
Chinese Workers Abandon Silicon Valley for Riches Back Home - thisisit
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-10/chinese-workers-abandon-silicon-valley-for-riches-back-home
======
asabjorn
I am a Norwegian in Silicon Valley that have spent most of my career with
Chinese colleagues, both in academia and industry, and my anecdata seem to
indicate that my highly talented China-born colleagues are sadly leaving
because;

\- China has great opportunities for riches

\- Getting a US VISA is hard and painful when you come from a populous country
like China or India

\- My China-born colleagues seem to in general be more conservative, and
Silicon Valley has become violently intolerant of anyone that holds an opinion
different than the predominant view

Only the first reason is somewhat objective, while the two others cause stress
in their daily life as their ability to provide can at any time be removed due
to what is perceived as arbitrary reasons. Everything being equal, many of
them have told me they would prefer the less crowded Silicon Valley.

~~~
drb91
> My China-born colleagues seem to in general be more conservative, and
> Silicon Valley has become violently intolerant of anyone that holds an
> opinion different than the predominant view

What exactly does this mean? Are they evangelical baptists, libertarians,
reactionaries, nationalist, homophobic, misogynist, racist, anti-atheist, pro
family-values, pro corporation, skeptical of global warming, pro fossil fuel
energy, war hawks, or something else altogether? It's really quite difficult
to interpret your statement as anything meaningful without clarification, and
there are ten thousand different ways to be "conservative".

And to be clear, "conservative" is anything but a dirty word or something I'm
trying to critique here--just a context-sensitive one. It could be a
pejorative or a value.

Otherwise it doesn't add much to the conversation--it is itself a reactionary
statement.

~~~
ictoan
I'll try to take a stab at this. I'm Chinese-American and I feel the Chinese
folks who come to the US to study or to work have very different mindsets.

I have a friend who is dating a lot in NYC and he told me he notice most of
his Chinese-American friends are liberal as in we fight for freedom of
expression and social justice. Whereas the girls he met who are newly from
China are conservative and support Trump because they are pro-business and
more money-driven.

Based on his observation and my own experience I would agree. Most new Chinese
visitors or immigrants don't value social rights and freedom of speech. And to
be a bit critical, I feel they are so used to having the government or
authority telling them what to do that they are comfortable with authoritarian
rules and don't understand the importance of having independent thoughts and
diversity.

~~~
fredliu
With the risk of being down-voted, I would like to ask does "fight for freedom
of expression and social rights" really has to be the polar opposite of "pro-
business and more money-driven"? To me, those are answers/attitudes towards
two potentially orthogonal questions. To put it another way, is a "pro-
business and more money-driven" a good predictor on a person's opinion on
"freedom of expression and social rights" and vise-versa? Since there are so
many potentially orthogonal questions to ask, it seems to me it tells more
about those who ask those questions (which questions are more important to
them), than those who answered.

~~~
ictoan
Eh, so I would like to add I lean towards social democracy. And I admit I have
a bias view. When I think of pro-business, I think of corporations valuing
profit over people, of government valuing control over personal freedom, and
of people who assume money can solve all their problems.

~~~
platinumrad
Most people who consider themselves "pro-business" prefer less government
control vs personal freedom.

------
ryanianian
It is understandable why somebody would want to return to their home-country.
The "Bamboo Ceiling" the article discusses is incredibly concerning. It's
America's loss for sure.

I'm curious (1) how much of these people's education or experience was
subsidized by the American economy and (2) how common the same situation is in
China (i.e. US expats training up in China and taking that expertise back to
the US).

If (1) and (2) aren't aligned, it could be one of the factors contributing to
the growing sense that we pour a bunch of money into higher-ed without seeing
much return.

I don't mean this from a US nationalist or political perspective - I'm merely
speculating on the economics. Are the incentives for coming to the country
aligned for both the person and the country? Many companies will pay for
employees to go to grad-school but demand repayment if the employee isn't
still with the company N years later. Would such a system for college/work
visas make any sense to help keep talent?

