If these multinational companies COULD have offshored their engineering, they would have done it long long ago. I remember back in the 90s that Ford’s Electronics Division tried to move some of its design activity to Chihuahua. They sent loads of equipment and people down there. It was such a disaster that they brought it all back in a couple of years.
There is a real cultural difference between people who grew up in the U.S. and those who grew up in other places. In most of those places, people are conditioned to do EXACTLY what they are told— to do things “right” regardless of what the right thing to do is. If the boss says to bolt a ground strap onto a lug nut, well that’s what they’re going to do. This is one of the big problems with Ford’s engineering today, and no amount of quality and problem solving classes will change that.
What IS going to happen is Ford is going to force out more and more of their native-born engineering staff and get crushed by their competition.
You often hear multinational companies moaning, “We can’t find Americans to do these jobs.” That’s not the full sentence in their heads. The full sentence is, “We can’t find Americans to do these jobs for what we want to pay them.”
Also, almost no job at Ford requires a PhD, few require a master’s degree, and even a bachelor’s degree is overkill. They use these educational requirements to eliminate domestic talent and domestic wages.
This was absolutely perfectly said, @tfo+1nic1HqI.