The most concerning quote: "About 80 percent of Chinese students who get degrees abroad now go back — up from about 33 percent in 2007, according to China’s Ministry of Education. Some 15 percent take jobs in China’s booming tech sector."<p>Attracting top global talent has always been a competitive advance for America, and it's not a good sign for our economy if we can't retain people that we are educating here.
Does anybody know how hard it is for non-Chinese citizens to live and work in China?<p>One of the competitive advantages of the US has been its ability to draw top talent from all over the world and not just its own citizens. Chinese citizens leaving the US is not a good thing, but it is just one nationality. If China manages to draw talent from everywhere, then the US has a real problem ahead of it.<p>For example, my team in the US only has a few US citizens on it, most of us are foreigners who moved here for the opportunities. While a few are Chinese, the majority are from countries other than China and the US.
> China’s tech sector has its own shorthand to describe the hours that employees work in the country: “9-9-6,” meaning from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.<p>> “Our factories are still talking to us at 10 p.m. or 11 p.m., sometimes well into midnight. They’re working on weekends, so things get done much faster,” Gui said. “Whereas back in San Francisco, after 5 p.m. people won’t respond to your emails and you can’t get anything done until the next day.”<p>If that is the price of fast innovation, I rather be a bit slow.
Eh, as a third culture kid with a US passport and 50%+ friends being international/TCK - it's honestly because the VISA process is appalling.<p>Out of a sample of 10 international students I went to school with at Stanford 20 years ago (I just eyeballed my FB friend list and took 10, totally biased anec-data I know):<p>• 4 are now citizens - all their green card processes took 7+ years, except the one person who got it via marriage<p>• 2 are STILL in the green card process<p>• 1 intentionally went home for opportunity<p>• 3 left due to VISA expiration issues. 2 went to Europe, 1 went to Canada. 2 are CS grads, 1 has a PhD in ML.<p>It massively sucks. We're talking about amazingly resourceful people who got raised at whatever sheep farm in Kenya and Uzbekistan, made it all the way to Stanford via merit-based scholarships and what not, and then got ejected from the US because national policy... and now some other country with friendlier VISA policies got 'em.
> “Wang said the salaries of his 40-person team for two years cost $700,000.”<p>Good luck with that. If you’re averaging $10k per employee per year over the long term, I guarantee anyone with the ability to be a good engineer is still going to come to the US where they can make orders of magnitude more.
More than that: the US gov't has declared their own tech giants a threat. Meanwhile, the Chinese gov't is supporting theirs as a potential goldmine on all fronts: national security, foreign policy, economic.
<i>"Wang Meng Qiu, a startup founder who graduated from Stanford University with a doctorate in computer science, held jobs at Facebook and Twitter in Silicon Valley before he moved to the outskirts of Shanghai to launch his own drone company, Zero Zero Robotics.<p>Wang said the salaries of his 40-person team for two years cost $700,000."</i><p>Generously assuming that the full 40-person team didn't onboard until year 2, that's an annual average salary of only 17,500 USD per person. I know the software development labour is cheaper in China, but quick comparisons indicate that something is off with this figure. Maybe most of the 40-person team are on an assembly line?
Silicon Valley has changed a lot in the last 20-30 years.<p>The ability to physically design and create things has basically disappeared. I'm not only talking about chips, but mechanical, electrical engineering and all the miscellaneous disciplines associated with creating something in one place.<p>That used to be the strength of the valley.<p>If you want to do software, ok, but that's arguably less location dependent.
Talent will follow opportunity, so this shift in sentiment may reflect the relative outlook on the level of opportunity that US provides relative to China, at least for those who are able to work in China.<p>As an aside, the American immigration system leaves a lot to be desired in terms of its efficiency, and may be a contributing factor.
We're quite far from the scale tipping in that direction, but it makes me curious about whether the US government has the legal authority to say "educating foreigners is no longer in the national interest, therefore it is no longer a valid reason to remain in the United States" and decimate the foreign student population essentially overnight.
