6 ms·

Does it mean it costed the US of potential opportunities? I don't think it made any difference in the US. But it surely helped in his home country. While we ar

Does it mean it costed the US of potential opportunities? I don't think it made any difference in the US. But it surely helped in his home country. While we are at it, what do you think of current visa issue in the USA? For a long time, I thought it was difficult only to people of Asian countries to migrate to US, but turns out it is equally difficult for any other nations. In the long term, does it make a difference in US if it doesn't bring talent across the world? Of course, there are a lot of talent and there is always someone willing to move to US. So it shouldn't be an issue, should it?

strikelaserclaw 4y ago
agree, since India is like 5-10 years behind USA in the tech space, most unicorns in India are just companies that already exist in some form in USA. In India, the execution of a business is the hard part by far, and not the novelty of the idea.
- manishsharan 4y ago
  >>India is like 5-10 years behind USA in the tech space I don't quite understand this. Do you mean that they are still using Internet Explorer , Java 5 , Windows 7 and Myspace? Please explain.
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    This idiom is referring to the maturity of their tech industry at a high level, not their tooling (though that could be a minor part of it). As an example, a country with paper-only tax filing might be said to be a decade behind a country with easy online e-file. It’s referring to the difference in technical capabilities, capacity, and/or innovation.
    - TomVDB 4y ago
      Putting a check in the mail (or pressing some button on a web form to make it so) is one of the things that comes to mind.
  - 22c 4y ago
    I guess they're trying to say that things like Uber, Amazon, Door Dash, AirBNB, Venmo etc. have a strong foothold in USA, but in India there's a lot of "home grown" alternatives that have beaten the US big tech to adapt to the Indian market. eg. Ola, Flipkart, Paytm, etc.
- factorialboy 4y ago
  > since India is like 5-10 years behind USA in the tech space, most unicorns in India are just companies that already exist in some form in USA. There are some areas where India has leapfrogged ahead of United States and China. Look at digital payments for instance. Since the 90's we have seen countless examples of how US / western products and services cannot be sold as-is. Like all markets, India is unique. It also happens to be significant in size and companies homegrown and global focus on addressing local needs.
  - ignoramous 4y ago
    > ...since India is like 5-10 years behind USA in the tech space The fact that the tech scene in the West (which is the place where most things happen) is white-male dominated and likely outranks Indians by a factor of 10x (?), which means, as a group, they're likely to accomplish 10x in a lot of metrics. Also, India is roughly 5x / 10x behind the US in tech salaries too (amidst high inflation and weakening currency), resulting in the infamous brain drain to the West (where they then make things happen, if they catch a break).
    - govg 4y ago
      Indian salaries at the top firms ( FANG ) are more like 3x-4x lower now, and rising.
  - zht 4y ago
    sorry in what way has India's digital payments space leapfrogged China's? Do you know what WeChat/Alipay are?
    - govg 4y ago
      Do you know what UPI is?
      - zht 4y ago
        yes? in what way is UPI leap frogging the ubiquity of wechat/alipay? p2p, b2b payments go through WeChat. it all goes through WeChat. people selling food on the street, basically all retail stores, e-commerce, goes through some combination of wechat/alipay
- sbmthakur 4y ago
  How exactly? In certain sectors like payments, India appears to be ahead of the US by certain years thanks to UPI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    India was always a little bit ahead of the US in banking, just because of leapfrog effects
- madmax108 4y ago
  I feel that a reason for this is the cheap human labor available in India, which naturally allows manual-powered processes to scale much more easily in India compared to tech solutions. Also, given the sheer size of the market, even building CRUD apps backed by manual labor for more and more niche use-cases can still garner a lot of users (but revenue per user is still quite low). And note that there is nearly no upside to actually replace the manual component or build state of the art tech solutions because labor costs are relatively small and non-prohibitive Related recent thread on Twitter which discussed some of these ideas: https://twitter.com/championswimmer/status/1533906614738391040 https://twitter.com/championswimmer/status/15339066147383910...
- aldebran 4y ago
  This is just categorically false. Shopping / delivery / payments are a few categories where startups in India are doing much better.
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  This is true all over the world. Some of the most valuable companies in Asia or South America are just Uber or Doordash clones for example.
- deadcoder0904 4y ago
  dude no. most foreign apps won't work in india bcz we don't like to pay for apps. "people come to india for dau, not arpu" ~ kunal shah on the knowledge project [0] tiktok executed perfectly bcz they were optimizing for dau but even flipkart is doing better than amazon here. many apps just won't work bcz they don't understand. see how netflix lost by asking to pay? people don't understand india as much as they think they do so i'd suggest you to watch the video below as it covers actual india from an actual indian who understands it. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl1PIagzgUo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl1PIagzgUo
kshacker 4y ago
