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Comment by future_unclear | Hacker News Reader

There are millions of south Asians who’d be happy to work any hour of the day you ask them to.

Your work product will definitely suffer if you are trying to maintain a sleep/wake schedule significantly different from your family and friends. I've seen this happen directly, and it's really bad.

Not to mention what a creepy and unnatural work culture that would be back in the home base location.

“Hey everyone, let me introduce you to the wholesale replacement technology staff we obviously hired just to pay them way unfairly less and fire all your friends who did a good job. It may be night time every time you see them on the video call but don’t worry. As you capitalize on a near indentured servant relationship with them so we can pay them less than their worth purely because of geopolitical arbitrage, they’ve generously agreed to never read their kids bedtime stories or sleep at the same time their spouses do, as they live out a stereotype hellscape of Western arrogance where they are happy to be worker ants endlessly reciting Bill Gates’ “flipping burgers is opportunity” speech in their heads.”

True, but how many of them are good programmers? The US is just better at producing them than other places.

https://blogs.worldbank.org/education/who-trains-best-comput...

> The United States trains the best computer graduates ― by far: We find that CS seniors in the United States substantially outperform seniors in China, India, and Russia. The average computer science student in the United States ranks higher than about 80 percent of students tested in China, India, and Russia. Seniors in elite institutions in the United States similarly outperform seniors in elite institutions in China, India, and Russia by approximately 0.85 Standard Deviations (SDs). Importantly, the skills advantage of the United States is not because it has a large proportion of high-scoring international students.

It's important to highlight that the more significant variable here is probably the quality/prestige of universities within the U.S., which in turn then attracts the best talent and students around the world, rather than the other way around.

> Importantly, the skills advantage of the United States is not because it has a large proportion of high-scoring international students.

I think you may be misunderstanding my point. My comment is meant to highlight the fact that the quality / prestige of universities in the US consequently attract the smartest / most talented students by virtue of being the most highly ranked in the world.

They basically did a computerized quiz? While I might agree with conclusions I might suspect the methodology.

This study looks highly flawed. They gave ets tests to random (categorized) people in the three countries. So far so ok (although the question is always what does the test measure, I mean what e.g. recursion is not big in china, because it is not used in production etc). But for the US the take ets data instead of testing people for this study. So it seems they compare it with people who took this exam for other reasons (and probably studied/prepaeed for this exam!); or maybe I understand this wrongly

The US is the best of these four. There are other countries, too.

There's some solid programming talent in Vietnam, they constantly amaze me with their skills and will work for a few hundred a week before they get poached by the states.

I've seen kids straight out of highschool who can write solid stuff and know git back to front compared to some lad with an Ivy league bachelor's who is basically clueless, needing his hand held for months and yet demanding 8x the wage.

I treat everyone who only has a degree and no real world skills with a lot of suspicion. There's plenty of ridiculously good hires out there.

Mostly agreed. A bigger difference might be that American companies do a decent job overall of training their 'apprentice programmers' (that's what fresh grads mostly are).

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