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Comment by finexplained | Hacker News Reader

I don't really think the connection you're trying to draw follows immediately. There are very strong domestic students, probably enough to fill all the top PhD programs. The calculus for pursuing a PhD is different if you're a domestic vs international student. If you're international and want to move to and eventually live in the US, where some of the highest paying jobs in the world are available, then first getting into a well regarded graduate program, which will attract potential employers, coming in on a student visa and then getting an employer to sponsor an H1B is a pretty good strategy. If you're already a top student in the US at a top university, you already have access to those employers and intend to stay in the same country long term, so the opportunity cost of going to graduate school is so much higher.

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If that was the case then FAANG wouldn't be filled with Asians and engineers from ex-Soviet countries. The makeup of high paying tech companies does not represent in any way the makeup of the American population. I posit the reason this is the case is American culture and anti-intellectualism.

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 don't know that America is anti-intellectual beyond a facade. It's easy to not like something that you'll perceivably never have or can manage to live without. Education is mainly reserved for the select few, and those select few aren't so revered anymore. People all want the same opportunities, but they're definitely not anywhere close to universally attainable. If you give people access to those things then I think you'll see that facade drip away.

The smartest Americans go into law and medicine and banking, because the expected value is even higher for bright people in those fields than technology.

it used to be true, before 2008 crisis. Not anymore

Maybe this is implicitly understood, but I don't think everyone's goal is to maximize income/wealth. That is, not everyone would calculate "expected value" in the same way.

I don't think thats true anymore, unless you become a partner at a large law firm (very unlikely even for top grads) or are a very specialized surgeon (extremely difficult job) most FAANG level senior developers will out earn you and work far less. Might be true of banking but idk

Not quite. American across the sea immigration selects for the smartest and most ambitious people in the world. It's natural that they and their descendants will outperform most Americans.

& it benefits Americans (even those whose families have been here for generations) tremendously.

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.)

> If that was the case then FAANG wouldn't be filled with Asians and engineers from ex-Soviet countries. The makeup of high paying tech companies does not represent in any way the makeup of the American population. I posit the reason this is the case is American culture and anti-intellectualism.

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.

do you really think that FAANG companies want to pay less? they are already top paying employers, i think you are mistaken

It wasn't that long ago that FAANG got caught for rigging the labour market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

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.

"do you really think that FAANG companies want to pay less?"

That's the basic premise of markets.

Conversely, they are posting huge profits, why don't they pat even more?

H1B's in Big tech are about as far from indentured servants as you can imagine, they're in high demand and switch jobs for better pay constantly. American kids with access to generational wealth aren't as interested in difficult technical subjects.

> H1B's in Big tech are about as far from indentured servants as you can imagine

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.

>new employer has to go through the entire process of getting them a new H1 visa.

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

> I posit the reason this is the case is American culture and anti-intellectualism.

Or perhaps awful schools

Part of it is control. If you’re on an H1B, applying for a green card you are often chained to your company. If you quit (or get fired), you have 60 days to find a job or you have to leave the country.

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.

> 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.

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.

How about this: the easier it is to relocate and work for FAANG companies, the more the FAANG workforce will resemble the global supply of people who would like to work for them. If the skill sought is coding, not sales, sufficient English fluency is not a great barrier. There are plenty of programmers who do fine without ever having mastered definite articles or the present perfect.

The difference between American and Soviet schools back in the day was that Soviet curriculum was designed for ~80% to pass, while American was designed for ~99% to pass. (Nowadays, Russia has lowered the bar significantly, so the difference is no longer as huge.)

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.

> If you look at top public school undergrad programs that don't practice affirmative action (UC's, UW) the programs are almost 50% Asian.

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.

>so you know he's there on merit

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.

%34 of the world population are from India and China. And to be honest there isn't as many ex-soviet engineers in FANG as you would think, they are vastly outnumbered to chinese and indian engineers.

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.

That's an interesting observation, because paired with the elite overproduction hypothesis, it implies that allowing skilled immigration destabilises the country those people are entering, and stabilises the one they have left.

By playing to win like the tech companies do, they created a growth frontier that allows for more total elite capacity, and it shows as pretty much only growing part of the US economy. Overall if the US didn't allow immigration in this regards, it probably would have been way worse overall. Do you want to be a king of a trash pile or a player in an empire?

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