Chinese Workers Abandon Silicon Valley for Riches Back Home
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
- China has great opportunities for riches
- Getting a US VISA is hard and painful when you come from a populous country like China or India
- My China-born colleagues seem to in general be more conservative, and Silicon Valley has become violently intolerant of anyone that holds an opinion different than the predominant view
Only the first reason is somewhat objective, while the two others cause stress in their daily life as their ability to provide can at any time be removed due to what is perceived as arbitrary reasons. Everything being equal, many of them have told me they would prefer the less crowded Silicon Valley.
Getting a green card is harder if you were born in China or India, not getting a visa, but once you've been on an H-1B for a sufficiently long period of time, you can only keep that status with a pending green card application. Switching employers at this stage is more difficult.
The DHS has said that they want to propose the end of the H-4 visa giving work authorization for spouses of H-1B holders.
What exactly does this mean? Are they evangelical baptists, libertarians, reactionaries, nationalist, homophobic, misogynist, racist, anti-atheist, pro family-values, pro corporation, skeptical of global warming, pro fossil fuel energy, war hawks, or something else altogether? It's really quite difficult to interpret your statement as anything meaningful without clarification, and there are ten thousand different ways to be "conservative".
And to be clear, "conservative" is anything but a dirty word or something I'm trying to critique here--just a context-sensitive one. It could be a pejorative or a value.
Otherwise it doesn't add much to the conversation--it is itself a reactionary statement.
Edit: I suppose my confusion is incorrect...?
It does in the US. Absolutely does.
The rise of "social justice" means that anyone who doesn't agree with those tactics is now conservative. I think you'll find many atheists in those ranks. In fact, their community was one of the first battle grounds in the current culture war.
The primary non-monetary reasons I hear for Chinese nationals to come to the US is for the air pollution and their children's schools. It's not like cost of housing is much lower in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, HK...
I have a friend who is dating a lot in NYC and he told me he notice most of his Chinese-American friends are liberal as in we fight for freedom of expression and social justice. Whereas the girls he met who are newly from China are conservative and support Trump because they are pro-business and more money-driven.
Based on his observation and my own experience I would agree. Most new Chinese visitors or immigrants don't value social rights and freedom of speech. And to be a bit critical, I feel they are so used to having the government or authority telling them what to do that they are comfortable with authoritarian rules and don't understand the importance of having independent thoughts and diversity.
In my opinion you can't value independent thoughts and diversity, without being inclusive of different opinions and setting the same standard of discourse regardless of which viewpoint you are furthering. Because if not who choose what the correct viewpoints are? And are you sure your viewpoints will always stay popular?
Although what we value is very different I am not so sure that we are all that different at this point from China, except for this being enforced by a state sanctioned monopoly on violence in China while its now too often mob-rule violence in the US that I am not confident would be upheld in the courts.
Fighting for what you perceive as justice in a democracy is rarely furthered well by authoritarian means, and should be done through the democratic process and you should respect that the state has a monopoly on violence. Freedom is a fragile thing, and democracy is not the default state of society.
They do, however, feel very disillusioned with a lot of the current progressive environment. It's less to do with not agreeing with those values, and more to do with disapproval with how we in the West express our dissatisfaction - we're quick to take to the streets, protest on social media, and believe anything our echo chambers tell us, hence where the Chinese insult "white left" comes from, referring to people who are overly emotional and sensitive about things.
China and Asia, in general, has a very conservative "keep it to yourself, fix it yourself" attitude when it comes to problems, which can be very toxic. But this current NA attitude of blaming others and expecting the world to change to accommodate you is incredibly frustrating to the coworkers I talked to, and with the current political environment magnifying this problem to incredible levels some of those same coworkers felt that if they didn't participate in these politics (gender, race, religion, etc) then it would reflect negatively on them, but their opinions differed enough (ie only 2 genders) that they would be crucified if they said anything. It wasn't surprising to hear from some of them that they considered going back to China sometimes.
I think the attitude is more 'don't stand out' and 'don't be different' attitude. 'keep to yourself' is a behavior resulted from this attitude.
Most native Chinese folks value group experience over individual experience.
Wonder if there is a nicer way to ask the person to clarify their point without listing all those things.
Or do you honestly think there is a large number Chinese evangelical baptists who come to SF and work in tech companies.
There is a quite sizable evangelical Chinese immigrant community in the Bay Area. Whether they work in tech, I don't know.
It's an interesting topic actually, (and off-topic here) how likely are immigrant communities to switch their traditional religious affiliation after moving to US. In know a Korean family who became Catholic, and often wonder if it is a common thing and if there are patterns.
For instance, I consider myself a technological conservative—I tend to not believe in the inherent good of technological investment. I would not describe myself as “a conservative”. It is a word generally only useful in a one dimensional context.
> What exactly does this mean? Are they evangelical baptists, libertarians, reactionaries, nationalist, homophobic, misogynist, racist, anti-atheist, pro family-values, pro corporation, skeptical of global warming, pro fossil fuel energy, war hawks, or something else altogether?
That's a long list.
baptist: no
libertarians: definitely no
reactionaries: depends on what you mean
nationalist: yes, beyond your wildest dreams... btw fuck Japan
homophobic: no, disapproval of homosexuality is likely, but not phobia
misogynist: rarely, but routinely sexist
racist: yes... especially vs Japanese
anti-atheist: of course not
pro family-values: absolutely
pro corporation: yes
skeptical of global warming: no
pro fossil fuel energy: not on the radar
war hawks: only if rightful and historical claims are not respected
something else altogether: many, many things
That's a snarky comment.
Obviously not everyone raised in a given country holds identical views, but there are real differences in cultures and beliefs between countries (especially those with centrally managed media).
It's a gentle reminder to all who read things like this that Chinese people are individuals too, and don't all subscribe to the same beliefs. The notion that the modern Chinese person is racist towards the Japanese is pretty laughable, for example.
> The notion that the modern Chinese person is racist towards the Japanese is pretty laughable, for example.
It's hard to see how anyone with any familiarity with China who does not themselves hate Japanese would laugh at this.
Not only is there widespread hatred of Japan (including Japanese people whose parents weren't even born during WWII), but it's fanned by the government[1]. Anti-Japanese specials run on TV during national week and over 200 anti-Japanese films are produced in China every year. In some cases anti-Japanese films are censored for being too moderate. A well known example is the 2000s war film, Devils at the Doorstep, which was nationally banned for including a scene where one Japanese soldier was friendly with Chinese villagers.
Despite your implication that modern China suffers less from this, surveys have shown that anti-Japanese sentiment in China is higher among the current generation than among the Chinese who lived through the war occupation. [2]
Personal anecdote is the weakest form of argument in this kind of debate, but I'll also add that while living on the mainland, I've personally received criticism simply for having befriended several Japanese students during my uni days.
1) https://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/giga/jcca/article/view/1...
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Japanese_sentiment_in_Chi...
I do not find it useful at all to try to list out the views that are not tolerated as there is no way that you can reduce a huge population groups opinions into neat categories, people can hold both conservative and liberal opinions as well as everything outside those at the same time, and I believe doing so would distract from the real conversation which is the intolerance.
