Bumps on the Flat Earth

By Michael Feldman

January 25, 2008

In response to last week’s “Flat Earth” commentary, I received several thoughtful letters. One of the most interesting was from Enda O’Brien, the founder and director of Parallel Programming Services in Ireland, who argued that the world is not nearly flat enough. If it were, he says, salaries of technology workers would be much more globally equitable than they actually are.

Writes O’Brien:

If pay-rates were similar the world over, there would be no pressure to outsource work or export jobs in the “knowledge economy” to places like India or Russia where pay-rates are lower. Instead, engineers everywhere would be competing on the basis of their knowledge, skills and experience. This is roughly how it is within the U.S. or within India, even if places like Silicon Valley and Bangalore stick out from the national “flatness”. People and businesses “cluster” into these local centres because the premium pay on offer and the premium output produced tend to positively feed back on each other. I suspect that this is an organic kind of “un-evenness” that most people are comfortable with.

The only real solution to this problem of global “tilt” is for pay-rates in India, Russia and other countries to rise to the levels where their appeal will be based more on their engineering skills than the cheapness of their labour. This is happening already to a certain extent, but still has some way to go. (When I worked for HP in Galway, the company brought over 3 engineers from India for us to train, so they could in turn train their own teams in Bangalore, who would then take over our work and allow us to be laid off. That cunning plan only failed because on return to India, our 3 heroes left HP for better jobs with another company.) Pay in India doesn’t have to rise to American levels for the playing field to “level”: While multinational corporations find Indian engineers very attractive at 10-20 percent of “western” salaries, the attraction tends to vanish at 60-70 percent of that same “western” pay-rate.

The second problem is that even national economies aren’t flat enough. By this I mean that the average software engineer or rank-and-file scientist in any discipline is grossly under-valued and under-paid for what he or she does relative to other professionals in western countries. As a corollary, software and related services are likewise under-valued and too cheap. Why would any average rational human choose to become a scientist or engineer when the starting pay, career prospects, and job security are all so poor relative to other careers in the medical, legal, or financial services sectors (current difficulties in the latter notwithstanding)?

There are several reasons for this national “deficit” in the professional status of scientists and engineers. One is that they are just not “professionalized”, in the sense meant by George Bernard Shaw when he called all professions “conspiracies against the laity”. You need a formal certification to be a teacher, a nurse, a pharmacist, an accountant, or a lawyer, but all you need to be a software engineer is the ability to do the job. Pharmacists and lawyers command set fees which are inflated by virtue of their certification, even for very simple, routine work. Scientists and engineers command no such premium. If your 14-year old brother can build a web-site for the price of a movie ticket, why bother with a “real” engineer? Maybe rank-and-file software engineers will professionalize some day, but realistically, it won’t be any time soon.

Another reason for the low status of scientists and engineers is simply cultural inertia on the part of both themselves and society at large. Scientists and engineers are not primarily businessmen, so others tend to control and benefit from their work. As with your iconic woman who reads “People” but not “Time”, or even those who read “Time” but not the “New Yorker”, a certain anti-intellectualism pervades American society. Among the ignorentia or the scientifically semi-literate bourgeois, scientists and engineers are not appreciated as they would like to be, and certainly not as much as they are appreciated in countries like India, where they have (almost) the status of professional sportsmen!

O’Brien highlights some telling contradictions here. Although most people might not put scientists and engineers in the category of “underpaid professions,” the fact is that these are essentially middle-class jobs. If we are to believe the standard rhetoric that tells us that technologists not only represent the drivers of 21st economic progress, but also are in critically short supply, then why aren’t salaries higher? After all nobody is saying we need to start cranking out more movies stars, sports heroes, plastic surgeons or trial lawyers. Yet all of these latter professions reach into the seven-figure range — eight if you’re talking Tom Hanks.

There are lots of reasons for pay disparity, and O’Brien hits on most of them. But the aggregate truth is that your salary is determined by what the market will bear, which is just a polite way of saying what “society” thinks you’re worth. For example, the fact the plastic surgeons make more money than general practitioners represents a cultural bias; it’s not a reflection of the relative intelligence, skill, educational level, job difficulty, or number of certificates on the wall. It’s easy to imagine a culture where a plastic surgeon would have no value at all. The more favorable treatment tech workers receive in countries like India and Russia is another example where societal values are reflected differently than in the United States. So for better or worse, the value of technological expertise is a function of the culture it’s applied in, not just its economic worth.

For the argument that upper management tends to hoard the wealth of a firm, market forces would counterbalance that by drawing the best talent to companies where monetary rewards were more equitably distributed. In that sense, the ability for executives to reward themselves is self-limiting. In truth, that model breaks down on a pretty regular basis, especially in industries dominated by just a handful of companies or where the execs are engaged in “creative financing” unbeknownst to the worker-bees. In any case, this is an area where I see the culture changing for the better, as people react to the horror stories of CEOs making thousands of times more than the average worker. The younger generation seems to be particularly concerned about balance of wealth distribution within companies.

In general though, waiting for the cultural revolution that assigns more value to scientists and engineers is likely to be a frustrating strategy. The conventional wisdom these days says that the positions in most demand in the tech fields are those that combine technical skills with people skills. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ 11th Annual Global CEO Survey announced this week at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, CEOs said that “combined technical and business experience, global work experience and leadership skills are the most difficult areas for their companies to recruit.”

Well, no kidding. People who can do it all tend to be in short supply. The cynic in me would suggest that CEOs are really telling us they would like to hire workers with the same skill sets as themselves, but at 1/10 of the pay.

On the other hand, there’s no denying that following a purely technical career path is a precarious strategy these days. Between outsourcing, skill obsolescence and automation, technologists are exposing themselves to three of the biggest dangers facing the contemporary worker. In a world where being old-fashioned means spelling Internet with a capital I, the technological juggernaut is going to run over workers who still act like they live in the 20th century.

—–

As always, comments about HPCwire are welcomed and encouraged. Write to me, Michael Feldman, at [email protected].

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire