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Apple still depends on traditional American engineers, and is slowly losing them

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Re: Apple still depends on traditional American engineers, and is slowly losing them

#21

Post by closeparen »

IlyaMoroshkin wrote: post #5

The US needs to improve its immigration system so that it can hire these smart engineers, from places like Europe in particular. Right now, the current H1B system is totally dominated by Indians, who make up 70% of the intake. The scheme seems designed to undercut American salaries, rather than enhance American companies with highly skilled workers. The scheme should be redesigned with a higher minimum salary, and a…

You're missing the very important concept of soft power. We don't need to defeat our enemies using superior proprietary knowledge. Instead we export our cultural memes to them until they're no longer motivated to be enemies. We get far more influence and respect as the destination for international students the world over, than we do as the owner of an aircraft carrier.

They have to put up walls to keep Americanism out and their own citizens in. NATO was about piercing the Iron Curtain, not building our own parallel to it.

Re: Apple still depends on traditional American engineers, and is slowly losing them

#22

Post by unishark »

kootling wrote: post #2

Main point of the article (quoted): > In 2017, Tim Cook came as close as he ever has to publicly addressing the issue. "In the US," he said, "you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I'm not sure you could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields." One possible reason for this is that US education is generally broad compared to other countries. No one in America majors in "tool engin…

Another possible reason is they give "engineering" jobs and degrees to almost anyone with a pulse. Much easier to pull off what you're paying the $50 per day or whatever it is to operate a machine as a technician.

Re: Apple still depends on traditional American engineers, and is slowly losing them

#23

Post by geofft »

unishark wrote: post #20
geofft wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing in the article to imply that these "smart engineers" exist in Europe, is there? Nor is there anything to imply that the US education system has the ability to produce them. But they certainly exist, and are being trained, in China.

> Nor is there anything to imply that the US education system has the ability to produce them. Are you serious? Maybe you mean has the capacity or willing students or something? Because if you're saying US education is somehow inferior to Asia or whatever, then you have been misled. US schools produce exactly what US firms demand of their graduates. Industry quite literally sets the demands for degrees in engineering…

I am going by the claims in the article, which are very specific about how China is, empirically, far more successful at producing engineers skilled in this particular discipline than the US. Perhaps the US education system is capable of it, if it tried. (Actually, almost certainly the US is capable of it, there's nothing about geography or ethnicity or law to prevent it.) But the US does not, nonetheless.

It seems a lot of people are discussing something which is related to immigration but not related to the topic of the article.

Re: Apple still depends on traditional American engineers, and is slowly losing them

#24

Post by renewiltord »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #13
renewiltord wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People ask me why I don't want programmer unions. This is why. This will be in the top 5 things on their agenda. Not interested in making America some sort of loser fiefdom operated by the inadequate who need regulation because they cannot compete. No way. Besides, if Europe is so great, maybe there would be this massive collection of great tech companies there. Instead, 49 square miles in America has produced more e…

> Not interested in making America some sort of loser fiefdom operated by the inadequate who need regulation because they cannot compete. No way. Only if ability to compete is defined as accepting a much smaller wage for the same job with the same skill level. The way you get 'fiefdoms' is by helping companies build up enormous piles of profit without paying their workers well.

America is a beautiful land of opportunity for folks in tech. The exploited/exploiter dichotomy is a problem for someone whose primary advantage is being a native English speaker and located in the US. That sort of engineer is already been commodified away by the thousands by remote engineering teams from Gdansk to Lahore to Manila. He has one more generation while the young Asians start up as native English speakers and everyone gets used to remote workers.

On the other hand, the engineer whose primary advantage is his engineering is super-charged by focusing on where he provides comparative advantage.

Yeah, it turns out updating your Coldfusion website to display a notice on Sunday is something a child can do, and making a scalable backend for Dropbox's storage requires immense expertise. If you're the first guy, the writing is on the wall. If you're the second guy, the less time you spend on things that don't require your skill, the more valuable you are.

Re: Apple still depends on traditional American engineers, and is slowly losing them

#25

Post by geofft »

kbrwn wrote: post #9
IlyaMoroshkin wrote: post #5

The US needs to improve its immigration system so that it can hire these smart engineers, from places like Europe in particular. Right now, the current H1B system is totally dominated by Indians, who make up 70% of the intake. The scheme seems designed to undercut American salaries, rather than enhance American companies with highly skilled workers. The scheme should be redesigned with a higher minimum salary, and a…

A ton of amazing engineers and founders are born in India, China, and South East Asia also many from Eastern Europe and Russia. How would limiting the migration of these people help the USA or companies founded in the USA? NATO is a military alliance between democratic and semi-democratic governments it does not represent a framework for any sort of education based immigration system.

(It does, however, represent a fantastic framework for an ethnically-based immigration system, if that happens to be the goal.)

