<p>A couple of flaws in this logic. It isn’t engineers who bring products to market. It is the marketing department. I have no doubt that all the innovation we need for the next 30 years is already out there. We just need to translate it from idea to marketable product.</p>
<p>Secondly, engineers (yes, American engineers) are very hesitant to jump from the home company to the competitor. Once again the marketing department has no problem with this concept. But the engineering personality would rather stay in his or her current home and learn a new industry and take on a new challenge than move across the country and go to work for the competetion. That coupled with the sometimes less desirable locations of certain engineering companies is the reason so many engineering managers are of forgein origin - they have already moved once for their career, are willing to do it again whether for more money, a better title or a bigger challenge, and the recruiters know this and call them first.</p>
<p>Fair enough, but you still need a product in the first place before it can be brought to market. </p>
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<p>Well, I suppose that depends on how you define ‘innovation’: whether defined purely as the development of basic research or as recastings of basic research that presently exists. I hesitate the join the fray of defining bright line boundaries of the term ‘innovation’. </p>
<p>But surely what is uncontroversial is that this holiday season, surely billions upon billions of dollars will be spend upon technologies such as tablet computers, smart-phones, high-end video games, and other newfangled gadgets that barely existed only a few years ago. While I don’t disagree that marketing plays a role in serving that market, surely we can all agree that engineering does as well. Hence, there is clear demand for what engineers can provide, as consumers clearly still crave new technological gadgets. For example, there is little doubt that the Iphone4S, Droid Razr, and the Nexus Galaxy are impressive feats of engineering. {I don’t dispute that marketing can boost demand by demonstrating to consumers why they are impressive feats of engineering, but the fact remains that engineers still had to develop those devices in the first place.} </p>
<p>But the fact remains that engineers still aren’t paid particularly well, and the question then is why? If the answer is because marketers are able to capture the lion’s share of the value, then the next question is - why? </p>
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<p>You seem to have contradicted yourself: on the one hand, you say that engineering companies are often times found in less desirable locations, but then you argue that engineers are unwilling to move. Well, wouldn’t those employees (which seem to be largely engineers) in those undesirable locales be precisely the ones who are the most willing to move? After all, that is the definition of an ‘undesirable locale’ - as a region where people prefer not to be - is it not? Otherwise, are you claiming that engineers are somehow irrational in that they actually enjoy being in undesirable locales? {If you are asserting that, then that is indeed an interesting notion, for you’d be effectively arguing that engineers suffer from a masochistic psychological quirk.} </p>
<p>But more importantly, your argument seems not to be supported empirically. Engineering managers are more likely to be foreign than are engineers? Really? The opposite is almost certainly true to the point of being a stereotype: American tech firms seem to be mostly managed by natives who oversee a staff of largely foreign-born engineers. Rarely if ever do you see the reverse. One simply has to look at the leadership of the major American tech firms and note that they are almost always run by native-born Americans (and frankly, mostly by white men). Google (Larry Page), Microsoft (Ballmer & Gates), Apple (Jobs and now Tim Cook), Oracle (Larry Ellison), Facebook (Zuck), Cisco (John Chambers), Dell (Michael Dell), Groupon (Andrew Mason, Eric Lefkosky), IBM (Sam Palmisano), HP (Meg Whitman), Intel (Paul Otellini) - all run by native-born (white) Americans, yet all employing thousands of foreign-born engineers. One has to stretch to think of US tech companies that are actually led by foreign-born managers (you could think of Yahoo run by Jerry Yang, Sergey Brin as a co-founder of Google, or Sanjay Jha as CEO of Motorola Mobility, but the list is rather short). </p>
<p>But even if you are completely correct that engineers - whether domestic or foreign-born - are not well paid because they are simply unwilling to move away from undesirable locations to improve their salaries (which I highly doubt), then that points to a possible solution: we could train engineers to be more aggressive about their career. That seems to be a sell so easy as to be trivial: you could move to a more desirable location, and be paid more to boot! Who wouldn’t want that?</p>