~~~
fogzen
We could keep talent if we just allowed people to work here. We don’t. We only
allow 65,000 people to work in large corporations, in specific industries, at
the behest of the company, under constant threat of deportation and after
gambling thousands of dollars on the chance at approval.

My friends went back to China because the US is incredibly unwelcoming to
hard-working immigrants and provides no reliable path to citizenship or
permanent residency besides fraudulent marriage. Why should intelligent hard
working people put up with that? At a certain point dignity and a reliable
future are more important than the chance at a higher salary. The more
developed China becomes the less reason there is to put up with those
hardships.

~~~
ashwinaj
There is no denying the fact that it's hard to get permanent residency in the
US. But immigration should be a two way street, if people decide to stay in
the US they should try to assimilate. Is there a "bamboo celing", yes there
is; so is a "curry ceiling" and what have you "ceiling". But if you do not
push yourself to better your communication skills and other relevant skills
required to be successful, you can't expect to shatter this ceiling. This was
true for other immigrants too (18th/19th century Irish, Italian etc.)

It's hard not to overlook the fact that a lot of would be immigrants make no
effort to assimilate and cluster themselves off from mainstream society;
especially in a immigrant welcoming area like Silicon Valley. I bet if you
were to go to China/India etc., no one's going to go out of their way to
accept you.

(BTW, I'm an Indian citizen on H1B and I'm saying this, you can downvote my
post but it doesn't change ground realities)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Indians do much better in SV/tech senior management positions than Chinese.

Also, what does assimilate mean in an American context? It’s not like America
really has a strong well defined culture in the first place, it’s been like
ever since the country was founded.

~~~
ryanianian
> Indians do much better in SV/tech senior management positions than Chinese.

Please be careful about making generalizations based on race - they're
generally incorrect/unprovable and rarely provide any value to a conversation.
You can rephrase this to be "I've seen more Indians do better..."

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Huh? This is quantifiable. It’s no big mystery to anyone who works in tech,
and is not saying anything about abilities, just outcomes.

~~~
ryanianian
I've experienced the opposite in general, but I've seen some huge outliers in
both directions on both sides.

------
jorblumesea
I think it's interesting that many of those same criticisms can be leveled at
China. If you're not Han Chinese you'll never get far in any Chinese company.
You will get far helping someone else get rich. Getting permanent residency is
similarly stressful. In many ways, China is even less open than Western
societies and far less accepting of doing things a different way. Might be
great for returning Chinese but I'm not entirely sure they will be able to
attract a global talent pool like SV has done. Add in censorship and you've
got a pretty toxic environment brewing.

My guess is they'll run into similar (or worse) issues with their own SV.

I don't think that means any of what SV is doing is okay, just interesting
that other nationalities there will face the exact same issues that they faced
here.

------
lostmsu
There's one important datapoint in this article: "The Bamboo Ceiling".

When the whole fuzz about gender discrimination started, Microsoft and Google
published numbers, claiming women got the same pay at the same positions as
men. Knowing there's discrimination from personal experience/feeling, I
theorized, that women are discriminated in a different way: they don't receive
promotions.

Under otherwise similar circumstances having children does not feel to be
enough to explain why of 100 women hired in tech on professional roles less
are promoted to higher positions, than of 100 men. That trend is (at least
anecdotally for me) observable even before people become parents.

This "Bamboo Ceiling" shows the same effect for another potentially
discriminated group of people.

