Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

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The reality is you couldn't hand over jobs to the most qualified person. In most cases the most qualified person already works for you (or is you!), and just needs an assistant who by definition is less qualified.

Suppose you found someone at your competitor who is doing your exact same job (already unlikely - their have a different structure in some way that is important) who is better than you. Would they be willing to move to where you company is? Would your company be willing to pay enough to make them join? Even if the above are true, all those structures your company has that are different mean there will be some time before they are better than you.

Most jobs don't need the best person. Is my doctor the best in the world - probably not - but she is more than good enough for my needs.

Though I have to object to your 95% number. Most people in the world do not have the education that the US provides. Most people are not fluent in English which is almost always a critical part of working for a company in the US. Once you add those requirements, the something closer to 50% of the most qualified people for your job live in the US (now if New Zealand was your country 95% of the most qualified don't live there - and most probably wouldn't want to move even though it is apparently a nice country)

Which is to say even if there was unlimited immigration allowed, your best hire in the US will be an American in most cases.

Though it doesn't matter who is most qualified you need to a plan to mentor and train up the younger generation. (who then grow old and train the next generation)

Your hypothesis straight up assumes that a) Americans have the best possible education required for the work (we don't; functional illiteracy has never been higher in the last few decades). And b) Americans are the most fluent in English (again see a.).

Even if the above assumptions are true the set of Americans who are qualified will be completely outnumbered by, say, even 2% of qualified people from a huge population like China/India/etc.

Your first assumption is completely and utterly wrong. I do not require anyone to have the best education. America does have a great education system. Do others do better? Well, that's very, very arguable, but let's accept it for discussion. The American education system is still very good. For most purposes, the American education system is more than good enough for the job at hand, and so it doesn't matter that an arbitrary education system is better since better doesn't matter once you've crossed the line of knowing the required material.

As for English, most Americans have English as a first language. Now there are certainly accent differences, but that actually plays in the favor of Americans when you're in the U.S. I can understand someone from Australia. However, they do speak a little different and I have to work a little bit at it. That makes them worse at any communication they would have to do with me. The majority of the world does not speak English as a first language. Some people are better than others, but the vast, vast majority of people I've heard who don't live in America have poor English skills. Sure, in countries like England or New Zealand, they will have great English skills as well, but when you get to Germany, some have great, some can just barely get by, and some, despite years of studying, can't actually speak it. Germans are one of the more likely people to have good English skills. If we were to go to China or India, English gets really really hard to understand. Their grammar is typically very very wrong.

Two billion people between India and China with rough numbers, two percent of that is about the population of the US. You're not looking at overwhelming the number of people in the US with only 2% of your population, at most half, and that is before we get into it, there are a lot of people in India and China who are older and not well educated. By contrast, your older people in the US are still likely to have had a fair amount of school and so be better.

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