The debate on engineering outsourcing and competitiveness is raging on. The European approach is to fund megastudies like ITEA 2, which study the way the world is going – or, rather, the way the world has gone. They have just concluded that software-intensive embedded systems are the Next Big Thing, and they had better jump right on that. I hate to point out to them that FPGAs are taking a run at making software obsolete in some embedded applications.

Back here in the U.S. the debate goes on as to whether (or how much) outsourcing is really hurting people. A recent study by the ITAA trade group claims that outsourcing helps a local economy by creating more jobs than it destroys, although they do admit that there can be a lag in between the destruction and the subsequent creation. Countering that argument is a recent article by Jack Ganssle talking about how we are all going to be working at Wal-Mart.

The truth is probably somewhere in between these extremes. There are new engineering jobs coming online as companies are discovering that outsourcing is not a panacea, but a large number of those jobs seem to be going to new graduates rather than the experienced engineers that have been displaced. I haven’t seen serious studies to back that up, but I have seen anecdotal evidence that supports the idea. If so, it may very well be another set of shortsighted decisions as young engineers make the same mistakes that experienced engineers have already learned from.

Larry Mittag