> Does it mean it costed the US of potential opportunities? I don't think it made any difference in the US. But it surely helped in his home country. Our immigration service hands out N visas a year. You reject one, someone else will pick up that slot. On an average it should not make a difference either for US or the other country unless they are so small their number of visas doubled or something because of this one reject. > In the long term, does it make a difference in US if it doesn't bring talent across the world? Yes it does make a difference, but fixing that has other impacts. In the 90s when the H1 visa regime started (or got big), if someone in Ceylon wanted to write software for an American company, they probably could not do it, at least in the early 90s. They did not have too many other options so US not acquiring an available talent did not impact them. Nowadays such un-acquired talent can do anything - set up a company, work for Russia (or choose any other name who you would rather not have acquire talent, maybe an oil company). However, the fix is not so simple. To acquire all the talent pool would require upping our immigration intake many fold, and that is not going to happen for various reasons (politics, cost, limits to how much immigration can you absorb).
- davidw 4y ago
  > N visas a year That number is pretty clearly a number pulled out of someone's ass, rather than anything 'scientific'. It's a nice round number that sounded good to someone, but is pretty completely disconnected from reality.
manuelabeledo 4y ago
> While we are at it, what do you think of current visa issue in the USA? For a long time, I thought it was difficult only to people of Asian countries to migrate to US, but turns out it is equally difficult for any other nations. I suffered the consequences of the ongoing visa mayhem myself, losing my job in early 2022. Luckily, I received my green card soon afterwards. The US immigration policies, especially for work and talent related visas, are incredibly disconnected from reality. There is still no mechanism in place to curb the abuse by IT consultancy companies, aka "visa mills". Instead, we have brilliant people rejected because of their nationality, not their achievements. Even worse, people with 5, 10, 15 years in the country, high earners and taxpayers, may see themselves kicked out because bureaucracy is just slow. > Of course, there are a lot of talent and there is always someone willing to move to US. So it shouldn't be an issue, should it? It is. At some point, money won't justify the looming feeling of insecurity, and people will be less willing to leave their home countries and come to the US. Even now, immigrating to the US is prohibitively expensive. The talent pool is being reduced to those who can either afford it, or are sponsored by their companies, and this doesn't guarantee that the best and brightest are the ones arriving anyway.
petilon 4y ago
> In the long term, does it make a difference in US if it doesn't bring talent across the world? Of course, it does! The only reason the standard of living in the US is higher than anywhere else in the world is because the US makes stuff the rest of the world covets. America is the leading economy in the world today not because it has the most number of people, but because it has the best and the brightest, gathered from around the world. We have the smartest people not because the smartest people of the world were all born here, but because smart people born elsewhere have been immigrating to the United States. Stopping this is not the path to creating jobs. US tech exports in 2018 was $338 billion. Tech is our biggest export by far. Think of the US tech industry as a siphon that sucks in wealth from foreign countries. Would you want to make that siphon bigger or smaller? If you want to make that siphon bigger — and more competitive — how would you do it? By limiting the people that can work in tech to whoever you can find locally, or by bringing in the smartest people from around the world? Keep in mind that the money this siphon brings in is not only benefiting tech workers and tech shareholders. When the money is spent it turns the wheels of our economy, which leads to prosperity for all Americans, not just the few that work in tech. Think of the tech industry as a way to suck money from foreign countries and pump it into the economy of our country. The beneficiaries include all Americans, including those who work in restaurants, retail, healthcare, insurance, education, housing, transportation, entertainment and so on. Limiting tech industry to whoever companies can find locally will hurt its global competitiveness. Such a move will not just hurt the few would-be tech immigrants that are prevented from immigrating, but American prosperity in general.
- 62951413 4y ago
  Shouldn't the government do more to promote equality? The current approach makes possible to arbitrage at scale when the government can * bring in a large number of already educated (for free or _much_ cheaper) foreigners * often from an upper middle class background in their home countries * progressively lower the bar on the secondary education for Americans to jeopardize their chances of competing with foreigners for STEM majors and eventually jobs in high-tech. Which hits the disappearing [lower] middle class the hardest. * keep college education significantly more expensive than it is for the very same foreigners
topspin 4y ago
> But it surely helped in his home country. Likely. The absorption of young, motivated people by the US is a major loss for their origin nations. Why this never seems to be a concern for anyone involved is the proverbial gorilla in the room.
- yourapostasy 4y ago
  > Why this never seems to be a concern for anyone involved is the proverbial gorilla in the room. Young, motivated, smart, driven, creative, innovative, persistent…hmm, all the right ingredients to successfully challenge the existing status quo in many nations. If you were part of the elite in those nations, what’s not to love about the current setup where the US not only absorbs the best and brightest who have a shot at upending your sinecure but even if those best of the best return to your nation, they are usually turned towards industrial rather than sociopolitical leadership pursuits that would bring “disruptive innovation” to your sphere?

