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Comment by glitchc | Hacker News Reader

I concur with the outcome but not with the cause.

A big part of the problem is management at American firms. They are rarely, if ever, run by engineers at the helm. If you put arts and business majors in charge, it's no surprise that outputs look like art and business projects. These leaders pick people just like them at all tiers. Those who do boring and honest engineering work are shunned, excluded from promotions and left out of the leadership circle. It's little wonder that all of the real engineers depart for greener pastures.

Fix leadership and you will fix American industry.

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I think the problem lies with the American polity, values, and business environment, and not industry leadership per se. Smart new grads generally go where the money is, and for the last 20 years that has meant either finance or big data firms that may have no interest in real technical progress.

> Smart new grads generally go where the money is, and for the last 20 years that has meant either finance or big data firms

Software TC has outpaced high finance for almost 15 years now, especially for the kinds of candidates who had the option between the two.

I went to one of those universities where CS grads had the option between being a Quant at Citadel, an APM at Google, or an SWE working on an ML research team. Most CS students chose 2 and 3 because the hours worked were shorter than 1 and the hourly wage and TC was largely comparable.

> may have no interest in real technical progress.

Hard to make technical progress as (eg.) a cybersecurity company when most CS programs do not teach OS development beyond a cursory introduction to systems program, and in a lot of cases don't introduce computer architecture beyond basic MIPS.

The talent pipeline for a lot of subdisciplines of CS and CE has been shot domestically for the past 10-15 years when curricula were increasingly watered down.

The talent pipeline was shut down because adtech sucked most of the oxygen out of the room, and consolidation by hyperscalers finished off what was left. Big data firms simply don’t need the same headcounts to maintain their infrastructure - it is arguably the whole point of their business.

I have spent over a decade asking myself when the systemic cost of this would be realized. Better now than in another 10 years - all of the cohort that predates this will have aged out of the workforce by then.

> The talent pipeline was shut down because adtech sucked most of the oxygen out of the room, and consolidation by hyperscalers finished off what was left

I've been in this space as an IC, a Manager, and a VC and trust me when I say the education standards have been watered down in CS for 10 years now, that I no longer have a pipeline to train detection engineers, exploit developers, eBPF developers, and others out of college in the US.

Just take a look at the curriculum changes for the CSE major (course 6-3) at MIT in the 2025 [0] versus 2017-22 [1] versus pre-2017 [2] - there is a steady decrease in the amount of EE/CE content and an increased amount in math. Nothing wrong with increasing the math content, but reducing the ECE content in a CSE major is bad given how tightly coupled software is with hardware. We are now at a point where an entire generation of CSE majors in America do not know what a series or parallel circuit is.

And this trend has been happening at every program in the US over the past 10 years.

[0] - https://eecsis.mit.edu/degree_requirements.html#6-3_2025

[1] - https://eecsis.mit.edu/degree_requirements.html#6-3_2017

[2] - https://www.scribd.com/document/555216170/6-3-roadmap

> I went to one of those universities where CS grads had the option between being a Quant at Citadel, an APM at Google, or an SWE working on an ML research team

I find it interesting that you are trying to find fault in my position while describing the same phenomenon in even greater detail than I could have myself. All of the roles you list are broadly aligned with the finance or adtech industries, which simply do not employ people with the skills you desire in sufficient numbers. The talent you seek is following the money, just like your peers did.

Management culture has issues, but in the tech industry, management has been technical in nature for a generation now.

I've funded startups in Israel and the US, and trust me when I say that the mindset of the average IC engineer in Israel versus the US is a night and day difference.

The Israeli IC will be extremely opinionated and will fight for their opinions, and if it makes sense from a business perspective, the strategy would change. But the Israeli IC when fighting these battles would also try to make a business case.

On the other hand, when I used to be a SWE, I almost never saw my peers try to fight for engineering positions while also leveraging arguments supporting the business. That's why I became a PM, but I noticed the same IC SWEs like the former overwhelmingly became PMs. And then a subset of those PMs become founders or VCs like I did.

I've found solutions and sales engineers to be the best management track individuals - technical enough to not be bullshitted by a SWE who really really loves this specific stack, but also business minded enough to drive outcomes that generate revenue.

But anyhow, the point is there is a mindset issue amongst Americans across the entire gamut of the American tech industry - especially amongst those who started their careers in the past 10 years.

That’s not because they have different engineering perspectives, that’s an Israeli cultural trait. Israeli’s tend to index more towards directness in their communication. That’s definitely not the case with someone from, say, India.

Americans fall somewhere in between.

True, but it still doesn't detract from the skills issues I have mentioned ad nauseum.

I am basically paying 1.5-2x for talent who lacks basic domain experience depending on the subfield.

American managers do not tolerate dissent and that creates culture of saying only yes.

These cultural aspects are always set at the top. The bottom people react to what the leaders do, what they reward and what they punish.

This is the reason. I logged in to basically say the same thing. I used to be this way, and give opinions, but you cause problems over time that ends up with you getting disciplined in subtle ways or fired.

Yeah, it’s hilarious to be having this conversation about MLEs while attributing the bad outcomes to anything other than poorly designed reward functions, i.e. management. If an engineer burned millions on failed training runs because they did a shit job of creating a policy that maximized for the desired outcome, they’d get canned, but that’s just a Tuesday for your average MBA with VC backing.

It’s more nuanced than that. Americans on the west coast can express dissent; the means, however, are indirect and easily missed by managers who lack cross cultural competence. There’s also less motivation for a worker at a large successful American firm to express dissent in the first place. Employees at smaller firms speak up earlier.

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