Returning EEs see India as land of opportunity

BANGALORE, India — When startup Insilica Semiconductors India Pvt. Ltd. took a booth at a recent job fair in California to recruit for its Bangalore design center, it was unprepared for the deluge of about 150 applications that followed. The response underscored what many observers consider an increasingly common phenomenon: Expatriate design engineers — not just programmers — are returning to India in droves.

“It's historic; it's never happened before,” said New Path Ventures co-founder Vinod Dham, a renowned expat chip designer and investor who pioneered the Pentium architecture while at Intel Corp. “I expected software design engineers to be returning to India, but not chip designers. It is the uncertainty in the U.S. job market and the growth happening in India that's making it happen.”

In fact, engineers and recruiters cite a raft of reasons for the reverse migration, from rising living standards in India to a sense among some engineers that it's time to give back something to the communities that educated them. Mostly, though, it's because India is now seen as a center for innovation.

“More multinational companies are setting up not just back-end operations in India but also product development centers and research labs,” said N. Muralidharan, managing director of Jobstreet.com India Pvt. Ltd.

India may be "the last really great emerging market,” said Mark Zetter, president of Venture Outsource (San Jose, Calif.). While returning engineers may not be working at the same level of technical sophistication, Zetter said, they have greater control over their own destiny in India than they would working for a U.S.-based company.

Employed...and looking

The opportunities seem so ripe that even engineers “who still have jobs in the U.S. want to explore options back home,” said Gautam Sinha, chief executive of search firm TVA Infotech Pvt. Ltd.

Over the past few years, many big U.S. technology companies have set up engineering centers here or in Hyderabad, Pune, New Delhi or Chennai. The industry slump that started in 2001 led many companies to cut thousands of engineers at their U.S. locations, but few laid off workers in India.

Indeed, many Indian companies continue to hire. “We've had this shortage of experienced people. The people who are returning now are not those who went to the U.S. during the boom there; it's those with [at least several years] of experience,” said S. Karthik, managing director of Analog Devices Inc.'s India Product Development Center.

Network Associates Inc.'s Bangalore engineering center estimates that 10 to 15 percent of its staff of 175 consists of workers who have “returned from the U.S. within the last 18 months,” said Sridhar Jayanthi, the center's director, who himself spent 18 years overseas.

Many of those returning to India lost a U.S. job to the downturn and were unable to find another within the period legally allowed by U.S. immigration authorities. But others went to the United States a decade or more ago and are returning to raise their children in India or to take care of family members still living here. "In the latter category, there are many people who are objectively looking to place themselves in India, where the next boom in technology is anticipated, similar to what people did in the '90s by going to the U.S.," Jayanthi said.

Ravish Sinha, a senior software engineer at Yahoo's Indian center, left India in 1999 and worked in the States, including a stint with Applied Materials Inc., before moving back home three years later. "The U.S. was going through a tough period, and I found India emerging as a land of better opportunities in terms of the quality of work done and career growth," Sinha said.

Sinha's colleague Arjun Bathija returned because he wanted to raise his son in India.

Shivananda Koteshwar worked for four years in the United States before returning two years ago to join Synopsys India as an engineering manager at its Bangalore center. He was looking for “opportunities in India to grow both personally and professionally, the chance to pursue my long-time interest to work closely with universities, but mostly the opportunity to work with Synopsys,” Koteshwar said. “I also thought I could have a better lifestyle and make a bigger difference working in India.”

That view would have seemed odd only a few years ago, when almost all software jobs in India involved programming and afforded scant opportunities for innovation. "Asia is a growing market force and is just starting to define new products," said Vijay Davar, a general manager at Texas Instruments (India) who worked overseas for 20 years, for such companies as Motorola and Bell Labs. "India is one of the leading contributors to this dynamic, and I would like to be one who is part of this."

Chinnu Senthil Kumar, a design manager at TI (India), worked in the States for 11 years, including a stint at Intel. Now back in Bangalore, he said he returned to India because he "wanted to be close to my family-a four-hour drive from Bangalore, as opposed to 40 hours of travel to see my folks earlier. The second reason is the availability of high-tech jobs in the areas of mixed-signal design," a relatively recent occurrence.

Giving back, fitting in

Engineers are also returning to give back to the country that educated them. "By bringing my experience and expertise to India, I will be able to pass on my knowledge to many other engineers. It is my way of paying back my motherland for providing such a wonderful engineering education at almost no cost," said Kumar of TI (India).

Even diet is an issue for some returning engineers. Many children in India are brought up under a caring but strict regimen that addresses diet and includes the pressures of education. The social structure in India is not often conducive to socializing with people from other cultural backgrounds.

"Food was a major issue of depression for me" in the United States, said Sampada Pachury, a senior design engineer at STMicroelectronics in India and a strict vegetarian, adding that he had found it hard to socialize with his U.S. colleagues. "I do not miss the U.S. at all," Pachury said.

Many companies are welcoming voluntary relocation of their engineers to their Indian facilities. While an Intel spokesman declined to comment, the word here is that the company is not only happy some engineers are relocating to India but is giving them incentives to do so. Given the growth planned for Intel's engineering center here, with staff numbers expected to triple from the current level of 1,000, the company has both a need for more experienced engineers here and a desire to limit the ill effects of the U.S. slump.

But returning Indian engineers do face one obstacle: U.S. export control laws restrict the know-how they can take with them to new jobs. While such "deemed export" rules have proved extremely difficult to enforce, the issue could come to the fore as additional U.S.-trained engineers return home.

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