strikelaserclaw 4y ago

agree, since India is like 5-10 years behind USA in the tech space, most unicorns in India are just companies that already exist in some form in USA. In India, the execution of a business is the hard part by far, and not the novelty of the idea.

manishsharan 4y ago
>>India is like 5-10 years behind USA in the tech space I don't quite understand this. Do you mean that they are still using Internet Explorer , Java 5 , Windows 7 and Myspace? Please explain.
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  This idiom is referring to the maturity of their tech industry at a high level, not their tooling (though that could be a minor part of it). As an example, a country with paper-only tax filing might be said to be a decade behind a country with easy online e-file. It’s referring to the difference in technical capabilities, capacity, and/or innovation.
  - TomVDB 4y ago
    Putting a check in the mail (or pressing some button on a web form to make it so) is one of the things that comes to mind.
- 22c 4y ago
  I guess they're trying to say that things like Uber, Amazon, Door Dash, AirBNB, Venmo etc. have a strong foothold in USA, but in India there's a lot of "home grown" alternatives that have beaten the US big tech to adapt to the Indian market. eg. Ola, Flipkart, Paytm, etc.
factorialboy 4y ago
> since India is like 5-10 years behind USA in the tech space, most unicorns in India are just companies that already exist in some form in USA. There are some areas where India has leapfrogged ahead of United States and China. Look at digital payments for instance. Since the 90's we have seen countless examples of how US / western products and services cannot be sold as-is. Like all markets, India is unique. It also happens to be significant in size and companies homegrown and global focus on addressing local needs.
- ignoramous 4y ago
  > ...since India is like 5-10 years behind USA in the tech space The fact that the tech scene in the West (which is the place where most things happen) is white-male dominated and likely outranks Indians by a factor of 10x (?), which means, as a group, they're likely to accomplish 10x in a lot of metrics. Also, India is roughly 5x / 10x behind the US in tech salaries too (amidst high inflation and weakening currency), resulting in the infamous brain drain to the West (where they then make things happen, if they catch a break).
  - govg 4y ago
    Indian salaries at the top firms ( FANG ) are more like 3x-4x lower now, and rising.
- zht 4y ago
  sorry in what way has India's digital payments space leapfrogged China's? Do you know what WeChat/Alipay are?
  - govg 4y ago
    Do you know what UPI is?
    - zht 4y ago
      yes? in what way is UPI leap frogging the ubiquity of wechat/alipay? p2p, b2b payments go through WeChat. it all goes through WeChat. people selling food on the street, basically all retail stores, e-commerce, goes through some combination of wechat/alipay
sbmthakur 4y ago
How exactly? In certain sectors like payments, India appears to be ahead of the US by certain years thanks to UPI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  India was always a little bit ahead of the US in banking, just because of leapfrog effects
madmax108 4y ago
I feel that a reason for this is the cheap human labor available in India, which naturally allows manual-powered processes to scale much more easily in India compared to tech solutions. Also, given the sheer size of the market, even building CRUD apps backed by manual labor for more and more niche use-cases can still garner a lot of users (but revenue per user is still quite low). And note that there is nearly no upside to actually replace the manual component or build state of the art tech solutions because labor costs are relatively small and non-prohibitive Related recent thread on Twitter which discussed some of these ideas: https://twitter.com/championswimmer/status/1533906614738391040 https://twitter.com/championswimmer/status/15339066147383910...
aldebran 4y ago
This is just categorically false. Shopping / delivery / payments are a few categories where startups in India are doing much better.
adamsmith143 4y ago
This is true all over the world. Some of the most valuable companies in Asia or South America are just Uber or Doordash clones for example.
deadcoder0904 4y ago
dude no. most foreign apps won't work in india bcz we don't like to pay for apps. "people come to india for dau, not arpu" ~ kunal shah on the knowledge project [0] tiktok executed perfectly bcz they were optimizing for dau but even flipkart is doing better than amazon here. many apps just won't work bcz they don't understand. see how netflix lost by asking to pay? people don't understand india as much as they think they do so i'd suggest you to watch the video below as it covers actual india from an actual indian who understands it. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl1PIagzgUo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl1PIagzgUo

