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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

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.
  - true_religion 8y ago
    It's not really compensation. Lots of Americans won't be enticed to move to Germany for higher compensation when they don't speak the language well, and their entire families are in the USA. The same is true for the Chinese. They go back to China because they feel it is truly their home.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - lawrenceyan 8y ago
      Fair point. As someone who grew up here in America, I’m sure my perspective is somewhat different compared to my international student counterparts. But based on my anecdotal experience, the majority of my international peers want to stay in the Bay Area after they graduate, or at least somewhere comparable like Seattle, New York, etc. Also it’s not just them either, their parents also want them to stay in America. There’s a reason why they’re willing to pay exorbitant amounts of money every year to fund their children’s education here. This is true by the way for pretty much the entirety of the world, not just singling out China.
dstick 8y ago
I wish I had the link ready but this is actually not a brain drain, it’s a brain fill. China has government sponsored programs to actively send Han Chinese abroad but keep them loyal to the ‘motherland’ through local meetups. They shape the way the public perceives them in foreign countries in ways that sometimes read like a spy novel. Google “sharp power” for some insights into these tactics.
- lawrenceyan 8y ago
  Maybe it’s different for other majors, I don’t know, but as an engineering student at UC Berkeley, I can guarantee you that no one cares or has the time. The only thing that’s on their minds is the next problem set, midterm, or final. That or they’re doing LeetCode/Cracking The Code Interview prep since it’s internship interviewing season right now. I think it’s easy to fall into the trap of conspiracy theories, and honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if the Chinese government has tried to overtly influence university students, considering how blatant their attempts at intellectual property thefts are, but the spy novel you think is real life really isn’t.

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.
- true_religion 8y ago
  It's not really compensation. Lots of Americans won't be enticed to move to Germany for higher compensation when they don't speak the language well, and their entire families are in the USA. The same is true for the Chinese. They go back to China because they feel it is truly their home.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - lawrenceyan 8y ago
    Fair point. As someone who grew up here in America, I’m sure my perspective is somewhat different compared to my international student counterparts. But based on my anecdotal experience, the majority of my international peers want to stay in the Bay Area after they graduate, or at least somewhere comparable like Seattle, New York, etc. Also it’s not just them either, their parents also want them to stay in America. There’s a reason why they’re willing to pay exorbitant amounts of money every year to fund their children’s education here. This is true by the way for pretty much the entirety of the world, not just singling out China.

dstick 8y ago

I wish I had the link ready but this is actually not a brain drain, it’s a brain fill. China has government sponsored programs to actively send Han Chinese abroad but keep them loyal to the ‘motherland’ through local meetups. They shape the way the public perceives them in foreign countries in ways that sometimes read like a spy novel. Google “sharp power” for some insights into these tactics.

lawrenceyan 8y ago
Maybe it’s different for other majors, I don’t know, but as an engineering student at UC Berkeley, I can guarantee you that no one cares or has the time. The only thing that’s on their minds is the next problem set, midterm, or final. That or they’re doing LeetCode/Cracking The Code Interview prep since it’s internship interviewing season right now. I think it’s easy to fall into the trap of conspiracy theories, and honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if the Chinese government has tried to overtly influence university students, considering how blatant their attempts at intellectual property thefts are, but the spy novel you think is real life really isn’t.