If you look at top public school undergrad programs that don't practice affirmative action (UC's, UW) the programs are almost 50% Asian.
To be clear, when I say American I mean someone whose ancestors have lived in America for multiple generations, since at least the 1950's. I'm the child of immigrants and I don't consider myself an American. My culture places a distinctly different emphasis on educational achievement compared to what you might consider an American.
I am a “native born” American, and I’ve benefited a lot from having a whole bunch of extremely smart immigrants in my field. My physics graduate school mentor was from Ukraine, my advisor was an immigrant from China. The person who hired me out of graduate school to an aerospace/materials science job was an immigrant from the Philippines. Several of the coworkers who have best coached and mentored me were immigrants from Zimbabwe and Korea. Generally more helpful and kind to me than native-born coworkers. It is as positive sum as it gets.
(although I don’t think it lasts very long past first or second generation immigrants. It’s more individual choice and family culture than anything. So the only way to keep the benefit of cherrypicking & equipping the most ambitious and brightest among the world is to continuously encourage high skilled immigration.)
In a land where money buys everything, you think culture is the reason why a thing exists or doesn't exist? I think you're drinking too much of your own ideological kool aid.
High paying tech companies want to pay less, so they recruit internationally to not be so high paying. Along the same lines, American kids with the access to generational wealth to do whatever they want find it more lucrative to choose some other more localized field of work that doesn't compete with indentured servitude (H1s) for wages.
Obviously FAANG (and most companies) want to pay as little as possible for their labour. They don't pay $500,000 for senior engineers because of their innate generosity and desire to pay them well. They pay that much because they have to if they want to attract and retain the employees they are looking for.
That's the basic premise of markets.
Conversely, they are posting huge profits, why don't they pat even more?
False.
> they're in high demand and switch jobs for better pay constantly.
And each time they do so, their new employer has to go through the entire process of getting them a new H1 visa. When your right to be in a place is dependent upon your labor to a specific contracted employer, you are an indentured servant.
this is not true, saying this as a person on h1 who changed jobs easily.
when talking about indentured servants you are probably referring to small Indian IT bodyshops, that keep people on low wages due to them being on a very long green card queue, but this has nothing to do with H1 per se. These people do not work in big tech
Or perhaps awful schools
This isn’t the case with citizens who have much more freedom and mobility.
There are schools in every country.
There are not FAANG headquarters in every country.
The top candidates from around the world (who are willing to relocate) will emigrate to whatever country has the highest paying jobs. That happens to be FAANG companies in the United States right now.
So of course FAANG jobs will not mirror the population of schools. It will mirror the population of educated engineers who are able and willing to relocate (especially pre-COVID before remote was an option)
Trying to draw parallels between FAANG employment and American schools in this fashion is nonsensical.
This view is only correct if a) the US border is completely open and b) all the candidates around the world can speak professional English. We know that both the above conditions are false.
An average student who finished 5th grade in an average school in USSR could start 6th grade in the U.S. and coast along on what they'd learned until the first year of high school.
That's why, when looking at resumes, I've heard "Yeah, you know X is good, he went to Y (a school with affirmative action) and he's Asian/International, so you know he's there on merit".
I somehow feel we regressed over time.
it is hilarious how historical racism towards blacks leads to reverse racism (affirmative action) and leads to another racisms.
it's like you can't fix racism issues by instituting even more racism, it will only lead to more and more racism.
I hear often that Black employees are often looked down upon, because of the AC in hiring and education (the bar is extremely low for them). I think that Affirmative Action was created to reinforce stereotypes and racism, after the Civil Rights Movement
I don't think you can draw a cultural difference from this. I get what you're trying to say, particularly by narrowly defining "American"; that cultural influences put pressure/status on academics both by immigrant parents and non-American parents and that pressure causes students to excel academically and achieve these high paying positions. But there is so much selection bias here; both in the types of people who immigrate to a new country and those who leave their home country to attend school abroad. It's not clear to me Asian culture results in FAANG being disproportionally Asian, or simply that there are 2 billion Asian people in the world, and while the same percentage of people are sufficiently qualified as top American students (let's say 2%), 2% of 2 billion people is 40M people! Do you see the problem with jumping to this conclusion? You don't have sufficient evidence to reject the null hypothesis, that both cultures produce tops students at similar percentages.
A personal anecdote: I spend a lot of my interviewing candidates. Students for all the top schools in the world, international students and domestic students, undergrads and PhDs. Conditioned on having gone to a top university, I've never noticed a difference in performances between domestic students and international ones. (Or undergrad vs PhD to be honest.)
I also take a bit of issue with your definition of "American" on a personal level.
> To be clear, when I say American I mean someone whose ancestors have lived in America for multiple generations, since at least the 1950's.
My parents are immigrants, I'm a first generation American. But I am absolutely culturally American. There is no other country were I would feel at home culturally, and I've been heavily influenced by the country I grew up in. I'm also the product of US public schools, most notably UC Berkeley, which you cite. And I'm not Asian or Russian. And I do work at a FAANG level firm.