kshacker 4y ago

> Does it mean it costed the US of potential opportunities? I don't think it made any difference in the US. But it surely helped in his home country. Our immigration service hands out N visas a year. You reject one, someone else will pick up that slot. On an average it should not make a difference either for US or the other country unless they are so small their number of visas doubled or something because of this one reject. > In the long term, does it make a difference in US if it doesn't bring talent across the world? Yes it does make a difference, but fixing that has other impacts. In the 90s when the H1 visa regime started (or got big), if someone in Ceylon wanted to write software for an American company, they probably could not do it, at least in the early 90s. They did not have too many other options so US not acquiring an available talent did not impact them. Nowadays such un-acquired talent can do anything - set up a company, work for Russia (or choose any other name who you would rather not have acquire talent, maybe an oil company). However, the fix is not so simple. To acquire all the talent pool would require upping our immigration intake many fold, and that is not going to happen for various reasons (politics, cost, limits to how much immigration can you absorb).

davidw 4y ago
> N visas a year That number is pretty clearly a number pulled out of someone's ass, rather than anything 'scientific'. It's a nice round number that sounded good to someone, but is pretty completely disconnected from reality.

manuelabeledo 4y ago

> While we are at it, what do you think of current visa issue in the USA? For a long time, I thought it was difficult only to people of Asian countries to migrate to US, but turns out it is equally difficult for any other nations. I suffered the consequences of the ongoing visa mayhem myself, losing my job in early 2022. Luckily, I received my green card soon afterwards. The US immigration policies, especially for work and talent related visas, are incredibly disconnected from reality. There is still no mechanism in place to curb the abuse by IT consultancy companies, aka "visa mills". Instead, we have brilliant people rejected because of their nationality, not their achievements. Even worse, people with 5, 10, 15 years in the country, high earners and taxpayers, may see themselves kicked out because bureaucracy is just slow. > Of course, there are a lot of talent and there is always someone willing to move to US. So it shouldn't be an issue, should it? It is. At some point, money won't justify the looming feeling of insecurity, and people will be less willing to leave their home countries and come to the US. Even now, immigrating to the US is prohibitively expensive. The talent pool is being reduced to those who can either afford it, or are sponsored by their companies, and this doesn't guarantee that the best and brightest are the ones arriving anyway.

petilon 4y ago

> In the long term, does it make a difference in US if it doesn't bring talent across the world? Of course, it does! The only reason the standard of living in the US is higher than anywhere else in the world is because the US makes stuff the rest of the world covets. America is the leading economy in the world today not because it has the most number of people, but because it has the best and the brightest, gathered from around the world. We have the smartest people not because the smartest people of the world were all born here, but because smart people born elsewhere have been immigrating to the United States. Stopping this is not the path to creating jobs. US tech exports in 2018 was $338 billion. Tech is our biggest export by far. Think of the US tech industry as a siphon that sucks in wealth from foreign countries. Would you want to make that siphon bigger or smaller? If you want to make that siphon bigger — and more competitive — how would you do it? By limiting the people that can work in tech to whoever you can find locally, or by bringing in the smartest people from around the world? Keep in mind that the money this siphon brings in is not only benefiting tech workers and tech shareholders. When the money is spent it turns the wheels of our economy, which leads to prosperity for all Americans, not just the few that work in tech. Think of the tech industry as a way to suck money from foreign countries and pump it into the economy of our country. The beneficiaries include all Americans, including those who work in restaurants, retail, healthcare, insurance, education, housing, transportation, entertainment and so on. Limiting tech industry to whoever companies can find locally will hurt its global competitiveness. Such a move will not just hurt the few would-be tech immigrants that are prevented from immigrating, but American prosperity in general.

62951413 4y ago
Shouldn't the government do more to promote equality? The current approach makes possible to arbitrage at scale when the government can * bring in a large number of already educated (for free or _much_ cheaper) foreigners * often from an upper middle class background in their home countries * progressively lower the bar on the secondary education for Americans to jeopardize their chances of competing with foreigners for STEM majors and eventually jobs in high-tech. Which hits the disappearing [lower] middle class the hardest. * keep college education significantly more expensive than it is for the very same foreigners

topspin 4y ago

> But it surely helped in his home country. Likely. The absorption of young, motivated people by the US is a major loss for their origin nations. Why this never seems to be a concern for anyone involved is the proverbial gorilla in the room.

yourapostasy 4y ago
> Why this never seems to be a concern for anyone involved is the proverbial gorilla in the room. Young, motivated, smart, driven, creative, innovative, persistent…hmm, all the right ingredients to successfully challenge the existing status quo in many nations. If you were part of the elite in those nations, what’s not to love about the current setup where the US not only absorbs the best and brightest who have a shot at upending your sinecure but even if those best of the best return to your nation, they are usually turned towards industrial rather than sociopolitical leadership pursuits that would bring “disruptive innovation” to your sphere?