You make an interesting point. A master's in the United States, correct me if I am wrong, costs around $50,000. That sum is large for American students, but that sum seems unimaginable for middle class foreigners.
Are we getting the 'best and the brightest' with the H1-B (which we all agree is a good thing), or the richest and wealthiest willing to pay whatever it takes to get a visa?
Any system that can be gamed, will be gamed once demand is more than supply.
Maybe 10 years ago, the best and the brightest of Indians/Chinese, who studied at the top US schools would have got their H1B in this 20K advanced-degree quota. Not true today.
Though the average Indian/Chinese is poor, there are tens of millions of parents in India/China today who can afford the $50K "investment" for their non-so-bright child. I see this among my affluent relatives and friends in India.
There is an easy way to check this: plotting the applicants of this 20K advanced-degree quota against the US News/other university rankings of their university.
An easy but not perfect way to fix this would be to give the 20K slots to the applicants from the highest ranking universities.
Its not that. Most people who come from middle class families to the US for education go through a lot of struggle. Stuff like 3-4 people sharing a single room, waiting tables at restaurants for money, skipping meals to save etc etc. The list is endless. A few things they do will amaze you.
And then after that they have to go through a period of intense slogging to clear their student loans they would have taken in India. Then comes the H1B struggle to stay in the US to make a living, then the struggle for green card and so on.
By any means of measure these are exceptionally hard working and bright people. And don't go by what the throwaway29 is saying. These are not idiots who landed by luck and are dragging by. And its not as simple as throwaway29 is making it look like, where a few idiots are stealing away the opportunity from Einstein level geniuses.
Yes, but the original poster indicated that a masters from an American institution is typically required for STEM workers from developing countries. Only the wealthiest, not necessarily the best, can afford those masters degrees.
Define lower middle class -- the median household income in India and China is $3000 and $6000 respectively. What is the average net worth of the households who send students to America?
I interviewed at Theranos a year ago, and found the employees to be smart and dedicated.
However, the company was the most secretive I've interviewed at and the employees complained about being overworked. The fact the founder sold C++ compilers to Chinese universities when g++ is open-source sounded odd.
But I still had hope in them even after they passed on me -- a Silicon Valley company actually making a difference in the people's health. I WANT TO BELIEVE.
If this turns out to be smokes and mirrors, I'd be very saddened. Theranos' failure would confirm what everyone interested in biotech knows but wishes wasn't true: that advancements in this field do not move at the speed of the digital economy.
Holmes ran that business in high school. She was born in 1984, so that would put the date around 2000. There were good reasons not to use G++ in 2000. When Alexandrescu's book was published, in 2001, it was somewhat notorious on my team (shipping code on G++) for how much of it didn't work well, or at all, in G++.
Heck, virtually any C++ compiler was a big pile of sharp edges back then, by comparison to just a few years later. Especially if you dared to use it for embedded work, not so much due to the "embedded" part but just because the embedded suite compilers were just so much further behind the C++ curve.
Yep, but the commercial compilers generally had better STLs (particularly for debugging), debuggers that could properly mangle/demangle symbols, and precompiled headers --- in addition to different sets of C++ features that did or didn't work properly.
Largely true, but I recall actually isolating one chunk of code and compiling with g++ just to get halfway sane error messaging around a (IIRC) template-related error. I.e. you could do worse. The primary compiler for that code was the circa-2001 ARM tools suite. I wrote a few novels worth of feedback and bug reporting to them...
And to think I was shipping C++ software compiled during the egcs days. Of course, it compiled on IRIX, AIX, HP-UX and a few other compilers - I think some were still based on cfront - so we were using the boring, simple parts of C++ that everyone supported.
The compilers thing sounds like a made up story to give her am interesting bio. None of the news stories about it have any details.
She obviously didn't write a C++ compiler worth selling at that age in that time period , so at most it was likely some sort of off-the-shelf reselling sales gig.
[...] a Silicon Valley company actually making a difference in the people's health.
Except, in many ways, it isn't: 'disrupting' lab blood testing[1] is far from a public health priority --just because the founder is scared of blood and thinks phlebotomies are "barbaric" doesn't make it so.
[1] As opposed to point-of-care (viz, no-lab) testing, which is a genuine public health priority: i.e. portable glucose monitors, field tests for malaria, and so on.
I don't think it's all smokes and mirrors. I think there was likely a legitimate intent. After all, everyone has been talking about using microfluidics and microliter quantity samples for assays for nearly decades. It seems like the time is right in terms of tech maturity, for these things to hit clinical reality... Why not try to be the first on the scene?
FWIW, this isn't the only company to be trying this sort of thing, there was a company in the first batch of indie.bio claiming to do this, perhaps tellingly at demo day, the attempted live demo failed.
"Applying the cold logic so common in computer science to the cell biology of the disorder, we’ve started predicting therapies, some of which have since come to bear fruit and improved my son’s quality of life beyond measure."
I curious to read his research on this, but I haven't been able to find it here:
Are we getting the 'best and the brightest' with the H1-B (which we all agree is a good thing), or the richest and wealthiest willing to pay whatever it takes to get a visa?