~~~
geofft
This is the allegation of the Ellis, Pease, and Wisuri lawsuit against Google
- that Google does okay at _hiring_ women, but slots them into lower positions
and gives them fewer promotions than men.
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/technology/google-
gender-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/technology/google-gender-pay-
lawsuit.html) The NYT's report on the leaked #talkpay spreadsheet seems to
show that pattern: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/technology/google-
salarie...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/technology/google-salaries-
gender-disparity.html)

The neat thing about this form of discrimination is that you can claim to be
fixing "the pipeline" all you want and you can still maintain the
discrimination, because the leak is after the pipeline. The dominant group
isn't threatened by competition if they fund efforts to increase the number of
underrepresented groups in grade school or college STEM education, as long as
those college graduates aren't later competing for senior jobs on a level
playing field.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
Your post kind of assumes that a fair process would promote women at Google at
the same rate as men. If reality is sexist, are we obligated to discriminate
against men to fix it?

~~~
denzil_correa
Curious - how would gender affect promotion rates?

~~~
tomp
Two reasons.

Women want children earlier (because menopause) and are more affected by them
(because giving birth) than equally family-minded men. As a result, women are
more motivated to prioritise having children/family.

In addition, men derive more advantage from more money/power than women, so
they're more motivated to climb the corporate ladder (or take risks and fund
companies) than women.

I'm generalising, obviously, so "on average" everywhere.

~~~
lurr
> Women want children earlier (because menopause)

women _need_ to have children earlier.

I don't see 70 year old men eagerly having kids all that often. Most people
want to live to see their grandchildren.

> I'm generalising, obviously, so "on average" everywhere.

"I have black friends"

------
evidencepi
Can't say for everyone else, but from my observation, ppl from big china
cities are more likely to go back while ppl from small cities are more willing
to stay. The reasons is that moving to big china cities is as hard if not
harder than staying in SV.

For myself, I'd like to stay here even I came from a big city like shanghai as
I enjoy the freedom in US and agree with american values.

Besides, china is getting worse in every aspect I care about such as speech
freedom, news freedom, human rights, food and air safety, etc, under Xi's
administration.

Unfortunately the waiting time for a green card is too long, I don't want to
sacrifice some of the most valuable years in my life just waiting here while I
can achieve more if I'm able to work on my own project.

So I am moving back as well in the near future and hope someday I can make an
achievement and get back to US.

------
le-mark
Last paragraph is terrifying, does China not have privacy laws at all?

 _More interesting than prospects for some may be the sheer volume of intimate
data available and leeway to experiment in China. Tencent’s now-ubiquitous
WeChat, built by a small team in months, has become a poster-child for in-
house creative license. Modern computing is driven by crunching enormous
amounts of data, and generations of state surveillance has conditioned the
public to be less concerned about sharing information than Westerners. Local
startup SenseTime for instance has teamed with dozens of police departments to
track everything from visages to races, helping the country develop one of the
world’s most sophisticated and extensive surveillance machines._

~~~
cubano
Are you truly having a hard time understanding how life under a Communist
dictatorship and a Representative Democracy would differ for the average
citizen?

It's really confounding to me that the younger generations seems to have such
a hard time with this.

Do they not teach comparative history in schools anymore?

~~~
cgh
In my experience as a non-American, a lot of younger Americans have adopted a
sort of dark, distorted view of history that casts the US as a villainous
entity. For these people, any suggestion that other states, particularly non-
Western ones, are even more villainous is met with scepticism.

Maybe they understand the differences between a representative democracy and
an authoritarian regime in theory but believe there's no real difference in
practice. It's a deeply unfortunate type of cynicism.

~~~
jstarfish
Every generation goes through this; it's not just this one. It's naive
idealism sparked by learned helplessness, fueled by a lack of
maturity/experience and amplified by foreign influence.

It used to be every generation of Americans had its subset of youth who become
infatuated with Communism, for example. They generally grow out of it and come
to appreciate their global standing once they graduate college and accumulate
some wealth.

Europeans are accustomed to being more mobile and studying abroad seems to be
almost expected. America is a very insular culture by comparison; depending on
academic program a lot of schools don't have meaningful study abroad programs
("let's go spend a week attending some lectures in London then go home") and
support for things like working holiday visas is pathetic. We don't have
anything like Erasmus. The only people I ever seem to meet who have traveled
more than a few hundred miles from home have only done so on deployment with
the military.

