Comment by neilv
13 hours ago
What kind of success are countries having finding technical talent with the right savvy fighter mindset to sever the dependence on an aggressive and culturally-entrenched threat?
(Even the ordinary open source world has a lot of intrigue to be careful of. And most developers still think nothing of pulling in a fleet of dependencies from PyPI/NPM/Cargo/etc. as well as third-party network services. Everyone is being taught in school to play to FAANG interview rituals, and many go on to a career style of performative sprints. HCI is almost lost as a field to UX euphemism. Almost no one can deploy a system that won't be compromised, and most don't even try, except for some mandated ineffective theatre. AI homework-cheating mindset isn't helping. Etc. Not to complain, but to be clear the kind of inertia a country is facing.)
Do the countries wanting to fight this have enough of they right homegrown talent already, and know how to find and nurture it?
If they're importing additional talent, do they know how to find and incentive the right people, while turning away the ones with the wrong mindsets for this mission?
(ProTips: Look for the hardcore privacy&security non-careerist nerds. The left-leaning, societal-minded ones. Give them what they've been looking for, or support to help make what they've been looking for. Don't offer to pay too well. Anyone who asks "Why would I want to live in your country, when I can make more money elsewhere?" gets a permaban.)
The UK used to have a cloud provider (UK Cloud) but it got aggressively outcompeted by the US Hyperscalers, despite primarily targeting government departments. It's interesting that at the time the UK didn't consider data sovereignty enough of an issue to support a local cloud company. Shocking really.
A great deal of what may be included in "homegrown talent" in the US according to this comment, indeed has come from other countries...
And the US is much richer for them (monetarily, and culturally).
But what if home countries had said, "We can give you the resources you need for your work and home life, and it will be for purposes you can believe in and feel good about; not for crypto rug pulls, nor for surveillance capitalism, nor for stunting and manipulative social media"?
Sign me up.
I'm optimistic at the response from the EU on tech investment, but I haven't seen them put their money where their mouth is yet. If they want to poach talent from the US they'll also have to figure out an work visa path that makes it easier to move there (bureaucratically, like the classic "you need a phone number to sign up for a bank account, you need a bank account to rent an apartment, you need an address to sign up for a phone number") and direct investments away from the US and into local tech providers in support of infrastructure and development (that isn't AI related datacenters).