Many of you wrote to comment on my August column ("Decline and Fall?"), particularly concerning the cyclical nature of technical careers, and which areas one should focus on when training for these careers (see Feedback). Surprisingly, however, no one addressed Stevens Institute of Technology professor Larry Bernstein's assertions that the current job crisis is caused by the "advent of global software development" along with the "unwillingness of and difficulty for foreign students to come to the United States."
The IEEE and the ACM have opposed the tech industry's lobbying to raise caps on the number of H1-B visas granted annually. Let's put aside the question of whether in-creasing visa caps addresses a real shortage in engineering talent, as lobbyists maintain, or simply provides a way to hire cheap staff.
Instead, consider some startling statistics from George Mason University professor Richard Florida, who writes in The Flight of the Creative Class (HarperCollins, 2005) that the U.S. technology engine of the last 50 years was fueled by an influx of foreign technical talent. Beginning with European scientists fleeing Germany and the U.S.S.R. prior to World War II, this trend peaked in the 1990s, when the largest wave of immigration in U.S. history brought in 11 million people, many of whom, such as Linus Torvalds and Google's Sergey Brin, went on to make significant contributions to that decade's tech boom.
That was then, but what of today? Thomas Friedman, in The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005), cites statistics that show an increase in foreign-born scientists and engineers from 1990 to 2000. Nearly 40 percent of all working science and engineering Ph.Ds, for example, are now foreign-born.
However, several other countries are proving increasingly successful at competing with the U.S. for this vital pool of tech creativity. Florida analyzes how these other countries have created not only comparative (or superior) technological infrastructures but also diverse and open social milieus conducive to fostering creativity.
Asian and Eastern European countries are making tech education—as well as R&D—national priorities, but U.S. industry is finding it increasingly difficult to attract the graduates of these programs. The U.S. is still a significant center of innovation, but Florida maintains that increasing stratification into a two-class society, coupled with the severe restrictions placed on immigrants following the September 11 terror attacks, has resulted in the second trend that Bernstein laments.
Infrastructure and Open Source
Other factors are working against U.S. technological leadership, as well. In August, I quoted one of Friedman's New York Times columns: "We think that all we need to do is show up and everyone else will fold." But because of an increasingly "flat" world—Friedman's metaphor for the next phase of globalization in which, thanks to the excess of modern telecommunications capacity installed during the dot-com bubble—we have made it possible for our competitors to create virtual enterprises, unconstrained by national boundaries. And, he says, workflow platforms developed in part for companies experimenting with outsourcing engineering responsibilities to India and other developing nations are the third of 10 forces he maintains have flattened the globe.
These workflow solutions rest on a foundation of open source software and Web services technologies that have finally made it possible to circumvent the walls surrounding proprietary software applications. But beyond that, Friedman cites the open source software movement as the fourth of the 10 forces. From that world came the Apache Web server, and from Brian Behlendorf, one of the eight original Apache developers, came CollabNet—an open source organization focused on developing tools for collaboration.
Back to Bootstraps
Florida and Friedman both paint disturbing pictures of what may lie ahead for the U.S. tech industry. The challenge, according to Friedman, is to stimulate positive use of collaborative tools, and as Florida says, to once again take advantage of America's incredible transformative capabilities. Write me at [email protected].