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Singapore, where have all your talent gone?

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Re: Singapore, where have all your talent gone?

#11

Post by stan_rogers »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #9

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but in this case, both British and American English would say that the correct word is "has" and not "have" in the title? I know British English is a little different when referring to entities comprised of many people, but in this case, the the "have" refers to "your talent" and not "Signapore" and, as such, should be "has" instead?

"Your talent" would be a collective noun in this case, referring not to the talent held by an individual, but the pool of talented people to draw upon. The usage is analogous to team or crowd in this sense. (And yes, you could use the singular, shift mental gears to anthropomorphize Singapore and assign it the quality of talent, and keep the same overall meaning with a minor shift in grammar and metaphor. And who said English is a simple language?)

Re: Singapore, where have all your talent gone?

#12

Post by jbm »

muhfuhkuh wrote: post #10
ashray wrote: post #3

Singapore is a pretty great place. That said, the place is freakishly expensive. I recently looked at Singapore as an option to move there and start up a.. startup. The entrepass will require $50,000 of paid up capital plus yadda yadda. That is, post company registration: http://www.mom.gov.sg/foreign-manpower/passes-visas/entrepas... Following that, there are quite a few hoops to jump through but the worst part is t…

I think that Singapore is suffering from almost exactly the same problem as Vancouver, Canada. It's a fantastic city enveloped by the ocean and mountains, has world-class cuisine, and city planning that has a semblance of sanity to most observers. Yet, the young brains are draining en masse for Montreal and Toronto (not to mention California). It doesn't help that Vancouver hasn't bothered to match the aforementioned…

Brain drain to Montreal?

I am a bit skeptical that anyone would want to pay Quebec-level taxes, particularly with the recent political issues at play.

Could you offer some evidence for this? I'd love to believe it is true (as I am originally from there), but it just rings hollow.

Re: Singapore, where have all your talent gone?

#13

Post by yen223 »

To tech companies everywhere: If you're finding it hard to find talent in Singapore, you should seriously consider looking in Malaysia.

Here we have a glut of talent, costs are hell of a lot cheaper than Singapore, and best of all, the Googles and Facebooks of the world don't have much of a presence here, so that's less competition for you!

Re: Singapore, where have all your talent gone?

#15

Post by lostlogin »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #9

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but in this case, both British and American English would say that the correct word is "has" and not "have" in the title? I know British English is a little different when referring to entities comprised of many people, but in this case, the the "have" refers to "your talent" and not "Signapore" and, as such, should be "has" instead?

I took it as a vaguely racist comment on how a non English speaker might say it. I must be overly sensative.

Re: Singapore, where have all your talent gone?

#16

Post by frankchn »

To be honest, the absolute smartest Math/CS-types I know (with a few exceptions) went to the United States or the UK for their undergraduate studies and decided to stick around rather than return to Singapore. Start-ups in Singapore probably don't even know they exist.

Re: Singapore, where have all your talent gone?

#18

Post by eoin_murphy »

As a developer, with a good few years of experience behind me (admittedly in non-startup areas like insurance and equity plans), who's actively looked to move to Singapore I've found it quite hard to find any jobs that didn't fall into either the entry level code monkey (MUST KNOW HTML & XHTML) or the high level investment banking sector.

Really good local talent will probably drift towards the latter and startup's just can't compete with those sort of salaries. I imagine it's the same issue with New York.

As with all good jobs, startup positions are never really advertised openly. And if they are, they're not there for long.

Re: Singapore, where have all your talent gone?

#19

Post by jcampbell1 »

stan_rogers wrote: post #11
ComputerGuru wrote: post #9

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but in this case, both British and American English would say that the correct word is "has" and not "have" in the title? I know British English is a little different when referring to entities comprised of many people, but in this case, the the "have" refers to "your talent" and not "Signapore" and, as such, should be "has" instead?

"Your talent" would be a collective noun in this case, referring not to the talent held by an individual, but the pool of talented people to draw upon. The usage is analogous to team or crowd in this sense. (And yes, you could use the singular, shift mental gears to anthropomorphize Singapore and assign it the quality of talent, and keep the same overall meaning with a minor shift in grammar and metaphor. And who sai…

Talent is a non-countable collective noun, like money or sugar. Consider "Where has/have all your money gone?" Has is the correct answer, at least by American grammar rules.

Re: Singapore, where have all your talent gone?

#20

Post by yzhengyu »

ashray wrote: post #3

Singapore is a pretty great place. That said, the place is freakishly expensive. I recently looked at Singapore as an option to move there and start up a.. startup. The entrepass will require $50,000 of paid up capital plus yadda yadda. That is, post company registration: http://www.mom.gov.sg/foreign-manpower/passes-visas/entrepas... Following that, there are quite a few hoops to jump through but the worst part is t…

As someone living here for most of his life, yeah, Singapore has become very expensive. Doesn't help that inflation has been around 6% ~ 7% per year.

The .gov here has been playing with the exchange rate (rather than interest rates) to help out but it really hasn't really worked out.

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