I don't really think the connection you're trying to draw follows immediately. There are very strong domestic students, probably enough to fill all the top PhD programs. The calculus for pursuing a PhD is different if you're a domestic vs international student. If you're international and want to move to and eventually live in the US, where some of the highest paying jobs in the world are available, then first getting into a well regarded graduate program, which will attract potential employers, coming in on a student visa and then getting an employer to sponsor an H1B is a pretty good strategy. If you're already a top student in the US at a top university, you already have access to those employers and intend to stay in the same country long term, so the opportunity cost of going to graduate school is so much higher.

If that was the case then FAANG wouldn't be filled with Asians and engineers from ex-Soviet countries. The makeup of high paying tech companies does not represent in any way the makeup of the American population. I posit the reason this is the case is American culture and anti-intellectualism.

If you look at top public school undergrad programs that don't practice affirmative action (UC's, UW) the programs are almost 50% Asian.

To be clear, when I say American I mean someone whose ancestors have lived in America for multiple generations, since at least the 1950's. I'm the child of immigrants and I don't consider myself an American. My culture places a distinctly different emphasis on educational achievement compared to what you might consider an American.

> If that was the case then FAANG wouldn't be filled with Asians and engineers from ex-Soviet countries. The makeup of high paying tech companies does not represent in any way the makeup of the American population.

I don't think you can draw a cultural difference from this. I get what you're trying to say, particularly by narrowly defining "American"; that cultural influences put pressure/status on academics both by immigrant parents and non-American parents and that pressure causes students to excel academically and achieve these high paying positions. But there is so much selection bias here; both in the types of people who immigrate to a new country and those who leave their home country to attend school abroad. It's not clear to me Asian culture results in FAANG being disproportionally Asian, or simply that there are 2 billion Asian people in the world, and while the same percentage of people are sufficiently qualified as top American students (let's say 2%), 2% of 2 billion people is 40M people! Do you see the problem with jumping to this conclusion? You don't have sufficient evidence to reject the null hypothesis, that both cultures produce tops students at similar percentages.

A personal anecdote: I spend a lot of my interviewing candidates. Students for all the top schools in the world, international students and domestic students, undergrads and PhDs. Conditioned on having gone to a top university, I've never noticed a difference in performances between domestic students and international ones. (Or undergrad vs PhD to be honest.)

I also take a bit of issue with your definition of "American" on a personal level.

> To be clear, when I say American I mean someone whose ancestors have lived in America for multiple generations, since at least the 1950's.

My parents are immigrants, I'm a first generation American. But I am absolutely culturally American. There is no other country were I would feel at home culturally, and I've been heavily influenced by the country I grew up in. I'm also the product of US public schools, most notably UC Berkeley, which you cite. And I'm not Asian or Russian. And I do work at a FAANG level firm.

> If that was the case then FAANG wouldn't be filled with Asians and engineers from ex-Soviet countries. The makeup of high paying tech companies does not represent in any way the makeup of the American population. I posit the reason this is the case is American culture and anti-intellectualism.

There are schools in every country.

There are not FAANG headquarters in every country.

The top candidates from around the world (who are willing to relocate) will emigrate to whatever country has the highest paying jobs. That happens to be FAANG companies in the United States right now.

So of course FAANG jobs will not mirror the population of schools. It will mirror the population of educated engineers who are able and willing to relocate (especially pre-COVID before remote was an option)

Trying to draw parallels between FAANG employment and American schools in this fashion is nonsensical.

The difference between American and Soviet schools back in the day was that Soviet curriculum was designed for ~80% to pass, while American was designed for ~99% to pass. (Nowadays, Russia has lowered the bar significantly, so the difference is no longer as huge.)

An average student who finished 5th grade in an average school in USSR could start 6th grade in the U.S. and coast along on what they'd learned until the first year of high school.

> The top candidates from around the world (who are willing to relocate) will emigrate to whatever country has the highest paying jobs. That happens to be FAANG companies in the United States right now.

This view is only correct if a) the US border is completely open and b) all the candidates around the world can speak professional English. We know that both the above conditions are false.

How about this: the easier it is to relocate and work for FAANG companies, the more the FAANG workforce will resemble the global supply of people who would like to work for them. If the skill sought is coding, not sales, sufficient English fluency is not a great barrier. There are plenty of programmers who do fine without ever having mastered definite articles or the present perfect.

