Google Ex-CEO Eric Schmidt Says Curbs on Chinese Hiring Hurts Tech (bloomberg.com) 90
Eric Schmidt, Google's former chief executive officer and currently a top technical adviser to the Pentagon, argued on Monday that U.S. restrictions on hiring from China and sharing technology with the country are counterproductive. From a report: "I think the China problem is solvable with the following insight: we need access to their top scientists," Schmidt said at an event on artificial intelligence and ethics at Stanford University.
Schmidt didn't directly mention U.S. policies. But his comments came as the Trump administration weighs placing export bans on more critical technology fields, including AI systems and quantum computing, which would make it more difficult for American firms to hire experts from China. The White House has also accused Alphabet's Google of sharing technology with companies and the government in China. Schmidt subtly pushed back on this in his comments on U.S.-China relations. "We also benefit from common frameworks, Tensorflow is one of them," he said. Tensorflow is Google's open-source, free software library for creating AI tools like image-recognition. The company has promoted it aggressively in China. "It's being used pretty much by everybody now," Schmidt said.
Translation: Me Am Too Cheap To Pay Labor (Score:5, Insightful)
Tough. He should go out of business.
and don't give an dam about freedom (Score:1)
and don't give an dam about freedom
Re:and don't give an dam about IP Theft (Score:5, Insightful)
...and don't give an dam about IP Theft.
Not just labor (Score:5, Interesting)
No, I'm saying that's all they _want_ to pay them (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's the opposite. He wants to be able to tempt Chinese engineers away from China with money.
Aside from being good engineers they have knowledge of Chinese culture. There are 1.2 billion Chinese in China alone, and more outside. Google, like every company, can't afford to ignore that market.
Same with India, same with Brazil, same with Africa.
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He wants to be able to tempt Chinese engineers away from China with money.
That's what he says, but I don't believe it for a second. I think it's way more likely that he is using a small truth (China has some highly skilled people) as a back door into his real objective: getting REALLY cheap Chinese H1B workers to drive down the tech industry's payroll costs.
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I've heard the "cheap H1B" argument for decades. Yet the average H1B at Google earns somewhere near ~130k/year. It's mostly an argument used by uninformed and ignorant individuals looking to make a (fake) point.
Truth is, there's a lot of money to be made in (large scale) software. And companies don't mind paying a fraction of that money to hire talent. It just so happens that even a small fraction of a large market (one that sells to the whole world) is better than a bigger fraction of a small market (one t
Did you google that? (Score:2)
Then I actually perused various documents (your contention is not well supported.)
Why don't you try that before calling names, or is this what google pays you to do?
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I've heard the "cheap H1B" argument for decades. Yet the average H1B at Google earns somewhere near ~130k/year..
People who talk about cheap "H1B" have no idea what a "cheap L" is. That's the brilliant scheme by which an employee from another country can stay in the US for up to two years.... and get paid their local home wage. Cheap Chinese (and Indian) L's can be put up in an extended stay motel down the street from Google campus and be paid less than US minimum wage.
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Yet the average H1B at Google earns somewhere near ~130k/year. It's mostly an argument used by uninformed and ignorant individuals looking to make a (fake) point.
The average H-1B/L-1B doesn't work at Google, though. Besides, $130K/year in Mountain View isn't exactly raking in the cash. As for "uninformed and ignorant", I personally have worked with dozens of visa holders in the Central Florida area over the last 20 years or so, where they're generally not making anywhere close to $130K/year, so I'll cont
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It's there any evidence that Google pays H1B staff less?
Or for that matter that Google hires H1Bs disproportionately? Their last legally required diversity report suggests they don't.
Re: Translation: Me Am Too Cheap To Pay Labor (Score:2)
I would be very surprised if Big Brother Google's outsourcing contracts show up in their "diversity report".
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It's there any data on outsourcing at Google? Do they have to publish data on that?
Re: Translation: Me Am Too Cheap To Pay Labor (Score:2)
Of course not. The Owners want the masses to get worked up over sophomoric identity politics, not the real economic issues of the day.
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Why just Brazil and not all of Latin America? LATAM is full of bright engineers, and highly educated people. And we don't demand foreign companies to give away their trade secrets.
