Proud Jewish mother walks on a street with two little children and meets her friend. “What beautiful babies you have!” exclaims the friend, “How old are they?” “The advocate is three, and the psychologist is only one year old” she responds.

This joke reflects the reality of mid-twentieth century, when every Jewish mother wanted her son to become either advocate or psychologist. However, the situation has dramatically changed since then.

Nowadays Israel is known in the world as the State of Hi-Tech. Hundreds of start-ups, branches of all major world-wide companies and a cash flow of billions of dollars have turned the Land of Promise into the Land of Fulfillment. And the Jewish mother, our faithful weather vane, felt the winds of change: in modern Israel almost every adolescent is advised by her to start his career in what she calls “the computers”.

But one should never forget, that the only constant thing in this world is the change itself, and so recent tendencies in Israeli Hi-Tech hint at the possibility that its paramount is behind us.
Thanks to the technological and industrial development of the past decade, the everyday work in Hi-Tech companies turns simpler and even routine from day to day, and as a result the growing competition from the side of developing (part of them fully-developed already) societies can not be neglected anymore.

Thus NDS, one of the biggest Hi-Tech companies in Jerusalem, providing solutions of digital paid TV to the millions of subscribers worldwide, already a year ago has moved part of its development departments to India. Engineers of Bangalore do the job faster, cheaper and better!

Ultraorthodox Jewish women are another social segment that starts to conquer the heights of Hi-Tech labour market in Israel. Having no formally recognised degree in computer sciences, they work from home (no office expenses for the employer!), offer their talents in exchange for the “dumping” salaries and in this manner decrease the average compensation for the Hi-Tech jobs in our Mediterranean Silicon Valley.

The last warning message came few weeks ago from Matrix – one of the largest outsourcing companies in Israel. They started to recruit talented young men from Palestinian Authority, that even after short professional course can be positioned in some company’s projects. For the under-minimal salary, of course.
If the tendency continues, Jewish mothers need to update their dreams once again.

On the picture: one of the Israeli Intel branches.