Comment by alephnerd
13 hours ago
And, more critically - if foreigners are deciding to take up faculty positions in their home countries.
Countries like India, Vietnam, and South Korea have begun replicating the Chinese Thousand Talents program to attract their diasporas back to domestic academia.
Significant domains of CS such as HPC/Systems, Networking, OS internals, etc are heavily dependent on faculty, graduate students, and post-docs who are all on some sort of visa. And increasingly, at least amongst Indians, becuase the backlogs for US citizenship are insane, a number of those people have been taking sweetheart positions at INIs like the new IITs with almost US$100k in public-private lab startup grants on top of a $20k salary (tax free due to the income tax changes) with free housing and car and complete autonomy to consult with private sector players without IP entanglement (one of the biggest headaches for public private STEM R&D partnerships in the US).
Vietnam is doing something similar as well to attract Vietnamese diaspora in SK and Japan, along with Viet Kieu in America and Australia.
A nativist academic culture in STEM in the US would completely destroy any R&D capacity that even exists today.
> A nativist academic culture in STEM in the US would completely destroy any R&D capacity that even exists today.
Well, considering all other countries mentioned here are just hiring native people who worked in US. Indians are not hiring Chinese, or Europeans or any other than natively Indians. Same for Chinese or others. So nativist policy can for those countries but not US is strange.
If one sees crowd at US embassy or consulates in India, US has nothing to worry about talent not trying hard to come to US.
All this analysis about US downfall seems kind of assuming that rest of the world is doing lot better. Traveling to India in last few years and experiencing first hand tells me believing even 1% of these hype generators of India is believing too much.
As an Australian, I've seen recruiters from the US, Europe, Hong Kong, and Dubai. I think such offers are reflective of who pays more than Australia rather than nativism.
Since tech wages in the US are the highest anywhere in the world, with the possible exception of Monaco or something, I would imagine Americans don't see a lot of recruiters from elsewhere in the world. I would also imagine that's because it's harder to recruit someone who's earning American wages.
But these US wages aren't actually all that great anymore. The vast majority of people will have nothing to show for their decade of working in tech other than a bad back, carpal tunnel, and a neurosis.
The cost of living in the Bay Area creeps ever upward and absorbs just enough salary to keep the worker bees coming back to the office the next day. It's really not that different of a life than elsewhere in materialistic terms. Except there is also nothing to do other than work or go hiking. More and more people are cluing in.
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Indians in America aren't eligible for an E3 like Australians are.
Furthermore, Indians in America face a 20-80 year permanent residency backlog depending on when they arrived in the US. The majority of Indians nationals in America will eventually return to India as a result.
The US is increasingly viewed as a temporary posting instead of as a naturalization destination becuase of the backlog, and most other Western countries don't provide lucrative offers for the cream of the crop compared to what they can demand in India.
For example, the average new grad salary at IIT Kanpur was around US$30K for the class of 2024 [0], and a mid-career TC of US$60k-70K is realistic for INI grads (as one of the other posters in this thread is an example of).
Most of India's R&D is overwhelmingly generated by alumni of these INIs, and the majority of investment is placed in these programs. These are also the kinds of programs that previously used to represent the bulk of the brain drain 15-20 years ago, but their grads overwhelmingly remain in India unless doing graduate school like a PhD or an MBA (these aren't the kinds of people doing an MSc in Business Analytics at Wollongong in order to get an Australian permanent residency), let alone accepting decades of indentured servitude due to the EB2 processing backlog.
[0] - https://m.economictimes.com/jobs/fresher/iit-kanpur-class-of...
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>Well, considering all other countries mentioned here are just hiring native people who worked in US. Indians are not hiring Chinese, or Europeans or any other than natively Indians. Same for Chinese or others. So nativist policy can for those countries but not US is strange.
Context is not neutral. "We want to hold onto the labor we produce" works for labor exporters in a way that it doesn't work for labor importers.