But The Powers that Be, decided that ONLY China gets to have special treatment. The USSRMF (United States Strategic Reserve of Minerals and Freshwater), formerly known as Latin America, is banned from developing precisely because if the US allows these countries to develop they m
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MI6 and the CIA have tried that for decades. Thinking people who grew up under a Communist system will "take" freedom back into Communist China.
Only Communists get the approval to work outside Communist China.
That ensures no ideas of freedom and democracy return to Communist China after years of work in the free "West".
Re 'knowledge of Chinese culture"
Knowing how Communist China works has not opened Communist China to the West by paying for Com
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Chinese people are able to leave China and work abroad with no checks from the government.
My wife did, and she isn't a communist. In fact she finds the UK's socialism quite surprising, e.g. the government gives you free money if you have kids or are unemployed, healthcare is free etc.
Maybe you are thinking of Soviet Russia?
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Except they can't. Chinese people who have passports are free to leave China and work abroad, but the Chinese government decides who gets and who doesn't get a passport, and they can also revoke existing passports at whim to prevent political dissidents or people they otherwise do not like from getting out of the country. They're now rolling out the new social credit system, and there's already evidence that the system
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Only hiring 20-somethings and for the most part only those without mortgages and families is counterproductive.
Fscking sociopath billionaires.
Stupid anti Trump FUD (Score:2, Interesting)
Why (Score:2)
Why is every frigging story about Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon? Are there no other tech companies left?
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Welcome to Oligopolyland. Please check your competition in at the gate.
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The idea is that if you're in tech, you should be interested in Google, who does nothing good for you, and probably harms specifically: You.
Schmidt, who hated the very idea of Microsoft's existence, went from Sun to Novell to Google. His ideas of privacy coupled to his work as technical advisor to the Pentagon scare the hell out of me-- and they should scare you.
I agree that we should allow immigrant engineers, even a few H1B engineers. The best-and-brightest ought to admit just that-- best and brightest. I
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There are eight trackers on this very page.
And one of them is our old friend, Google Analytics.
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Attract employees with money, all you buy is greed and greedy employees will lie, cheat and steal to get to the top.
Want to attract good employees, you have to offer life style, good neighbourhoods, safe place to live, clean, nice police officers (not junk yard dog law enforcers), good medical services without worries but to provide all those a lower salary comes with it, you getter better more loyal staff for less money (they have to be loyal, their family becomes accustomed to the quality of life and dep
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To be fair to Trump, upon this basis quite a few of the Chinese H1Bs are likely to be Chinese agents, as other Chinese more interested in life style than greed, remain in China or prefer to go elsewhere like Canada and Australia. It only takes a short amount of time to feel out the system to insert some naughty hardware that you never touch again because someone from the outside via wireless across the ocean via the internet, does all the sneaky peaky stuff (swap a keyboard or mouse they are powered and hav
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Besides Uber? Nope.
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Why is every frigging story about Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon? Are there no other tech companies left?
Oh there are other tech companies. The question is whether they're still relevant or not.
Unless you already know you're holding Too Big To Fail status, then you most likely one of the ones that eventually will.
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Why is every frigging story about Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon? Are there no other tech companies left?
What about BIZX?
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Schmidt is a sock puppet for the globalists (Score:3, Insightful)
He's also the guy that said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
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Only if you're a white male exec who's part of the 1 percent.
Then it's fine, cause they'll destroy your career if you try to stop it.
Riiight... (Score:2)
Because executives actually have some sort of expertise. Even a former engineer starts to lose their touch with the pulse of technology the minute they become middle management let alone executive. Executives need to shut up and do what their various engineers tell them if they want to continue to pretend they are competent, especially in a tech company.
What we do not need is more "student", outsource, and H1B talent.
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Yes and no. Those with the most experience should be listened to the most. I know the twenty something's are pissed when their brilliant idea of creating an app is ignored. But a lot of software and hardware these days is so complicated you just cannot rely upon a junior engineer to see a big picture of how it all fits together. So you want the senior engineer's opinions, even if they happen to be managers, and even if they're experts in last year's technology and not this year's.
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"So you want the senior engineer's opinions, even if they happen to be managers"
Agreed but then you still have senior engineers who are not management, junior engineers who became management *cringe*, but executives were generally never either one. Their only real strength is detachment.
