SAN JOSE — Outside the gray ranch house in a quiet and well-tended neighborhood, a ceramic frog guards a flower bed.
The house is pretty much the same as the others on Woodford Drive, except for the plastic sign on the wall that says "Easic Corp." Inside, in the dining room and family room, there's a daybed for the dog, brass plaques memorializing the chip-design firm's patents and five employees setting strategy, reviewing software and sending e-mail to programming colleagues in Romania.
It looks a lot like the future of Silicon Valley. Zvi Or-Bach, Easic's founder, president and chief executive, hired the Romanians for the same reason he keeps Easic's headquarters in his three-bedroom house, where a secondhand mobile home in the backyard accommodates overflow employees.
"Obviously, it saves money," said Ze'ev Wurman, vice president of software development, noting that the Romanians' salaries are one-tenth of programmers' wages in San Jose.
As Silicon Valley emerges from three years in the economic wilderness, it is taking on a new look. These days, many technology powerhouses no longer have thousands of locals employed to perform tasks ranging from designing software to cleaning the cafeteria.
The new Silicon Valley is a land of headquarters, a place where deals are made but not necessarily carried out.
The transformation echoes the evolution of Hollywood, which from its base in Southern California manages film shoots in Canada, animation in South Korea and special effects in New Zealand. In fact, the Silicon Valley tech sector is the latest addition to a long list: Generations ago, the textile industry sent factory and management jobs south from its New England base, for example, and later back-office jobs in financial services migrated from lower Manhattan to New Jersey.
With the shift, "the character of the valley is changing pretty dramatically," said AnnaLee Saxenian, dean of UC Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems.
Although some companies are doing things the old-fashioned way, an increasing number of jobs that once were the guts of valley life -- technical support, programming, even some computer system design -- are now handled in places as remote as Bombay, India, and Bucharest, Romania.
More than half the companies backed by top venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers have operations offshore, firm partner John Doerr said.