There are also plenty of leaked examples of how people with other opinions are treated to even shock me that generally agree with the predominant view, and I encourage you to look it up and form your own opinion. I also think people like Tim Ferris and several in the YC leadership amongst others have made salient points on how Silicon Valley has become intolerant of anything but the predominant views, and how it is hurting our competitiveness.
Lots of bundling the "others" into one bin/box. If a liberal expresses opposition for DACA, then it is automatically assumed that they are a right leaning person, and several related policy attributes are attached to the person.
Often, simply being undecided and questioning a particular stance leads to the same effect.
I've seen it on HN: A general lack of tolerance for certain viewpoints, with perfectly valid questions resulting in accusations. Unfortunately, more often than I would like. Easy examples would be a lot of threads that involve Trump.
BTW, case in point is this other comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16127579
Just because the two are well correlated in the US does not make them the same, and if you come from abroad, you will find many things taken as a given in the US (like the conflation of conservatism with religion, or right leaning tendencies with conservatism) that will confuse you. I suspect their experience in SV has been that when they try to bring it up, they get labeled.
I'm guessing Europe has a lot of radically right wing folks who like their national health care just fine. Imagine they move to a very Republican part of the US, and ask "what's wrong with universal healthcare?" and then are labeled as being liberal. Now do that in reverse in SV.
If you've lived a lot in the rest of the world, you will probably easily find lots of examples where liberals are not acting according to their principles, and the same for conservatives. So when someone tries to be what they think is a "real" liberal (which may imply adopting stances that the "other" side is in favor of), then they'll feel unwelcome.
Some day I'll probably write a more thought-out piece on this. The above is just rambling.
I disagree; it's a word for people who disagree with an idea because it is different, often because it's an easy way to manipulate people or gain favor. One could call the Amish reactionary, but you'd be ignoring an entire philosophy, culture, and context.
i.e. they arguee that social justice become the new status quo holder and that become the new conservative point of view, which can't change for better or worse. the old conservatives want change for the worse. I personally think they have a point in this article (about preventing changes for better too) but the reasoning is dumb and falls in the same paradoxal fallacies as the ones they acuse the old-liberals-turned-conservatives.
Of course, I wasn't dismissing anyone! Read more carefully. And, they were kind enough to actually clarify, and I appreciated their comment.
Not every discussion about political words must be political itself.
Why is it sad? They get to go back home instead of on the other side of the planet from the place they grew up, and they don't have to give up nearly as much to do it.
Good for them.
> My China-born colleagues seem to in general be more conservative, and Silicon Valley has become violently intolerant of anyone that holds an opinion different than the predominant view
Had to get that "oppressed conservatives" narrative in.
I keep asking what views people are so intolerant of. Tend not to get real answers.
>I keep asking what views people are so intolerant of. Tend not to get real answers.
Because this is HN and people are less willing to let you derail the conversation with politics.
There are also plenty of leaked examples of how people with other opinions are treated to even shock me that generally agree with the predominant view, and I encourage you to look it up and form your own opinion.
> Why is it sad? They get to go back home instead of on the other side of the planet from the place they grew up, and they don't have to give up nearly as much to do it.
As an immigrant myself I can tell you that leaving my network and life here would come at a huge cost. There are benefits of cause, especially since my home country Norway has a much better social support system. In my opinion nobody should have to do this out of fear, and that I perceive fear to sometimes be a contributing reason is what I find sad. Including the fact that I loose great colleauges that I love working with.
The obvious answer is "I voted for trump". But then of course, why?
I am uncertain if you are seeking concrete examples from me because you do not believe there is an intolerance to opinions or if you want them to see if you agree with oppressing some specific views in a list. Considering your response I tend towards the latter interpretation. Again, I do not think it is possible to simplify the opinions of a large group of people into neat categories.
I'll give you some real answers. Note the are plenty of exceptions to what I'm about to say, but the views are very commonly held. Also note, in this post generally, and when I say 'Chinese' or 'Chinese community' I'm specifically referring to people who grew up in mainland China and moved to other countries as adults for study/work, not to children of people of Chinese descent who grew up in another country. Anyway, on to the issues:
1) Gay rights/issues - although not likely to be discriminatory to gays they know personally, being gay is generally viewed by the Chinese as a degenerate lifestyle choice and/or mental illness. Not to mention thinking that it spits on the graves of generations of their ancestors (because it has the high potential to end family lines). For a representative and recent (but non US) example, Australia recently held a referendum on whether to legalise gay marriage. The Chinese community was one of the strongest opposing voices to this. There is a common view that general acceptance of the gay community could teach/persuade their children to be gay, which is something none of them want. [0]
2) Trans rights/issues. Take the Chinese community's stance on gay rights/issues and multiply it by 10. That's how they feel on trans issues. Again with a recent Australian example, there is program called 'safe schools' that aims "to create an inclusive and safe environment for their school community, including for LGBTI students, families and teachers". The Chinese community is also vociferously opposed to this, believing (rightly or wrongly) that it is teaching their children to be gay/trans. [1]
3) Traditional gender roles. Chinese are very proud to announce that 'woman hold up half the sky' and that there is equally between men and women. It's a strongly held belief, because they compare things to how they were a hundred years ago when woman had bound feet, couldn't go to school, and weren't allowed outside without a male chaperone, and so yes things are definitely more equal now. Patriarchal Confucianism still has a strong influence on society however and women are generally still expected to do most of the cooking, cleaning and child-rearing in a household (unless the wife is from Shanghai, and then her husband is probably going to be doing all of it), and despite it being illegal for doctors to tell prospective parents the sex of their unborn child, there is still plenty of selective abortion that happens thanks to a cultural preference for males combined with an only recently loosened one child policy. [2]
That's three to start it off - I could go on, but this post is already getting long enough. In short, it's a fair assessment to say that the overseas Chinese community is generally socially conservative (I would also say they are generally fiscally conservative also).
0: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-16/chinese-community-expr...
1: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-23/safe-schools-mp-lodges...
2: http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2119281/...
Which is funny in the specific context of Chinese people, since you essentially have to get an internal visa to move to the city from the countryside, and it's difficult to get.
- The strong sense of rapid progress, culturally, technologically, socially, infrastructure-wise. Everything transforms every few years and there's still the sense that everyone's hard work goes towards making the pie bigger instead of fighting each other for pieces of the pie. In relative terms, there's more stagnation in the Silicon Valley. I don't know when's the last time there has been a brand new shiny mall built. POS are still routinely being plugged with a card so you revert to using a magnetic stripe. NIMBY movements are still trying to revert society to an agrarian state.
- The comfort feeling that your hard work translates to social approval and your personal wealth vs the feeling at least in the Silicon Valley that your hard work translates to your landlord's wealth and increased vilification of the tech working class.
I am tired of people claiming to fight for the poor and working class by fighting market rate housing and offices. Their position is objectively wrong and they are at this point inarguably causing damage to vast groups lives.