When you hire the world, your demographics are going to represent the world for the most part. There are a few modifications as to why latin america, africa and developed nation people are not as well represented, but it still holds.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/computer-science-salary-S...
https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-Co...
https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Degree=Master_of_Scienc...
https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...
Also most of the generic pay sites in my experience are down weighted by a bunch of underpaid visa workers, boot camp graduates and so on. Also government workers who don't get paid well but get great benefits.
A CS degree from Stanford almost has to start at at least 90k.
> Makes a technical PhD a lot less tempting
If it's as rare as you are saying, then it wouldn't factor into the broader reasoning of people debating to get PhDs at all. That's my point. I wasn't making any point that it isn't possible to make $200k/year out of undergrad.
edit: Also, $400k is about standard for a senior SE at a large tech company or late stage startup nowadays.
https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...
If your not from a top school , maybe you have to work in startups or lesser tier companies for $50k less for a year or two, and then go work at MAGMA at the same pay as your stanford equivalent peer.
Searching “computer science” in the jobs tab treats that as a keyword and shows results for a variety of job titles related to computer science. The salaries tab, however, seems to indicate it’s only collecting information about job titles that have “computer science” in the title.
www.levels.fyi
Getting a job at Google, isn't exactly easy. But it is a far cry from "as hard as winning the lotto" that other people were implying it is.
You get more of what you reward and less of what you don't. It's not always a pleasant truth, but it's a powerful one.
You can see this exemplified in the fact that, even as we are mocking people for not going to college, we are lowering academic standards and getting rid of gifted programs: https://www.teachforamerica.org/one-day/opinion/stop-elimina.... It’s magical thinking on all sides.
I agree that I don't like the direction we're headed, but hopefully the natural consequences of that direction will encourage people to revisit their ideological assumptions.
I'm not convinced that the rise of China will be so bad. Boomers and neocons want us to think so, but their "arguments" are mostly just paranoia and sentimentality.
this is what's going to happen to the US, but on much larger scale and worse consequences
You're not convinced that going from "living in the most economically dominant and militarily powerful country in the world" to "not" is going to somehow not be a painful experience?
You can use the "I am not convinced" line for anything. "I am not convinced that being homeless is worse than living in a nice house" but... ok, what would convince you?
Maybe it's good that other groups of people besides Americans and Europeans can make leading contributions to economic growth, science and technology.
Maybe America's dominance is mainly good for the rich and those who like to invade countries on a whim. I don't care about either of those groups.
When UK Parliament wanted Zuk to answer some tough question about his company facilitating electoral fraud, he simply refused to show up. Even first world nations struggle in dealing with American corporation, which often act as if they are above the law.
God forbid you are a developing nation. British American Tabacco has taken poor developing nations to court for trying to ban children from smoking (!!) and got compenation and the law repealed
I am not even mentioning illegal stuff: bribes, threats, drone strikes, strong-arming, etc.
Even the EU was strong armed when it comes to GPS:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/dec/08/world.internation...
Those that think that American economic advantage was won in a 'fair game' are super naive
Since you seem to be a fan of intellectual rigor, can you describe the process by which you arrive at the relative worth of (apparently) social science programs vs. small town social behavior?
Can that method also tell us whether citrus flavors are more valuable than ballet?
Culture, meanwhile, is the organically developed heuristics and norms of communities.
You can measure the relative worth of these things by looking at the functioning of society on various metrics. Unlike say civil engineers, practitioners of *studies and social sciences have demonstrated little ability to come into a community and make live measurably better for everyone. Arguably, as traditional social norms have been eroded, many communities are less healthy than ever—much more so than you’d expect looking at just the economic numbers. Millennials as a generation are the richest ever, yet seem profoundly unhappy and unsatisfied.
That's plain wrong, they have less disposable income and lower net worth than the two generations before them had at the same stage in their life.
Just because stock market grew doesn't mean life of an average Joe improved.
This stuff is complicated so make sure you’re comparing like with like. Even the chart above ignored one critical adjustment: in 1970 just 5% of the population was foreign born, while today its 15%. Millennials are much more likely today to be recent economic migrants, or the children of them, than boomers. That drags the numbers down, but doesn’t imply anything negative about millennials’ economic status. Indeed, those immigrants are experiencing upward economic mobility, and are seeing themselves that way. The dour attitude among millennials seems to be mainly on the native born, who really are doing as well or better than their parents.
At least, they’re doing better economically. Thanks to social changes, they have less agency than their parents did. They have few opportunities to garner authority and respect in their communities. They’re not building families and getting the hope that comes from nurturing the next generation. They have many reasons to be dour. Their parents failed them!
The *studies fields are rather small proportion of students. They also cluster mostly in top universities. It is just not true that they would dominated universities.
That one is just paranoia and blaming what you hate anyway.
It has nothing to do with elementary or high schools performance. Those produce capable kids enough. It has to do with decisions and priorities those people have as young adults. And they are not even making bad decisions, for them not doing PhD is rational choice.
Your comment is kind of meaningless drivel with abstruse language.
Edit: your account has already been repeatedly posting comments that either break the site guidelines or are on the edge. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.