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I was going to type a disagree until you edited that last bit. I don't mind the authoritarianism, since the authorities seem very proactive towards encouraging foreign tech startups, but creativity is near zero and heavily sanitized, and most devs are poorly treated, I guess due to the massive glut of technical folks for the tiny population it has.

Singapore feels so artificial, just like another Dubai. Going to London and now a smaller city in Germany was like a breath of fresh air. Startups grow "organically", as in without the government machinery shoved up their arse, people are freer to pursue whatever interests them, and since you can actually see the good and the bad in the city, you actually feel that the city is a living entity. Compare that to SG or DXB, where the homeless are stashed away/deported so that the tourists don't see them.

Recently Singapore has been making a push for the arts, yet it's clearly evident how inorganic the output is - one can clearly notice the wannabeism.

I also noticed that the foreign startups they lured in with their juicy incentives were not the better ones. Nonetheless they probably still believe that the same techniques that brought in Shell in the early days needed to be adapted for the "modern world".

Despite throwing money at tech salaries are still poor. Everybody gets that money except the developers.

They managed to persuade Grab to move from Malaysia to Singapore though.

Tech salaries are not poor if you compare them to other South East Asia countries (Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, etc). If you compare them to other professions in Singapore... then I can't say (I don't know).

Moving Grab isn't a big deal, considering Grab's founders are Malaysian Chinese, and likely face indirect discrimination thanks to Malaysia's constitution. Malaysia drove them away, Singapore didn't persuade them.

Edit:- to counter your example, devs are not as highly paid for the living costs of Singapore. And they don't even form part of the upper bracket, which is largely populated by people in finance and management.

> Despite throwing money at tech salaries are still poor. Everybody gets that money except the developers.

That's just Asia. I don't think a developer is considered "high status" anywhere in Asia.

Top devs in India and China are usually paid on par with the managerial salaries there. I have a bunch of mates who get paid on par with/more than mid-level IB bankers.

I wonder why this is the case. I also heard the software engineers are not considered "high status" as well in UK. Not sure in Europe (like Sweden, Germany, etc).

I don’t think we’re high status in the US either, especially socially, though staff SDEs at FAANGs can make as much as doctors.

> Recently Singapore has been making a push for the arts, yet it's clearly evident how inorganic the output is

Last time I went to Singapore I was struck by how it was impossible to buy any local music. I associate by music, so I always buy local music when I travel. But in Singapore's tiny music stores, I couldn't even find a Dick Lee CD for sale, and his music wasn't available through Australian iTunes.

(In the end I emailed his website asking which stores to try, and instead they sent one of his personal assistants to my Singapore hotel in person to hand deliver one of their remaining CD copies. For which my family were deeply grateful, we had discovered him 25 years earlier on a cassette we bought of The Mad Chinaman, and as a little Aussie kid I'd learned all the words of Rasa Sayang: "Everything we have has to be the best of the fabulous east and the wonderful west".)

Lately I've started to find Singaporean bands on Bandcamp, so things are improving. But it wasn't like I could walk into Starbucks and find CDs from a bunch of emerging local artists at the counter. I'm heartbroken that the 100th Starbucks store near The Fullerton Waterboat House has apparently closed too.

Speaking about art in SG. I find that street artists in Europe are way more better than those in SG. I’m always amazed by their skill and enthusiasm in my Europe trip. While back in SG, the only ones I see are art students or old uncles playing some music that you can hardly say “good”. This is sad.

Wasn't it a while back when the government licensed out certain building facades to artists who wanted to display their work lol? Or was it Dubai?

Some of that is cultural. Education is math and science, art is for when you’ve done your homework and is regarded more as “play” than a serious subject worth dedicating yourself to (some exception noted).

> Singapore feels so artificial, just like another Dubai. … Compare that to SG or DXB, where the homeless are stashed away/deported so that the tourists don't see them.

Singaporean here. The central touristy area is artificial, but the public housing areas surrounding it are slightly more organic — with a fair share of homeless people who sleep on benches at night, too.