Making private sector/startup consultancy really easy for professors to do is one of the main reasons there is an insane pickup of pace in the return of the diaspora. Many professors in my IIT suddenly have BMWs. I''ve never seen it before 2021ish. And yes, BMWs are a luxury car in India. And no. IITs being a government college don't pay professors enough for them to afford a luxury car on salary alone (in the context of financial conservativeness typical to india). For more context, my starting SWE job before I came back for M.S paid as much as my professor earned decades into his career, being dean, and having a couple of other responsibilities. - 50L per year (total comp, not base). Also helps that the STEM economy is picking up like crazy.
It is true that the govt institutions themselves have less IIT representation, mostly due to low salaries. However, what matters to the private sector is sources of capital. Tech investors in india usually went to IITs themselves, and so the ecosystem always remains close to IITs, allowing professors easy access. Lot of the startups (even YC ones!) by IIT students actually involved one of their professors in the ideation stage, and they even have equity % sometimes. Similar to Rajeev Motwani holding a stake in Google, they get really rich sometimes.
> Making private sector/startup consultancy really easy for professors to do is one of the main reasons there is an insane pickup of pace in the return of the diaspora
Yep! The University of Waterloo back in Ontario did the same thing in the 1960s, which helped catapult the program into a Tier 1 CSE program comparable to older more established programs like UToronto and UMich.
> Lot of the startups (even YC ones!) by IIT students actually involved one of their professors in the ideation stage, and they even have equity % sometimes
Yep! There are also some NIT, BITS Pilani, IIT, and other program specific networks made by their alumnis in academia and VC. I think Foundation Capital (Netflix, Cerebras, Fortanix) is running one such program.
> It is true that the govt institutions themselves have less IIT representation, mostly due to low salaries
Ministry affiliated universities are a major reason why. For example, ISRO overwhelmingly recruits from IIST, ONGC from IIPE, and other SOEs or R&D programs will recruit from universities specialized in that specific disciple instead of an IIT or NIT now.
> ministry affiliated
Ooh, didn't know that. Interesting.
Yeah, and the - often ignored in conversations - IIITs, are also quite strong.
This is one of the reasons India has a civilian spaceflight program.
The obvious overlap with military technology aside, it's a way to retain and increase the institutional knowledge within India across a lot of areas.
Indian spaceflight program done by ISRO have very few people from IITs or any of the so called elite colleges. Unlike china Indian colleges are really backward due to lack of research funding and a coaching industry which have gamified the entrance exams.
> Indian spaceflight program done by ISRO have very few people from IITs or any of the so called elite colleges
The bulk of recruitment at ISRO has always been happening at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST) and the Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc) - not IITs.
Even getting into an IIST or IISc is almost as difficult as getting into an old IIT based on the JEE cutoffs.
Both India and China have specialized institutions dedicated to subfields that end up getting the bulk of R&D funding in said subfields, for example, Petroleum Engineering and the China University of Petroleum and the Indian Institute of Petroleum Engineering, or in mining enigneeing, the China University of Mining and Technology and the Indian School of Mines (now IIT Dhanbad).
> Unlike china Indian colleges are really backward due to lack of research funding and a coaching industry which have gamified the entrance exams
China also bases acceptance on entrance exams - the Gaokao is equally as competitive as the JEE Advanced. The exact same gamification of entrance exams and coaching centers is sadly the norm in China as well, despite the Xi admin's initial attempts to crack down on it.
Additonally, Chinese R&D funding is also stratified the same way Indian R&D funding is.
The equivalent of a government engineering college in both China and India would be receiving relatively limited funding or autonomy, but a Double First Class University in China or an INI in India well get the first pick of research grants and subsidizes.
If there is a promising professor at a mid-tier program, they are likely affiliated and getting their funding via affiliation to a national academy like the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
This is why all regional powers have a civilian space flight program - the same thing you mentioned but also it allows you to sidestep some international treaties around testing.
> Countries like India, Vietnam, and South Korea have begun replicating the Chinese Thousand Talents program to attract their diasporas back to domestic academia.
Really? I'm yet to meet a single diaspora (i.e. born/raised abroad) professor here in Korea and I interact with universities quite a bit.
Unless diaspora here includes those who did their full university education abroad though, lots of those indeed.
> Unless diaspora here includes those who did their full university education abroad though, lots of those indeed.
Yes. By definition these are diaspora members as well.