Part of it is control. If you’re on an H1B, applying for a green card you are often chained to your company. If you quit (or get fired), you have 60 days to find a job or you have to leave the country.

This isn’t the case with citizens who have much more freedom and mobility.

Not quite. American across the sea immigration selects for the smartest and most ambitious people in the world. It's natural that they and their descendants will outperform most Americans.

& it benefits Americans (even those whose families have been here for generations) tremendously.

I am a “native born” American, and I’ve benefited a lot from having a whole bunch of extremely smart immigrants in my field. My physics graduate school mentor was from Ukraine, my advisor was an immigrant from China. The person who hired me out of graduate school to an aerospace/materials science job was an immigrant from the Philippines. Several of the coworkers who have best coached and mentored me were immigrants from Zimbabwe and Korea. Generally more helpful and kind to me than native-born coworkers. It is as positive sum as it gets.

(although I don’t think it lasts very long past first or second generation immigrants. It’s more individual choice and family culture than anything. So the only way to keep the benefit of cherrypicking & equipping the most ambitious and brightest among the world is to continuously encourage high skilled immigration.)

The smartest Americans go into law and medicine and banking, because the expected value is even higher for bright people in those fields than technology.

I don't think thats true anymore, unless you become a partner at a large law firm (very unlikely even for top grads) or are a very specialized surgeon (extremely difficult job) most FAANG level senior developers will out earn you and work far less. Might be true of banking but idk

Maybe this is implicitly understood, but I don't think everyone's goal is to maximize income/wealth. That is, not everyone would calculate "expected value" in the same way.

it used to be true, before 2008 crisis. Not anymore

> If that was the case then FAANG wouldn't be filled with Asians and engineers from ex-Soviet countries. The makeup of high paying tech companies does not represent in any way the makeup of the American population. I posit the reason this is the case is American culture and anti-intellectualism.

In a land where money buys everything, you think culture is the reason why a thing exists or doesn't exist? I think you're drinking too much of your own ideological kool aid.

High paying tech companies want to pay less, so they recruit internationally to not be so high paying. Along the same lines, American kids with the access to generational wealth to do whatever they want find it more lucrative to choose some other more localized field of work that doesn't compete with indentured servitude (H1s) for wages.

H1B's in Big tech are about as far from indentured servants as you can imagine, they're in high demand and switch jobs for better pay constantly. American kids with access to generational wealth aren't as interested in difficult technical subjects.

> H1B's in Big tech are about as far from indentured servants as you can imagine

False.

> they're in high demand and switch jobs for better pay constantly.

And each time they do so, their new employer has to go through the entire process of getting them a new H1 visa. When your right to be in a place is dependent upon your labor to a specific contracted employer, you are an indentured servant.

>new employer has to go through the entire process of getting them a new H1 visa.

this is not true, saying this as a person on h1 who changed jobs easily.

when talking about indentured servants you are probably referring to small Indian IT bodyshops, that keep people on low wages due to them being on a very long green card queue, but this has nothing to do with H1 per se. These people do not work in big tech

> I posit the reason this is the case is American culture and anti-intellectualism.

Or perhaps awful schools

do you really think that FAANG companies want to pay less? they are already top paying employers, i think you are mistaken

It wasn't that long ago that FAANG got caught for rigging the labour market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Obviously FAANG (and most companies) want to pay as little as possible for their labour. They don't pay $500,000 for senior engineers because of their innate generosity and desire to pay them well. They pay that much because they have to if they want to attract and retain the employees they are looking for.

"do you really think that FAANG companies want to pay less?"

That's the basic premise of markets.

Conversely, they are posting huge profits, why don't they pat even more?

I don't know that America is anti-intellectual beyond a facade. It's easy to not like something that you'll perceivably never have or can manage to live without. Education is mainly reserved for the select few, and those select few aren't so revered anymore. People all want the same opportunities, but they're definitely not anywhere close to universally attainable. If you give people access to those things then I think you'll see that facade drip away.

%34 of the world population are from India and China. And to be honest there isn't as many ex-soviet engineers in FANG as you would think, they are vastly outnumbered to chinese and indian engineers.

When you hire the world, your demographics are going to represent the world for the most part. There are a few modifications as to why latin america, africa and developed nation people are not as well represented, but it still holds.