I'm curious (1) how much of these people's education or experience was subsidized by the American economy and (2) how common the same situation is in China (i.e. US expats training up in China and taking that expertise back to the US).
If (1) and (2) aren't aligned, it could be one of the factors contributing to the growing sense that we pour a bunch of money into higher-ed without seeing much return.
I don't mean this from a US nationalist or political perspective - I'm merely speculating on the economics. Are the incentives for coming to the country aligned for both the person and the country? Many companies will pay for employees to go to grad-school but demand repayment if the employee isn't still with the company N years later. Would such a system for college/work visas make any sense to help keep talent?
In grad school I knew of several Singaporeans who had their tuition here in the US convered by the govt with repayment in form of returning to a govt job, which in Singapore is a highly prestigious job.
Grads are a large portion of the Chinese that work in SV.
Many of the Chinese who come to the states and pay for their education out of pocket couldn’t get into a good school back home and are going back after their education finishes. The others are rich, here for the experience, and will still go basic home because of their family expectations and connections.
One of my biggest concerns with China - as a a European - is that Brussel allows Chinese companies to buy huge amounts of European IP(eg robots, automotives, AI) but the Chinese government, on the other hand, forbids (or makes it very difficult) that foreign companies buy Chinese IP. So its a one way road !
Luckily some government officials now realized that and are actively trying to combat Chinese acquisitions (eg German foreign minister), but its still a real danger. China essentially takes huge advantage of our openness and our liberal markets but does not return the favour...
There's usually a lot of horse-trading that goes on before the formal application to figure out what's kosher to buy, and what's not.
My friends went back to China because the US is incredibly unwelcoming to hard-working immigrants and provides no reliable path to citizenship or permanent residency besides fraudulent marriage. Why should intelligent hard working people put up with that? At a certain point dignity and a reliable future are more important than the chance at a higher salary. The more developed China becomes the less reason there is to put up with those hardships.
As China becomes more developed, presumably the draw of going to the US to study will diminish (probably rapidly). If the US can't attract and retain top-talent from other countries, the US will fail to reap the benefits of a global economy.
FWIW this is not my experience (GC holder, us educated, mixed south Asian origins). Not saying your friends are wrong, just saying it isn’t inherently unwelcoming, even these days.
Unless you have family sponsoring you or $500k or $1m to invest, then there is no reliable path to permanent residence/green card. You are at the mercy of an opaque organization that answers to no one and also at the mercy of having an employer willing to take you on and jump through many hoops.
I could go on at length at what is fucked up about the US, and I could go on at least as long about what’s great about it. Some things are better here, some are...pitiful. My wife never adjusted to the lower standard of living in the US (the 1% don’t live as well as the 50% in Europe for example) while I found it more than compensated by the work and other interesting things.
I say that as someone who lived in the Bay area for almost a year and loved it. I had a great job, generated tons of wealth, got full-time offers with generous signing bonuses that I would have accepted in a heartbeat if it was not for the fact that not having a degree makes it impossible for me to get a visa.
The process would be a lot better for me if the work visa were simply allocated to the top N people in a priority queue where the weight of each entry is the salary.
Zurich, Toronto, and Montreal are my top choices now.
What seems fair is to ban arbitrary "top-N" quotas. If you can get a job that pays you a living wage (such that you don't have to draw from subsidies), then you can stay without hassle. Tax forms generally give all the information needed to make this decision.
Current US admin seems to strongly prefer giving opportunities based on citizenship (which is arbitrary) rather than saying anybody who wants to work an economic-net-positive job can do so.
> whereas your alternative would just deprive upstanding americans from those jobs
My stance is to not treat 'american citizens' as being more (or less!) deserving of US jobs. Anybody who contributes to the economy in a positive way deserves the same opportunity.
This is a rather extreme stance since it would probably lead to wages going down short-term as there's more job-supply than job-demand. The "gamble" in this ideology is that since you're requiring everyone to be a net-positive to the economy, the economy will thus grow and there will be more jobs as a result.
Ok. I just know that this won't happen anytime soon. My top-N solution feels like something the current administration would not be too reluctant to implement. It also address the concern that foreign labor pressure downs salaries for US citizens.
It's hard not to overlook the fact that a lot of would be immigrants make no effort to assimilate and cluster themselves off from mainstream society; especially in a immigrant welcoming area like Silicon Valley. I bet if you were to go to China/India etc., no one's going to go out of their way to accept you.
(BTW, I'm an Indian citizen on H1B and I'm saying this, you can downvote my post but it doesn't change ground realities)
If you wish to become an American, I wish you all the best of luck (sorry for all the paperwork) and welcome you to our country with open arms.
I am not American, so correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the melting pot metaphor about taking people from different cultures and backgrounds and "melting" them together into one much more homogenous culture?
The American melting pot rejects plenty of aspects from other culture, and does more along the lines of "this is how we do things in USA, take it or leave it" rather than assimilation (at least from what I've observed in the recent decade). From elementary schools to the workplace environment, things have only been getting harder for immigrants, to the point where I'm not sure if USA can claim to be multicultural by strict terms.
By contrast, a mosaic setup like in Canada, where every cultural aspect brought into the country are welcomed and celebrated, is much more comforting to immigrants. Because multiculturalism is actually incorporated into the Canadian federal policy thanks to, surprise surprise, the previous Trudeau.
The point of moving to a country is to make a better life for yourself. We are not trying to comfort immigrants, we are trying to make countries stronger.
There are plenty of abhorrent views held by people out there in the world. What part of the mosaic should that be part of?
I do not disagree with general idea in your post - I would just change the first sentence to "The salad palette is what makes America strong."
This is problematic. If you're a hard-working taxpayer who doesn't receive subsidies or cause a net negative on the economy, why do I care if you "assimilate" to my culture? In fact I'd rather you keep your culture proud and strong since it will make you happier and more productive. You may even encourage your hard-working friends to join you and make the economy even better.
("you" and "me" above are just rhetorical here...)
Instead of "assimilate", you can reframe your thinking to "be overall positive to the economy." I think that's what you intend but I could be wrong.
One of the most obvious things I saw different about Americans is their sense of individuality; you'd see a super conservative person living next to a hippie in peaceful co-existence (although these days the media would make you think otherwise).
As an example, I'm mostly vegetarian (for staying healthy, I'm atheist) but I do like the occasional steak. If I say to a fellow Indian (or naturalized Indian American) that I eat beef, I will be mostly ostracized (I'm assuming that this person is Hindu, which may not be the case). I personally don't care what anyone thinks about my personal choices, but this is an example of people not assimilating and accepting what is generally accepted American trait of "individuality".
That's a weird qualification to me, as if most other vegetarians do it because of their religion. I don't have any data/stats, but environmental destruction based on our farming practices, and cruelty to animals, both factor a lot higher than religion (has been my experience anyway, but it might be an interesting difference in the US given the deeply entrenched state of religion there).
If you look up the original Hindu texts, it specifically says you should not eat meat, respect nature and animals; which means you should NOT eat any kind of meat.
