
Apple still depends on traditional American engineers, and is slowly losing them - aspenmayer
https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/04/30/apple-still-depends-on-traditional-american-engineers-and-is-slowly-losing-them
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IlyaMoroshkin
The US needs to improve its immigration system so that it can hire these smart
engineers, from places like Europe in particular.

Right now, the current H1B system is totally dominated by Indians, who make up
70% of the intake. The scheme seems designed to undercut American salaries,
rather than enhance American companies with highly skilled workers.

The scheme should be redesigned with a higher minimum salary, and a maximum of
10% of the intake from any one country.

And yes, the education system needs to change. Education should not be an
'export' \- knowledge should be retained inside the nation, not sold off to
foreign competitors. International students should only be accepted from
America's closest allies.

Heck, education and immigration could just be overhauled to be NATO-only, with
selected highly developed NATO partner countries as well.

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renewiltord
People ask me why I don't want programmer unions. This is why. This will be in
the top 5 things on their agenda.

Not interested in making America some sort of loser fiefdom operated by the
inadequate who need regulation because they cannot compete. No way.

Besides, if Europe is so great, maybe there would be this massive collection
of great tech companies there. Instead, 49 square miles in America has
produced more economic value in tech than any European city.

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Dylan16807
> Not interested in making America some sort of loser fiefdom operated by the
> inadequate who need regulation because they cannot compete. No way.

Only if ability to compete is defined as accepting a much smaller wage for the
same job with the same skill level.

The way you get 'fiefdoms' is by helping companies build up enormous piles of
profit without paying their workers well.

~~~
renewiltord
America is a beautiful land of opportunity for folks in tech. The
exploited/exploiter dichotomy is a problem for someone whose primary advantage
is being a native English speaker and located in the US. That sort of engineer
is already been commodified away by the thousands by remote engineering teams
from Gdansk to Lahore to Manila. He has one more generation while the young
Asians start up as native English speakers and everyone gets used to remote
workers.

On the other hand, the engineer whose primary advantage is his engineering is
super-charged by focusing on where he provides comparative advantage.

Yeah, it turns out updating your Coldfusion website to display a notice on
Sunday is something a child can do, and making a scalable backend for
Dropbox's storage requires immense expertise. If you're the first guy, the
writing is on the wall. If you're the second guy, the less time you spend on
things that don't require your skill, the more valuable you are.

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kootling
Main point of the article (quoted):

> In 2017, Tim Cook came as close as he ever has to publicly addressing the
> issue. "In the US," he said, "you could have a meeting of tooling engineers,
> and I'm not sure you could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple
> football fields."

One possible reason for this is that US education is generally broad compared
to other countries. No one in America majors in "tool engineering" but a
mechanical engineer could certainly be trained for the job. In other countries
such as Germany and China you're more likely to follow a more narrow path (for
better or worse).

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api
Isn't there an obvious reason? The US outsourced everything physical to other
countries. You can fill stadiums in the US with finance, marketing, software,
and business experts.

~~~
Rury
Exactly, the problem is outsourcing.

Whatever you decide to outsource you gradually lose expertise in. Which should
be obvious, as if I paid someone to fix my car for me all the time, I probably
wouldn't come to be an expert in knowing how to fix it myself.

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mrkirk
Apple is pretty much an exception of a hardware company that still shine as a
cool place to work. These traditional industrial jobs have moved abroad a long
time ago. You will find at most prototyping in the US, however everything is
manufactured in China. The pandemics has proven that. Even on sensitive
medical equipment, the mass production takes place in China.

~~~
jmeister
This is what I thought too, but I’ve been told that there’s a lot of fantastic
manufacturing expertise in the defense industry? Boeing, Lockheed Martin etc.?

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etrabroline
Why should we care if Americans are teaching the next generation of Americans,
as opposed to the next generation of Chinese? Imagine if someone said we
should reserve American universities for our own people instead of giving
slots to foreign students. That would immediately be condemned as xenophobic
racism, and I don't see how this is any different.