That's an interesting observation, because paired with the elite overproduction hypothesis, it implies that allowing skilled immigration destabilises the country those people are entering, and stabilises the one they have left.

By playing to win like the tech companies do, they created a growth frontier that allows for more total elite capacity, and it shows as pretty much only growing part of the US economy. Overall if the US didn't allow immigration in this regards, it probably would have been way worse overall. Do you want to be a king of a trash pile or a player in an empire?

> If you look at top public school undergrad programs that don't practice affirmative action (UC's, UW) the programs are almost 50% Asian.

That's why, when looking at resumes, I've heard "Yeah, you know X is good, he went to Y (a school with affirmative action) and he's Asian/International, so you know he's there on merit".

I somehow feel we regressed over time.

>so you know he's there on merit

it is hilarious how historical racism towards blacks leads to reverse racism (affirmative action) and leads to another racisms.

it's like you can't fix racism issues by instituting even more racism, it will only lead to more and more racism.

I hear often that Black employees are often looked down upon, because of the AC in hiring and education (the bar is extremely low for them). I think that Affirmative Action was created to reinforce stereotypes and racism, after the Civil Rights Movement

That’s because of visas. In the US you can study CS at a good school now and make $200k straight out of undergrad. Makes a technical PhD a lot less tempting

Where are you getting that $200k figure? These are for not just out of college:

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/computer-science-salary-S...

https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-Co...

https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Degree=Master_of_Scienc...

OP said you can make $200k straight out of undergrad, which is probably technically true, like it's technically true that I can win the lottery or get struck by lightning. There is probably a new grad somewhere making $200k in far-far right tail of the distribution. Just like it's technically true that you can make $400k (or $600k or $1M, whatever the popular number to cite is now) as a software engineer. Yes, these people probably do exist in that long tail, at certain top levels in certain top companies in certain top locations.

I really don't think it's that far out in the tails, especially given we're discussing top universities. If you're at MIT/Harvard/Stanford you're definitely aiming for 200k TC fresh out of undergrad.

Exactly my thought:

A CS degree from Stanford almost has to start at at least 90k.

Its far more likely that you make 200k out of college than win the lottery, in fact at top schools i think most students would disappointed if they didn't get close to that number

If you think it's that far in the right tail then you're really underestimating how much large tech companies pay even new grads.

edit: Also, $400k is about standard for a senior SE at a large tech company or late stage startup nowadays.

His comment was in reference to the lack of PhD as an explanation of the lack of PhDs as mentioned in TFA. He then went to say that the ability to get $200k out of undergrad was, and I quote:

> Makes a technical PhD a lot less tempting

If it's as rare as you are saying, then it wouldn't factor into the broader reasoning of people debating to get PhDs at all. That's my point. I wasn't making any point that it isn't possible to make $200k/year out of undergrad.

Entry level at Google is SDE III. According to levels.fyi the average total compensation for that is $191,860. There are lots of people making $200,000 straight out of undergrad. CMU, MIT, Berkeley and Stanford do not graduate enough students every year to fulfil Google's demand, never mind FAANG's and the same would be true if you expanded hiring to the top 20 CS universities.

https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...

No it's not a lie, look at levels.fyi

If your not from a top school , maybe you have to work in startups or lesser tier companies for $50k less for a year or two, and then go work at MAGMA at the same pay as your stanford equivalent peer.

You probably won't make 200k right out of undergrad in bigtech these days. But you will within 2-3 years. Most of my acquaintances in bigtech make 220-260K by age 25 doing run-of-the-mill stuff. This does not require elite level skill or knowledge - just merely bright people who put in the time and pass the filters. Most of us are fairly mediocre.

Somewhat unrelated to the point you’re making, something seems off about the results in that Glassdoor link.

Searching “computer science” in the jobs tab treats that as a keyword and shows results for a variety of job titles related to computer science. The salaries tab, however, seems to indicate it’s only collecting information about job titles that have “computer science” in the title.

The top bin in the first link was labeled $187K and the bins are at least $13K wide so it's possible there might be a data point at $193K (probably a bit higher) which is not so far from $200K/yr as a new grad, according to the glassdoor dataset anyway.

Large tech companies will pay that much and if you've got the skills to get a PhD then you can very likely pass their interview process.

https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...

