Hacker News Reader

Comment by datashow | Hacker News Reader

Most Thousand Talents Program recruits are Chinese nationals studying and working in the U.S. Some of them may have green card, but mostly are not U.S. citizens. This is not a patriotism issue.

The money is not just the directly reward from the Thousand Talents Program. Being a Thousand Talents Program recruit, you can easily become a professor and lab director in China. This gives you money and status.

I knew a physicist worked in a 100~150 rank state University as a research scientist for a decade, low pay, cannot find a tenure position. But he got in the Thousand Talents Program, so he left the U.S. and became a professor in a top 10 University in China.

View on HN

According to [1] the Thousand Talents Program has one strand for Chinese scholars only, and a separate strand for foreigners only.

The people listed in this article, like Alan List and Thomas Sellers, don't seem to be Chinese nationals.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Program

Why can't US schools and companies offer those scientists competitive salaries and status, if their research is so important?

I think the unfortunate truth is that US academia job market is already highly saturated.

Look, a professor may need 5 to 10 PhD students, but there won't be so many positions open when those students graduate. In the past physics and biology graduates will try to stay as postdoc or research assistant as long as possible. Or find a position in industry. Nevertheless, this is just not a sustainable model in the long run. Eventually it will come to a point where more and more of them will go back to their home country.

You read the old guys and they were in the opposite situation. I remember reading the intro to Goodman and Gilman's once; I think it was Gilman who noted he was the unfortunate who couldn't find a job in industry and had to take a job in academia. Grass is always greener.

For internationals, it is easier to get Visa and Green Card in academia.

Because their research is not important. If it were, academia would pay more, and have better working conditions. If it were, immigration to the US would be easier[1].

That everyone is wringing their hands over this issue today is quite telling. The people doing it aren't interested in advancing research - they are interested in using public money to make privately capitalizable discoveries.

If a single penny of public money was used in research, the results should be public. At that point, it doesn't matter whether or not that research ended up going to China.

[1] Yes, it's possible for researchers to immigrate to the US. But it's not exactly easy. It's a mountain of beurocracy, stress, legal fees, arbitrary restrictions on travel, and a big drain on your time. Combine that with all the other costs of permanently moving to another country, and you shouldn't be surprised that a lot of people opt not to do it.

I tend to agree that there is a lot of unimportant and largely unimpressive research going on. Just my anecdotal observation, but try picking a random mid tier university and check out the professors' websites to see what they are working on.

>Because their research is not important. If it were, academia would pay more, and have better working conditions.

This assumes academia cares for the research (as opposed for milking students, getting grants, and so on).

Does the person making your latte at Starbucks deeply care about making coffee, or about getting a paycheque on Thursday?

It's obviously the latter, yet cafes exist, and lattes get made.

> if their research is so important

Because it is not. US tenure positions are already saturated with far more applicants than available positions. There are still a lot of top tier chinese professors at US universities. But, the US is skimming the cream of the cream of cream. Some inevitably fall through the cracks.

Also, US universities expect their profs to teach. I know for a fact, that grad school rejected professors for not having adequate English proficiency for teaching. These same people probably excel at teaching in Chinese back in China.

It is also a culture thing. Sometimes US universities want to recruit talent that fits in with their culture. Sometimes, bad culture matches for US universities, might just be good culture matches for Chinese universities.

there aren't enough positions. I work at a large internet company that employs literally thousands of PhD scientists (PhDs in fields like astronomy, bioinformatics). Many of them trained to be professors, then found that the market was full. They make more money and work less as data scientists/programmers/product managers/people managers, but without the level of satisfaction they might get from being a professor.

It is unclear whether having many more scientists would increase the rate of novel discoveries or of general useful information production in a country like the US. On the other hand, China intends to be a full member of the international scientific community and needs publications in prestiguous journals to get there.

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22034080)

*recruits

Thank you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com