Most vegetarians on the Indian subcontinent/Asia in general do not eat meat for religious/cultural reasons. Growing up in a Hindu/Buddhist-adjacent culture is often enough to cause someone to avoid red meat.
I am not US American, but to me this description rather sounds like that you don't accept his individuality, too.
The example I used for myself is the typical group/herd mentality that people have (unlike individuality). The assumption is I'm a Hindu Indian, hence by definition I should not eat beef. And if I do I'm a "bad" person/outcast, rather than someone who is different from you despite sharing a similar background.
In the sense that you are cautious to accept that the other side is rather serious about religion and vegetarism.
What anyone eats is their own business, me or anyone should not judge. My point was there is a slanderous judgement on one's character based on personal diet choices which is ridiculous.
Let me give you an example; in Texas I once had colleague who was extremely conservative and has a tremendous amount of Southern pride (he has a confederate flag on his Jeep). Professionally speaking, I never had any issues with him whatsoever. I can't say the same about a fellow Indian who despises me (personally and professionally) just because I have a personal choice of eating beef. This is the a subset of American "individuality" I'm talking about; that despite the differences they are willing to work together. In India (and Asian countries, or so I've heard) people conflate personal and professional lives, which IMO is backward and stupid.
Therefore if you choose to be American or live in America, you need to accept that people are different and learn to accept as they are. Just because someone is different from you doesn't make you superior or inferior. Now, I know you can give me examples of tensions between race relations in the US (which I agree totally exists), but people try not to mix professional vs personal lives as much in the US as elsewhere in the world.
There is some compassion for Grandma, but other cultures are seen as "backwards" as not being "developed" enough.
Also, what does assimilate mean in an American context? It’s not like America really has a strong well defined culture in the first place, it’s been like ever since the country was founded.
Please be careful about making generalizations based on race - they're generally incorrect/unprovable and rarely provide any value to a conversation. You can rephrase this to be "I've seen more Indians do better..."
Doesn't explain the "why" though.
I do have some ideas about why, but it requires going into some sociological analysis. (note: I'm a minority so I speak from that experience).
What exactly is the connection you are implying between the two?
Why?
> if people decide to stay in the US they should try to assimilate
oh I see.
Apparently hte people who come to the US for school and try to live and work here right alongside you and me (white guy) aren't trying hard enough to assimilate.
> BTW, I'm an Indian citizen on H1B and I'm saying this
So? You're criticizing chinese people pretty explicitly. Don't try to hide behind your race.
No it's true for Indians too. I said "It's hard not to overlook the fact that a lot of would be immigrants make no effort to assimilate" which includes Indians too.
Are you suggesting that the Irish and Italians brushed up their communication skills in order to succeed? The Irish and Italian immigrants weren't considered white initially - I can't say if there is a causal relationship between their success and this perception changing.
China is far more unwelcoming to hard-working immigrants and provides no reliable path to citizenship or permanent residency even if one is willing to marry for it. Unless you're very wealthy or famous, it just doesn't happen.
It's not easy to be an immigrant just about anywhere, but as closed as the US may seem, it's not even in the same league. The US grants more people green cards and citizenship each month than China has ever.
The end goal of any country is to become more powerful. Who cares about fairness and compassion when other countries let people move to you and they don't let you move to their country?
Reciprocity agreements would be find. Just because your country is not pleasant to live in doesn't mean you should live in ours.
(Potential) immigrants care. Attracting skilled immigrants is not just US vs. China (which doesn't really play the game); it's US vs. China vs. Canada vs. Germany vs. ...
I'm sorry, I thought we based policy on what we thought was right and not what totalitarian regimes in other countries do.
Maybe try comparing to Canada or other comparable democracies instead.
It's about abandoning SV for China.
Or to be more precise, Chinese émigrés abandoning SV for China. You'll find that China is very welcoming to this population.
This comment from nopinsight goes through the scores:
Key competitive advantages of China are their strength in quantitative skills as well as huge population and the hard working and competitive culture of its populace. An objective measure is PISA results [1]. When comparing with even the best performing US state, Massachusetts, China has many more top performers in Math, as a proportion of population [2].
(In 2015 only four provinces of China participated, but their combined population was 230 million vs Massachusetts's 6.8 million. The math result of Shanghai (24 million pop.) alone would show an even larger gap.)
Since PISA results are scaled such that OECD country's mean is 500 and standard deviation is 100. China's 531 math score implies country mean at 0.3 SD above PISA mean, and US' math score at 470 implies 0.3 SD below mean. If people capable of doing AI research or proper AI implementation need to have math skills at, say, 2 SD above PISA mean, then there will be a tremendous difference in proportion between two populations with 0.6 SD difference. My back-of-the-envelope calculation, assuming above figures, is the difference in proportion will be about five times. But China has more than 4 times the population of the US, so the difference in potential numbers of AI-capable natives could be over 20 times. (Since other provinces may drag down China's mean, it could be a bit less. We'll see soon since China as a whole will participate in 2018.)
Agreed. There's a huge gulf between the coast and the inner provinces, but China has tremendous human capital and that is why I'm bullish in the long term, despite the current crises and issues with its neighbors.
per year. There are many many more than that on H-1B. Plus you have OPT and L1.
The bigger issue is being on an H-1B kind of sucks. If you get fired you're screwed. It's hard to maximize value because switching employers is a pain. You have people who accuse you constantly of being a low paid scrub stealing american jobs. You have the risk that the US government might pull the rug out from under you somehow.
Chinese and Indian people have to put up with this for years. Decades in the case of Indians.
> US is incredibly unwelcoming to hard-working immigrants and provides no reliable path to citizenship or permanent residency besides fraudulent marriage.
From India and China (and a couple other places, to a lesser degree). If you were born in another country and get an H-1B (which is a pretty terrible system) you can get a green card in a couple years.
Like, even if a daycare worker finds it easier to get a job with a college degree, are we better off as a society if more daycare workers have college degrees? I think not.
I'd bet having a college degree is much more than a tie-breaker in most cases - it shows a level of work, discipline, and probable intelligence that is genuinely an advantage for most jobs.
(This is problematic because it also shows a huge set of advantages that the degree-holder has had. If somebody has enough advantages to have a degree and is applying for a daycare position, it might mean something is very wrong for this person and maybe it should tip the tie-breaker situation the other way!)
Having a degree is a good indicator that you'll work hard and be disciplined. If I have to break a tie between two candidates, things that show levels of work/discipline/* will help me break the tie.
Example: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/us/international-enrollme...
(It could be it was a subsidy-exchange between the university and a chinese institution but I didn't get that impression. It could have been a private party as well. In any case it was definitely a scholarship by a US institution - not sure if public or private.)
These friends were brilliant and couldn't have afforded to attend without it. However: last I heard, they have all since moved back to China and are doing quite well for themselves.
This is objectively good news for these people, but that scholarship money was effectively just given to China. There are ripple benefits that aren't so tangible (added diversity, the chance that they could have stayed, the impact they had while here, etc).
Overall it seems "fair" that scholarship money should be converted to a loan if the education isn't used long-term in the same economy as the scholarship.
