Posted on 10/20/2009 6:20:49 PM PDT by rabidralph
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.
I spent Columbus Day in Sunnyvale, fittingly, meeting with a roomful of new arrivals. Well, relatively new. They were Indians living in Silicon Valley. The event was organized by the Think India Foundation, a think-tank that seeks to solve problems which Indians face. When introducing the topic of skilled immigration, the discussion moderator, Sand Hill Group founder M.R. Rangaswami asked the obvious question. How many planned to return to India? I was shocked to see more than three-quarters of the audience raise their hands.
Even Rangaswami was taken back. He lived in a different Silicon Valley, from a time when Indians flocked to the U.S. and rapidly populated the programming (and later executive) ranks of the top software companies in California. But the generational difference between older Indians who have made it in the Valley and the younger group in the room was striking. The present reality is this. Large numbers of the Valley’s top young guns (and some older bulls, as well) are seeing opportunities in other countries and are returning home. It isn’t just the Indians. Ask any VC who does business in China, and they’ll tell you about the tens of thousands who have already returned to cities like Shanghai and Beijing. The VC’s are following the talent. And this is bringing a new vitality to R&D in China and India.
Why would such talented people voluntarily leave Silicon Valley, a place that remains the hottest hotbed of technology innovation on Earth?
(Excerpt) Read more at techcrunch.com ...
And the Tech Crunch web site has tons of interesting articles if you're as geeky as I am.
Just waiting for the barrage of responses saying ‘good riddance’ or ‘more jobs for us’. The reality is that it’s not going to mean more jobs here, because simply stated, the business will relocate to where the talent is.
Cheers!
Count me as one saying Good bye
I don't know where the stereotype Indians are hard workers came from, they most certain are not. They may work cheaper but forget about getting any real work done or anything resembling quality. Indians have all but ruined the Pharmaceutical Industry (look up Able Labs).
Any company going to India to be "where the talent is" won't last long no matter what slave wage they pay. There's a reason why with so much "Talent" India is still pretty much a 3rd world country
There are silver linings to every cloud.
The election of a communist POTUS is going to accelerate the reverse brain drain. Why attempt to get rich in the U.S. when onerous and usurious taxes are coming and your wealth will be confiscated in the name of “fairness”? We are going to pay the price for the election of the commie in chief for many, many years as he continues his work to destroy the U.S.
I bet that’s the biggest reason left out of this article.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.