Re: Apple still depends on traditional American engineers, and is slowly losing them

#26

Post by renewiltord »

perl4ever wrote: post #15
renewiltord wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies started in SF, grown in SF, serve the world. SF engineers with SF money in SF offices made that. These mythical super-Europeans we're supposed to pin our hopes on have nothing to show for it but Jetbrains, Deep Mind, and SAP (successful companies, yes, but three countries' worth to match one tiny piece of land). No disrespect intended. They run things in Europe the way they want to. But regulating to ensure…

I have no disagreement with your final sentence, but I still take issue with attributing purported value created by people in the vicinity of SF with SF itself and concluding that the key to that sort of success is how SF is run. Delaware, a state of somewhere around a million people, has "over half" the companies on the S&P 500. That's like $15 trillion in market cap. That's a reasonable sized stock market for a bil…

Are you saying I'm attributing Silicon Valley's achievements to SF? I wasn't intending to do that. I was talking about solely SF companies because that illustrates the point on its own, but we can make it the SJ-SF-Oak CSA if you'd like. But that sort of blows Europe's tech companies out of the water. I wanted to keep it in the range of comparison.

Re: Apple still depends on traditional American engineers, and is slowly losing them

#27

Post by unishark »

geofft wrote: post #17
IlyaMoroshkin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because otherwise people from the biggest countries dominate the system simply due to their high population numbers, and then distort the host society and its immigration system to suit their needs. Immigration knowledge becomes monopolised. To put it simply - Indians, when they have established themselves, hire more Indian migrants, at the expense of others. Lookup Infosys discrimination in the USA, this is establis…

Still not sure what this has to do with the article - the article is saying there are tons of qualified Chinese for certain jobs and barely any qualified Americans. Should the American companies do without, then? How will that help American companies compete against Chinese companies?

In terms of simple microeconomics they need to offer more pay. It's supply and demand for labor. The entire temporary visa game is practically designed to warp the economics. Step 1: hire a ton of temporary workers during boom years and more accommodating political times to up the supply of labor, step 2: demonstrate that you can't find new people with paying the going market rate in a market already dominated by those temporary workers, and hence can only continue the status quo by bringing in yet more temporary workers. Well no kidding.

US students who choose to go into other areas which are protected politically (like medicine) are responding rationally.

Also US firms' unwillingness, by and large, to train new hires is another artificial and solvable aspect of the problem.

Re: Apple still depends on traditional American engineers, and is slowly losing them

#28

Post by geofft »

unishark wrote: post #27
geofft wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still not sure what this has to do with the article - the article is saying there are tons of qualified Chinese for certain jobs and barely any qualified Americans. Should the American companies do without, then? How will that help American companies compete against Chinese companies?

In terms of simple microeconomics they need to offer more pay. It's supply and demand for labor. The entire temporary visa game is practically designed to warp the economics. Step 1: hire a ton of temporary workers during boom years and more accommodating political times to up the supply of labor, step 2: demonstrate that you can't find new people with paying the going market rate in a market already dominated by tho…

OK, but the article also gives multiple examples of having to hire back the same (American) worker after they left because nobody else could do it.

So either the market doesn't work at all and cannot exhibit enough demand to cause a supply to exist (perhaps the offered pay would need to be so high that the endeavor ceases to be profitable?), in which case throwing government regulation at the market to artificially restrict supply certainly won't help anything, or companies are able but unwilling to pay high enough wages, at which point we're proposing using government regulation to punish American businesses who don't work the way we want in the hope that they concede defeat, which hardly strikes me as a pro-American position - and more practically doesn't seem like a way to make American business more competitive.

Re: Apple still depends on traditional American engineers, and is slowly losing them

#29

Post by ashtonkem »

IlyaMoroshkin wrote: post #5

The US needs to improve its immigration system so that it can hire these smart engineers, from places like Europe in particular. Right now, the current H1B system is totally dominated by Indians, who make up 70% of the intake. The scheme seems designed to undercut American salaries, rather than enhance American companies with highly skilled workers. The scheme should be redesigned with a higher minimum salary, and a…

Immigration should be thought more in terms of importing educational budgets. If a skilled laborer immigrates, you’ve gained access to their skills while not paying for their education; effectively importing the cost of whatever it took to educate them.

Re: Apple still depends on traditional American engineers, and is slowly losing them

#30

Post by unishark »

geofft wrote: post #28
unishark wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of simple microeconomics they need to offer more pay. It's supply and demand for labor. The entire temporary visa game is practically designed to warp the economics. Step 1: hire a ton of temporary workers during boom years and more accommodating political times to up the supply of labor, step 2: demonstrate that you can't find new people with paying the going market rate in a market already dominated by tho…

OK, but the article also gives multiple examples of having to hire back the same (American) worker after they left because nobody else could do it. So either the market doesn't work at all and cannot exhibit enough demand to cause a supply to exist (perhaps the offered pay would need to be so high that the endeavor ceases to be profitable?), in which case throwing government regulation at the market to artificially r…

> So either the market doesn't work at all and cannot exhibit enough demand to cause a supply to exist (perhaps the offered pay would need to be so high that the endeavor ceases to be profitable?), in which case..

Perhaps not though, in which case we don't need to follow this line of thinking to the end of the world. The US isn't lacking in college students or workers, just ones willing to work in one of the hardest majors while being treated as a commodity that includes workers from developing countries.

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