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Making private sector/startup consultancy really easy for professors to do is one of the main reasons there is an insane pickup of pace in the return of the diaspora. Many professors in my IIT suddenly have BMWs. I''ve never seen it before 2021ish. And yes, BMWs are a luxury car in India. And no. IITs being a government college don't pay professors enough for them to afford a luxury car on salary alone (in the context of financial conservativeness typical to india). For more context, my starting SWE job before I came back for M.S paid as much as my professor earned decades into his career, being dean, and having a couple of other responsibilities. - 50L per year (total comp, not base). Also helps that the STEM economy is picking up like crazy.

It is true that the govt institutions themselves have less IIT representation, mostly due to low salaries. However, what matters to the private sector is sources of capital. Tech investors in india usually went to IITs themselves, and so the ecosystem always remains close to IITs, allowing professors easy access. Lot of the startups (even YC ones!) by IIT students actually involved one of their professors in the ideation stage, and they even have equity % sometimes. Similar to Rajeev Motwani holding a stake in Google, they get really rich sometimes.

> Making private sector/startup consultancy really easy for professors to do is one of the main reasons there is an insane pickup of pace in the return of the diaspora

Yep! The University of Waterloo back in Ontario did the same thing in the 1960s, which helped catapult the program into a Tier 1 CSE program comparable to older more established programs like UToronto and UMich.

> Lot of the startups (even YC ones!) by IIT students actually involved one of their professors in the ideation stage, and they even have equity % sometimes

Yep! There are also some NIT, BITS Pilani, IIT, and other program specific networks made by their alumnis in academia and VC. I think Foundation Capital (Netflix, Cerebras, Fortanix) is running one such program.

> It is true that the govt institutions themselves have less IIT representation, mostly due to low salaries

Ministry affiliated universities are a major reason why. For example, ISRO overwhelmingly recruits from IIST, ONGC from IIPE, and other SOEs or R&D programs will recruit from universities specialized in that specific disciple instead of an IIT or NIT now.

Yeah, and the - often ignored in conversations - IIITs, are also quite strong.

> ministry affiliated

Ooh, didn't know that. Interesting.

> A nativist academic culture in STEM in the US would completely destroy any R&D capacity that even exists today.

Well, considering all other countries mentioned here are just hiring native people who worked in US. Indians are not hiring Chinese, or Europeans or any other than natively Indians. Same for Chinese or others. So nativist policy can for those countries but not US is strange.

If one sees crowd at US embassy or consulates in India, US has nothing to worry about talent not trying hard to come to US.

All this analysis about US downfall seems kind of assuming that rest of the world is doing lot better. Traveling to India in last few years and experiencing first hand tells me believing even 1% of these hype generators of India is believing too much.

As an Australian, I've seen recruiters from the US, Europe, Hong Kong, and Dubai. I think such offers are reflective of who pays more than Australia rather than nativism.

Since tech wages in the US are the highest anywhere in the world, with the possible exception of Monaco or something, I would imagine Americans don't see a lot of recruiters from elsewhere in the world. I would also imagine that's because it's harder to recruit someone who's earning American wages.

But these US wages aren't actually all that great anymore. The vast majority of people will have nothing to show for their decade of working in tech other than a bad back, carpal tunnel, and a neurosis.

The cost of living in the Bay Area creeps ever upward and absorbs just enough salary to keep the worker bees coming back to the office the next day. It's really not that different of a life than elsewhere in materialistic terms. Except there is also nothing to do other than work or go hiking. More and more people are cluing in.

If you can’t afford to live on 150k/year even in SF, that’s just poor financial planning…

It’s not like McDonald’s or Target don’t exist in SF. Those workers get paid way less than big tech and somehow they make rent every month. Yea, you might have to commute instead living within walking distance of the campus where you work, but that’s just being a responsible adult imo.

Levels.fyi puts the median software engineering salary in San Francisco at USD$238000, while the median where I currently live is USD$90000. That's 2.6x higher.

