giving up on the US,' says Pinto. 'China needs more electricity. It's as simple as that.' Western companies are also attracted to China's huge reservoirs of cheap, highly skilled engineers and the subsidies offered by many Chinese cities and regions, particularly for green energy companies. Applied Materials decided to build their new $250 million research facility in Xi'an after the city government sold them a 75-year land lease at a deep discount and is reimbursing the company for roughly a quarter of the lab complex's operating costs for five years."
This is what happens when you try to be smart ass and move all of your work load to other countries because it's supposedly cheaper. Good job.
The decline of the US has already happened. But we're too arrogant or perhaps more ignorant on whats going on. Within the next 10 years, China will surpass the US in everything. The only thing the US still maintains a hold on is the Media/Entertainment industry. Wake up America otherwise we will go gently into that good night.
While China is busy developing technology from the last decade, America is has leapfrogged everyone with the social media revolution. We've got things like Twitter, Facebook, Gowalla, 4Square and hundreds of other innovative services which connect people so they can share their stories and do social media stuff like upload their photos and blog right from their email clients! Location-aware twitter cloud blogging! ...ok, we're fucked.
I guess the last region to be exploited is Africa. Is it already too late to start buying land?
Yup. China is already buying and developing land in Africa. (Not kidding!)
However, the development of Africa means the end of the "race to the bottom" and the end of absolute poverty.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Back in the late 80s, Applied Materials thought of Japan as the new technology epicenter, and their chairman ordered hiring managers to bring in as many Japanese speakers as possible. They even moved their HQ to Japan. I learned all this from a job fair presentation and subsequent articles about them in the tech press at the time. Clearly, Applied Materials now considers China the new epicenter.
However, AMAT is just one company and does not necessarily represent a trend; they are just a company that is particularly focused on Asia. Significant technology R&D still happens in the U.S., notably around MIT and the Research Triangle in the east, Silicon Valley in the west, and various pockets elsewhere around the country (Seattle, Atlanta--anywhere there are clusters of universities and tech companies).
Obviously, China is going to either buy or grow the talent it needs to expand technology domestically. There is a trend for top Chinese scientists trained in the U.S. to relocate back to China to help their own country develop, or at least to land a more prestigious position more quickly than in the West. It's only a matter of time before China, like Japan before it, becomes self-sufficient in technology and starts to really contribute its own inventions rather than simply copying or building on others.
The way for America (and other countries) to compete is simply to make our country as competitive an environment as possible. Make small business loans as available as possible, and otherwise stay out of the way and let businesses incubate. We Americans tend to take business for granted, but like the flowers and grass in the yard, you have to pay attention or the plants you need and want will be overrun by weeds, or die from lack of water or fertilization.
Like the other Asian players, the Chinese get this. Ever since Deng Xiaoping and the 4 Modernizations movement, business has been seen as the engine of growth and prosperity. We Americans would do well to learn from their example and get back to basics. We have a goose that lays golden eggs; let's feed it, not kill it. I would begin by upping civilian research, allowing more tax incentives for corporate R&D, and maybe push more math and science education down to the high school level.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
So you think Google is the rule, and not the exception? Most modern corporations have the will to skirt US law to sell to countries like Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and so forth, despite trade embargoes. US companies helped themselves and Hitler make a killing during WWII. (A guy named Prescott Bush even got in some trouble for it.) The US and her corporations armed Indonesia in the genocide of the East Timorese, right through the 90s. We are still responsible for 70% of the arms sales in the world, all manufactured by US corporations.
So, no. As long as the Chinese government is paying cash, corporations will ignore everything else. Just like they always do.
Hell, US investment in China skyrocketed after Tiananmen Square, because China proved they were willing to kill their own citizens to maintain order while they opened China up to "investment" in the Special Economic Zones. Meanwhile, Cuba is under an embargo because it's a communist state? I think we can all see the true value system of the American corporation. Just be glad you're on this side of the equation -- for now.
I hear this a lot, about how the Chinese and Indians are supposedly so much smarter than Americans, Europeans, Australians and the Japanese. Having worked in industry and academia with them, I can tell you that it's a load of bunk.
The education there is very different from that of Western nations. Since they have so many people competing for comparatively few spots, they resort to various aptitude tests to try and weed out people. The people who succeed here are the ones who can memorize huge amounts of otherwise useless information, and regurgitate it at will.
Anyone who has worked in advanced R&D is aware that just knowing a huge amount of facts isn't of much use. With the Internet and computers making information retrieval trivial, memorizing huge amounts of information really isn't as beneficial as it may have been.
In R&D, the main factor to consider is how inventive and innovative a researcher is. That doesn't come from being "book smart". It comes from being able to think flexibly and creatively. This is a trait that is encouraged in the academia of the West, but denounced and suppressed in the East.
Take software development. Sure, Indians can rattle off all sorts of near-useless data about class hierarchies and method signatures and algorithm runtime complexities (you know, the sort of stuff the rest of us would just search for online or in a book). However, ask them to perform a task that requires some innovation, trial-and-error or critical thinking, and they're totally lost. That's why so many software projects developed in India by Indian-trained developers fail so horribly.