These scholarships were almost certainly awarded by the institution, not the federal government.
I don't care about where waiver "should" be used as this is subjective, I'm merely talking about what's "fair" economically which is theoretically objective. If the US hands out "good job" money in the form of net-economy-negative subsidies, then it explains a lot of what's going on in higher education.
I wouldn't limit this to just internationals as well. If you get a huge subsidy to go to a US school and then leave the country it's the same situation even if you're a US citizen.
>> If you get a huge subsidy to go to a US school
The "US?" The school is the US? In the vast majority of cases, the institution hands out the waiver, not the government. Furthermore, international students are regularly charged a premium to attend.
If Microsoft pays me a huge salary, I learn a ton before contributing significantly back to private software industry, then quit and move to Canada, do I owe... taxpayers... Microsoft?... remuneration?
This is still (probably) a draw from the US economy on net. Unless the institution is offsetting it somehow or is somehow not a part of the US economy.
> do I owe... taxpayers... Microsoft?... remuneration?
If Microsoft paid a lot to train you up and you leave before they get that value back, then they may want you to repay them.
That's generally not how things are done, but if the learn-and-run thing that this article talks about were to spread more into private industries, I can imagine private companies either paying less during the first N months or having minimum-term work-contracts with early-termination fees.
Who's going to pay back societies that send off educated, healthy young adults to the US economy? The value invested in individuals does not accrue all at once while they are at university.
It makes zero sense to try and balance the value at level of individuals. It is better to look at it at a larger scale (tens of thousands to millions) and approximate the value of what's coming in and leaving. There is a lot of guess-work involved, especially around future-value. There are no precise control-knobs to get the exact number and caliber of people you want; the best countries can do is set policies and hope for the best, without accounting for second and third order effects.
I suspect that US actually profits off of foreign students, atleast thats what I've heard informally (since we have to pay much higher fees than natives), but I've never checked the fees to be honest.
In a profitable system, its a fair assumption that those who pay the most make atleast some contribution to profits right?
"I'm just asking questions"
"he country as a whole does not experience large-scale human capital flight as compared with other countries, with an emigration rate of only 0.7 per 1,000 educated people,[199] but it is often the destination of skilled workers migrating from elsewhere in the world.[200]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight#United_St...
My guess is they'll run into similar (or worse) issues with their own SV.
I don't think that means any of what SV is doing is okay, just interesting that other nationalities there will face the exact same issues that they faced here.
When the whole fuzz about gender discrimination started, Microsoft and Google published numbers, claiming women got the same pay at the same positions as men. Knowing there's discrimination from personal experience/feeling, I theorized, that women are discriminated in a different way: they don't receive promotions.
Under otherwise similar circumstances having children does not feel to be enough to explain why of 100 women hired in tech on professional roles less are promoted to higher positions, than of 100 men. That trend is (at least anecdotally for me) observable even before people become parents.
This "Bamboo Ceiling" shows the same effect for another potentially discriminated group of people.
Stop rocking the boat, thank you!
It’s amusing to see these comments fluctuate wrt karma so quickly for the simple thesis that women might have traits that allow them to be better managers. I even come with study citations!
My condolences to those of you who might work somewhere where your livelihood is threatened for freedom of thought. The job market is great right now FYI.
Actually PG said the opposite. I used to have the comment saved, but lost it in a format.
Anyway, people also downvote because they are sick of talking about this.
Also, if one's sick of discussing a topic, s/he can simply don't read about or discuss it. Why prevent others from discussing it?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691
It's how HN has always worked, and in my opinion needs to. A site that cares about discussion quality needs those white blood cells.
Differences should never lead to inequality - women are better at some things, conversely so are men, but you need to treat (and pay) people equally - and this next part is the most important part - you also need to ensure that you have positions for all kinds of people in your organization - and that culturally, you allow for diversity, and have an organization that allows people from diverse backgrounds an experiences thrive.
The latter part is a key flaw of geek culture (most often seen in engineering organizations) - we often fail at inclusivity, because we've spent our whole lives being left on the outside, so we develop a fundamental distrust of people unlike us (look at the interplay between sales and engineering in most old line companies), and have not learned the skills to create an inclusive environment.
Because of this we tend to create 'old boys clubs' that are full of people who are remarkably like us.
But, we can do better, and should - however shutting down the discussion is not how you solve these problems, it just makes them worse in the long term by creating a new culture even more intolerant of dissent.
Oh but citations. Good for you, that's a good bit of research. Sure the facts seem cherry picked and don't necessarily support your conclusions. You also presented them in an entirely tone deaf manner, you seem to imply a number of negative things, you perpetuated stereotypes, and you didn't explore any possible alternative explanations, but you definitely cited some research papers. B+ for effort, F for execution.
F as in fired with cause.
More like go directly to S as in seven figure settlement package.
EDIT: Direct reference to Google's incident.
The neat thing about this form of discrimination is that you can claim to be fixing "the pipeline" all you want and you can still maintain the discrimination, because the leak is after the pipeline. The dominant group isn't threatened by competition if they fund efforts to increase the number of underrepresented groups in grade school or college STEM education, as long as those college graduates aren't later competing for senior jobs on a level playing field.
But what is their incentive to "maintain" discrimination. Even under a charitable interpretation, it seems to imply there is a group at the top which actively hates women and wants to suppress their influence? Maybe there is, Google is pretty scary and is in bed with the government https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00006782..., but I think it would be good to dissect that statement to see what it points to.
Check out the literature on "implicit bias". While there are problems in some social sciences, this particular research area has a lot of high-quality reproduced studies. Of course, it is only the start of the conversation and there are many caveats, but I believe it will address your comment.
This strikes me as kind of like saying that evolution is pseudoscience because 95% of professors in the field are not evangelical Christians, or something.
There may be other reasons to believe that implicit bias is pseudoscience, but "People who believe certain things about it tend to end up with personal worldviews that are consistent with their research" doesn't seem like one.
> As an aside I feel much less comfortable arguing this point after checking out your personal site and seeing that you write Debian packages. I really enjoy Debian, especially the reproducible builds work that's going on over there. I respect your opinions on this matter.
Are you trying to mkae some sort of point?
By applying empiricism.
The fact that the political right is ideologicslly opposed to doing that in social science fields rather than accepting dogma (an attitude which also applies to an increasing number of areas of the physical sciences) is problematic, to be sure.
I'm not making a claim about what the political right is opposed to.
But they do research that should be repeatable and thus it doesn't matter.
Unless you think they have implicit bias.
I am aware of that, good to point out though. However I was wondering because the wording "you can still maintain the discrimination" implies awareness and perhaps conspiracy. For example if I was talking about "implicit bias" I might have said something like - "it doesn't modify existing implicit biases and institutional constraints, which have been responsible for ...". But even then it would be good to see what exactly those biases and constraints are at Google.
On the topic of "implicit bias", it's also useful to add that it doesn't have to be just a personal "implicit" bias, it could institutional as well, incentives and rules that combine to exclude certain groups more than others, in this case women. Though then it's not clear how they would fix it, given that it's implicit. Maybe hire an outside consultancy which will be able to identify it better (since they are not part of the culture and not affected by same incentives)...
