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Sounds like you had a very rare experience with a few H1B immigrants, but I would hold off on making a broader conclusion about a vast country like Russia, each

by trome 10y ago

Sounds like you had a very rare experience with a few H1B immigrants, but I would hold off on making a broader conclusion about a vast country like Russia, each state sized entity is a country unto itself, similar to our states. Education varies (as I saw when hosting many exchange students) and some parts (Kazakhstan) were much better off post-USSR as they became fully autonomous.

akiselev 10y ago
Those were just the more colorful examples because they were all from a single unknown university in Siberia, a rather sparsely populated region. These examples are very common, just not as concentrated in one company like Tata or Infosys. Just around the LA Eastern European and Caltech community, there are tens of thousands of immigrants who came here on H1Bs from the top of their classes and found high paying, extremely specialized jobs usually getting green cards and citizenship. If you expand the network to the LA metropolitan area including all the universities and aerospace companies, you're talking hundreds of thousand. Hundreds of thousands more in the New York metropolitan area. Tens of thousands of H1Bs go to universities and smaller companies every year and many of those go on to get permanent residency so over decades, the numbers really add up. That doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of abuse, but you have to be extra careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
mbroncano 10y ago
In my humble opinion, the STEM education in the US is not even in the same league as that of EU or Russia. What baffles me the most is, not only the education is lacking some of the most basic items but it's self perceived as world class. That perception extends out of the US, at least it did to me at some point. The mirage of the ARPA funding during the sixties and its undoubtedly success still resonates deeply, but the H1-B system and gaming it's only a canary of a deeper problem: the education system in the US is not on par with the rest of the western world anymore, possibly for the last twenty years. And indeed the public is not ready to even acknowledge it, much less to pay for it.

by trome 10y ago

akiselev 10y ago

Those were just the more colorful examples because they were all from a single unknown university in Siberia, a rather sparsely populated region. These examples are very common, just not as concentrated in one company like Tata or Infosys. Just around the LA Eastern European and Caltech community, there are tens of thousands of immigrants who came here on H1Bs from the top of their classes and found high paying, extremely specialized jobs usually getting green cards and citizenship. If you expand the network to the LA metropolitan area including all the universities and aerospace companies, you're talking hundreds of thousand. Hundreds of thousands more in the New York metropolitan area. Tens of thousands of H1Bs go to universities and smaller companies every year and many of those go on to get permanent residency so over decades, the numbers really add up. That doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of abuse, but you have to be extra careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

mbroncano 10y ago

In my humble opinion, the STEM education in the US is not even in the same league as that of EU or Russia. What baffles me the most is, not only the education is lacking some of the most basic items but it's self perceived as world class. That perception extends out of the US, at least it did to me at some point. The mirage of the ARPA funding during the sixties and its undoubtedly success still resonates deeply, but the H1-B system and gaming it's only a canary of a deeper problem: the education system in the US is not on par with the rest of the western world anymore, possibly for the last twenty years. And indeed the public is not ready to even acknowledge it, much less to pay for it.