The blog is very useful.

Crimson: Perhaps they can be but it is nowhere near as effective. Actually I remember reading something about MS and IBM offshoring R&D work. Overall point is that if you are a smart enough programmer/tech that you should be able to save your hind from offshoring.

If we look closely at the ‘Engineers’ that are on the billionaires list then we might find that they have additional skills that most enfineering school graduates may lack.

Among these skills would be social skills, marketing and an innate sense of how to make a buck.

Unless engineering schools decide to take on these challenges students will have to pursue business education to gain skills that may not be part of their normal up-bringing.

Nik:

Ideas and innovation can’t be offshored? Sure they can. Microsft R&D has offshored work to India. So has Intel and plenty of other companies in a variety of industries (biotech, pharm, etc). In fact, my old company offshored some R&D to China. I don’t think the US has cornered the market on being able to come up with new ideas or innovating. I can’t think of a *new* product to come out of India, but it’s not like I’ve been looking and I wouldn’t be the least bit suprised to find out that I’m using one.
That said, I don’t think it means the end of the world for the top end American engineers (software or otherwise).

Ideas and innovation can not be offshored. Name a decent software product to come out of India..

If you’re smart and you see your career-life simply as a financial risk/reward ratio, then really your best option is to go to med school and become a plastic surgeon in Los Angeles. Whether or not pursuing this kind of life is “worth it” could be the subject of another Phil G. post.
And I’m not sure if there exists an engineering discipline invulnerable to offshoring, though the activation energy for offshoring software engineering is certainly lower than most. (Ironically, America is an offshoring *destination* for some companies like Mercedes who build plants in places like Alabama to avoid the red tape of Europe.)

Philip: What I was trying to say is that there is much more room to move and options in the tech field than what there are in law or medicine. For eg. I can come up with an application that people will pay money for out of my bedroom with just a PC. The word ’startup’ has become synonymous with young technology companies. Lawyers dont have that option, doctors need a lab. So a programmers potential risk in starting something up is a few months of no-salary work (or lower wages and options when joining a new company), and requires a bit of alternate thinking. I know a lot of people who are talented programmers who have potential to be very wealthy, but complain about salaries and the shortening of programming-based career lifespan, but these people just averse to taking risk. This is a mass generalisation since the topic as a whole is huge, but while I do agree with you one thing that the tech field provides are different scales of risk (and corresponding potential rewards). On one side of this is starting your own company with just an idea (risk huge, value zero) to idling in the corporate foodchain as an employee for a large, stable firm. Between them there are many scenarios.

As Phil has pointed out lots of times, a *top* student (i.e., a student from a top university with a high GPA and the ability to score above 95%ile on standardized tests) is virtually guaranteed a salary above 200K (maybe even 300K) in medicine or patent law. If they’re looking for risk, using those engineering quant skills on wallstreet is more likely to provide a big payout. The people who want to hire engineers don’t seem to make this connection – they’re not just competing with other technology companies for the current pool of existing engineers, they’re competing with law firms, medical practices, and investment banks for the smartest college (or even high school students) who are trying to decide what to do with their lives. In other words, the tech companies have lost much of the top talent 5-10 years before they even start thinking about hiring.

Nik: You’re forgetting to adjust returns for risk. A person who invested in the Nasdaq in 1995 and sold out in 2000 isn’t necessarily smarter by Wall Street standards than someone who invested in bonds. There is a concept of “risk-adjusted return”. Some of the people who take big risks will end up rich but you have to factor in the percentage who took similar risks and ended up poor. Oprah and Tom Cruise are rich but you wouldn’t tell a young person to expect to earn more money by becoming an actor than by studying to be a dentist.

Look at the Forbes rich list – I see far more programmers and engineers than lawyers and doctors. People in technology have far more earning potential than people in other fields. The other option to re-educating and getting an MBA would be to take some risks.