Slashdot Mirror
Why China Can't Lure Tech Talent (bloomberg.com)
China may have been hoping to attract tech talent to its nation, but it is unlikely that people in the tech industry will move there. A columnist at Bloomberg explains why: The biggest problem is government control of the internet. For a software developer, the inconvenience goes well beyond not being able to access YouTube during coffee breaks. It means that key software libraries and tools are often inaccessible. In 2013, China blocked Github, a globally important open-source depository and collaboration tool, thereby forcing developers to seek workarounds. Using a virtual private network to "tunnel" through the blockades is one popular option. But VPNs slow uploads, downloads and collaboration. And it isn't just developers who suffer. Among the restricted sites in China is Google Scholar, a tool that indexes online peer-reviewed studies, conference proceedings, books and other research material into an easily accessible format. It's become a crucial database for academics around the world, and Chinese researchers -- even those with VPNs -- struggle to use it. The situation grew so dire this summer that several state-run news outlets published complaints from Chinese scientists, with one practically begging the nationalist Global Times newspaper: "We hope the government can relax supervision for academic purposes." The cumulative impact of these restrictions is significant. Scientists unable to keep up with what researchers in other countries are publishing are destined to be left behind, which is one reason China is having difficulty luring foreign scholars to its universities. Programmers who can't take advantage of the sites and tools that make development a global effort are destined to write software customized solely for the Chinese market. The author has raised several other reasons to make his case.
I would never have thought that people with good educations and job prospects wouldn't want to move to a country with totalitarian control of your daily life. Next you're going to tell me North Korea has similar problems.
I suspect the people being recruited are concerned that the goal is to transfer the expertise they have to Chinese engineers/scientists. Once that transfer is done the foreigner will no longer have any value.
But... the Chinese Government has much more control than the EPA could dream...
Maybe less meddling by the government is what is actually the good thing; after all, "private" property owners want their property kept in good condition.
Daily life in China is freer than in the USA only because the government in China lacks the resources to apply its oppression more pervasively; freedom is the ability of the common man to evade or resist imposition.
They said tech "talent".
http://www.npr.org/sections/th...
From the linked article:
And it turns out that the job done in China was above par - the employee's "code was clean, well written, and submitted in a timely fashion. Quarter after quarter, his performance review noted him as the best developer in the building," according to the Verizon Security Blog.
All told, it looked like he earned several hundred thousand dollars a year, and only had to pay the Chinese consulting firm about fifty grand annually," according to the Security Blog.
Maybe they're not the best of the best, but neither are most slashdotters or coder either. These bunch are probably better and cheaper than most of you here.
And what did "private" society do to clean up the environment? Mobilized to force politicians to enact laws and regulations, that's what, because that's what works most efficiently. Government leads the parade because we put it there, because nobody else has the power to do what we need it to do. If we created some other entity with that ability, it would just be 'government' by a different name.
The EPA could certainly be run better. It could certainly do a better job. I've yet to hear real suggestions about that, as opposed to knee-jerk "Government bad, private sector free market good" drivel. The private sector would murder babies if it increased profits and nobody stopped them, because that's how capitalism works if left unchecked. Capitalism can do very good things, but like nuclear energy, if you don't control it, it makes a huge frakking mess. Don't believe me? Go read up on Slavery. (No, Slavery wasn't about race at first - it was about money. The racist stuff was what people invented to help themselves feel less terrible about the terrible things they were doing to other humans).
Clearly the problem is that we need to do a better job of controlling our government - but I think the problem is less that the agencies run amuck, so much as some of the people we're sending to Washington who have no interest in seeing the government be run well. We elect people that say "Government is Terrible", and then we're surprised when they give us terrible government?