Apple still depends on traditional American engineers, and is slowly losing them
appleinsider.com
appleinsider.com
Right now, the current H1B system is totally dominated by Indians, who make up 70% of the intake. The scheme seems designed to undercut American salaries, rather than enhance American companies with highly skilled workers.
The scheme should be redesigned with a higher minimum salary, and a maximum of 10% of the intake from any one country.
And yes, the education system needs to change. Education should not be an 'export' - knowledge should be retained inside the nation, not sold off to foreign competitors. International students should only be accepted from America's closest allies.
Heck, education and immigration could just be overhauled to be NATO-only, with selected highly developed NATO partner countries as well.
To put it simply - Indians, when they have established themselves, hire more Indian migrants, at the expense of others. Lookup Infosys discrimination in the USA, this is established fact.
US students who choose to go into other areas which are protected politically (like medicine) are responding rationally.
Also US firms' unwillingness, by and large, to train new hires is another artificial and solvable aspect of the problem.
So either the market doesn't work at all and cannot exhibit enough demand to cause a supply to exist (perhaps the offered pay would need to be so high that the endeavor ceases to be profitable?), in which case throwing government regulation at the market to artificially restrict supply certainly won't help anything, or companies are able but unwilling to pay high enough wages, at which point we're proposing using government regulation to punish American businesses who don't work the way we want in the hope that they concede defeat, which hardly strikes me as a pro-American position - and more practically doesn't seem like a way to make American business more competitive.
Perhaps not though, in which case we don't need to follow this line of thinking to the end of the world. The US isn't lacking in college students or workers, just ones willing to work in one of the hardest majors while being treated as a commodity that includes workers from developing countries.
the article is saying there are tons of qualified Chinese for certain jobs and barely any qualified Americans.
Apple has spent most of a generation offshoring all of its manufacturing. Now, they whine that people stopped pursuing manufacturing-oriented degrees (because there weren't domestic jobs anymore for them to land in)?
It's like the Menendez brothers seeking sentencing leniency "because, hey, we're orphans now!"
But they certainly exist, and are being trained, in China.
Are you serious? Maybe you mean has the capacity or willing students or something?
Because if you're saying US education is somehow inferior to Asia or whatever, then you have been misled. US schools produce exactly what US firms demand of their graduates. Industry quite literally sets the demands for degrees in engineering. Asian education is memorization and rote practice. If that actually worked for students other than the top 1 percent or so who will excel in any system anyway, we'd do it too as it's so damn easy to teach that way.
It seems a lot of people are discussing something which is related to immigration but not related to the topic of the article.
This is baffling. The article is lamenting the fact that industry has been outsourced. There are few American engineers because there are so few American engineering jobs left. The American education system produced something like half of all new technology in the 20th century. Americans are obviously not less capable of being engineers than Chinese people.
the claims in the article, which are very specific
Not interested in making America some sort of loser fiefdom operated by the inadequate who need regulation because they cannot compete. No way.
Besides, if Europe is so great, maybe there would be this massive collection of great tech companies there. Instead, 49 square miles in America has produced more economic value in tech than any European city.
No disrespect intended. They run things in Europe the way they want to. But regulating to ensure only immigration from Europe is not in America's interests.
Delaware, a state of somewhere around a million people, has "over half" the companies on the S&P 500. That's like $15 trillion in market cap. That's a reasonable sized stock market for a billion people in the wider world. Should we conclude that everyone should emulate Delaware in how they organize their society? If they did do that, should we expect that the rest of humanity, unleashed, could produce $15 trillion in value for every million or so people? If they can't, does that mean they're inferior or failing to follow the example of Delaware? Not to put too fine a point on it, what about the Cayman Islands?
Edit once more: and, "SF engineers" and "SF money"? Come on!
Maybe you could clarify with some examples of the companies you're talking about, in SF, that mostly draw on local talent and resources.
Only if ability to compete is defined as accepting a much smaller wage for the same job with the same skill level.
The way you get 'fiefdoms' is by helping companies build up enormous piles of profit without paying their workers well.
On the other hand, the engineer whose primary advantage is his engineering is super-charged by focusing on where he provides comparative advantage.
Yeah, it turns out updating your Coldfusion website to display a notice on Sunday is something a child can do, and making a scalable backend for Dropbox's storage requires immense expertise. If you're the first guy, the writing is on the wall. If you're the second guy, the less time you spend on things that don't require your skill, the more valuable you are.
NATO is a military alliance between democratic and semi-democratic governments it does not represent a framework for any sort of education based immigration system.
I say this to reply to the first 3 paragraphs. I object to the last two paragraphs on moral grounds but have no desire to continue a conversation about them.
The problem they face is a little like the "tenure" problem.
How would your workstyle change if you were "on probation" for a number of years? In a highly competitive situation with lots of other folks like you? Would you say "no" technically or otherwise?
And after the probation period was over, would you be changed by it?
I'm not an Indian engineer, but I've worked somewhere where there were a few rounds of layoffs. The culture really changed when everyone had to show off their own skills and compete.
I think the trick is that apple has to create a really great culture for everyone, even folks with special situations. The recent articles about apple's internal tools groups makes me wonder[1].
They have to put up walls to keep Americanism out and their own citizens in. NATO was about piercing the Iron Curtain, not building our own parallel to it.
Just because a country is huge population wise shouldn't be consideration in who to employ.
India is diverse, it has many states with different culture and even color/looks on people.
India is more like EU and individual states are more like European countries like Germany, Netherlands. There only have very little in common with each other.
I really doubt you can identify a person from India just based on how he looks.
History is proof when meritocracy has been shunned because of these government policies, or nepotism - local companies and economy has always lost.
> education and knowledge should not be exported
Not sure a country that bans export of knowledge has much knowledge to export to begin with. I suspect you are more interested in a one way valve for knowledge and brains. You can get in but can’t get out. But with a per country cap for both knowledge and brains ?
> In 2017, Tim Cook came as close as he ever has to publicly addressing the issue. "In the US," he said, "you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I'm not sure you could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields."
One possible reason for this is that US education is generally broad compared to other countries. No one in America majors in "tool engineering" but a mechanical engineer could certainly be trained for the job. In other countries such as Germany and China you're more likely to follow a more narrow path (for better or worse).
Whatever you decide to outsource you gradually lose expertise in. Which should be obvious, as if I paid someone to fix my car for me all the time, I probably wouldn't come to be an expert in knowing how to fix it myself.