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posted by
martyb
on Friday November 30 2018, @09:47AM
from the Quite-a-few-from-Europe-and-China,-too dept.
from the Quite-a-few-from-Europe-and-China,-too dept.
As a former H1 visa holder, this article interested me and shows the value that immigrants bring to the USA.
According to this opinion piece, the USA and specifically Santa Clara county is only the leader in tech because of immigrants.
In 1965, the Immigration Act of 1924 was repealed, opening the gates to immigrants and allowing a critical mass of technology companies to develop in clusters around Boston and Santa Clara County. A significant proportion of all the best graduates from the best schools in India (IIT) came to the USA -- in effect, the USA siphoned off India's best talent and used it to develop leadership in technology and to grow the economy.
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The US is Only a Leader in Tech Because of Foreign Workers
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 01 2018, @01:26AM
I've spent half a century thinking about just what it is that constitutes leadership.
I first noticed this phenomenon when I was in junior high school, in PE, and later, in high school ROTC. People did not always take their lead from the person who was officially in charge. There was another dynamic at work.
Back in the 1980s there was a lot of research on monkeys and the term "alpha male" got bandied about. However, a bully is not a leader. They rarely CREATE. Bullies tend to excel at CONTROL. That is not leadership. So what is?
In Silicon Valley, for instance, I have noticed that when you have a team of fairly technical subject matter experts, smart enough and honest enough with themselves to admit that they do not know everything - a bunch of INTJs, basically - that they self-organize and tend to take their instructions from the person who knows the most. That focus may change with the nature of the task. There is no one "leader". There are no "followers". They operate by consensus. You see this dynamic at work in all good teams - there is no power or control, there are only skills and responsibilities.
Occasionally one gets testosterone-fuelled interactions between two wannabe alpha males and that tends to destroy the group, from which I infer, leaders are NOT testosterone-fuelled males. So what ARE leaders?
Here's my take on it.
REAL leaders are loners.
Real leaders are OUTLIERS. They prefer the fringes of society, where there is more room for exploration.
Real leaders are EXPLORERS.
Real leaders, out on the edge, see something interesting, and they start heading for it.
Everyone else watches them to see what will happen. Perhaps a few follow along, behind.
If they are successful, they will turn around and find everyone following them. "Why are you following me?" they will cry. They don't want to be leaders. They don't CALL themselves leaders. They want to be ALONE. Out on the fringe. Where there is room to explore.
THAT IS A LEADER. A leader is one who leads.
So if those are the REAL leaders, that everyone is REALLY following ... who are those other "leaders"?
Somewhere back in the crowd, close to the middle of the crowd, as far from the edges as they can get, there is another sort of person.
This person ALSO calls themselves a leader.
They like attention. They like to talk. They tend to be social. Which may be why they prefer to be in the middle of the crowd, where it is, only coincidentally, also the safest place to be.
They are, basically, herd animals. They possess a pack instinct. They understand how to herd other herd animals, like themselves.
They call this herding behavior, "leadership" ... and they describe themselves, as "leaders".
It is painfully obvious that they are NOT the leaders because one cannot lead a group from the CENTER of the herd - one can only lead a herd, from the EDGE. From the center of the herd, one cannot even see where one is going.
People not under such people's spell will more accurately describe such people as politicians, or worse.
Being a real leader involves taking risks. Silicon Valley doesn't take risks. Therefore, Silicon Valley has relinquished the leadership role to those whom WILL take risks.
The same can be said for the United States. The lawyers have taken over ... and everyone is more concerned about keeping their liability to a minimum, than they are in doing risky things like build supersonic trains or deep underwater submarine bases or hypersonic missiles or orbital space stations or Moon bases or missions to Mars or other star systems.
Also, Silicon Valley has crippled itself with a poisonous philosophy that claims that one can have it cheap, AND fast, AND good ... if only one finds the right third world shithole to do the hard work, while the dot com assholes watch their stock split.
Obviously these morons know nothing about project management - see Project_management_triangle [wikipedia.org] for details.