I'm obviously talking about companies of size. Being out of touch with the reality of the work, the workplace, and truth vs business spin is a problem everywhere but in a sufficiently small entity the CEO may well be working
Evil Never Sleeps! (Score:3, Funny)
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All he has to do is not be Han and they'll do it for him free.
What Jefferson said... (Score:4, Insightful)
Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.
â"Thomas Jefferson
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Not sure why this was modded down - the quote was true in 1814, it's still true today, and it's relevant to the topic at hand.
I must be missing something (Score:5, Insightful)
So he's saying that by hiring engineers from China to work on projects in the US they're going to send their best engineers and transfer their knowledge to the US? From what I can tell most of the engineers from China are either students or just out of school. Often times they are students from US universities.
From a lot of the news stories I've seen they eventually leave to return to China, or sell the knowledge to the Chinese government or businesses. How is that beneficial long term? I can understand that getting them to figure out a solution has short term benefits, but when the knowledge walks out the door to another country that doesn't care about intellectual property, how is this good long term?
Granted my experience is limited, but how often do senior engineers and scientists come to the US from China and bring solutions to the table? I'm sure it must happen. I'm just curious how often knowledge is brought from China to the US rather than the other way around. I haven't heard about any Huawei engineers bringing 5G innovation to any US companies.
Cold War (Score:1)
During the cold war Russian scientists would constantly defect to the US and bring tech so that US kept a lead (own research + whatever russians poured money into)
If during this new cold war scientists are going the other way maybe our system is not as good and we need to lose this war?
Re:Cold War (Score:5, Insightful)
maybe our system is not as good and we need to lose this war?
This is depressing. The US and west were successful because of the systems that they were built on. Now, because of that success and because it's not perfect, apathy has taken hold. The US is objectively a better place than China. If anyone wants to argue then they can wait until Xi is out of power, elections are held, free speech is protected, and their ethno-national fascistic government comes to an end.
I'll take a million Trumps over forced labor and forced reading of propaganda in concentration camps waiting for forced abortions forced organ harvesting while denied freedom of movement and public accommodations all for being the wrong religion or race or having the wrong idea.
We are failing future generations because we cannot even understand how good we have it. We are squandering nations built on enlightenment because it's not perfect. We are poisoning our inheritance because Google and Nike want slave labor. We are becoming the living example of democracy replaced with tyranny. All for a buck for a few.
I don't care if China is the superpower of the next century. I care that it is a fascistic ethno-national state built on authoritarian tyranny.
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Stuff and nonsense. Don't believe what you read in the Chinese press.
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Isn't it wonderful that we can search up the wrong things our government has done? How does a nation stop doing bad things if the citizens never know they happen?
I would take your criticism more seriously if the Chinese people had the same access of the wrong doings of their government and people at their finger tips.
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If USA is really that superior as a system, Chinese scientists should be defecting to the US with their research. Yet Chinese students who study here, work in our tech companies than go back to China. China must be doing something better than we are from lifestyle perspective
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> Chinese scientists should be defecting to the US with their research.
Quite the arbitrary standard you have set there. I don't know why. If China is like other tyrannical government I wouldn't put it past them to threaten the family if the scientists didn't return to China. Or maybe it's because there is a general ignorance of what happens in China since censorship is rampant. Maybe the scientists don't care because their research is more important to them. Maybe they want to live with their family and
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Idealism is all well and good.
In theory Communism is more humane system. Its based on Christian teachings of charity and taking care of the poor. From each according to their ability to each according to their need. In practice humans are selfish and if everyone is going to get the same then people try to compete on who can work the least which in turn means a functioning communist country needs to be a police state to force the people to work. This is what happened in USSR
Now China is Communist only in nam
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> Idealism is all well and good.
Nothing idealistic about living in a practically free society that is working than living in a authoritarian society with a tyrant that will theoretically always be benevolent.
> maybe people value the freedom to not have
And people in the US can look at those examples, debate it, and vote for the change they want instead of praying that Xi will change his mind after he censored it. Everyone knows the problems the US has. First step in fixing a problem is recognizing ther
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Forced Abortions is what happens when Asians believe the West. Most of the Communist leadership was educated in France and fell for the Malthus Hoax that overpopulation is a problem. Population (when educated) is an asset not a liability. The Chinese are understanding their mistake now. Which is why they take western pronouncements with heaps of salt now. If Malthus was a hoax maybe democracy is not that good an idea either.....
