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This intuition only holds as long as you believe there is zero chance of new large competitors arising in other countries. If protectionism causes a rival to G

This intuition only holds as long as you believe there is zero chance of new large competitors arising in other countries. If protectionism causes a rival to Google to be viable in other countries, that could hurt your salary prospects back home quite a bit.

iguy 8y ago
So the US should vacuum up all talent so hard it has no chance to coalesce elsewhere? I'm not sure this is a viable or even desirable strategy. The most likely competitors are in China. The actions of the Chinese government have much much more to do with this than the actions of the US. Historically, attempts to keep a lead by any other path than leading ahead haven't worked well.
ALittleLight 8y ago
It seems like the current model, which is import large numbers of software related folks to the US, hurts competition. What I mean by this is that Amazon, Google, etc have a few core businesses that are monopolies (search, online retail, etc) and many ancillary endeavors. Most software people don't work in the core business. If so many software people weren't imported to extend US software giants then some of those people would stay home and develop regional competitors. This would be bad for the company I work for, but for customers it would be good, for foreign software developers who could stay home AND work in a successful domestic company it would be good, and for me it would be good - I'd be paid more.