US plans campaign to attract Russian scientists, engineers to America & CERN
sciencebusiness.net
sciencebusiness.net
This benefit for Soviet scientists will be available for a limited time for a limited number of qualified scientists. Therefore, anyone who may qualify under the Soviet Scientist interim rule should begin filing as soon as possible to avoid missing this window of opportunity. This category is supposed to create a win-win situation for the individuals concerned, who are of exceptional ability, and in the national interest of the United States by bringing exceptional scientists to work within the government or the private sector on important projects.
[1] https://www.uscis.gov/i-140 [2] https://www.murthy.com/2005/04/29/soviet-scientist-interim-r...
What will be left? The same power structure and malevolent culture that already exists, minus some of the brains.
I believe the last few rounds of brain drain out of Russia have helped to leave their scientific, aerospace and military programs in the relatively dire condition they are at present vs the Soviet past (emphasis on helped, there are other factors such as eg Ukraine no longer being part of the USSR, with Ukraine being an important contributor to various Soviet accomplishments). It has net weakened Russia considerably in my opinion, that's a good thing, until or unless their culture changes.
The ideal situation for the American ruling class is to simply import highly skilled workers from other countries, rather than produce them at home. This alleviates the domestic burden of paying for a truly world class education system.
For the past decades, it already felt that the main exports from Russia were a) fossil fuels, b) organized crime. What else does Russia provide the world?
No, it doesn't. This "woe is me, underpaid all the time" rhetoric from someone with a software dev salary is getting really tiring.
Moscow is huge. And Software devs are a small minority of all occupations. Plenty of people afford living in Moscow just fine without anywhere near the level of salary typical of software.
Probably the only place in the world that priced out software devs was pre-Covid SV, where you weren't able to work remotely from cheaper accommodations. But that really is a unique location and a self-inflicted CA problem.
It's not even a first-world problem. It's more of a middle-upper class spoiled rich brat with a 1% salary problem. The NY alternative for this is "woe is me I can't afford private school for my 6 kids and a 5th ave apartment at the same time"
You'd be surprised.
As far as I know, in the US both Seattle and Austin became terribly expensive to the point FANG salaries don't allow for a comfortable, well-off life style with a lot of disposable income to spare.
Austin alone is renowned for requiring a >$100k salary to live comfortably, when FANGs with a presence there barely pay $120k.
Personally, I know a couple of ex-Amazon developers from Madrid who outright quit because Amazon's salary (around €40k for SDE1) wasn't enough to afford a two-bedroom apartment in the city center.
Compared to what? Compared to other Russian cities it is certainly expensive. Compared to e.g. San Francisco it is very cheap.
> it prices even software developer leads out.
Doesn't match my experience at all. It doesn't require extraordinary thrift for someone with a software developer lead salary to start a family and pay off a mortgage for a decent apartment.
Given the context provided for the statement, “Moscow is too expensive: it prices even software developer leads out”, local wages, since (as described) it is too expensive for even relatively high-wage workers.
I don't recommend to anyone to get a PhD these days.
Edit: I don't think your comment is fair. My recommended solution was not to cut immigration or anything like that.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-gove...
My personal view is more similar to yours. We simply dont fund science almost at all. The economy is simply dysfunctional.
We spend plenty on research, just inequitably, and with bizarre pyramid schemes.
MIT's best research was 1960-2000. At the end of that period, the endowment was around 1/10th of what it is now. That's a very healthy level of funding. $2M per professor is enough that it doesn't need to worry about money, but that there aren't obscene levels flowing into odd pockets in odd ways.
Once an institution is overcapitalized like that, dynamics change. There's a ton of corruption in 2022-era MIT (and peer institutions), conflicts-of-interest, and the insane level of competition leads to a lot of unethical behavior. There's so much money swishing around that it's tempting to skim off the top. Combine that with the traditional MIT rule-breaking ethic, and you've got trouble.
I would love for MIT to spend 90% of its money, and be back to 2000-era endowment. I would even more love for MIT to expand it's faculty and student bodies 10-fold, and give more people an opportunity to be there.
What I hate is MIT now being brand-obsessed, money-focused, hyper-competitive, and valuing high-impact and high-profit research over high-integrity research.
Dude obtained his PhD in 1991 and had some bad blood with his advisor. Coupled with the influx of Soviet talent and some stubborness with staying in academia, he had to deliver food and make sandwiches for almost a decade before finally landing a lecturer job and eventually academic breakthrough more than a decade after that.
I don't think a PhD is necessary to learn how to do research, however, and I think it's actually a bad way to learn how to do research. The system is quite abusive in my view and pays poorly. I think it's likely someone could do better by taking a well-paid job and going on long research sabbaticals every once in a while.
A while back I recall someone on HN comparing a PhD to an apprenticeship, which is not consistent with my experience. My PhD advisor did not provide a lot of value I couldn't have got on my own.