Quality of life (e.g. security, stability, happiness) for the average citizen in the US seems to be on a downward trend. I imagine that is a big factor for foreign tech workers leaving the country. It's not all about money.
An interesting tidbit for non-Mandarin Chinese speakers. The sea turtle doesn’t refer to analogy of grown sea turtles returning to their home when young, but it’s a homonym to 海歸 (same sounds as sea turtle 海龜), that roughly means “return from sea (ie. abroad)”.
If China can continue this growth, this trend will continue. But China's financial system is a house of cards and it's unclear if they will make it out of the next recession without significant damage. There's serious strategic threats including opaque financial system, improper banking controls massive "market rigging" and government corruption. No one knows the true state of the Chinese economy, including China itself.<p>I wonder how many of these employees will make it back to the West eventually. Big <i>if</i> obviously as there are many unknowns.<p><a href="https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/2173461/china-underestimating-its-us3-trillion-dollar-debt-and-could" rel="nofollow">https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/2173461/c...</a><p><a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/ben-bernanke/2016/03/08/chinas-transparency-challenges/" rel="nofollow">https://www.brookings.edu/blog/ben-bernanke/2016/03/08/china...</a><p><a href="https://www.ft.com/content/961b4b32-3fce-11e9-b896-fe36ec32aece" rel="nofollow">https://www.ft.com/content/961b4b32-3fce-11e9-b896-fe36ec32a...</a>
Honestly,<p>If the Chinese can be prevented from exporting their version of the prison state, this could be a good thing in the near-medium term. (The U.S. imprisons the most per capita)<p>China needs smart people there to transition the economy. India has been massively slowed down by the brain drain to the U.S.<p>The more people out of poverty, the better.
A lot of these conversations miss two aspects completely:<p>1. Smart STEM people are more inclined to having a family. Constant uncertainty is not conducive to family. That will cause a lot of smart people to be sea turtles.<p>2. The most significant drawback of smart people congregating elsewhere is that future American companies are fucked. There is just going to be a lot more competition for products globally. Future Apple will have to fight Chinese companies in India. Mariott will have to fight Oyo in China. Future Tesla will have to fight BYD in Europe.<p>A LOT of our stock wealth is because other companies couldn't innovate as rapidly because the US was draining those countries of this talent pool. With this reversal, American companies will have a smaller pool of talent and will get whacked everywhere. Its super unfortunate.
Nothing to be surprised about.<p>Hometown is almost more attractive if other factors considered to be irrelevant. You have your native language, your family around, the food and just familiarity of things, as comparing to be a foreigner in a country that constantly put your status at risk.<p>Why America if it is hostile? What for?
As long as people keep coming to the US to get an education, that helps the economics of academia; out-of-state tuition paid for by somebody else (usually, countries or rich families) is $$$$. Maybe the problem is the US isn't as welcoming socially, politically or bureaucratically (visa process) as it once was? That's a PR image problem that the current political climate tarnished through inept and ignorant messaging.
Well of course they're leaving, I'm seeing firsthand how hard it is for them to stay here. Employment authorization takes so long that I've seen students lose the internships and job offers they have lined up. That's on top of all the culture/language differences and whatnot. I don't blame them one bit for going back home.
It doesn't make sense for America to educate its rivals. We should also be wary of Universities turning into backdoor immigration schemes - this has already happened in Australia and lead to a massive reduction in education quality.<p>The focus should be on training Americans to fill American jobs - and any immigration scheme should be arranged with military, economic, and cultural Allies only (UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea).
Did I read it correctly? Threatened 'brain drain'? So 'brain drain' to US is being viewed as a positive thing?<p>I think the idea is to send people back to build their countries, not to stay here to build America. This is indeed a good news that we are spreading the talents and knowledge and eventually prosperity more evenly across the globe. US has enjoyed this monopoly over talents for too long, and that is probably not a good thing and definitely shouldn't be taken for granted.