Just because brogrammers want to promote other brogrammers does not make them whatever-ist. Claiming that implicit bias is a type of whatever-ism is just BS doublespeak like "if you're not the solution you're the problem".
There is valid concern on how predictive the implicit bias test is in non-test conditions. But "implicit bias" is only the start of the conversation - it is one easy thing to measure in a sea of difficult to measure issues. If you want to jump into this rabbit hole, I have found the researches that work in this field to be eager to describe their more up-to-date work on addressing them (I do try to play a devil's advocate in such conversations and have gained much respect for their rigor). Regrettably, as usual in academia, the easies way to be exposed to those conversations is not that easy: going to talks given by those researchers.
Going back to the subject of this article, we generally find it morally permissible for a country to have employment / visa policies that strongly incentivize companies to find qualified but mediocre employees from the same country instead of hiring exceptional workers from other countries, even if the foreign workers would be better for profit / GDP / economic growth. (That is, the country might decide to have more or fewer visas based on whatever policies it wants to implement, but we don't think that the zero-visas option is immoral.) And the overt and stated intention is to protect the employment opportunities of the countries' own citizens.
This doesn't seem fundamentally different, to me, from discrimination on sex / race / whatever to protect the employment opportunities of members of the more politically powerful sex / race / etc. - it's just that we tend to find it morally impermissible to discriminate between a countries' own citizens on those categories if we believe that membership in those categories is irrelevant to aptitude, but we find it perfectly permissible to discriminate between one countries' citizens on another despite knowing full well that citizenship is pretty irrelevant to aptitude. (I am personally leaning towards the viewpoint that actually both are morally impermissible, and protectionism in visas is justifiable only as the lesser of two evils as long as it's necessary for a country's economic stability, and no longer.)
I was mostly referring the point about women. The slots in the management hierarchy will get filled anyway, and I can see how people can have implicit biases, but it seemed the comment was more about an active and explicit suppression.
Based on what I've heard about Google, and I have been critical of it before, it still just doesn't seem like a company with a pervasive active sexism with managers suppressing women because they need to empower their own gender (male) group.
> (I am personally leaning towards the viewpoint that actually both are morally impermissible, and protectionism in visas is justifiable only as the lesser of two evils as long as it's necessary for a country's economic stability, and no longer.)
Agreed there, especially on gender, race, sexual orientation. But not sure completely on nationality. Ideally citizenship would be just a passport and a label and people with matching abilities and skills could freely move and find better lives elsewhere. I think that is the idealized version the term "globalization". However it eventually ended up meaning that only multinational companies and wealthy people get to travel and take advantage of regulatory and labor cost arbitrage.
As long as countries exist, I don't see each country trying to protect its own citizens first as a terribly bad thing. In particular in this case, the people seem to get great offers at home in China. I kind of like seeing China do well and being able to offer such opportunities. Perhaps at some point US will find itself falling behind and will have to work harder to compete, and that's not a terribly bad thing either.
Are these correlated? My impression is that high-paying jobs tend to be low-physical-injury....
(Also, there are no shortage of barriers against women participating in high-mortality jobs - take the rules against women in combat for a particularly obvious example.)
Just intuitively, longer working hours (which may correlate with higher pay) and later average retirement age (which may correlate with higher paid jobs, especially with less physical demands), may contribute to greater probability of death from non-work causes, including age-related causes, happening while at work.
Yeah. For one small-scale example, the pay differential between the pizza delivery drivers and the in-store workers who make the pizzas. Roughly equivalent difficulty, drivers make $10-$15 an hour more due to tips and the risk of getting involved in a car accident or robbery. IIRC the gender ratio is more skewed towards men for delivery drivers than for in-store food service workers.
I suspect that white-collar senior management jobs contribute a lot more than pizza delivery jobs to the fact that men make more money than women in total. (But probably this is also true for median or first-decile wage?)
Women want children earlier (because menopause) and are more affected by them (because giving birth) than equally family-minded men. As a result, women are more motivated to prioritise having children/family.
In addition, men derive more advantage from more money/power than women, so they're more motivated to climb the corporate ladder (or take risks and fund companies) than women.
I'm generalising, obviously, so "on average" everywhere.
women need to have children earlier.
I don't see 70 year old men eagerly having kids all that often. Most people want to live to see their grandchildren.
> I'm generalising, obviously, so "on average" everywhere.
"I have black friends"
You can try strawman arguments like "they are not equally qualified" or "reverse sexism" or "they are doing it to themselves by not negotiating", but a cursory look at any reproducible social sciences review disproves those (laziness to not use google or google scholar is a tiresome excuse).
"equally qualified" is not an objective, measurable quantity, which is the whole cause of the issue... If dev productivity could be unambiguously measured and ranked, the issue of late promotions,etc would never have been raised.
These are fuzzy metrics, and what you consider poor\unfiar treatment, I may consider fair (and vice versa)..
The parent comment to yours was poorly worded and snarky, so you have a right to be upset. But still, I think your reasoning is flawed. People are generally promoted by their competence and their negotiating/office politics skills, and you can't claim that those are the same across all genders. Why would women, who are fundamentally different than men, have the exact same competence and negotiating abilities as men? There's no reason the two genders should be equal.
If you really have two equally skilled engineers, one male, one female, and only the male is promoted, that's sexism. But two engineers are never the same, so you can't make that argument.
But say I'm doing a project in Java and they are about equal, I keep giving Al the meaty work then use it justify a promotion, which I can't justify for Marcy. It's not that she's that much worse, I just never gave her the chance to prove it (blah blah peter principle, perform at next level, etc...). That just might be a bit sexist.
Have you really never worked on a project where the golden boy was the face of everything and everyone else was ignored?
You aren't allowed to reference social science studies because their aren't enough conservatives to make those fields "fair".
But "reality" does not seem to be sexist, rather our biases and tribalism is sexist (and racist and plenty of other -ist). When high-quality reproducible research has observed phenomena like "stereotype threat" and "implicit bias" it is worthwhile to spend some of our idle time on thinking how to address this unfairness. Even if we do it simply so that we have a wider applicant pool from which to pick high-quality employees.
For more digestible information look around their website.
I guess it is my turn: What debunking are you talking about besides the more extremist men's rights advocates (which are different from the moderates that have very valid concerns)? "Implicit bias" is indeed only the start of a discussion, as one needs to consider its predictive value in non-test conditions, but if you are sincerely interested in pursuing this conversation, the website above is a good starting point.
This was a discussion a month ago. I'm mostly basing my opinion on it.
- the John/Jennifer study http://www.yalescientific.org/2013/02/john-vs-jennifer-a-bat...
- the chairs study http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.465...
- the police shooting armed people in VR study http://www.washington.edu/news/2003/07/08/blacks-more-likely...
- the general idea of "stereotype threat" (which becomes unrelated, not as much of an offshoot)
I am not expecting you to spend the time to vet every single of those links (and admittedly I used google, so some of the links might be overly editorialized), however I do believe these are good resources to consider for inclusion in your intellectual toolkit when you have the time.