Also most of the generic pay sites in my experience are down weighted by a bunch of underpaid visa workers, boot camp graduates and so on. Also government workers who don't get paid well but get great benefits.

From my new grad offer letters 2 years ago :)

The numbers you are looking for are here:

www.levels.fyi

Getting a job at Google, isn't exactly easy. But it is a far cry from "as hard as winning the lotto" that other people were implying it is.

As an immigrant to USA in my teens in mid-2000s, one of the striking and underappreciated things about Americans (those that are born in USA) as well as the entire culture of America embodies a sort of a liberating spirit that resonates everywhere. Once you graduate high-school, the world is yours. The transition is quite remarkable and college students have a tremendous amount of ambition. I hated highschool because it was too easy (even AP courses), but loved college. There is also a deep disdain for hierarchical structure in USA and it is one of the most unique aspects that I don't see anywhere else. It gets developed in college years and then continues onwards to the professional world. If we have a spectrum from "Individualism" to "Hierarchical", we can draw USA on one end and may be Japan on the other. Germany would fall in the middle. I don't think international students like myself bring anything new, but we learn a lot from Americans and then obtain citizenship. These observations were at the center of my conscience as I was growing up into adulthood.

I can't help but wonder if the current economy, with all its inequality and disproportionate rewards for the highly skilled, is a necessary step on the path towards changing the anti-intellectual US culture.

You get more of what you reward and less of what you don't. It's not always a pleasant truth, but it's a powerful one.

Calling it a “step” implies moving in that direction. But the problem in America is that the counter-movement against “anti-intellectualism” is just as anti-intellectual. More people are going to college, but they’re not majoring in math and science. We have an ever expanding ecosystem of non-rigorous *studies fields. These are arguably even less valuable than the cultural norms of Bible-thumping small towns. At least the latter has demonstrated itself as a framework capable of socially supporting communities of people who build things. The former has no track record whatsoever.

You can see this exemplified in the fact that, even as we are mocking people for not going to college, we are lowering academic standards and getting rid of gifted programs: https://www.teachforamerica.org/one-day/opinion/stop-elimina.... It’s magical thinking on all sides.

> These are arguably even less valuable than the cultural norms of Bible-thumping small towns.

Since you seem to be a fan of intellectual rigor, can you describe the process by which you arrive at the relative worth of (apparently) social science programs vs. small town social behavior?

Can that method also tell us whether citrus flavors are more valuable than ballet?

Both social sciences and cultural studies are quite self consciously meant to be applied to understanding and improving society. It’s not the study of dead societies, but our own.

Culture, meanwhile, is the organically developed heuristics and norms of communities.

You can measure the relative worth of these things by looking at the functioning of society on various metrics. Unlike say civil engineers, practitioners of *studies and social sciences have demonstrated little ability to come into a community and make live measurably better for everyone. Arguably, as traditional social norms have been eroded, many communities are less healthy than ever—much more so than you’d expect looking at just the economic numbers. Millennials as a generation are the richest ever, yet seem profoundly unhappy and unsatisfied.

"Millennials as a generation are the richest ever"

That's plain wrong, they have less disposable income and lower net worth than the two generations before them had at the same stage in their life.

Just because stock market grew doesn't mean life of an average Joe improved.

They’re following the same trajectory as previous generations: https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2021/09/01/who-is-the-w...

This stuff is complicated so make sure you’re comparing like with like. Even the chart above ignored one critical adjustment: in 1970 just 5% of the population was foreign born, while today its 15%. Millennials are much more likely today to be recent economic migrants, or the children of them, than boomers. That drags the numbers down, but doesn’t imply anything negative about millennials’ economic status. Indeed, those immigrants are experiencing upward economic mobility, and are seeing themselves that way. The dour attitude among millennials seems to be mainly on the native born, who really are doing as well or better than their parents.

At least, they’re doing better economically. Thanks to social changes, they have less agency than their parents did. They have few opportunities to garner authority and respect in their communities. They’re not building families and getting the hope that comes from nurturing the next generation. They have many reasons to be dour. Their parents failed them!

Thats a good perspective and adjustment, but we know wealth inequality has increased, and a few billionaires can inflate that number unrealistically - it would be good to compare median and standard deviation.

Wealth inequality has increased, particularly the upper middle class pulling away: https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-dangerous-separation-...