I agree. I've seen my fair share of homeless folks in SG, but I heard they are regularly stashed away in some temporary housing that can barely fit anyone.

And of course, for an actual taste of SG culture, one has to visit the hawker centres and the HDBs to actually get a feel of the city's life. But they seem so staid and artificial still, almost Soviet-esque, compared to their counterparts elsewhere. Even if I take a locality in Dubai (the other culprit here), the Dubai Marina is still vastly more lively than MBS, and the less fancier residential colonies in Old Dubai are still more lively than the average HDB complex. Shenton Way turns into practically a ghost town on weekends in comparison to its counterparts elsewhere.

I live in Vietnam and I've always been surprised at the large number of Singaporean tech companies that open up development offices in Vietnam. And it isn't (just) to save money on salaries. The average quality of a Singaporean developer is shockingly bad for such an educated, developed country.

And saying that Vietnam has more creativity isn't exactly a high bar given the similar values of Confucian hierarchy here!

The best developers in Singapore usually work in SV, because Singaporeans have access to H-1B1 which makes it extremely easy for them to move over.

You mean their H1B quota is somehow more liberal making it easier for them to move?

Google H-1B1. It's essentially unlimited for Singaporeans.

Yep - we have a separate quota from the regular H1B, meaning that almost anyone that applies can get it

Vietnam has twenty times the population of Singapore; it's not surprising that it'd be easier to find good developers there. It's also harder for good Vietnamese developers to emigrate to somewhere with better pay like the US, compared to Singaporean developers.

>And saying that Vietnam has more creativity isn't exactly a high bar given the similar values of Confucian hierarchy here!

I know some mainland Chinese who live in Singapore, and they often complain about how closed-minded the locals are. If Vietnam is similar to China in that regard, then it might well be less hierarchical than Singapore (Chinese culture seems much less hierarchical than some other Confucian-influenced cultures like Japan/Korea, maybe due to the communist revolution actively demonising Confucious, and Vietnam also had a similar revolution).

> Vietnam has twenty times the population of Singapore

And it has majority of its population living in small towns, and villages, some of which don't even have a single cellphone tower.

> And saying that Vietnam has more creativity isn't exactly a high bar given the similar values of Confucian hierarchy here!

I'd suggest that it's because the "happy path" for most residents in Singapore is ridiculously straightforward to navigate, so people don't need to be resourceful to accomplish things.

As a Singaporean, I've travelled to Vietnam multiple times, and have worked with Vietnamese on projects before. The Vietnamese usually get my admiration for being highly resourceful and entrepreneurial. They're really good at hustling and improvising.

Lots of working-class Singaporeans aren't raised like that, because the first 18 to 20 years of their lives have been laid out for them.

Yes but Vietnam’s population has been through a millenia of war and they are the most enthusiastic group of people I’ve ever met for doing something well other than that

> The reaction to the communists. Lee Kuan Yew didn't just annihilate the communists with coldstore, he tried to replicate their policies to maintain his stranglehold on power (note the resemblance of HDBs to soviet style housing, for instance). In a way, his lack of any real

PAP itself started as a largely communist party. The later confrontation can be largely seen as two communist parties vying for power. And the Western styled communist party (PAP) has won.

Did you read the bit of the article that explicitly rejected that hypothesis?

And if they do, I reject their hypothesis

> Lee's economic policies were, while good, largely not his idea. He had the good sense to follow this guy's proscriptions though

On Winsemius, in its early history, Singapore was indeed using a cargo cult mass industrialisation, and it of course was only half successful.

A much less "genius" idea of turning the country into an offshore finance centre was what made it, and it was not his idea.

It was Lee junior, who spent his youth in London, who brought it.

Being an offshore finance centre isn't something you can just become. It requires an industrial or resource extraction base to generate wealth (e.g. Dubai/singapore/London/NYC) or a client state relationship with a powerful country (Bahamas). Lesotho, for instance, would never be able to do this and neither would 1950s Singapore.