Apple Goes On A Hiring Spree In China

[Flatulo]

34. I spent most of my career as a design engineer in the tech sector, specifically disk drives.

I worked for Data General, DEC, Quantum, Maxtor and Seagate. Other than the move from Data General to DEC, I never moved my desk in almost 30 years. Acquisitions and buyouts were the order of the day once the MBAs came in and took over from the engineer/entrepreneur founders.

With the exception of Seagate, the MBAs destroyed all of these great companies. Engineering became a nuisance, an expense to get rid of. Anything that could be sent overseas was, including entire design centers. But the innovation and engineering excellence just isn't there yet in China, possibly due to cultural factors (waiting to be told what to do). As a result, the storage business is stuck at an inflection point. For decades it followed Moore's Law, but now the only thing that's happening is the cost continues to plummet.

The US is graduating less than 100,000 engineers per yer compared to over 3m in China, so eventually we're just going to be an asterisk in the history of product development. The Chinese are learning to innovate, and they're learning statistical quality and process control (one of my last assignments was to teach six sigma techniques to them).

It's not looking too good for us.