By Engineer I mean mechanical, probably one of the last to have had (survived / endured) the old style apprenticeship, which is another point that won't mean anything to those younger than me, but is in fact vastly relevant to overall ability and knowledge.
For every technology that I have seen, the following is true.
1,000 guys actually manufacturing a product commercially using "x" technology push the field more in one year than 1,000 guys working in R&D do in 10 years.
Yeah, there is a bit of chicken and egg there, but the fact is that it is only when you start to make the product commercially, not prototypes, that you really learn about and master the technology.
The old engineering adage is "you have to build one, to build one".
A classic example for the US audience is the Saturn V, that was the pinnacle of 20 years of PRODUCTION effort from a team that arguably started with Von Braun's flying prototype bombs.
Even with CAD / CAM / CAE / CNC / etc, none of which we had back then, I sincerely doubt the US could build one today that actually flew to spec.
The Japanese basically fucked the British bike industry by starting out on PRODUCTION for a generation, before they were capable of designing anything even equal to what we had, not because they were stupid of rubbish engineers, but because it takes production experience to master anything.
Then the Japanese basically fucked the British car industry, exactly the same way.
Television sets? Ditto.
And the beat goes on.
You all have it 180 degrees out, worrying about R&D and IP and all that crap being outsourced, when you outsource production you are eating your own seed grain, doom is inevitable.
The next generation is based on the apprentice of today, and by far the best apprenticeship is one served in a production environment.
Mod me down as much as you like, I've got karma to burn.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
Consider the science contests from high school called science olympiads, where big scientists like Grigori Perelman and Terence Tao have competed, contests where things like the ones you mentioned (innovation, creativity, etc.) play a huge part for the results, let's say the two most relevant subjects for computer science (informatics and mathematics):
Historic results for all countries on the IMO (mathematics):
http://imo-official.org/results.aspx
Last results for gold medal on the 2009 IOI (informatics):
http://www.ioi2009.org/index.jsp?id=414&ln=2
As you can see, at least in these competitions, China DOES seem to be better than USA (than all countries in fact), while India seems a more mediocre country like you comment.
Unfortunately, we are not talking of Indian and US education. We are talking of US educated PhDs in India. They cant get Green cards or H1Bs easily in such a climate - so they go back.
Lets see - the average number of caucasians in any science or technology PhD program is low - most are asians. So I guess they have the critical skills to ace the US education system without their 'critical skills'.
So lets see some of the key things you point out:
1. Software development fails due to lack of critical thinking amongst Indians - so lets see MSFT projects routinely used to fail when indians were almost rare on msft campus. Cant blame that on Indians. Software projects in general fail quite a bit not because of programming but due to lack of project management skills.
You cant compare the average programmer who comes here to do crappy ERP consulting or Java programming with 'innovative researchers' here in the US.
2. Anyways lets see - what does the average Slashdot reader do ? programming for businesses to process orders ? sell stuff on the web ? How many are actually doing anything innovative ?
Will your CIO miss you if the HTML/JS/java stuff you are doing is done by some other dork in another part of the world ? I dont think so - esp. if it is done at 1/3rd the price and with limited benefits and 6 day work weeks.
For those of you who are truly 'innovative' - there is nothing to fear.
3. 40% of NASA/MSFT/GOOG etc. are asians (chinese + indians + koreans etc.) - now remember these are from the small population of the students who happen to be chinese and indians. So I guess these chinese and indians are not 'critical thinking' challenged.
4. Superiority complex is unfortunately akin to shooting yourself in the foot. You may think you are the critical thinkers and the innovators - but remember, indians/chinese and most 3rd world people are much hungrier for success. This is the windows vs Apple model. Apple may have been cooler - but Windows takes over by sheer numbers.
2 billion to 350 million. You would need to be 3-4 times as innovative as the rest of the world to survive :) - that is assuming like 800 million of the Chindia population is a complete waste. The reason India and China did not have much to show in patents was cos they cost $3-$4k even in small countries. Now the patents from Indian research labs are piling up!
Bye bye average American programmer!
I suspect the above poster is only seeing the tip of the iceberg. The sort of developers that people are exposed to via outsourcing are usually of very poor quality.
Outsourcing to a highly profit driven company works a lot like the way the USSR rocket program used it's German staff.
Here's how it worked. The experienced German staff were put in a team with a few Russians that knew nothing but the basics. After a while the Russians in the team would be competant, and then they would suddenly be posted elsewhere and there would be new people in the team that knew nothing but the basics. After a while there was a very large pool of Russian staff that knew everything the German staff knew and it was no longer considered worthwhile to continue to feed the German staff.
I suspect the only outsourced developers the above poster met were the ones that he was training while being told that they were working for him. The answer is not to look at the bottom of the pile but instead at published papers and products. The two countries the above poster implies are full of dumb heathens of inferior race have civilian nuclear power programs twenty or thirty years ahead of what Westinghouse etc in the USA can do, and they did it with less cash.
He's forgetting that outsourcing is often about milking the client as much as possible while spending as little as possible and not about a successful software project.