Silicon Valley's Globalized Work Force

The U.S. Census Bureau  has recently reported that the United States has reached a historic tipping point -- with Latino, Asian, mixed race and African American births constituting a majority of births for the first time. Minorities made up about 2 million, or 50.4%, of the births in the 12-month period ending July 2011. The latest figure was up from 49.5% reported in the 2010 census.

80386 CPU Design Team
Standing L to R: Riaz Haq, Jan Prak, Gene Hill, Pat Gelsinger, John Crawford
Sitting in Front: Dave Vannier
I  have personally witnessed Silicon Valley's racial mix change dramatically over the last several decades. When I arrived here to join Intel in 1981, there were few non-whites in the Valley. In fact, I was the only nonwhite person in a picture of the six-member award winning Intel 80386 CPU design team which was published by the PC Magazine in 1988.


My experience of the demographic changes in this high-tech valley is not just anecdotal. It's supported by data compiled by the local San Jose Mercury newspaper in 2010. The data shows that 49% of Intel employees are now Asian, a full 7% more than whites. In Silicon Valley, the difference is even more pronounced with Asians accounting for 53.9% of the employees versus 37.6% white workers.


 With Asians accounting for just 15.5% of the high-tech work force nationally, Silicon Valley's high-tech racial mix is also very different from the rest of the country. Silicon valley's employee pool also differs in terms of under-representation of Blacks, Hispanics and women relative the national averages.

 Among Asian-Americans, Pakistani-Americans are the 7th largest community in America, according to a report titled "A Community of Contrasts Asian Americans in the United States: 2011" published by Asian-American Center For Advancing Justice.  Pakistani-American population has doubled from 204,309 in 2000 to 409,163 in 2010, the second largest percentage increase after Bangladeshis' 157% increase in the same period.

Source:  TheAtlantic Cities


The total fertility rate in the United States is now at 2.06, just enough to maintain the current level of US population. It's possible mainly due to the history of relatively liberal US immigration policy. If US immigration policy is tightened in response to pressures from various labor organizations and the traditional anti-immigration groups, the US fertility rate is likely to dip and hurt the US economy which needs more workers to pay for the retiree benefits of the growing population of senior citizens. Already, many US multinational corporations have added 1.5 million workers to their payrolls in Asia and the Pacific region from 1999 to 2009, and 477,500 workers in Latin America, according to US Commerce Dept data as reported by the Wall Street Journal. If the businesses can not find workers in the United States, they are more likely to continue to accelerate moving jobs elsewhere, depriving the US government the revenue it needs to balance its budget.

Related Links:

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US Firms Adding Jobs Overseas 

Pakistan's Demographic Dividend

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Pakistan's Youth Bulge

Pakistani Diaspora World's 7th Largest

Pakistani-American NFL Team Owner

Pakistani-American Entrepreneurs Catch the Wave

Pakistani Graduation Rate Higher Than India's

Comments

Riaz Haq said…
Here's a Times of India story on Indian exaggeration of Indian professionals in US:

It's an Internet myth that has taken on a life of its own. No matter how often you slay this phony legend, it keeps popping up again like some hydra-headed beast.

But on Monday, the Indian government itself consecrated the oft-circulated fiction as fact in Parliament, possibly laying itself open to a breach of privilege. By relaying to Rajya Sabha members (as reported in The Times of India) a host of unsubstantiated and inflated figures about Indian professionals in US, the government also made a laughing stock of itself.

The figures provided by the Minister of State for Human Resource Development Purandeshwari included claims that 38 per cent of doctors in US are Indians, as are 36 per cent of NASA scientists and 34 per cent of Microsoft employees.

There is no survey that establishes these numbers, and absent a government clarification, it appears that the figures come from a shop-worn Internet chain mail that has been in circulation for many years. Spam has finally found its way into the Indian parliament dressed up as fact.

Attempts by this correspondent over the years to authenticate the figures have shown that it is exaggerated, and even false. Both Microsoft and NASA say they don't keep an ethnic headcount. While they acknowledge that a large number of their employees are of Indian origin, it is hardly in the 30-35 per cent range.

In a 2003 interview with this correspondent, Microsoft chief Bill Gates guessed that the number of Indians in the engineering sections of the company was perhaps in the region of 20 per cent, but he thought the overall figure was not true. NASA workers say the number of Indians in the organization is in the region of 4-5 per cent, but the 36 per cent figure is pure fiction.

The number of physicians of Indian-origin in the US is a little easier to estimate. The Association of American Physicians of Indian Origin (AAPI) has 42,000 members, in addition to around 15,000 medical students and residents. There were an estimated 850,000 doctors in the US in 2004. So, conflating the figures, no more than ten per cent of the physicians in US maybe of Indian-origin – and that includes Indian-Americans – assuming not everyone is registered with AAPI.

