COLUMN ONE : Taiwanese ‘Brains’ Leave U.S. : Career opportunities help lure engineers trained and educated in America back home. The trend could spell trouble for U.S. high-tech industries.
TAIPEI, Taiwan — Leonard Liu, Ronald Chwang and Andrew Wang are among the engineers from Taiwan who have played a critical role in the Silicon Valley.
Combined, they boast 56 years of experience at such high-tech icons as International Business Machines Corp. and Intel Corp. They possess advanced skills in the core technology of the information age, the integrated circuit. And they hold doctorates in engineering or computer science from top U.S. universities.
But the three men also reflect a potentially troubling trend for America: They have decided to leave the United States and go home.
In a reverse brain drain, a growing number of Taiwanese engineers educated and trained in America are doing likewise. Pulled by patriotism and career opportunity, they are heading back to help Taiwan upgrade its technology and make the leap from low-end computer clones to products that are speedier, pricier and more reliable.
“You are attached to where you grew up and feel somehow that, if you can help or contribute to the growth of industry here, it’s emotionally satisfying,” said Chwang, 41, who received a Ph.D in electrical engineering from USC and has 12 years of experience in North America, including five years designing computer chips for Intel. He returned last year to head the semiconductor lab for Acer Inc., Taiwan’s largest computer firm.
Although the migration is a boon to Taiwan, some U.S. researchers say it could hurt America’s high-tech efforts by luring away badly needed engineers and by expediting the leakage of technology overseas. Both experienced engineers and new graduates in engineering at U.S. universities, who have typically stayed in America for jobs, are heading back to Taiwan in greater numbers.
“This is an issue we’re very concerned about, with what we believe will be an increasing requirement from the home governments, such as China, that these students go back, or that they will choose to go back,” said Eve Majure, manager of the Electronics Education Foundation for the American Electronics Assn. “We can’t afford to lose what few engineers we have.”
So far, about 500 engineers have returned to Taiwan’s equivalent of the Silicon Valley, the Hsinchu Science-based Industrial Park, most of them in the last two years, said H. Steve Hsieh, park director general. Nearly all of the “CEOs”--Chinese entrepreneurs overseas--are senior managers from California, Hsieh said. They include such luminaries as Liu, IBM’s highest-ranking Taiwanese executive, who directed the firm’s Silicon Valley research lab before joining Acer as president this year.
The government of Taiwan is actively wooing its sons and daughters home. Its two offices in California maintain data on nearly 3,000 engineers and computer scientists, information they make available to Taiwanese talent scouts. Other government agencies sponsor five seminars a year each in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, Seattle and New York on high-tech career opportunities in Taiwan. In addition, they place recruiting ads in Chinese-language newspapers, such as a recent ad portraying an elephant separated from its herd, and the plea: “Come Home.”
A Different Image
The U.S.-trained engineers offer a lifeline to help lift Taiwan from its image of copycat producers of cheap computer parts to innovative makers of more advanced product lines.
“As Taiwan’s labor costs go higher and the Taiwan dollar appreciates, we can no longer stay in the low end. We must upgrade our lines to stay competitive,” said Eric Hwang, marketing specialist for the Institute for Information Industry, a joint public-private corporation that promotes Taiwan’s computer-related technological development.
“We hope to get these senior managers back to Taiwan to leverage their knowledge of advanced technology to upgrade more quickly.”
Taiwan’s private sector is also reaching out. At Hsinchu, a dozen executives, all returnees themselves, have begun the “OCEAN” program, for Overseas Chinese Entrepreneurs Advisory Network. They help returnees adjust to Taiwan, hammer out strong business plans and find the right partners.
To be sure, there are still many more Taiwanese engineers flowing the other way. Yet that is also changing. Taiwan, a mountainous island of just 20 million people in the South China Sea, still sends more Ph.D candidates in engineering to the United States than any other nation in the world. They receive one-fifth of all doctorates conferred on foreign students, according to a study last year by the National Research Council.
So long as Taiwan remained a floating factory that churned out cheap toys, shoes and garments, there was little for advanced researchers to do but teach. Thus, about 80% have traditionally stayed in America to pursue jobs, Hsinchu park officials said.
