
The “startup nation” is running out of steam - wslh
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21701810-startup-nation-running-out-steam-talent-search
======
reuven
Israel has a great high-tech sector. I have enjoyed it for more than 20 years,
and continue to be a part of it as a consultant. It's amazing to see how many
companies are here, big and small. And for engineers, it's shocking to see
just how many good jobs you can choose from. Israelis in high tech live a
privileged life.

And yet, we have to remember that Israel is a small country, and that even if
a large proportion of your population goes into high tech, that's still a far
cry from everyone. Add to that the fact that our schools aren't pushing
science and math nearly as well as they could, and I'm not hugely surprised
that there are problems on the horizon, near- and long-term.

The problem would seem to be more for companies than for individual engineers.
Individuals with high-tech skills will continue to be sought after. But if
you're starting a company, and want to recruit talent, then the competition
for such talent (already quite fierce) might well be even tougher.

The government is making a strong push for better math and CS education, to
try to stem this problem. And I'd like to think that things will change, but I
don't know by how much.

------
whamlastxmas
TL;DR: Israel is apparently known by some as the "startup nation" and growth
in the tech sector is growing slower than rest of economy, supposedly due to
lack of trained employees.

There was another article recently saying the same thing about (I think)
Spain.

~~~
Kinnard
The moniker "Startup Nation" owe's a lot to the eponymous book:
[https://www.amazon.com/Start-up-Nation-Israels-Economic-
Mira...](https://www.amazon.com/Start-up-Nation-Israels-Economic-
Miracle/dp/0446541478/) It's a great read.

Speaking from personal experience, Israel is the only place on earth with a
startup ecosystem comparable to the Valley.

~~~
lsc
>Speaking from personal experience, Israel is the only place on earth with a
startup ecosystem comparable to the Valley.

Hm. So, I guess when I was starting my company, the ability to make a lot of
money myself made a huge difference; I was able to turn that money into a
company... (Now, of course, I understand this isn't what most people do, and
after doing it myself, I understand why most people don't do it that way. This
isn't how I'm going to start my next company, if I ever start a company
again.)

The problem with Israel, (in my experience, which is approaching a decade old)
is just that the pay there was very dramatically less, to the point where,
yeah, if I had money, I might want to start a company there, sure, but I
couldn't do what I did in silicon valley; I couldn't use my own labor to
bootstrap the capital required to start a company, because my labor would be
worth a small fraction of what it's worth in silicon valley.

------
chongli
It makes sense. What are the prospects of non-Jewish engineers moving to
Israel? The Valley depends on large amounts of immigration from all over the
world, particularly Asia. I would think that most Jewish engineers who would
want to live in Israel are already there by now.

~~~
tamana
Why would a non-Jewish engineer (or Jewish engineer ) not want to move to
Israel, if there are job opportunities?

Why would no more Jewish engineers want to mve to Israel? There are more being
born and growing up every year -- Jewish engineers are a renewable resource.

~~~
Dr_tldr
[http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/bye-the-beloved-
country-w...](http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/bye-the-beloved-country-why-
almost-40-percent-of-israelis-are-thinking-of-emigrating.premium-1.484945)

People who live in a country usually know it better than foreigners, so if
almost 40% of them are contemplating emigration, there are some deep economic
and social problems within that society.

The last major immigration to Israel were eastern european jews leaving the
Soviet Union in the late 1980s, and that was only because Israel put enormous
political pressure on the US to not allow them to come to the states instead.

~~~
reissbaker
> The last major immigration to Israel were eastern european jews leaving the
> Soviet Union in the late 1980s, and that was only because Israel put
> enormous political pressure on the US to not allow them to come to the
> states instead.

I can't find a source for your claim the Israel put political pressure on the
US to not allow Soviet Jews to immigrate. Your dates are also off by 1-2
decades, according to Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_Post-
Soviet_aliyah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_Post-Soviet_aliyah)

Do you have a source for your claim?

~~~
Dr_tldr
>The 1990s Post-Soviet aliyah began en masse in late 1980s when the government
of Mikhail Gorbachev opened the borders of the USSR and allowed Jews to leave
the country for Israel.

Yes, the one you just linked and didn't read, at all. Literally the first
sentence of the wikipedia article. The first sentence. From Wikipedia, the
highest number of Jewish immigrants from The Soviet Union was in 1990. The
first chart!