These numbers in themselves are remarkable considering Indians constitute less than one per cent of the US population. But in its enthusiasm to spin the image of the successful global Indian to its advantage, the government appears to have milked a long-discredited spam - an effort seen by some readers as the work of a lazy bureaucrat and an inept minister.

The story has attracted withering scrutiny and criticism on the Times of India's website, with most readers across the world trashing it. "The minister should be hauled up by the house for breach of privilege of parliament (by presenting false information based on hearsay). We Indians are undoubtedly one of the most successful ethnic groups in USA, be it in Medicine, Engineering, Entrepreneurship. BUT, that does not translate to those ridiculous numbers that have been presented....this is a circulating e-mail hoax," wrote in Soumya from USA, who said he worked at the NASA facility in Ames, California, and the number was nowhere near what was mentioned in the figures given to Parliament.


http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2008-03-12/us/27742502_1_indian-origin-indian-parliament-indian-american
Riaz Haq said…
Here's an ET story about Pak tech companies with Si Valley connections:

With about 50 people assembled in one room to discuss seven start-up ideas, the general mood was ecstatic at The Second Floor (T2F), a project of PeaceNiche and a community space for open dialogue.

Budding entrepreneurs, technology geeks, fresh business graduates and app developers were there to participate in the first Entrepreneurs Roundtable Pakistan (ERT PK), an informal meeting of entrepreneurs to get instant feedback on their ideas from each other.

“It’s not about pitching your ideas as a salesman. The objective is to share these ideas with other entrepreneurs and get their feedback,” said Shirley Lin, who helped popularise the concept of informal meetings of entrepreneurs to share start-up ideas in cafes of Silicon Valley, while addressing the audience from California via Skype.

1 Doc Way

Danish Munir began his presentation by asking the audience if any of them found the procedure of getting a doctor’s appointment easy. Predictably, no one from the audience replied in the affirmative. Munir said his business aimed to help patients pay online visits to their doctors at their own convenience without worrying about the commute or time off work.

He said his website was generating revenues in the US, mainly because 60% of doctor-patient meetings in the country were conversational. “After the patient-doctor meeting on Skype, the doctor’s secretary calls the pharmacy and the patient can later collect the medicine,” Munir said.

Although the business model works differently in different countries, the website does not require patients to pay any additional charges.

Munir worked at Microsoft in Seattle, Washington, until eight months ago. He said he quit his “mundane job with a great package” for the love of entrepreneurship.

I’m confused

How many times have you been at a loss when deciding where to eat out when you have a certain amount of money to spare? “It’s either money or the location of the restaurant. Random searches on Google or even Karachi Snob don’t produce desired results most of the time,” said Zafar Syed, who is developing an advanced search engine by the name of “I’m confused.”

Syed said it would initially be focused on food and fashion outlets, adding the search engine would produce results according to prices one could afford to pay and look for such businesses within a defined area.

Pakistan’s Silicon Valley?

“People often say Lahore is to Pakistan what Bangalore is to India when it comes to the IT industry. But I think Karachi is swiftly catching up with Lahore. Both are neck and neck in terms of entrepreneurial activities,” said AR Rafiq, a California-based technologist, who organised the ERT PK along with the Pakistan Software Houses Association (P@SHA), while talking to The Express Tribune.

“There’re a lot of tech companies in America that have offices here, including Folio3, Whizz Systems, PalmChip, NexLogic and Inspurate,” he said, adding that Karachi’s IT professionals should now move away from the “outsourcing model” to the “equal partnership model” to reap the benefits of a truly globalised IT industry.


http://tribune.com.pk/story/325306/budding-entrepreneurs-gather-to-share-novel-ideas/
Riaz Haq said…
Lots of places want to become the "next Silicon Valley." But that's much easier said than done, according to a new study from the Kauffman Foundation.

The study compares the nation's top 20 large metros in terms of high-tech start-up density in 1990 and 2010. San Jose leads in both periods. And although the order has shifted a bit, every single one of the top 10 metro areas in 2010 was among the top 20 in 1990. ...Only five of the top 20 in 2010 — Portland, Wilmington, Phoenix, Kansas City and New Orleans — weren't among the most tech-dense cities twenty years ago. Even metros that have begun to climb the high tech ranks recently, like Kansas City and Portland, really "owe their emerging entrepreneurial ecosystems to many years of spinoffs and entrepreneurial spawning," the report notes.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/09/long-history-americas-leading-high-tech-hubs/6774/

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