If you do find a scientific reason to reject the null hypothesis, hopefully such an analysis will come with some specific number other than 50/50 - and we can see if Google's processes match those numbers.
Yup, sounds completely reasonable.
Hey, how come so many more women become doctors now? High stress job, takes a long time, I don't think it's any more "attractive" then being a nurse.
I'm gonna go ahead and say that this line of thinking is sexist. I'm not trying to attack you I just think it needs to be said because I think it's actively harmful. It ignores any other reasons behind the gap, and it's a terrible line of thinking for anyone who manages women. "I don't know if I should give her this role, women aren't really suited for leadership".
https://youtu.be/eieVE-xFXuo?t=2m50s
He also makes the argument that the issue isn't why there aren't more women in these jobs, but why are there so many men insane enough to spend 80 hrs a week doing them? Money != Happiness.
Affirmative action often involves discussion on reducing quality or creating self-fulfilling prophecies by have no role models at the top.
I think a deeper issue is that leadership as an idea is still "masculine" in nature, reflecting a heroes journey to conquer something in the wild and bring it home. Heroines are just females still going out on a hunt. Instead there is much and underappreciated value in the maintenance of hearth and home. In learning how to live and creating wealth and complexity out of relationships between objects and people rather than extracting some sort of value from the environment.
It's just that such types of created wealth don't have the exponential explosion of conquered wealth.
For myself, I'd like to stay here even I came from a big city like shanghai as I enjoy the freedom in US and agree with american values.
Besides, china is getting worse in every aspect I care about such as speech freedom, news freedom, human rights, food and air safety, etc, under Xi's administration.
Unfortunately the waiting time for a green card is too long, I don't want to sacrifice some of the most valuable years in my life just waiting here while I can achieve more if I'm able to work on my own project.
So I am moving back as well in the near future and hope someday I can make an achievement and get back to US.
More interesting than prospects for some may be the sheer volume of intimate data available and leeway to experiment in China. Tencent’s now-ubiquitous WeChat, built by a small team in months, has become a poster-child for in-house creative license. Modern computing is driven by crunching enormous amounts of data, and generations of state surveillance has conditioned the public to be less concerned about sharing information than Westerners. Local startup SenseTime for instance has teamed with dozens of police departments to track everything from visages to races, helping the country develop one of the world’s most sophisticated and extensive surveillance machines.
> generations of state surveillance has conditioned the public to be less concerned about sharing information than Westerners
They are already so used to being watched that they don't find it odd to be watched.
1) People aren't raised with a mind to combat discrimination. Despite recognizing and celebrate some 50+ ethnic groups, the majority of Chinese are Han and look like each other. There are some laws in place to protect against discrimination against certain classes (e.g. Gender/Ethnicity) but they're not strongly enforced. The legal system simply isn't there for individual plaintiffs to succeed against corporations or government.
2) Chinese have culturally accepted authoritarian rulers as "heaven's mandate". As long as people can be fed, clothed, have a roof over their heads and even prosper, then the ruler continues to carry "heaven's mandate", regardless of what Machiavellian means by which the ruler achieves prosperity for the majority. If the government has to read my letters in order to find evil schemers to keep me safe then so be it. But if the government did all these things and the safety/prosperity of significant communities are still constantly at risk, then the ruler has lost the heaven's mandate, and it's time for a revolution to install a new ruler.
3) Chinese people are raised on family, piety, and harmony, not individualism. Many place a sense of family/community acceptance above individual will. I think most are protective of the very private -- maybe on the class of secrets -- what I say to my friends or my own journals as private, but there are very few that even think that the metadata about how they carry out their lives should be considered private. Ultimately I think most people's mindset is that if I went to a restaurant and ordered food and they kept a record that I went there and ordered XYZ off the menu then it's no longer a secret. People haven't really come around to the power of what can be done when enough information has been gathered by simply going about your everyday business.
Just because we're American and we sort of have that here? No privacy allows for greater systems efficiency and easier time in law enforcement investigations.
Doesn't make it right either; I'm a US citizen after all and abhor state-based intrusions of privacy more than even the average HN reader, but projection of societal norms is kinda silly.
Especially int he context of talking to someone who lives with tyranny and doesn't really care.
> but projection of societal norms is kinda silly.
It's not when you are talking about basic human rights. China is wrong about this.
I still attribute the success of Tencent and Alibaba significantly to both the public perception of privacy as well as what I expect to be a tacit compliance with the government on making available the data that they gather.
The Chinese government can find ways to shut down any company pretty much at will. I can't imagine Tencent or Alibaba or Baidu got to where they are today without playing ball with the government.
It's really confounding to me that the younger generations seems to have such a hard time with this.
Do they not teach comparative history in schools anymore?
While its certainly at least authoritarian and perhaps an actual dictatorship, and I recognize that the ruling party still calls itself “the Communist Party of China”, still we wouldn't be talking about Tencent if it actually was a Communist (defined, most centrally, by the prohibition in private ownership of the means of production) dictatorship.
The difference aren't that great. The most heavily surveiled society on earth is britain.
> It's really confounding to me that the younger generations seems to have such a hard time with this.
And it's confounding how the older generation thinks the west is any better.
> Do they not teach comparative history in schools anymore?
They do but just a lot better than they did in the past.
Maybe they understand the differences between a representative democracy and an authoritarian regime in theory but believe there's no real difference in practice. It's a deeply unfortunate type of cynicism.
It used to be every generation of Americans had its subset of youth who become infatuated with Communism, for example. They generally grow out of it and come to appreciate their global standing once they graduate college and accumulate some wealth.
Europeans are accustomed to being more mobile and studying abroad seems to be almost expected. America is a very insular culture by comparison; depending on academic program a lot of schools don't have meaningful study abroad programs ("let's go spend a week attending some lectures in London then go home") and support for things like working holiday visas is pathetic. We don't have anything like Erasmus. The only people I ever seem to meet who have traveled more than a few hundred miles from home have only done so on deployment with the military.
In aggregate we know virtually nothing about the rest of the world, so it's easy for disillusioned kids to be convinced that their minor dissatisfactions are on the level of human rights violations and that North Korea or ISIS-held Syria are favorable by comparison.
Note that there are bad people and bad emperors and everything in between, having vastly different abilities to affect people. They are hardly equivalent, though bad they all are.
Or they have adopted a realistic view of history. The US has done loads of shitty things.
They have never had stalin like purges or a hitler like dictator.
An educated person, old or young, might look at Iran and be less likely to think "horrible regime hell bent on the destruction of Israel and the west" and more likely to think "huh, we probably shouldn't have fucked with their government decades ago".
Also that whole thing about voting being worth less for huge chunks of the country. Oh, and getting constantly screwed over by previous generations.
Being cynical doesn't make you naive.
Every generation everywhere feels they've been "screwed over" by their parents, or their parents' parents. You lack perspective.
Oh look, more ageism on hacker news.
