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Comment by SenHeng | Hacker News Reader

Is the tech talent pool really that good?

I was there a decade ago and many foreign run startups were adamant about not hiring Singaporeans for creative or software engineering positions. Something something lack of initiative and free/critical thinking skills. The admin and finance side were mostly Singaporeans though.

To be fair, I am an ex-Singaporean and no longer keep up with matters concerning the island. Left because of the stifling (physical/cultural/political) environment. I visit every few years and find little has changed in those regards.

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When I visited in 2013, the NTU was churning out lots of highly skilled and highly motivated engineers every year. If they kept up the pace, they should have a bigger talent pool than Germany by now... In part, that's also because Germany had more stipends for gender studies than for mathematics in recent years, while STEM knowledge is still strongly supported and highly prestigious in South East Asian cultures.

I had the precisely the same experience as a developer there several years ago. Wasnt just the critical/free thinking skills though, developer jobs were disrespected and poorly paid and ambitious people would aim for better paid middle management, civil service, finance or even real estate jobs. Really good developers tended to emigrate to the US.

The government had a bad case of silicon valley envy though and would throw money at things local tech CEOs told them would be a good idea.

Things have changed dramatically and continues to in the wake of China-US tensions (many Chinese companies setting up shop in SG to avoid a risk of getting frozen out from western market access), HK imploding, Shanghai lockdown troubles and political instability in Malaysia

On fin tech, there’s Silicon Valley style critical mass now.

No longer. At least in my space (Data Science), I've been able to hire good Singaporean talent from NUS/NTU

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