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Comment by johnnyanmac | Hacker News Reader

It's falling out in America precisely because we don't pay for good talent. So most talent flows into China. So, no surprise they are kicking the Us's butt in hardware while they are only now starting to build Silicon manufacturing plants domestically.

That's alway the issue with outsourcing. You rely exclusively on middlemen, middlemen will realize they can cut out their middlemen and just go directly to the customers.

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>> It's falling out in America precisely because we don't pay for good talent. So most talent flows into China.

These claims are quite hard to square with the long waits for H1B visas, extremely high salaries in the technology sector and net immigration to the US from China.

I’m not aware of any Americans or Europeans in my network who have gone the other direction to China.

Perhaps you have different data about the demand for tech worker visas in China.

I think we're focusing on the wrong degrees. Replies assume I was focusing on "information engineering" when I was instead talking about the "electrical engineering".

EE as a US career is night and day from Software centered engineers. Night and day from 20 years ago as well.

http://www.talentsquare.info/blog/fall-engineering-jobs-elec...

I don't think it's much of a controversial take to suggest that China is kicking the US's butt in silicon chip production. EE's are one of the primary fields traditionally seeked to work with this.

> I don't think it's much of a controversial take to suggest that China is kicking the US's butt in silicon chip production. EE's are one of the primary fields traditionally seeked to work with this.

That will be controversial until mainland China produces modern process chips economically (they can do one or the other so far). Rather Taiwan and South Korea are not the EE powerhouses. China though pays better than Taiwan (a lot of the hardware researchers in my Beijing lab were from Taiwan and Korea).

If (or when) mainland China gets up to speed with modern silicon process, it'll slot in nicely with the rest of the hardware work chain involved in producing electronics, which they pretty much own at this point.

Yes, and it is only a matter of when. But the material science and the lithography, there aren't any shortcuts for them to take there, it will still take awhile.

Grandparent was talking about hardware. Despite hardware being deep tech, the compensation is so different that it's practically a non-sequitur to refer to "high salaries in the technology sector" in a discussion about hardware. I don't know how many of those H1Bs are coming as electrical engineers; some, I'm sure, but I don't know how it measures against counterflows back into China.

China doesn't really pay hardware people well (even compared to local standard) either.

Most of the talent that flows into China is Chinese, their biggest challenge has always been keeping talent flowing out of China rather than attracting talent in. I don’t think any of these new AI efforts include non-Chinese principals, while western efforts almost certainly include more than a few.

It's not really about AI, it's about silicon. America sized down and dismantled the domestic silicon factories to the point where Biden had to star an initiative in early 2023 to get them back.

I think the plan was to have it built by 2027, but who knows now. Meanwhile, Trump called the CHIPS act "ridiculous" (very optimistic future, clearly) and just imposed tariffs on Taiwan.

I didn't hear about tariffs on Taiwan yet before this morning, I can't believe Trump is this dumb.

I just bought a new laptop last night just in case. A refurbished M3 Max with enough memory to run DeepSeek 70b :).

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