In aggregate we know virtually nothing about the rest of the world, so it's
easy for disillusioned kids to be convinced that their minor dissatisfactions
are on the level of human rights violations and that North Korea or ISIS-held
Syria are favorable by comparison.

~~~
cgh
Yes, very true. I suppose the internet just amplifies something that's been
around for decades. To add to your examples, it amazes me that people
favourably compare Russia's fixed elections with the failings of the Electoral
College.

------
GuiA
I don't think this is just Chinese workers, although it's a more noticeable
phenomenon just because of the numbers involved.

Many of my European colleagues have expressed a desire to move back to Europe
soon (<3 years, much less for many of them). It's a mix of a number of things
(for many, family is a big component), but really the biggest one is that they
don't feel that the opportunities the US offers are worth the sacrifices they
have to make anymore. A particular sacrifice that comes to mind is their
spouse being able to work - the Green Card process has been a shit show
lately.

In fact, many of them are realizing that the "American Tech Dream" that was
sold to them did not live up to expectations - particularly when it comes to
things like being able to afford a house, education for children, healthcare,
etc. in the Bay Area.

I've been in tech, in Silicon Valley, for 8 years, and this feels like it's
really influenced by the Trump presidency (the moment Trump got elected, I
have a few friends who left the US). But it's probably been brewing for longer
than that, and I was just paying less attention to it at the beginning of my
career.

FWIW I'm European and intend on leaving the US in <2 years for similar reasons
(namely, that I can have a much better standard of life in Europe, be closer
to my family, and do work that is as meaningful).

~~~
pedrosorio
"Many of my European colleagues have expressed a desire to move back to Europe
soon (...) A particular sacrifice that comes to mind is their spouse being
able to work - the Green Card process has been a shit show lately"

As another European immigrant, I can give you my perspective. Initially I was
apprehensive about my wife not being able to work.

In practice, it was less than a year from the moment she arrived until she got
an EAD card (work authorization after reaching a certain stage in the green
card application). Certainly a sacrifice, but looking back it was worth it.

The green card process took ~1.5 years in total (received it early 2017),
which pales in comparison to what people from China and (especially) India
have to go through. Did it become much worse in the last year?

~~~
GuiA
Yes. Current waiting times for the final step of the process is 12+ months (it
was ~2 months before the current administration according to lawyers). I am
currently 2.5+ years in, and late spring/early summer would be the best case
scenario according to the lawyers handling it. Same for several of my
coworkers. I work at a large, well known tech company.

~~~
yks
It's never been 2 months for 485 maybe apart from exceptional cases. 6 months
was possible though.

------
shadowtree
Noticeable in our hiring pipeline across iOS/C#/Java stacks.

Used to be a pretty diverse mix across Asian and Eastern European candidates,
with a rare white US person mixed in.

Now it is pre-dominantly Indian.

Really don't like single-ethnic teams, so hiring is getting even more
challenging in the Bay Area. We've also opened dev centers in the US mid-west
and Canada to help with this.

~~~
holydude
Are those indians americans or immigrants ?

And I am being downvoted...because ?

~~~
cubano
maybe because native americans would be the term and your question sounds
purposefully obtuse and perhaps even discriminatory?

just a guess.

~~~
hhw
I would have interpreted his question as whether they were East Indians with
US citizenship or not.

Also, I believe First Nations tends to be the preferred term over indigenous,
aboriginal, or native american.

~~~
Aloha
I've only heard First Nations used in the context of Canada - Native American
I believe is still the preferred term in the United States.

------
ggregoire
Why would they stay? China is seeing a huge boom in the tech industry and it's
only the beginning. The future is there, not in SV. I'm kinda jealous of my
friends who learned Chinese in college and are now working there.

~~~
djroomba
Being only part chinese, I can tell you unless you are full han chinese, you
will have a hard time on the mainland, regardless of how much chinese/mandarin
you know.

Edit: Im not going to share personal stories, I dont want my relatives there
to suffer for anything that gets reported back.