But now Taiwan has transformed itself into the sixth largest producer of computer products in the world. Its wildly expanding stock market, whose index has skyrocketed to 10,000 from 1,500 since 1986, has created entrepreneurial millionaires virtually overnight. As a result, officials said, the percentage of graduates who stay in America has dropped to about 60%.
“We are seeing a constant flow of CEOs into the park, most of them with masters and Ph.Ds,” Hsieh said. He grinned. “Now they have a chance to make a fortune and become a billionaire.”
Take Bobo Wang, for instance. He isn’t a billionaire yet. But he is a multimillionaire who was featured on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” and is thus one of Taiwan’s most famous returning engineers. He was also one of the first to come back.
High-Tech Hotshot
Wang, a boyish and vivacious 43-year-old, followed the familiar path of Taiwan’s high-tech hotshots. He was graduated in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University, the republic’s most prestigious school, in 1969. After serving his mandatory military service, there was no question as to whether he would go abroad for advanced study. He chose UCLA and received a master’s degree in computer science in 1971.
“There weren’t many jobs in the private sector in the late 1960s. Taiwan was just starting its exporting-zone stage, in very low-end assembly,” Wang said in his high-rise office in Taipei’s financial district. “The best graduates didn’t even think of staying.”
For the next eight years, Wang worked for Xerox in El Segundo, Calif., first as a testing engineer on mainframe computers and then on the first wave of microprocessors to hit the market. At age 35, he hit a “mid-life crisis,” sensed the virgin opportunities in Taiwan and headed home in 1980 to found Microtek International Inc.
In eight years, Wang has gone from a Xerox engineer earning $43,000 annually to Microtek’s president worth $36 million.
“We really didn’t know whether to come back or not,” Wang said. “But there were so many Chinese engineers overseas, and they never came back. And, if we could be successful, we could have a big impact on the returnees.”
Lure of Success
Taiwanese officials say Wang and others have done just that. Irving Ho, president of the Institute for Information Industry, who returned to establish the Hsinchu science park in 1979 after 17 years at IBM and Fairchild, calls Microtek one of Taiwan’s “star pupils,” along with Acer and others.
“With these kinds of success stories, we do our recruiting,” Ho said. “Now people are queuing to get in.”
Liu, by contrast, was not interested in creating a new firm. He was accustomed to running billion-dollar business units for IBM and was lured to Acer only because it was large enough--with 1988 worldwide sales of $530 million--to offer the potential of becoming a major international player in the information industry.
Even five years ago, Taiwan could not have offered such opportunity.
“I think the 1990s will belong to the Pacific Basin,” said Liu, 48, who received his doctorate from Princeton University. “I think Taiwan has developed to the point where it has an environment, where it has the skills and now it has the opportunities. To build a multibillion-dollar, first-class company in the world headquartered in Taiwan is something I’d be very proud of.”
Liu, whom IBM promoted regularly and rapidly, figures he could have kept up his career advancement. But a shot at company president is something few Americans, much less foreigners, could hope to get at IBM, making Acer all the more enticing, he said.
Young-Lim Su, however, is less sure about executive-level opportunities for Taiwanese and other Asian engineers in America. Many of his friends, he said, have 10 years of experience yet “still cannot get promoted.” He blames cultural differences, one of the factors that pulled him home in 1987 to help found a computer peripheral firm, E-Tech Inc.
Su, 33, received a doctorate in electrical engineering at Stanford University in 1983. He was cited as an Outstanding Young Man of America in 1982 and taught at UC Berkeley. For four years, he worked for Fairchild Research Lab in Palo Alto, developing advanced communication products, such as high-speed modems.
But he soon noticed that his good work would sometimes go uncredited, and he balked at speaking up. Some of his Asian friends, he said, saw credit for their work taken by American colleagues.
“It’s really a personal philosophy. In the U.S.A., people always try to show ‘this is my credit,’ ” Su said. “But some Oriental people are kind of shy. They are humble. They think people should recognize them. But they don’t.”
Su’s lament is common. Tze-Chen Tu, director of the Institute for Information Industry office in Mountain View, Calif., said he gets four to five inquiries a week from Taiwanese engineers in California about opportunities in Taiwan. “More than half the people say they have very strong frustrations to get promoted in America even after they have 10 years experience,” Tu said.