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It is something like every four or five migrants would rather move to the US.
You know what Kennedy's shooter did after he moved to the Soviet Union? He moved back.
From *the Washington Post* !!!:
"It turns out that there are 44 countries where, according to Gallup's data, more than 5 percent of the adult population say say they would like to move to the United States. Five percent!"
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
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Just because there are countries doing worse doesnt mean China is not doing better than the US at attracting talent
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There's no parallel between debriefed defectors who arrive in small enough numbers to keep under surveillance and free immigration.
There's still a few proper defectors from China, the list is as short as the USSR one ... because defecting and betraying secrets while your family remains under control of a dictatorship is a decision not easily taken.
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The point is not the number, its the direction. During the cold war, Soviet scientists had privileged lives and the best the Soviet System could provide, yet they would risk their and their families' lives to defect. USA was a shining star. Now Chinese students who study here, see the best of Silicon valley dont want to stay here and go back to China. Maybe they are tired of all the SJW, the PCness, the homeless shitting on the streets, the demonization of scientists and the glorification of sportstars and
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Thats the CIA, MI6 idea. Get the best from a Communist nation.
Show the Communist people what freedom is like in the West.
Send the Communist staff back to Communist China and have them spread Western democracy and freedom from within.
China only allows select good Communist to work in the West so they stay loyal to Communist China long term and are not changed by the offerings of the free "West".
Re 'How is that bene
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"From a lot of the news stories I've seen they eventually leave to return to China, or sell the knowledge to the Chinese government or businesses."
Do the news stories represent a large or small amount? An increase or a decrease?
The ones that stay in the US, become citizens, and have a regular career have no reason to be in the news.
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I can understand that getting them to figure out a solution has short term benefits, but when the knowledge walks out the door to another country that doesn't care about intellectual property, how is this good long term?
If they were smart enough to figure out the solution in America helping an American company (even if temporarily).
What makes you think they wouldn't be smart enough to just figure out that same solution back in China? And just benefit the Chinese company directly (and only)?
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If they were smart enough to figure out the solution in America helping an American company (even if temporarily). What makes you think they wouldn't be smart enough to just figure out that same solution back in China? And just benefit the Chinese company directly (and only)?
There are many reasons. Having access to company's trade secrets, proprietary tools, algorithms, etc. A lot of the time a specialized engineer's work is only a small part of the whole, even though it's an indispensable part. Two of my friends published unrelated PhD thesis 30+ years ago. One was related to weather predictions and the other was a mathematical formula that is used in radar to this day. They have both found their work being used in a lot of unrelated fields. Finance being one.
China has a l
Counterproductive to what? (Score:2)
U.S. restrictions on hiring from China and sharing technology with the country are counterproductive.
... to the bottom line?
... to fighting for human rights?
or
Personal opinion... but I feel we should probably start leaning towards "fighting for human rights" with China right now. I don't pretend for a second to know how to do that.
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Or, counterproductive to whom? For an advisor to the Pentagon, Schmidt seems blissfully unaware of US concerns about economic espionage, intellectual property theft, etc. What's "productive" to private-sector corporations might be counterproductive to those with national-security concerns, or those who want the US to maintain any competitive advantage it may have.
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"fighting for human rights" with China right now.
But we already fixed "Human Rights" in China. That was the whole point of throwing open the doors of "free trade" with China when we gave Most Favored Nation trading status to China in the late 90's. Oh yes; China committed to complying with UN Human Rights requirements and the US rewarded China with the keys to the kingdom.
Problem solved.
Right?
And the sources once again: (Score:2)
Schmidt said a lot of things... (Score:4, Insightful)
He also said we needed to "get over" our desire for personal privacy. Then he got pissed when someone posted his home address on the web.
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That reminds me, we need to release Schmidt's SSN and other banking info.
It's always about the money (Score:2)
BS (Score:3)
Then it hurts tech. (Score:2)
Better that tech suffer some setbacks and slowdowns than we destroy our economy.
Because, then, how will THAT hurt tech?
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Correction.
They will TRY.
Granted, they've stolen enough tech from the US...so they have a good chance.
STILL don't give a shit.
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Save the natives (Score:2)