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The scope of engineering talent in China is hard to contemplate. Because of the, on average, higher quantitative talent of Hans Chinese over gentile whites and

by wycs 8y ago

The scope of engineering talent in China is hard to contemplate. Because of the, on average, higher quantitative talent of Hans Chinese over gentile whites and much larger population, China has, on average, at least 10 times the number of people capable of high-level engineering. This is not a false alarm like India. India's talent pool is proving much shallower than people expected - though not to the people politically incorrect enough to keep an eye on PISA scores. This just is not the case with China. Chinese human capital is more plentiful and of higher quality than that of any other country on earth. An additional multiplier is an almost fanatical work culture that is comparable to that of Japan. Combine this with local governments that are as competent as the Bay Area government is incompetent, and there is finally a threat to America's domination of tech. My money is on China, or it would be if it was possible to get exposure. I sort of wonder what the comparative advantage of the west will be when this all shakes out. This old comment from nopinsight goes through the scores: Key competitive advantages of China are their strength in quantitative skills as well as huge population and the hard working and competitive culture of its populace. An objective measure is PISA results [1]. When comparing with even the best performing US state, Massachusetts, China has many more top performers in Math, as a proportion of population [2]. (In 2015 only four provinces of China participated, but their combined population was 230 million vs Massachusetts's 6.8 million. The math result of Shanghai (24 million pop.) alone would show an even larger gap.) Since PISA results are scaled such that OECD country's mean is 500 and standard deviation is 100. China's 531 math score implies country mean at 0.3 SD above PISA mean, and US' math score at 470 implies 0.3 SD below mean. If people capable of doing AI research or proper AI implementation need to have math skills at, say, 2 SD above PISA mean, then there will be a tremendous difference in proportion between two populations with 0.6 SD difference. My back-of-the-envelope calculation, assuming above figures, is the difference in proportion will be about five times. But China has more than 4 times the population of the US, so the difference in potential numbers of AI-capable natives could be over 20 times. (Since other provinces may drag down China's mean, it could be a bit less. We'll see soon since China as a whole will participate in 2018.)

lawrenceyan 8y ago
All the smartest people come to America though by and large. The brain drain is real, and I don’t think that will change anytime soon. Why stay in China where you face pollution, a salary depressed job market, and increasing authoritarianism when you can come to the Bay Area and make 10 times the salary you could otherwise? Of course not everyone can make it with the bar set so high, but the people who do end up coming are the ones you really don’t want to be losing.
- vernon99 8y ago
  Proof? My empirical evidence suggests the opposite, multiple engineers with Chinese origins I personally know moved back to China because it already provides compensation rewarding enough to compete with SV lifestyle. Plus really SV is a village comparing to Shangai, Shenzhen, etc
  - lawrenceyan 8y ago
    Let’s compare using hard numbers. We have person A working at Baidu/Tencent/Alibaba/etc., the best of the best that China can offer to an enterprising new graduate who for the sake of this example, let’s say has graduated from the best university in China. What compensation can this person expect being in the top 1% of their graduating pool? Let’s be generous and say 500,000 yuan/year. I highly doubt in reality that anyone gets offered that much, but even with my outrageous rounding, that’s still only about ～$83,000 in USD. The mean new grad offer, some higher and some lower of course, from an equivalent American tech company (Google/Facebook/Amazon/etc.) is around $200,000/year. So even disregarding sociopolitical variables in addition to things like environmental pollution, there is absolutely zero chance that a new grad offer from mainland China outcompetes an equivalent American offer. This isn’t to say that it’s just China that deals with this problem. It’s sort of a global thing really, just purely due to the fact that the Bay Area is wholly unique in the circumstances it evolved from that has made it almost completely divergent from the rest of the world. An average software engineering salary in Europe for example is around 30,000 Euros, such that it’s possible one might be able to get a better offer from an equivalent Chinese company than from a European one these days. So I’m not saying you can’t get a decent lifestyle working in a major city in China. It’s just that in some places in America, primarily the Bay Area and spreading out from there, there is a more than order of magnitude difference such that the gap isn’t something which can arbitrarily be closed.

by wycs 8y ago

lawrenceyan 8y ago

All the smartest people come to America though by and large. The brain drain is real, and I don’t think that will change anytime soon. Why stay in China where you face pollution, a salary depressed job market, and increasing authoritarianism when you can come to the Bay Area and make 10 times the salary you could otherwise? Of course not everyone can make it with the bar set so high, but the people who do end up coming are the ones you really don’t want to be losing.

vernon99 8y ago
Proof? My empirical evidence suggests the opposite, multiple engineers with Chinese origins I personally know moved back to China because it already provides compensation rewarding enough to compete with SV lifestyle. Plus really SV is a village comparing to Shangai, Shenzhen, etc
- lawrenceyan 8y ago
  Let’s compare using hard numbers. We have person A working at Baidu/Tencent/Alibaba/etc., the best of the best that China can offer to an enterprising new graduate who for the sake of this example, let’s say has graduated from the best university in China. What compensation can this person expect being in the top 1% of their graduating pool? Let’s be generous and say 500,000 yuan/year. I highly doubt in reality that anyone gets offered that much, but even with my outrageous rounding, that’s still only about ～$83,000 in USD. The mean new grad offer, some higher and some lower of course, from an equivalent American tech company (Google/Facebook/Amazon/etc.) is around $200,000/year. So even disregarding sociopolitical variables in addition to things like environmental pollution, there is absolutely zero chance that a new grad offer from mainland China outcompetes an equivalent American offer. This isn’t to say that it’s just China that deals with this problem. It’s sort of a global thing really, just purely due to the fact that the Bay Area is wholly unique in the circumstances it evolved from that has made it almost completely divergent from the rest of the world. An average software engineering salary in Europe for example is around 30,000 Euros, such that it’s possible one might be able to get a better offer from an equivalent Chinese company than from a European one these days. So I’m not saying you can’t get a decent lifestyle working in a major city in China. It’s just that in some places in America, primarily the Bay Area and spreading out from there, there is a more than order of magnitude difference such that the gap isn’t something which can arbitrarily be closed.