Many of my European colleagues have expressed a desire to move back to Europe soon (<3 years, much less for many of them). It's a mix of a number of things (for many, family is a big component), but really the biggest one is that they don't feel that the opportunities the US offers are worth the sacrifices they have to make anymore. A particular sacrifice that comes to mind is their spouse being able to work - the Green Card process has been a shit show lately.
In fact, many of them are realizing that the "American Tech Dream" that was sold to them did not live up to expectations - particularly when it comes to things like being able to afford a house, education for children, healthcare, etc. in the Bay Area.
I've been in tech, in Silicon Valley, for 8 years, and this feels like it's really influenced by the Trump presidency (the moment Trump got elected, I have a few friends who left the US). But it's probably been brewing for longer than that, and I was just paying less attention to it at the beginning of my career.
FWIW I'm European and intend on leaving the US in <2 years for similar reasons (namely, that I can have a much better standard of life in Europe, be closer to my family, and do work that is as meaningful).
As another European immigrant, I can give you my perspective. Initially I was apprehensive about my wife not being able to work.
In practice, it was less than a year from the moment she arrived until she got an EAD card (work authorization after reaching a certain stage in the green card application). Certainly a sacrifice, but looking back it was worth it.
The green card process took ~1.5 years in total (received it early 2017), which pales in comparison to what people from China and (especially) India have to go through. Did it become much worse in the last year?
Used to be a pretty diverse mix across Asian and Eastern European candidates, with a rare white US person mixed in.
Now it is pre-dominantly Indian.
Really don't like single-ethnic teams, so hiring is getting even more challenging in the Bay Area. We've also opened dev centers in the US mid-west and Canada to help with this.
And I am being downvoted...because ?
just a guess.
Also, I believe First Nations tends to be the preferred term over indigenous, aboriginal, or native american.
I will use my "Indian privilege" to try to guess the answer to your question. As an ethnic group with more recent immigration, unless the job requires federal security clearance, most of the Indians are likely to be Immigrants, with Citizens in there (most likely in a bit senior positions).
Edit: Im not going to share personal stories, I dont want my relatives there to suffer for anything that gets reported back.
Unless you are a 6 foot plus black guy with a wicked three point shot... do not go to China to make your fortune if you are not Chinese. Go to China to ASSIST someone ELSE in making a fortune instead. You'll be a good deal more successful.
Edit: I guess I should say "attitudes/expectations/behaviors change, for the better or worse"
The problem is we are too damn stupid to realize that we cant allow chinese protectionism anymore
It's not at all. We can still criticize the US government for their actions.
You actually couldn't do that in China.
Is it:
a) someone with an undergraduate/graduate/doctorate degree in CS with specialization in AI/ML?
b) someone with a non-CS degree (Math/EE/CE/Other) who specialized in AI/ML?
c) someone who attended an AI/ML course on Coursera?
d) other?
If they previously integrated Nuance's speech recognition into a product, they were just an engineer, now they are an AI engineer. Worked on mapping product which does routing before? Well route searching is an "AI" kind of problem so they are an "AI engineer" too, and so on.
AI/ML is the new "big data" basically. As soon as "big data" appeared, nobody was doing just "data", they were all of the sudden doing "big data".
But hey, why would you ever need more than 640KB memory?
This is an admirable thing. But as China develops and grows - conditions becoming more equal between the US and China - it's only natural that Chinese expats will find that they can seek "riches" in what they feel is their homeland.
There's nothing wrong with this, and in fact will be good for people of all nationalities as competition increases for talent.
I can see your argument about returning to an "original homeland" (i.e. for reasons of cultural or social affinity), but "natural homeland"? There's nothing about the nature (air, land, climate, flora, fauna, etc) of China that is uniquely suited to a Chinese person any more than anyone else.
In that case, the correct term is "cultural homeland", not "natural homeland".
People who move from California to Seattle complain constantly about how horrible the weather is, for example.
850,000 sounds way way too high.
> While Chinese engineers are well represented in the Valley, the perception is that comparatively fewer advance to the top rungs, a phenomenon labeled the “Bamboo Ceiling.”
American culture does reward asshole-behaviour a lot more than one can tolerate sometimes. It's definitely not just a conservative problem, so don't go blaming it on Trump.
Sociapaths can be charming as means to their ends.
Whereas sociopathy is a learned willingness to completely subvert empathy to serve personal goals. They do have brain wiring for empathy, which is what makes them effective at subverting it.
High-functioning psychopaths generally have to create a 'mask' in order to pass for normal. The mask is quite cognitively expensive and so they tend to prefer solitude. Low-functioning psychopaths tend towards criminality due to poor self-control.
I've seen recruiters at companies I've worked for throw AI/ML/Vision on job postings that have nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, to do with AI, Statistical Machine Learning, or Computer Vision.
Maybe you're repeating what people have said to you, but it's a very liberal bubble thing to say it's a conservative problem. Weinstein and Jobs certainly aren't (weren't) conservative. Rahm Emanuel isn't considered a sweetheart.
Also, conservative outlets (the National Review, the Weekly Standard, etc.) generally opposed Trump's campaign, so that's not even the correct label if we're going to get partisan about this. I like to argue that he's a personality with whims and allies more than an ideology. I think the case that he's properly "conservative", either in politics or in temperament, is a little thin.
But to agree with your actual point, American culture is tolerant of terrible behavior more than it should be. The fact that Donald "grab them by the pussy" Trump was elected is downstream of that problem. Though arguably Hilary "bimbo eruptions" Clinton was seen as an enabler of other terrible behavior instead of a clear contrast to Trump's.
The score is easily 10x worse in other cities but specifically Shanghai seems overblown.
https://aqicn.org/city/shanghai/
http://aqicn.org/city/california/san-francisco/san-francisco...
Keep in mind it’s also night in china ATM while it is noon in SF.
Shanghai is much worse than SF on average. It dips into the red zone more often, retreating when it rains. Shanghai is much better than the rest of china barring Shenzhen, Xiamen, and maybe Kunming, but it would still come across to an American visitor as smoggier than they were used to.
Seriously ?
It's worse than what you write, though. I've seen the "AI" and "machine learning engineer" labels applied to jobs where the developer is basically copy-and-pasting some sklearn snippet from an ipython notebook written by an actual ML/Data Science engineer into his "production" pipeline.
The other aspect i didn't see mentioned is that dating for an average immigrant man (which are still the majority of the immigration in tech) is a brutal experience; between the skew gender ratio, the ruthlessness of modern/app based dating and increasing intolerance against "conservative values" etc... for anecdotal sample, a large population are just leaving to escape the loneliness and try to start a family
Throughout this thread, I see a lot of solid reasons for a Chinese Expat in SV to give returning to China thoughtful consideration. That said, one hard negative moving from non-China into China is the availability of modern, standard-practice develop tools. Replicating the tools/DevEv within China is certainly possible, but requires effort and is often frustrating. VPN hot potato is getting more frequent & homegrown China DevEnv tools are often dramatically different from the tools common to non-China business.
(I have no real opinion about whether there is a bamboo ceiling effect in tech, not having done any study of the question, but the two examples you point to are far from even a strong reason to doubt the effect.)