Further discussion of the reason for Jewish organizations in America and
Israel supporting limiting the amount of Soviet Jewish immigration to the US
can be found here:

[http://quod.lib.umich.edu/b/belin/13469761.0016.001/\--we-
are...](http://quod.lib.umich.edu/b/belin/13469761.0016.001/--we-are-not-one-
american-jews-israel-and-the-struggle-for?rgn=main;view=fulltext)

I can't imagine you're a good developer or a good project contributor, since
not only are you not capable of reading the documentation or doing a google
search, you correct people who are right by using sources that say that you're
wrong.

~~~
reissbaker
Sure, the highest spike was in 1990 — which is, you'll notice, not actually in
the 80s — but nonetheless the article is quite clear that there was a high
volume of Jewish immigration to Israel from the former Soviet Union throughout
the 1990s and tapering off toward the end and through the early 2000s. There
were 50k immigrants in the year 2000, for example, in the chart you're
referencing. Saying that the "the last major immigration to Israel were
eastern european jews leaving the Soviet Union in the late 1980s" (sic) is off
by a decade even if you only count the '90s as part of the post-Soviet aliyah,
and more than a decade if you count the early 2000s — Wikipedia considers the
entire immigration wave to be from roughly 1989 to 2006, as mentioned in the
_second_ sentence of the post.

Your other ad hominem comments seem pretty absurd.

~~~
Dr_tldr
Are you a non-native speaker of english at a lower-intermediate level? Because
most conversational speakers of english would be able to successfully
understand that it was implied as an ongoing process, while most lower-
intermediate speakers tend to focus on grammar rules mechanically while having
limited comprehension of everyday usage.

Ie, most of the people who left in 1990 had already begun their applications
and prepared to emigrate in 1989 or even earlier, unless you believe that the
crumbling soviet bureaucracy moved at lighting speed and that it was easy for
jews in central Asia to travel thousands of miles and spend potentially weeks
applying for an exit visa in Moscow.

Citing wikipedia as a primary source is something that wikipedia explicitly
discourages, in part because so many articles are constantly being degraded in
quality by extremist political partisans: scientologists, objectivists,
zionists, stalinists, neo-nazis, etc. Clearly I have a grasp of the facts of
the matter, so why are you splitting hairs if not to distract from the other
things I said that you have no response to.

The link I posted (of which you have said nothing, nor have you attempted a
defense of why the Israeli government shut down a Finnish transit point that
allowed soviet Jews to choose between the US and Israel) puts the period
between 1989 and 1993. Furthermore, it provides exhaustive and nuanced
evidence that the Israeli state was strongly opposed to allowing soviet jews
freedom of choice. Ironically, the Israeli political mainstream is quite
similar to the Soviet Union itself, in both its curtailing of human freedom,
crude propaganda lies, and ugly ethno-nationalism.

It is pretty absurd that you would have this evidence but be in such a strong
state of dissonance that you're not willing to contest or process them, you're
only trying to block them out.

That sounds to me like a developer who ignores technical debt, isn't capable
of learning new ways of thinking or disagreeing rationally, and insists on
endless bikeshedding of irrelevant minutia instead of dealing with actual
facts. I've known several great expat Israeli developers, and more than one of
them left Israel precisely because they found that engineers and politicians
with attitudes like the one I've described are destroying Israeli economic and
social life.

------
vertis
If you're like me and like to click on links to the economist, you might not
be able to read the full text of this article.

[http://www.geektime.com/2016/06/30/is-the-startup-nation-
run...](http://www.geektime.com/2016/06/30/is-the-startup-nation-running-out-
of-steam/) has some details (and looks like it was written before the
economist article).

------
davidf18
Intel Israel employs about 10,000 Israelis. Many of the intel processors are
designed there and they are converting a 22nm fab to 10 nm there as well.

Much of Apple's computer chip design operations are in Israel and the head of
the computer chip design group is an Israeli Arab with a masters degree from
Israel's Technion University.

Israeli drones protect NATO troops in Afghanistan. Germany will be leasing the
newest Heron missile drones from Israel for over $600 million.

------
spaceflunky
I'm someone who works on partnerships with startups for a large tech company.

IMO the "hard tech" companies from Israel are pretty good (it infrastructure,
cloud computing, data, microprocessors, etc).

The most of the 'consumer tech' startups are kinda lame and copycat-ish imo.
Waze was a weird anomaly and sparked about 100 derivative geo startups in
Israel.

~~~
Illniyar
Israel is pretty strong in several "soft tech" \- gambling (888, playtika
etc...), adtech (amobee, outbrain, taboola etc..) and fintech.

There are a few other big consumer startups of renown that aren't copycatish -
viber, wix, fiverr.

~~~
spaceflunky
Come on now... viber, wix, fiverr? Those are basically Skype,
Squarespace/Wordpress, and a million other professional services marketplaces.

There's nothing unique about any of those companies.

------
Illniyar
We hear this lack of engineers issue lately about practically every country,
either it's a story that sells so it gets copied by every local news agency or
it's a global trend.

I'm guessing its something in between - a global trend (mostly caused by
increase in demand) and increased hype because people like to hear about it.

------
z88
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