It can’t be both. PhDs can do more things this just become a professor, which does have a fixed number of spots.
a vigorous and unending renegotiation between management, the agents of management, and people who "do it", in action.. advanced negotiating tactic - broadly give public opinion in mainstream media about "shortages" of whatever it is that you want more control over.. next, read carefully for market change and new entrants.. rewards, feast on newbs and do-gooders with special offers and limited term deals.. repeat..
But what is so specific about your needs that the candidate absolutely must have a CS degree -- and for which it simply will not suffice, as is nearly universally standard throughout the industry, to have "equivalent experience"?
A strange view of the world (even the world programming), to say the least.
In general I find people without a CD degree don't get why clean code is important. Since I'm on a project with tens of millions of lines of code (big, but I'm well aware that other projects are much bigger) clean code is important.
For example, a person with a PhD in history will probably be a good writer and researcher, but may need a couple of years training and experience before they're an amazing journalist, for example, and may only be OK at PR, even after a couple of years. If you want PR 'talent' then the history PhDs would not be very helpful.
A bio PhD would be amazing at many things, but would probably suck as a nurse.
So it's not just the raw talent, but also training and inclination.
I know people doing/with PhDs who are great theoreticians and good programmers but I also know people who (will) have all the creds in the world but simply know fuck all about actually making useful software/anything. Even in an industrial research context they'd be less useful than you'd think because they wouldn't be able to translate it into useful business applications.
Yes they have specific expertise in some field. But also they know how to do intendent research. This is the critical skill.
Having a job doing valuable research would be nice. I'm not too picky about the topic, but it seems that most employers view the capabilities of a candidate very narrowly. So I'm probably stuck with things like what I did during my PhD.
Some of my friends were sent for about 1.5 months and had to postpone their three-month internship (sic!) at Google because of that. That was about five years ago. Some other had to wait months before being able to renew (sic!) their work visa. There are rumors of people waiting years without hearing back.
To compare, one can obtain a national German visa in a week or two after receiving an offer, if you have your university degree translated to German (not even apostille is required for lots of cases). This visa gets converted into a EU Blue Card once you arrive and apply for it, IIRC.
That's absolutely incorrect. The US is literally the number one destination of international migrants. [1]
[1]: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/top...
Also, my comment is clearly not a "random factoid". You can even see that Germany is the second one in the list (kinda to @yeputons's credit).
Finally, I don't appreciate the language policing. We can talk like normal human beings on HN, and save the corpo-speak for our day jobs.
The article is literally about a proposed relaxation of the visa policy for Russians with postgraduate science/tech degrees.
The only specific relaxation the article mentions is:
> The legislation includes language that would permit technically qualified Russians with masters or doctoral degrees in a range of fields to immigrate to the US without the usual visa requirement that they have a job lined up in advance. They would have to pass a US security background check.
As I said, getting the offer is the easy part. Lifting that requirements does little. They even say explicitly that some kind of "security background check" is still necessary.
A random story: a friend of mine (Software Engineer, LGBTQ+, smart and sociable folk) has tried to relocate to the US for years. They even got multiple offers in the same year with multiple entries to the H1-B lottery to increase their chances. No luck. In the end they simply relocated to London instead.
Another one: Massachusetts (yes, a state, not the federal government) have established a Global Entrepreneur in Residence Program several years ago using a loophole in H1-B visas. Quoting https://vdc.umb.edu/2019/04/20/how-does-the-massachusetts-gl...
> To smooth the path, Massachusetts established the Global Entrepreneur in Residence (GEIR) program. By working part-time at the University of Massachusetts, entrepreneurs can obtain a cap-exempt H-1B visa anytime during the year, since universities are exempt from the annual H-1B quota. The program gives an entrepreneur time to master the company building process, and document their talent and ability, so that they can eventually obtain a visa independent of the University of Massachusetts.
Another one, but I haven't heard it first-hand: Google typically does not even bother with H1-B last years, so unreliable it is. So the default route for a person who is needed in the US is to work in a London/Zurich office for a year and then apply via L1-B.
Maybe the campaign is aimed at people like "Wernher von Braun and Kurt Debus, later the first director of the Kennedy Space Center". Again, I don't think getting an offer for such kind of people is hard in any way.
- Maybe the campaign is aimed at people working in universities, which are H1-B cap-exempt. In that case, the lottery is lifted, which does make the process easier. Still not as easy as with Germany or the UK.
Once sanctions are lifted, they plan to go back.
How many sanctions were lifted since 2014? How many sanctions were lifted from Cuba since 1960s?
This of course can change any day, but for now SWIFT transfers still work with non-sanctioned banks (e.g. Tinkoff). So this may be a pretext.
The current "campaign to attract" will probably require travel to some random country first to get a visa, and presenting tons of random documentation, and waiting for arbitrary amounts of time in random places (US, Russia, third-party countries for a visa). It will only attract people who are truly hell-bent on moving specifically to the US.