Nothing he said referenced the social sciences in any way. He referred to * Studies. The Social Sciences all aim at truth in some way, whether you're talking about Sociology, Anthropology, Economics or Political Science.

The *studies folks are complaining loudly and bitterly of their debt and not having cushy jobs handed to them on a silver platter. In principle this should encourage future students not to take those paths.

I agree that I don't like the direction we're headed, but hopefully the natural consequences of that direction will encourage people to revisit their ideological assumptions.

The natural consequences of this will be China overtaking the US. Americans are not going to enjoy a world where they’re not the dominant power. Among other things they’re really going to hate not being able to print money for consumption free of consequences.

It's a concern, but a strong dollar isn't all roses and sunshine either. For one thing, it makes it hard for the American economy to compete in anything but the highest-margin industries.

I'm not convinced that the rise of China will be so bad. Boomers and neocons want us to think so, but their "arguments" are mostly just paranoia and sentimentality.

> I'm not convinced that the rise of China will be so bad. Boomers and neocons want us to think so

You're not convinced that going from "living in the most economically dominant and militarily powerful country in the world" to "not" is going to somehow not be a painful experience?

You can use the "I am not convinced" line for anything. "I am not convinced that being homeless is worse than living in a nice house" but... ok, what would convince you?

What's the big deal whose GDP is bigger? You think China's going to invade us?

Maybe it's good that other groups of people besides Americans and Europeans can make leading contributions to economic growth, science and technology.

Maybe America's dominance is mainly good for the rich and those who like to invade countries on a whim. I don't care about either of those groups.

A lot of our ability to simply ignore reality—e.g. budget deficits, or comically high infrastructure costs—comes from having the biggest economy and being the most attractive target of investment.

Aren't you implying that every country besides the US is currently having a painful experience?

Absolutely!

When UK Parliament wanted Zuk to answer some tough question about his company facilitating electoral fraud, he simply refused to show up. Even first world nations struggle in dealing with American corporation, which often act as if they are above the law.

God forbid you are a developing nation. British American Tabacco has taken poor developing nations to court for trying to ban children from smoking (!!) and got compenation and the law repealed

https://youtu.be/6UsHHOCH4q8

I am not even mentioning illegal stuff: bribes, threats, drone strikes, strong-arming, etc.

Even the EU was strong armed when it comes to GPS:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/dec/08/world.internation...

Those that think that American economic advantage was won in a 'fair game' are super naive

And yet the US is not #1 in pretty much any quality of life metric. The point is there are plenty of nations with varying degrees of US influence that are far from miserable or painful places to live.

Living in USA will be more painful than it is now when USA no longer gets to import a lot of goods giving nothing in return. USA hasn't had a positive trade balance in half a century, people will want back their stuff at some point and that point wont be fun for the Americans.

Not the OP but these countries do have to put up with America's influence.

It’s going to be painful for Americans to adjust to being an only-ran. Consider how much of democratic politics right now is driven by the ability to run insane deficits to avoid taxing the upper middle class professional base. (Taxes on people making under $500k are still at Reagan levels and Biden promised not to raise them.) EU countries have to tax the middle class to balance their budgets, like proles.

just look at the UK - lowering of living standards, wages, inflation across the board.

this is what's going to happen to the US, but on much larger scale and worse consequences

Most college students go for practical and business majors. They literally go for what seems to promiss them money.

The *studies fields are rather small proportion of students. They also cluster mostly in top universities. It is just not true that they would dominated universities.

That one is just paranoia and blaming what you hate anyway.

I'm not sure your evidence makes the point you intended. The academic meat-grinder is the best way for those international students to get visas.

America produce huge amount of smart educated people. They choose to not do PhD, because financially it is often sucky decision.

It has nothing to do with elementary or high schools performance. Those produce capable kids enough. It has to do with decisions and priorities those people have as young adults. And they are not even making bad decisions, for them not doing PhD is rational choice.

Worth noting that many of those cultures have a much more idealistic view of Science. Americans often use business terms when discussing science.

Which has what implications?

Your comment is kind of meaningless drivel with abstruse language.

Name-calling like this will get you banned here. Can you please make your substantive points thoughtfully and respectfully?

Edit: your account has already been repeatedly posting comments that either break the site guidelines or are on the edge. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.