As Chwang put it: “Have you ever seen a (chief executive) that’s not an Anglo-Saxon? You just don’t.” To keep their Taiwanese talent, Chwang said, American firms must begin to broaden their career paths. Too often, he said, Asians tend to stay--or are kept--in the technical side of the business.
Quiet Departure
But the trend of returning to Taiwan may be too small or quiet to command such attention from individual U.S. firms. Even though the phenomenon is widely discussed in the Taiwanese community, several U.S. companies, including IBM, said they had not noticed a number of engineers leaving or heard about promotion frustrations. Part of the problem, they said, is that attrition is not tracked by nationality.
And at least one group thinks fewer foreign engineers in America would be good news. The U.S. office of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. views them as economic competition and wants to tighten rules against their employment. Spokesman Frank Lord challenged the notion of a shortage, saying U.S. needs could be met by using the current supply of engineers more efficiently.
One firm that has noticed the problem and tried to address it is Intel Corp. in Santa Clara, Calif. Since 1983, the company has held classes for its Taiwanese engineers on everything from speaking under pressure to accent improvement. The classes were initially begun to help broaden their skills and enhance their career potential at a time when many were leaving for other local start-ups. The competition from Taiwan has exacerbated the pressure.
“We’d very much like to keep them from other U.S. companies and keep them from going back,” said Albert Yu, vice president of Intel’s components development group. “Most of our new hires are from Taiwan, Hong Kong, India. If these people work a few years and go back, where is our next generation of people driving the technology and companies?”
Shortage of Engineers
Where, indeed? IBM has forecast a shortage of 400,000 engineers, mathematicians and scientists by the year 2000, and the National Science Foundation predicts that the shortage could hit 700,000 by the year 2010. Although foreign engineers made up just 3% of all engineers in the United States in 1986, Taiwan officials estimate that Taiwanese comprise as much as 20% in the Silicon Valley.
“At Rolm, (Hewlett-Packard) and IBM, in every company I’ve worked at, I have seen Taiwanese in key positions. Period,” said Doug Stone, president of P-CAD, a software firm in San Jose, Calif. “If those people all picked up and walked out of here or decided they were going to start their own company, it would be catastrophic.”
And educational trends portend an even greater reliance on foreign engineers. While the number of American graduates in engineering is dropping, the proportion of degrees going to foreign nationals is growing. Foreign nationals now receive 44.5% of all engineering doctorates, the American Assn. of Engineering Societies found.
The American Electronics Assn. is so concerned about the loss of foreign talent and the looming engineering shortage that it announced in September an initiative to strengthen math and science education for students in kindergarten through high school. The proposal marks a shift from the association’s past emphasis on college education, Majure said.
The issue of technology leakage provokes less alarm but is still a concern, said Arthur Chait, director of technology and strategy consulting at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park.
“Any time anyone leaves anywhere, they take technology with them,” Chait said. “Instead of going from H-P to Next or IBM to Apple, you’re now going outside the country. That loss outside our borders could be quite significant.”
But, he added: “It would be a mistake to paint this as a one-way situation. Lots of people are coming over, and lots of people are going back. I think overall, it’s positive.”
Back to America
Indeed, many of the engineers who have come home to Taiwan express a desire to return again to America some day. For people who have become accustomed to the space and freedom in America, Taiwan’s crowding, social strictures and industrial pollution can make life trying. The education of their children, many of whom speak better English than Chinese, is a pressing problem.
Andrew Wang, who worked at IBM and Amdahl before taking a job this year with one of Taiwan’s premier high-tech research companies, is worn out by all of the evening entertainment common to the Asian business culture.
After repeatedly asking his staff for opinions and getting silence, Chwang realized he was using an American management style and had to adjust.
But, as long as they are in Taiwan, the returnees say they can benefit both sides by putting people who understand American business practices into firms here.
Chwang, for instance, still works closely with his former company, Intel, which supplies the advanced chips that have helped Acer--and Taiwan--close the technology gap.
“To me, it’s mutually beneficial,” said Hsieh of the science park. Grinning, he added: “The best way to fight the Japanese is to team up between America and us.”
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