A short time after returning from India, I was approached in an airport by a young man who wanted to talk about some columns I had written from there. We had a nice chat, I asked him for his card, and we struck up an e-mail friendship. His name is Mike Arguello, and he is an IT systems architect living in San Antonio. He does high-end IT systems design and does not feel threatened by foreign competition. He also teaches computer science. When I asked him what we needed to do in America to get our edge back, he sent me this e-mail:
I taught at a local university. It was disheartening to see the poor work ethic of many of my students. Of the students I taught over six semesters, I'd only consider hiring two of them. The rest lacked the creativity, problem-solving abilities and passion for learning. As you well know, India's biggest advantage over the Chinese and Russians is that they speak English. But it would be wrong to assume the top Indian developers are better than their American counterparts. The advantage they have is the number of bodies they can throw at a problem. The Indians that I work with are the cream of the crop. They are educated by the equivalents of MIT back in India and there are plenty of them. If you were to follow me in my daily meetings it would become very obvious that a great deal of my time is spent working with Indians. Most managers are probably still under the impression that all Indians are doing is lower-end software development-“software assembly.” But technologies, such as Linux, are allowing them to start taking higher-paying system design jobs that had previously been the exclusive domain of American workers. It has provided them with the means to move up the technology food chain, putting them on par with domestic workers. It's brain power against brain power, and in this area they are formidable. From a technology perspective, the world is flat and getting flatter (if that is possible). The only two areas that I have not seen Indian labor in are networking architects and system architects, but it is only a matter of time. Indians are very bright and they are quickly learning from their interaction with system architects just how all of the pieces of the IT puzzle fit together... Were Congress to pass legislation to stop the flow of Indian labor, you would have major software systems that would have nobody who knew what was going on. It is unfortunate that many management positions in IT are filled with non-technical managers who may not be fully aware of their exposure... I'm an expert in information systems, not economics, but I know a high-paying job requires one be able to produce something of high value. The economy is producing the jobs both at the high end and low end, but increasingly the high-end jobs are out of reach of many. Low education means low-paying jobs, plain and simple, and this is where more and more Americans are finding themselves. Many Americans can't believe they aren't qualified for high-paying jobs. I call this the “American Idol problem.” If you've ever seen the reaction of contestants when Simon Cowell tells them they have no talent, they look at him in total disbelief. I'm just hoping someday I'm not given such a rude awakening.
In the winter of 2004 I had tea in Tokyo with Richard C. Koo, chief economist for the Nomura Research Institute. I tested out on Richard my “coefficient of flatness”: the notion that the flatter one's country is-that is, the fewer natural resources it has-the better off it will be in a flat world. The ideal country in a flat world is the one with no natural resources, because countries with no natural resources tend to dig inside themselves. They try to tap the energy, entrepreneurship, creativity, and intelligence of their own people-men and women-rather than drill an oil well. Taiwan is a barren rock in a typhoon-laden sea, with virtually no natural resources-nothing but the energy, ambition, and talent of its own people-and today it has the third-largest financial reserves in the world. The success of Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and coastal China can all be traced to a similar flatness.
“I am a Taiwanese-American with a father from Taiwan and with a Japanese mother,” Koo told me. “I was bom in Japan and went to Japanese elementary school and then moved to the States. There is a saying in China that whatever you put in your head and your stomach, no one can take away from you. In this whole region, that is in the DNA. You just have to study hard and move forward. I was told relatively early by my teachers, 'We can never live like Americans and Canadians. We have no resources. We have to study hard, work hard, and export hard.'”