~~~
fredliu
I heard the other side of the story that ABCs could have a hard time in China,
because they look just like full han Chinese, but when people find out you are
not really "Chinese Chinese", attitudes/expectations/behaviors change.

Edit: I guess I should say "attitudes/expectations/behaviors change, for the
better or worse"

~~~
jdtang13
This doesn't seem super true in my opinion, but I could be wrong. I think that
a lot of native Chinese actually lower their expectations around ABCs and are
pretty interested in asking questions about American culture.

~~~
fredliu
I think what you said just confirmed my point: Is "Lower their expectations"
necessarily a good thing? Especially when we are talking about under a
professional environment. "He's really an American, he doesn't really
understand how to be a good manager for a team of native Chinese" doesn't
sound like an advantage to me.

------
gjkood
I am curious what the definition of an 'AI engineer' is.

Is it:

a) someone with an undergraduate/graduate/doctorate degree in CS with
specialization in AI/ML?

b) someone with a non-CS degree (Math/EE/CE/Other) who specialized in AI/ML?

c) someone who attended an AI/ML course on Coursera?

d) other?

~~~
rdtsc
Basically AI/ML is the new hot thing so everyone wants to be called an AI
engineer.

If they previously integrated Nuance's speech recognition into a product, they
were just an engineer, now they are an AI engineer. Worked on mapping product
which does routing before? Well route searching is an "AI" kind of problem so
they are an "AI engineer" too, and so on.

AI/ML is the new "big data" basically. As soon as "big data" appeared, nobody
was doing just "data", they were all of the sudden doing "big data".

~~~
gjkood
I do remember the days when a database in the 'GB' size range was considered a
very large database.

But hey, why would you ever need more than 640KB memory?

------
meri_dian
This makes sense by the simple observation that, all other things being equal,
most people will want to live and work in what they consider their homeland.
For many people who have come to the US, they have come not to find a new
homeland but rather to get wealthy and pursue opportunity.

This is an admirable thing. But as China develops and grows - conditions
becoming more equal between the US and China - it's only natural that Chinese
expats will find that they can seek "riches" in what they feel is their
homeland.

There's nothing wrong with this, and in fact will be good for people of all
nationalities as competition increases for talent.

~~~
danans
> it's only natural that Chinese expats will find that they can seek "riches"
> in what they feel is their natural and original homeland.

I can see your argument about returning to an "original homeland" (i.e. for
reasons of cultural or social affinity), but "natural homeland"? There's
nothing about the nature (air, land, climate, flora, fauna, etc) of China that
is uniquely suited to a Chinese person any more than anyone else.

~~~
meri_dian
That's not what I mean by a natural homeland. I say "original" because it's
where they're born and "natural" because it's the nation with the culture
they're most familiar and presumably comfortable with.

~~~
danans
> and "natural" because it's the nation with the culture they're most familiar
> and presumably comfortable with.

In that case, the correct term is "cultural homeland", not "natural homeland".

------
infinity0
> Of the more than 850,000 AI engineers across America, 7.9 percent are
> Chinese, according to a 2017 report from LinkedIn.

850,000 sounds way way too high.

> While Chinese engineers are well represented in the Valley, the perception
> is that comparatively fewer advance to the top rungs, a phenomenon labeled
> the “Bamboo Ceiling.”

American culture does reward asshole-behaviour a lot more than one can
tolerate sometimes. It's definitely not just a conservative problem, so don't
go blaming it on Trump.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Sociopaths tend to rise to the top in every organization, sadly.

