Silicon Careers: Where Are the Jobs?

EETimes editor-in-chief Junko Yoshida wrote the following essay as an entree to the Silicon 60 Career Issue, a searchable digital guide to up-and-coming startups in the global electronics industry. Here's her essay, which originally appeared on EETimes.com.

That's the question of the year. It's easy to blame the President, Congress, and Wall Street. In some way or another, they're all complicit. My addition to the rogues gallery would be those big high-tech companies in the United States that are sitting on hoards of cash but neither hiring nor investing.

Meanwhile, I came across in the New York Times an op-ed piece by Susan Hockfield, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Her essay started eloquently:

The president of MIT is saying that "manufacturing" has powers to fuel a US recovery.

On the one hand, I want to believe that she is right. On the other hand, I wish things were so clear cut.

Call me jaded, but in the global electronics industry which EE Times has been covering for almost 40 years, we've all witnessed the mass exodus of manufacturing facilities overseas, thus attracting (and hiring) talented design engineers abroad. Operations offshore certainly haven't stopped at mere "manufacturing." Production offshore has also led to innovation abroad, with many companies investing in more design centers and R&D facilities outside the United States.

When a high-tech company sees more revenue from overseas markets, the company can't help but feel justified in trimming its United States workforce. The explanation is always the same: "We need to be there [abroad] to understand the local market's needs. We are a global company; we need to design locally and manufacture locally."

That "global" label is your get-out-of-jail-free card. You are beholden to your customers in the "global" markets and to your shareholders in the United States, but not to workers and engineers in the United States, even though you are a US-based company.

How can we break this all-too-familiar cycle of a US company that invents and develops something new but then sends manufacturing jobs overseas and eventually parts also with design/engineering and even R&D jobs?

By "manufacturing," Hockfield means: "To make our economy grow, sell more goods to the world, and replenish the work force, we need to restore manufacturing -- not the assembly-line jobs of the past, but the high-tech advanced manufacturing of the future."

She wants us to hang our hats on "advanced manufacturing that relies on the marriage of science and engineering in cutting-edge fields."

We don't pretend to have all the answers. Far from it. But in the search for "cutting-edge fields" that could create advanced manufacturing/engineering jobs, we may be able to help. EE Times has been assembling, since April 2004, a list of emerging startups, informally known as the Silicon 60.

The EET Silicon 60 includes startups involved in semiconductor technologies for analog circuits, memory, logic, power, MEMS, optoelectronics, EDA software, foundry manufacturing, semiconductor production equipment, electronic subsystems, displays, packaging, and materials. This is a "highly selective" list. We chose companies based on a mix of criteria, including technology ingenuity, market focus, maturity, financial position, investment profile, and executive leadership.

EE Times' Silicon 60 list is a cross-section of excellence in the global electronics industry, where constant technology innovation -- coupled with new business models -- has driven growth and given birth to more new ideas, more companies, and, as a consequence, more new jobs.

Our special Silicon 60 Career Issue offers a list of hot 60 companies where you might be tempted to seek employment. It illustrates available jobs and what sort of skills they require. (Please note that not all have openings.) It includes viewpoints from venture capitalists on the current startup landscape and poses five questions anyone should ask before joining a startup.

This can't be the whole answer to the job crisis. But it's a list of companies that are committed enough to good old ingenuity that they -- unlike, say, Congress -- have put their money where their mouth is.

Happy hunting!

For additional information:

The EETimes Silicon 60 Career Issue can be purchased for $34.99 here.

This story was originally posted by EE Times.

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