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Comment by mushufasa | Hacker News Reader

I truly believe this is a substantial part of the reason why there's such a shortage of top talent domestically in the USA. https://www.zdnet.com/article/u-s-companies-continue-to-look... . There could be much more talent unlocked if mainstream culture promoted intellectual pursuits.

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People keep parroting this urban myth, but I just don't see it. The best engineers I've worked with (by far) have been US-educated. Yes, mostly from the upper strata of academia (Stanford/Berkeley/UCLA/MIT/Caltech/etc.) but I'd say that the "average" US developer is significantly more capable than the average off-shore developer.

I mean, the great majority of the main technological advances of the past 20 years have generated by American companies (and more often than not by US-educated entrepreneurs).

Anti-intellectualism might indeed be a problem (maybe?) but to say that tech has been adversely affected is, imo, untrue.

A lot of outsiders can agree that American tech has been vibrant, but what about America outside of tech? Do the other parts of American society smell intellectually vibrant? Other jobs outside of tech appear extremely de-skilled, so I wonder what motivation a person has for furthering their mind -- to impress their peers?

Modern thinking on financial optimization has destroyed the spirit of work.

Yes, it's interesting to me (but not surprising) that the comments are focusing on just the tech industry. This is more widespread IMO.

> there's such a shortage of top talent domestically in the USA

>> The best engineers I've worked with (by far) have been US-educated

GP's statement does not preclude your experience. For example, all US engineers could have great expertise but there could be only a few of them.

I'm confident that's the case -- the model of US higher education is widely known to disproportionately prioritize the top tier of schools. We focus on the best in the world, but not the highest median quality in the world.

Also, top schools emphasize athletics and other aspects beyond intellectualism. Not saying that's a bad thing, but the emphasis on extracurricular activities seems greater than other parts of the world -- something also observed by Hofstadter.

57% of silicon valley tech workers and 43% of New York tech workers are immigrants, so advances made by American companies are not necessarily made by domestic American workers.

I'd argue that USA has lots of high quality tech workers mostly thanks to brain drain and its size.

https://www.newsweek.com/h-1b-visa-row-foreign-workers-make-...

Tech is cyclical. I got punched in the face financial-wise by the dot-com crash of the early 00's. I have little reason to believe such crashes won't happen again.

For example, our web standards are ill-fitted for productivity-oriented business applications, creating a lot of wasteful busywork. If new standards came along to address that, many coders would be let go.

And I'm sure there's an AI bubble at play. The PE ratios of AI companies are not realistic: they can't carry themselves from revenue alone. When the crutch of investment money dries up, they'll fall like dominos. If you are in AI, have a Plan B career.

I'm not so sure. I heard (second-hand anecdote, sources welcome) that primary education in the US is of poor quality - that seems like a more likely cause. Unless we blame anti-intellectualism for that poor quality.

Edit: dlp211 inspired me to find a source, and it confirms his suspicions - US education seems reasonably good: https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/dec/07/world-...

Even so, a few doubts remain. Could the US have good students on average, but fail to fully utilize its more talented students?

I wonder if a poor level of civics education could also be a factor?

"Math class is tough" Barbie is a byproduct of this attitude. It directly feeds into under-performance in academics. The education system itself isn't broken so much as expectations are low to let the less studious scrape by.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teen_Talk_Barbie

If you want to get elected, you don't propose to expel the students who are performing below average. They have parents who vote and/or cry on the TV news.

It was funny and sad to see standards getting set, then reduced. We know what is required. Various states set graduation requirements at that, with a test to be passed, and then backed off when they realized that many would not graduate. Since it isn't politically acceptable to deny graduation to anybody, we have no standards.

I think that might not be approaching it form the best angle? Perhaps the best question is: how to motivate students to excel academically, and give them opportunity to study to match their motivation? (instead of having poorly performing students be punished)

If you look at it that way, I think the solutions are much more akin to better motivating students, creating better environments (if they don't have them at home).

Motivation is both from showing better job opportunities to be had (higher salaries, employability), the practical value of intellectual and scientific education (to daily life decisions, participating well in democracy -- which cannot work without well educated citizens), and finally an intrinsic value of education -- showing how beautiful intellectual fields are, from a fun approach to mathematics education, to literature, etc.

Environments is making sure the school and classmate interactions are positive, possibly making available study spaces outside regular class time, elective extracurricular activities (programming classes, etc), etc.

Both of those probably go through investing heavily in teacher salaries and adequate teacher education. It's a societal commitment, really.

I feel like this is one of those things that everyone knows but just isn't true.

It’s a educational quality distribution problem. States/regions with good education rival the best in the world, but that’s balanced against states/regions that have middling and poor education. The US is a big country, and it has a shaky history when it comes to providing high quality education for ALL citizens.

It's of very poor quality since we've had Prop 13, Howard Jarvis and all the same in the lesser states

There isn't a shortage of top talent domestically in the USA. US tech companies import workers so they can drive down wages.

This isn't controversial and it's not xenophobic. The NYT has many op-eds covering this issue:

1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/06/us/outsourcin...

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/15/opinion/workers-betrayed-...

See also the criticisms on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Criticisms_of_the_pr...

There is definitely a shortage of top tech talent domestically in USA if you consider that USA has more top tech companies than the rest of the world combined. The only way to reasonably distribute top talent to those companies is to either accept lots of high quality immigrants or to move some of them abroad to spread out the competition for talent.

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