Q: What is a Science department at an American University?

A: It is a strange place where Russian professors teach Chinese students in English.

Put the limits even lower so we in Europe can take all nice skilled people! Thanks US!

The industry says they can't get enough PhDs, so they lobby congress to increase the limits. A little problem, however: they don't pay the PhDs particularly well. This leads to a generation of students investing in law, medicine and 'real professions' instead of engineering. What American industry wants is "cheap PhDs". This is extremely short sighted.

Joe Kraska

San Diego CA

USA

God knows Americans are idiots. Most of my colleagues can only count "1... 2... uhhh MANY!" They can't google an error message, their "solution" to a server issue is to power it off and back on w/o warning, they don't understand what a heap overflow or memory leak is in Java, and when asked to type in a simple command in bash, the result is total panic.

And no, I'm not posting anonymously, they're too stupid to read El Reg.

"And no, I'm not posting anonymously, they're too stupid to read El Reg"

I beg your pardon?

There is no need to knock us all because of a few, er, "many", morons. I'm not university educated. But I do pride myself on being up and up on technology. When you have (whats left) of freedom, there's bound to be more idiots in a population because well, they can be. Not a good excuse, merely the truth. Everyone country has their issues. I'm sure you have yours.

"Can't we all just, get along?" - had to say it.

If we take Dan's numbers and apply a few additional facts (courtesy of the good ol' CIA), we learn that the 2006 US R&D budget was about 390 billion US$ (2.7% of a 13.3 trillion US$ GDP), making it larger than either Finland's or Sweden's entire 2006 GDP (176 billion US$ and 290 billion US$, respectively).

As for institutions of higher learning, a more interesting number would be the percentage of foreign students at said universities. Perhaps the US doesn't need as many because we're not actually going there. And as for scientific literacy, well, duhh. Enough said already, I think.

I've seen and heard exactly what you said, Joe. Tech Engineers aren't paid anywhere near enough to warrant the education. Students know it, which is why none of us went engineering. Not many were interested in PhD's, either. The few that did went to civil and the like. No one will touch anything tech related with a 10 foot poll. An intelligent student can control an entire department of foreign PhD's with an MBA.

This will continue on until the government becomes more protectionist, or world job market salaries for the jobs increase.

Multiply your % of GDP numbers by GDP, and your numbers tell a completely different story...

"God knows Americans are idiots. Most of my colleagues can only count "1... 2... uhhh MANY!" They can't google an error message, their "solution" to a server issue is to power it off and back on w/o warning, they don't understand what a heap overflow or memory leak is in Java, and when asked to type in a simple command in bash, the result is total panic.

And no, I'm not posting anonymously, they're too stupid to read El Reg. "

You really are an ass hole.

As for your server solution pang, its not just Americans, its DEVELOPERS. I've worked with my fair share of developers from a variety of nations, and they are pretty much all ignoramuses (sp) when it comes to troubleshooitng a server side issue outside of code. Why? Because they aren't sys admins, thats why! I don't expect them to handle server side issues and they don't expect me to debug their code. Simple as that. Disparaging somebody because they don't share your exact 733t Java skill set is pretty moronic. Try coming out of your own self centered world once in a while and you might find that there is more to life than just you...

- John - a US citizen (because not everybody who lives in "America" is part of the United States)

From: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080313-gates-to-congress-microsoft-needs-more-h1-b-visas.html (among others)

"Disputing claims that skilled immigrants would cost American jobs, Gates argued that Microsoft hires four Americans for supporting roles for every high-skilled H-1B visa holder it hires. He also cited a study by a Virginia-based group that found a similar pattern held in other American high-tech companies.

Gates singled out the timing of the H-1B process for particular criticism. Visas for the coming year become available each April, and immigrants are permitted to begin work in October. Because a college degree is required before a worker can apply for an H-1B visa, foreign students who graduate from an American university in May are forced to wait until October of the following year to begin work at an American company. Not surprisingly, many highly skilled workers choose to take jobs outside of the US rather than wait for 18 months for the opportunity to take a job in the US."

He also claims that Microsoft H-1B hires are paid in excess of US$100k per year ... almost US$60k more than the median household annual income in Washington State. That does not describe "cheap labor". When we're spending so much on R&D, we need lots and lots of researchers and developers. We're not churning out enough of them, and we need more of them simply to complete the works in-progress. I guess that's hard to fathom when you live in a country with near double-digit unemployment rates.

"As for your server solution pang, its not just Americans, its DEVELOPERS. I've worked with my fair share of developers from a variety of nations, and they are pretty much all ignoramuses (sp) when it comes to troubleshoo[ti]ng a server side issue outside of code."

John, let me be the first developer to say:

You really are an ass hole[1].

For managing to lower yourself to Gene's level. Well done sir.

[1] Does splitting it into two words make it bigger?

Many technologists suffer from an innate tendency to compare their intelligence to that of the people around them and assume that they're inferior and stupid. After all, those people tend to have pesky minds of their own, and don't always agree with a technologist's obviously brilliant and superior point of view. It MUST be stupidity, right? He couldn't be... WRONG...

And when someone else makes a gaffe (like accidentally suffering a memory leak in Java, where garbage collection has a mind of its own, perchance?) it's easy to snipe at them and point the finger. "LOOK!" a sysadmin might say. "His code has a memory leak! He's obviously incompetent! Fire 'im!" When the sysadmin's boss tells him to STFU and get back to work, the sysadmin writes it off by saying the boss is an idiot. Of COURSE! It can't be that the sysadmin is being a psycho about something that can be fixed in a short debugging session.

Maybe -- just MAYBE -- the answer is to accept that you, individually, are not the be-all, end-all of technology. It could be that people choose different career tracks based on their preferences, not their ability or lack thereof. It might surprise you, GENE, to realize that there are 300 million Americans and you've only worked with a few, so generalizations are likely to fail. And John, you might be humbled to realize that developers' jobs are to write and debug code, NOT work on server-side issues outside of their purview.

I'm sure that when your next memory leak comes up, if you ask NICELY, your developers will be happy to throw their code on the debugger and track it down for you.

Here's an idea:

How about we all just do our jobs, treat our colleages with respect, and develop a little healthy humility, hmm?

And Robert? There's a bit of irony in your post. I leave its detection as an exercise for the reader.

if other governments would just drop the price of oil, and keep their criminals in line (instead of exiling them so they can become terrorists), maybe the US can go back to being the tech leader and get the human race off this rock before we self-destruct as a species.

Ya, I agree. Maybe it came off incorrectly, in the above post, but I wasn't using the term ignoramus disparagingly. I am an ignoramus when it comes to C#, Java, etc (actually, I would call myself an idiot!). Its not my thing. And actually I DO go to my delvelopers often to look for answers to issues that are not system related. It's called colaboration! Here at work we are a .Net shop. We use Avicode to dig deep into the happenings of our site when ther are problems (and to find issues before they become problems). It gives us TONS of info, that frankly, I can't make sense of half the time. Where do I go when I get stuck? The developers. And conversely, when there are questions about how the code performs on the server side, they don't bother guessing, the come to our team and ask, because it is not their thing. Happy all around.

Oh, and I wouldn't fire the developer for the memory leak - somebody has to fix it! :D

"How about we all just do our jobs, treat our colleages with respect, and develop a little healthy humility, hmm?"

Absolutely. Well said.

Yes you're right, my post was slightly ironic, I shall beat a retreat behind the 'I'll get my coat' icon.