~~~
sremani
I guess you mean psychopaths, Sociopaths are anti-social, so my guess is they
are not charming. It's a generalization but you do not get to the top without
being persuasive at decent level and to stay there, you better be good.

~~~
vinceguidry
You've got it backwards. Psychopathy is a particular variant of Antisocial
Personality disorder and is characterized by a complete lack of empathy. The
brain wiring literally doesn't exist.

Whereas sociopathy is a learned willingness to completely subvert empathy to
serve personal goals. They do have brain wiring for empathy, which is what
makes them effective at subverting it.

High-functioning psychopaths generally have to create a 'mask' in order to
pass for normal. The mask is quite cognitively expensive and so they tend to
prefer solitude. Low-functioning psychopaths tend towards criminality due to
poor self-control.

------
holydude
Money is the king. Seriously there are people that prefer their own familiar
environment but a logical explanation is if you can get significantly more
money elsewhere why not to go ? After all you can retire early and live
wherever you want. You would be surprised how many brilliant engineers work
have small coffee shops around the world not caring about money anymore.

------
xster
Shanghai is "smog-choked"? The AQI is the same as San Francisco.

The score is easily 10x worse in other cities but specifically Shanghai seems
overblown.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Look at the history: shanghai dipped orange and red multiple times in the past
few days, while SF just dipped into the yellow.

[https://aqicn.org/city/shanghai/](https://aqicn.org/city/shanghai/)

[http://aqicn.org/city/california/san-francisco/san-
francisco...](http://aqicn.org/city/california/san-francisco/san-francisco-
arkansas-street)

Keep in mind it’s also night in china ATM while it is noon in SF.

Shanghai is much worse than SF on average. It dips into the red zone more
often, retreating when it rains. Shanghai is much better than the rest of
china barring Shenzhen, Xiamen, and maybe Kunming, but it would still come
across to an American visitor as smoggier than they were used to.

------
hokkos
> "850,000 AI engineers across America"

Seriously ?

~~~
monocasa
It's like they counted up the number of people who know what a linear
regression is, and called them all 'AI engineers'.

~~~
sidlls
In fairness a regression is about the extent of a large number of "machine
learning" efforts ever get to (often with good reason, actually).

It's worse than what you write, though. I've seen the "AI" and "machine
learning engineer" labels applied to jobs where the developer is basically
copy-and-pasting some sklearn snippet from an ipython notebook written by an
actual ML/Data Science engineer into his "production" pipeline.

------
ThrowAway3456
I think it's not just Chinese, but pretty much most immigrant have a stronger
desire to go back home. Speaking as an immigrant myself,i don't think most of
us came to the US because we loved american culture, we came for the
opportunity, and as more and more opportuinity open up in culture closer to
our native cultures, going back make more and more sense.

The other aspect i didn't see mentioned is that dating for an average
immigrant man (which are still the majority of the immigration in tech) is a
brutal experience; between the skew gender ratio, the ruthlessness of
modern/app based dating and increasing intolerance against "conservative
values" etc... for anecdotal sample, a large population are just leaving to
escape the loneliness and try to start a family

------
taylorhost
No surprise from an opportunity standpoint. Certain research fields are now
much better funded in China. That said, reasons for moving home are most-often
individual/personal.

Throughout this thread, I see a lot of solid reasons for a Chinese Expat in SV
to give returning to China thoughtful consideration. That said, one hard
negative moving from non-China into China is the availability of modern,
standard-practice develop tools. Replicating the tools/DevEv within China is
certainly possible, but requires effort and is often frustrating. VPN hot
potato is getting more frequent & homegrown China DevEnv tools are often
dramatically different from the tools common to non-China business.

------
luminati
What is this bamboo ceiling in tech that they are talking about? The last time
I checked the CEOs of Microsoft and Google weren’t the stereotypical
ethnicity.

~~~
dragonwriter
The fact that some South Asians rise to high ranking positions in tech in the
US does not mean that Asians in tech overall are not disadvantaged in practice
in advancement in the field in the US.

(I have no real opinion about whether there _is_ a bamboo ceiling effect in
tech, not having done any study of the question, but the two examples you
point to are far from even a strong reason to doubt the effect.)

