I am a San Jose resident all my life and graduated in 2001; and for six years, no engineering experience meant no engineering job, and no engineering job meant no engineering experience. I struggled and finally became a real engineer in 2007. That's the main problem with the Silicon Valley, where it's so high cost that all the lower techs disappear. Without this lower tech, new grads can't get started here. You can train 1 billion more engineers, but they will not get started in Silicon Valley. They have no choice but to go elsewhere. High cost has also lead businesses to rely increasingly on government spending. Much of what the silicon valley makes are sold to the government directly or via health care subsidies. Main stream tech has long left silicon valley. Good example is that the current Intel CPU Core2 design did not come from Silicon Valley, but from Israel - even though Silicon valley nominally hosts Intel world head quarters. Detroit didn't want to make the wrong kind of cars - but their costs were too high and cannot afford to make the "right" kind of cars.
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Silicon Valley’s Fork in the Road
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In Williams's lab at HP, only 18 of the 75 scientists were born in the United States, and 10 of those American-born researchers are over 50 years old; only six are under the age of 35. For now, HP can rely on foreign-born scientists, but "what happens when those people stop wanting to come here?" Williams asks. "That's the scary part."
Williams got through college and grad school in the 1970s thanks to government grants. He reckons he was a good investment. Through taxes, he's paid back the government many times over. "Technology has been paying the bills in this country," he says. "It's delivering all of the innovation and the profits in the United States. The IT industry has created the wealth that we're enjoying now. But because the industry is doing well, it gets neglected. We're killing the goose that lays the golden eggs."
That's something to think about the next time you're stuck in that traffic on Route 101.
© 2009
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