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

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31–40 of 42 posts

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

#31

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…

Seems fine as long as you treat whole EU as a single country otherwise, it seems unfair to people from other countries.

Just because a country is huge population wise shouldn't be consideration in who to employ.

India is diverse, it has many states with different culture and even color/looks on people.

India is more like EU and individual states are more like European countries like Germany, Netherlands. There only have very little in common with each other.

I really doubt you can identify a person from India just based on how he looks.

History is proof when meritocracy has been shunned because of these government policies, or nepotism - local companies and economy has always lost.

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

#32
Apple is pretty much an exception of a hardware company that still shine as a cool place to work. These traditional industrial jobs have moved abroad a long time ago. You will find at most prototyping in the US, however everything is manufactured in China. The pandemics has proven that. Even on sensitive medical equipment, the mass production takes place in China.

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

#33
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>China is, empirically, far more successful at producing engineers

This is baffling. The article is lamenting the fact that industry has been outsourced. There are few American engineers because there are so few American engineering jobs left. The American education system produced something like half of all new technology in the 20th century. Americans are obviously not less capable of being engineers than Chinese people.

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

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't write "Silicon Valley", and I didn't notice you saying "Silicon Valley", until now.

Maybe you could clarify with some examples of the companies you're talking about, in SF, that mostly draw on local talent and resources.

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

#35
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…

The idea that Mike Janicek and Bob Mansfield are the only guys willing to do the work for the incredibly low fees Apple will provide while all these manufacturing engineers turn up their noses beggars belief.

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

#36
post #32

Apple is pretty much an exception of a hardware company that still shine as a cool place to work. These traditional industrial jobs have moved abroad a long time ago. You will find at most prototyping in the US, however everything is manufactured in China. The pandemics has proven that. Even on sensitive medical equipment, the mass production takes place in China.

This is what I thought too, but I’ve been told that there’s a lot of fantastic manufacturing expertise in the defense industry? Boeing, Lockheed Martin etc.?

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

#37
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…

Also consider that most Mechanical Engineers desire making flashy products that are consumer facing than boring machines or parts that sits in a factory. This is also reflected in salary, mechanical design engineers are generally paid better than a manufacturing engineer.

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

#38
post #17

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?

   the article is saying there are tons of qualified Chinese for certain jobs and barely any qualified Americans.
The article makes no such case. It merely quotes Apple executives claiming that with no supporting data.

Apple has spent most of a generation offshoring all of its manufacturing. Now, they whine that people stopped pursuing manufacturing-oriented degrees (because there weren't domestic jobs anymore for them to land in)?

It's like the Menendez brothers seeking sentencing leniency "because, hey, we're orphans now!"

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

#39
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

  the claims in the article, which are very specific
Hardly. Their entire research for that content in this article is just offhand comments by Apple executives -- the most biased possible source.

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

#40

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…

H-1B is a temporary work visa. You’ll be happy to know there is already a per country cap on green cards. Maybe there should be a per country cap on the path to citizenship of undocumented immigrants also ? Otherwise Indians may just overstay their visa and use that ?

> education and knowledge should not be exported

Not sure a country that bans export of knowledge has much knowledge to export to begin with. I suspect you are more interested in a one way valve for knowledge and brains. You can get in but can’t get out. But with a per country cap for both knowledge and brains ?

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