
Singapore, where have all your talent gone? - andycroll
http://e27.sg/2012/11/06/singapore-where-have-all-your-talent-gone/
======
ashray
Singapore is a pretty great place.

That said, the place is freakishly expensive. I recently looked at Singapore
as an option to move there and start up a.. startup. The entrepass will
require $50,000 of paid up capital plus yadda yadda. That is, post company
registration: [http://www.mom.gov.sg/foreign-manpower/passes-
visas/entrepas...](http://www.mom.gov.sg/foreign-manpower/passes-
visas/entrepass/before-you-apply/Pages/default.aspx)

Following that, there are quite a few hoops to jump through but the worst part
is that they _require_ you to spend $100,000+ per year plus there are
milestones regarding hiring singapore nationals within the first two years.

Couple that with rents that are in the range of Manhattan housing.

It's a bit of a complicated situation for a startup to be in considering that
startups are already pretty complicated high risk businesses.

Then there's the question of pretty strong programming competition from India.
If a startup were to choose between India and Singapore based on costs, market
size, etc. then India would be the obvious choice. (ease of business and
quality of life in Singapore however is orders of magnitude higher!)

I'm absolutely certain that Singapore has great talent available but starting
up there needs to be made easier considering the high cost of living. As for
home-grown entrepreneurs, maybe the Singapore government should look at a
program like Startup Chile that may help foster some innovation locally.

~~~
czcar
Hey Ash, been meaning to write a blog post as someone who moved their startup
from NZ to Singapore - it's not quite as dire as you supposed.

Firstly, I would never recommend anyone to get the Entrepass - best thing to
do is just to register a business and apply for an EP pass as an employee of
said company. Admittedly in this scenario you would need a local director -
but services for this shouldn't run over $1000/annum.

The next statement about spending $100,000+ per year, is again - not true if
you are on the standard EP pass.

Rents for accomodation are, however as you stated expensive, we're currently
paying $5400 SGD / month for a 3 bdroom in a nice condo in central Singapore.

However, for 2800-3500 / month you can find 3-4 bedroom places that are
lacking condo facilities but are more than suitable for living.

If you have any additional questions or queries please don't hesitate.

Also, don't take this as a glowing endorsement of SG - there are plenty of
downsides to this island nation for tech.

cam