Yeah, I get it. The multiplier on the salary has gone down from 3.6x to 2.6x. A studio is ridiculously expensive, I once paid $2300/month to live in one room in the piss-soaked Tenderloin, I understand your pain. It's not as good as it sounds. Still ... if you were sitting in Germany or Dubai and had to decide which area to try to recruit from, do you think you'd choose the more expensive one unless you had no choice?

> The vast majority of people will have nothing to show for their decade of working in tech other than a bad back, carpal tunnel, and a neurosis.

If you're terrible with money, perhaps. Anyone making SWE wages in the bay area should be able to save a decent amount of money.

I think (or I hope) what they mean is long-term.

For a number of nationalities like Indians and Chinese, it takes 15-25 years to naturalize as a permanent resident/green card holder because of the backlogs and processing issues at USCIS.

That is a lot of instability, with various pitfalls at each step (eg. potentially getting deported if you cannot find a new job in 60 days after being terminated, increasingly needing to pay out of pocket to do visa processing instead of the company doing it).

More critically, if you have a kid and you as the parent do not get a green card by 21, they will be treated as a new applicant and will have to start the entire process from scratch.

If you are able to demand EU or Canada level salaries in India or China, you have no reason to deal with the kind of headaches I mentioned above. You could have put a similar amount of money purchasing real estate in Hyderabad or Hangzhou, or investing in the Chinese or Indian equities market which are both seeing an IPO boom, or founded your own startup without being scared of being the reason you and your dependents got booted out. You can't even justify buying a house or a condo because you won't even know if you'd be able to live there long term.

As a result, what you end up seeing is people from both countries increasingly viewing their stay in the US as temporary - so the American strategy of leveraging a brain drain to make more Americans is failing, becuase it is now becoming a reverse brain drain right when they are mid-career (so at their most valuable point from a human capital perspective).

This has been impacting everyone from line level IC engineers all the way up to even VPs at major companies and even a couple well know VCs I am acquaintances with.

I have heard endless stories since 2000s at least of how some mediocre teacher/professor from a midwest university got recruited by IITs or some such and now this will change everything with world class teaching/research faculties now being lured by IITs from top US institutions.

What media didn't cover is how after couple of years of "world class" living and working in Delhi/Gurgaon or some such they quietly came back to US on first chance to escape again. Funny thing is 20-25 years back those cities had better living condition than today in my first hand experience.

To my understanding living in US/Canada/UK/Australia is lot more tough today for citizens and immigrants alike. And immigration policies in west are reflection rather then reason for it.

Indians in America aren't eligible for an E3 like Australians are.

Furthermore, Indians in America face a 20-80 year permanent residency backlog depending on when they arrived in the US. The majority of Indians nationals in America will eventually return to India as a result.

The US is increasingly viewed as a temporary posting instead of as a naturalization destination becuase of the backlog, and most other Western countries don't provide lucrative offers for the cream of the crop compared to what they can demand in India.

For example, the average new grad salary at IIT Kanpur was around US$30K for the class of 2024 [0], and a mid-career TC of US$60k-70K is realistic for INI grads (as one of the other posters in this thread is an example of).

Most of India's R&D is overwhelmingly generated by alumni of these INIs, and the majority of investment is placed in these programs. These are also the kinds of programs that previously used to represent the bulk of the brain drain 15-20 years ago, but their grads overwhelmingly remain in India unless doing graduate school like a PhD or an MBA (these aren't the kinds of people doing an MSc in Business Analytics at Wollongong in order to get an Australian permanent residency), let alone accepting decades of indentured servitude due to the EB2 processing backlog.

[0] - https://m.economictimes.com/jobs/fresher/iit-kanpur-class-of...

I'm not sure what information you're trying to impart here, because I was talking about nativism in hiring practices and this has nothing to do with what I wrote.

I agree that Indians get fucked by the US when it comes to immigration and that the E-3 visa is awesome. What does that have to do with whether India, Europe, and China refuse to hire foreigners for nativist reasons? Did you reply to the wrong person by accident?

Whoops! I went 1 level too deep in the thread! Meant to reply to geodel

This all seems good thing to me. Good for India. Good for USA.

Ten out of thousand maybe great students, engineers, scientists etc. And no one is really stopping them from coming to US.