However I wonder what the actual value now would be. They would get some inside info on some technology but it would be very far from the tech they got from WvB after WW2
So they expect people to shut up and work on supporting government goals in order to keep better living standard than “regular people”, like they themselves did in the Soviet era (yeah, at the time when just having stylish foreign clothes meant you were well connected, and above “regular people”). It's hard to imagine that someone with a decent IT career can see that as an opportunity.
However, there is enough swindling types to ride the “we are constantly reducing our dependence on imported technology” propaganda wave who try to make contacts with relevant officials in order to transfigure government budgets into personal wealth. There have been many companies relabeling Chinese hardware after making minimal changes, and there is going to be more. So, among other things, it was announced that we need “our own Github”, and they vaguely described it as some kind of “central source of open source”. Man, even I can make “my own Github”, and maybe even a second one if I'm not feeling lazy. That announcement only resulted in people scratching their heads and guessing whether Github would be blocked, and require additional network configuration to be accessed.
Those who could flee did it when planes were still flying, and dollars were still in the ATMs. Senior, highly paid, having an experience in working for an international company, currently hired by an international company — those have been moving abroad for years, had an option to quickly relocate with their families, and tried to keep their current jobs. The campaign would probably help to decrease pressure in Armenia, Georgia, and Turkey, which are now really full of Russian emigrants who don't have any specific plans.
As for the scientists, it has been common for the top students to go abroad for decades. Even if they intended to return, it could help with career opportunities and having better perspective. Also, some fields have been badly funded or badly managed, so some scientists basically had to move to work where they could do actual work.
The brain drain of 90-ties has resulted in severe impact to Russia - as you see there is no capable Generation X aged leadership in Russia with most of the areas of technology and military having made no noticeable progress - like for example those blood thirsty old generals having no idea about drones, cell networks, etc. and only capable of WWII style ruining of the cities using unguided bombs. Brain draining the next generation from Russia would tremendously deepen Russian impotence in tech/military/space/etc. over the next decade.
If the US is able to attract the majority of that (as it most likely will), while keeping out the Putin-aligned plants and/or otherwise mentally deficient factions (which remains to be seen), that will definitely be huge gain for them.
That remains to be seen. There is a huge undercurrent of Russophobia, and potential takers will have observed the FBI-led harassment of Chinese scientists (not too long ago a Tennessee jury refused to convict a Chinese national on account of the threadbare evidence), already these factors would make anyone coming from an enemy country hesitant. Combine that with funding and employment issues in the physical and life sciences - anyone young and ambitious would be well advised to settle in China instead.
I personally wouldn't count on China, an ethno-nationalist country that does not offer a pathway for naturalization for people who are not Chinese-passing, to provide a safe place for me or my family to reside. Not to mention the enormous scale of abuse of power the current Chinese government is engaging in.
Where? The highly skilled Russians part of the brain drain will most likely go to big cities, full of high earning and/or well educated people, not in hick towns full of xenofobic loonies.
Russians brain drain to the US is not something new, but has been going on for several decades and it seems to have worked fine for them.
Make sure that source shows that this hatred/dislike is against regular russian citizens and not the russian government.
I'm sure there are plenty of folks who are against regular russians, but I want evidence that it's some sort of major concern.
Anyway, take a look at reddit, which is full of highly-educated baristas from large American cities. A common sentiment is that the "average Russian citizen" should be out protesting, and that if they aren't, then they support the evil nazi leadership.
give me a break - chinese students with USA sponsorship write reports back to their sponsors, and some of them do grab data and code, by the thousands.. I have seen it on networks and I believe in person at University.. one line about alleged harassment is equivalent to nothing without that context
Right now the federales are coming after a mathematician from Southern Illinois University: https://www.science.org/content/article/trial-mathematician-...
Dude is interested in control theory and had a joint appointment at two Chinese universities. You do ask - what does the government hope to achieve?
Having said that, I can imagine that there would be (already is a) proxy brain drain from Russia to Dubai but catering to the Western customers.
I doubt this occurred at very many places, but anecdotally Poland gained a meaningful number of highly skilled tech workers. I haven't worked with any of the Russians, but many of my Polish counterparts hold the belief that the US is largely responsible for the invasion of Ukraine. I will be very interested to see immigration numbers of where Russians end up.
America doesn't need political purity tests, let them all come. If the concern is espionage, that's the FBI's concern to worry about. If the concern is them sending money back to Russia, simply forbid that. If the concern is their influence on American politics.. well that's a non-issue because native born Americans sympathetic to Putin far outnumber all the PhDs in Russia. And besides, American society can and should be able to tolerate dissent. A small number of wackos are outnumbered by reasonable people and aren't a realistic threat to the system.
hmm - working people usually send money to those that need it, whatever the language spoken...
because I could see gains for both US and Putin. US obviously gains with more smart people here working for the US and paying taxes. Putin gains because he remove smart people from Russia, making it easier to keep hold on power.
Do you want Stranger Things? Because that's how you get Stranger Things.