~~~
pault
Is it easy enough to get around and socialize in english?

~~~
EliRivers
Singapore is English speaking. It's the first language for about a third, with
about 20% having no capacity in English. It's the language of business,
government and education.

------
irahul
I don't know about the tech scene in Singapore, but I recently visited
Singapore and here are some random excerpts about Singapore.

1\. As with any other country which isn't your own, familiarize yourself with
local law first. Littering is a punishable offense; watching pornography is
not an offense but possession, creation and distribution is; there are limits
to free speech but considering you are a tourist or evaluating the place for
business feasibility, I don't think that comes into play.

2\. It's expensive. And the currency conversion isn't going to help you(1 sgd
is 0.817 usd and 0.63 euro). If you are going to stay for long, the best
option is to crash on an acquaintance's couch. I don't have any clue about
budget hotels since I was staying at a friend's place.

3\. Rents are crazy expensive. The rents for a normal 3 bedroom apartment will
cost about 3000 sgd and a decent condo will cost you 5000 sgd. Considering
that average salary of a techie is about 5000 sgd, I will consider it very
high. Most of the working people share houses - it is normal to have 3(or
sometimes more) people sharing a 3 bedroom apartment.

4\. It's hot and humid, and this is coming from someone who lives in
India(though in Bangalore, which is on the cooler side).

5\. Taxes are low to non-existent for people on EP(Employment Pass). I don't
know the details but my friend hasn't been paying any taxes. As suggested
elsewhere, Entrepass will be unreasonable for small companies, and you are
better off registering a company with a PR(permanent resident) and getting EP
yourself.

6\. From what I heard from my friend(she was working on Singapore Exchange's
migration from mainframe to unix), the work culture is kinda high ceremony
viz. be on time(I was a bit surprised); leaving early will raise eyebrows;
seniority is based on how much time you have spent at a place and the work
relations are generally formal. I have never been to China and Japan, but the
description sounds pretty close to how people describe it. Anyway, this is an
anecdote and I haven't seen the whole picture.

7\. People are generally friendly and understand and speak English.

8\. Public transport is good and affordable. Get the transport smart card(they
call it MRT card I believe; you can buy it at any tube station).

9\. Cabs are on the expensive side. There is some sort of surcharge for
morning and evening peak hours.

10\. The city has decent nightlife and I found it safe and secure.

11\. There won't be any touts bothering you.

That's it as far as general Singapore information is concerned. If anyone has
any specific questions, feel free to mail me.

------
raghava
Am a programmer currently in Singapore; some of my observations are as below.

1\. Singapore is business friendly. But only for big businesses; investment
banks and such. Small and medium ones will have a tough time considering the
cost of living and expenses here.

2\. Local IT job market is tuned more towards jobs in banks and insurance
companies rather than in true programming/RnD. And as obvious, most of it is
for maintenance or support of legacy CRUD apps.

3\. Most of the smart local fellows move to UK/US and find the environment
there quite enriching, and stay. Singapore gets boring after a couple of
years.

4\. Govt has raised minimum salary limit for an employment pass, keeping in
mind the locals' emotions against increasing number of immigrants. Not many
are vocal about their unhappiness about inflow of immigrants, but few are very
much.

5\. Startups here seem to be hesitant to get smart folks from nearby places
like Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines or India. Just couldn't understand why.
My guess would be that an employment pass and dependent pass is quite costly
for them, or that getting immigrant workers would be too much of paperwork and
legal hassle for them.

6\. Most of the shops here follow the true Asian work culture where number of
years in a place trumps capability and competence. Singapore's culture is of
very high Power distance index. The mandatory national service for all boys at
their prime tunes and trains them that authority and orders must be followed
unquestionably.

7\. [http://blogs.wsj.com/searealtime/2011/12/15/wozniak-apple-
co...](http://blogs.wsj.com/searealtime/2011/12/15/wozniak-apple-couldnt-
emerge-in-singapore/)

and

<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.04/gibson_pr.html>

------
ComputerGuru
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but in this case, both British and American
English would say that the correct word is "has" and not "have" in the title?

I know British English is a little different when referring to entities
comprised of many people, but in this case, the the "have" refers to "your
talent" and not "Signapore" and, as such, should be "has" instead?

~~~
stan_rogers
"Your talent" would be a collective noun in this case, referring not to the
talent held by an individual, but the pool of talented people to draw upon.
The usage is analogous to _team_ or _crowd_ in this sense. (And yes, you could
use the singular, shift mental gears to anthropomorphize Singapore and assign
it the quality of talent, and keep the same overall meaning with a minor shift
in grammar and metaphor. And who said English is a simple language?)

~~~
jcampbell1
Talent is a _non-countable_ collective noun, like money or sugar. Consider
"Where has/have all your money gone?" Has is the correct answer, at least by
American grammar rules.

~~~
stan_rogers
Unless it's referring to people (actors, models, and so forth, as used in the
entertainment, photography and fashion industries). Again, the rules are
tricky, even in "straightforward" American (USA, that is) English.

------
noto
Personally, me and my friends have started a startup in Singapore from 2006
and shut it down after 5 years of trying to make it work. We graduated from
Computer Science of NUS in 2006 and startup is unheard of during that time.
Below is my opinion of "startups vs talent" in Singapore.

1\. There are very good CS guys around in Singapore, but most of them stayed
back at school to do PHD. The reason is very simple: Singapore IT jobs have
little coding skills needed and most of the time it is just project management
(with most of the coding jobs outsourced) or support work (calling up vendors,
standby when server down etc). There is no way for us to grow our talent once
out of school. College is the last place where we can do technically
challenging stuff, so those competent CS guys prefer to stay in school.

2\. Our govt is infact the biggest employer of our IT graduates, doing the
stuff of Point 1 above.

3\. Despite all the woohoo that the startup scene in Singapore is trying to
make itself into, it is really quite pathetic here. Cost is high, funding is
little, market is not in this region too. Naivety is still the main driving
force of startups in Singapore. Meaning those that want to startup in
Singapore are probably really first-timers that do not know what they are
getting into (especially fresh grads out of sch), and probably understood
startup as anything that has the mixture of "tech+biz"

4\. Companies do not value startup founders that failed, meaning if founders
want to find re-employment in other companies, it is doubly hard for them
cause employers do not understand what do startups do and how their experience
in startups can contribute in anything. Startup founders that failed in
Singapore is treated like a bankrupt equivalent.