The only people who seem really unhappy about are those who benefit from supporting scam of bringing thousands below average in by picking examples from ten great ones.

>Well, considering all other countries mentioned here are just hiring native people who worked in US. Indians are not hiring Chinese, or Europeans or any other than natively Indians. Same for Chinese or others. So nativist policy can for those countries but not US is strange.

Context is not neutral. "We want to hold onto the labor we produce" works for labor exporters in a way that it doesn't work for labor importers.

This is one of the reasons India has a civilian spaceflight program.

The obvious overlap with military technology aside, it's a way to retain and increase the institutional knowledge within India across a lot of areas.

This is why all regional powers have a civilian space flight program - the same thing you mentioned but also it allows you to sidestep some international treaties around testing.

Indian spaceflight program done by ISRO have very few people from IITs or any of the so called elite colleges. Unlike china Indian colleges are really backward due to lack of research funding and a coaching industry which have gamified the entrance exams.

> Indian spaceflight program done by ISRO have very few people from IITs or any of the so called elite colleges

The bulk of recruitment at ISRO has always been happening at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST) and the Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc) - not IITs.

Even getting into an IIST or IISc is almost as difficult as getting into an old IIT based on the JEE cutoffs.

Both India and China have specialized institutions dedicated to subfields that end up getting the bulk of R&D funding in said subfields, for example, Petroleum Engineering and the China University of Petroleum and the Indian Institute of Petroleum Engineering, or in mining enigneeing, the China University of Mining and Technology and the Indian School of Mines (now IIT Dhanbad).

> Unlike china Indian colleges are really backward due to lack of research funding and a coaching industry which have gamified the entrance exams

China also bases acceptance on entrance exams - the Gaokao is equally as competitive as the JEE Advanced. The exact same gamification of entrance exams and coaching centers is sadly the norm in China as well, despite the Xi admin's initial attempts to crack down on it.

Additonally, Chinese R&D funding is also stratified the same way Indian R&D funding is.

The equivalent of a government engineering college in both China and India would be receiving relatively limited funding or autonomy, but a Double First Class University in China or an INI in India well get the first pick of research grants and subsidizes.

If there is a promising professor at a mid-tier program, they are likely affiliated and getting their funding via affiliation to a national academy like the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Most of the program directors and other technical staff comes from lower ranked colleges like CET Trivandrum rather than from IISc and IIST. They are not based on IIT Jee rankings.

https://www.youngpostclub.com/yp/discover/news/asia/article/...

China banned the private tuition for Gaokao. Even before, it was not open to gamification like rote learning a few physics, chemistry, mathematics questions are(in the case of JEE). There are rounds to the exam which deals with latent intelligence rather than rote learning of problems for patterns. JEE has multiple choice questions and other pattern matching questions while Gaokao emphasise on subjective understanding.

Chinese professors are well paid and there are various perks to being a professor in China. Its a lucrative job and was one of the most well sought job before the private sector gained over it. IIRC the cafetaria for professors were said to be one of the biggest perks over working in private sector(jokingly mentioned by a chinese friend). I am not sure how true that is now.

> Countries like India, Vietnam, and South Korea have begun replicating the Chinese Thousand Talents program to attract their diasporas back to domestic academia.

Really? I'm yet to meet a single diaspora (i.e. born/raised abroad) professor here in Korea and I interact with universities quite a bit.

Unless diaspora here includes those who did their full university education abroad though, lots of those indeed.

> Unless diaspora here includes those who did their full university education abroad though, lots of those indeed.

Yes. By definition these are diaspora members as well.

That makes sense then.

For what it's worth, I've really never seen pure international students really been included in that term, especially those that are the student equivalent of expats on a fixed-term contract - another group I've never seen included. In all discussions I've been part of, it' s about people with heritage from country A (whether born there or through family), but "settled" (or if a minor, being raised) in country B, with the above two groups not fitting into the "settled" part, planning to move back to A the second their contract(/term) ends. But I'm sure there's other valid definitions out there and it depends on the context and all.

Makes sense! Interesting how diaspora has a different definition in Korean versus English.