So with job market that is generally not technically challenge, and startups
that are technically challenge but not making it at all, it is simple to see
why "talent" is not found in Singapore

~~~
dematio
Agree to number 4. If you are "out of touch" from corporate world for a few
years, it's difficult to get back to corporate world with a decent pay. You
have to take a big pay cut and probably you have start it from the beginning.

------
yen223
To tech companies everywhere: If you're finding it hard to find talent in
Singapore, you should seriously consider looking in Malaysia.

Here we have a glut of talent, costs are hell of a lot cheaper than Singapore,
and best of all, the Googles and Facebooks of the world don't have much of a
presence here, so that's less competition for you!

~~~
sushengloong
"Malaysia, where have all your talent gone?"

------
wheaties
Did he just complain about "companies he never heard of" and "top tech" like
Facebook? I hate to tell this kid but those companies you've never heard of
are 90% of what it means to be a start-up. Start-ups aren't well known at all
until they're already past the "might not be around next year" phase unless
they go through a well known incubator. Facebook on the other hand is
established. They aren't going anywhere any time soon.

------
eoin_murphy
As a developer, with a good few years of experience behind me (admittedly in
non-startup areas like insurance and equity plans), who's actively looked to
move to Singapore I've found it quite hard to find any jobs that didn't fall
into either the entry level code monkey (MUST KNOW HTML & XHTML) or the high
level investment banking sector.

Really good local talent will probably drift towards the latter and startup's
just can't compete with those sort of salaries. I imagine it's the same issue
with New York.

As with all good jobs, startup positions are never really advertised openly.
And if they are, they're not there for long.

------
frankchn
To be honest, the absolute smartest Math/CS-types I know (with a few
exceptions) went to the United States or the UK for their undergraduate
studies and decided to stick around rather than return to Singapore. Start-ups
in Singapore probably don't even know they exist.

------
hboon
Andy: I'm not tuned in to the startup scene here, have you observed this
trend?

~~~
andycroll
I've seen it. But it's the same as anywhere.

Good people are hard to hire.

Singapore also has a relatively favourable short-term working visa with the US
(H1B1?), which makes moving to the US more feasible for SG nationals.

~~~
wyclif
Good people are not hard to hire. If you don't believe me, take it from David
"Pardo" Keppel:

 _There's no shortage of smart, hardworking engineers. There's a shortage of
smart, hardworking engineers willing to work for very little money._

If you're having trouble hiring, it's because you're not paying enough. It
turns out that talented people are worth paying a lot for.

~~~
MugunthKumar
True that.

You can't easily see technical co-founders starting companies. As such, most
Singaporean startups are under the impression that building software can be
outsourced to cheaper countries like India/Philippines.

They don't seem to understand the difference between, "IT" and "Software
Engineering". The good engineers fight the system and eventually migrate to
greener pastures like SV.

I know some iOS developers who were offered salaries in the range of $3500 to
$4000 a month (matching a IT salary and not that of an Engineer's), almost
three times as low as SV, despite being a expensive city to live in.

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jmiseikis
How about hardware startups in Singapore?

~~~
notthetup
Almost inexistant.. Pretty ironic given the geographical closeness to
manufacturing centers like China and Taiwan.

I guess a part of it is the image that HW is not "fancy"..

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netpenthe
all your talent are belong to US

------
mmishra
How does it effect me ? Currently, why even to bother about anything else
other than work in hand !! - <http://syncfin.com>

~~~
mmishra
I apologize if I have hurt anyone's sentiments here. I didn't intend to hurt
anybody here. My comment was probably an impulsive, but unwanted, reaction. It
being the startup group forum, I was under the impression that only things
related to ideas and their execution will be discussed. But I was probably
wrong. I am seeing that topics are varying a lot here. There are topics from
generating power from urine to how to predict the trend of twitter.

In any case, I consider it as my mistake to put this comment which has been
considered by some as offensive. I regret the same.

I wish there was some way to delete it. I would have deleted it if it was
possible.

Thanks

