Tech Workers Are Fleeing Silicon Valley…For Japan!
Patrick Howley
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American technology workers are fleeing overseas to avoid working in Silicon Valley, according to new mainstream news reports. The trend that President Donald Trump consistently highlights and tries to correct — jobs going overseas — is now hitting the Big Tech community as major companies seek to throttle down political speech from many conservative voices.
Why are our skilled tech workers abandoning the United States? Reasons cited include more pay in Japan and better living conditions than crime-ridden California.
Here is Bloomberg’s video report on Americans living the “Japanese Dream.”
Interesting turn of events. The free market affects companies not only through consumers, but also through potential employees. Americans are scrambling to apply for jobs in Japan.
Automotive News reports from Tokyo:
Japan is hardly known as a freewheeling source of Silicon Valley-beating breakthroughs. But one autonomous driving upstart wants to change that by bringing a little of Silicon Valley to this side of the Pacific.
Ascent Robotics, founded two years ago, hopes to deliver a Level 4 autonomous vehicle in two years and showcase it at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
Ascent says it has a couple of secret weapons that will catapult it to the fore of the self-driving race. The first is an artificial intelligence that takes advantage of human neuroscience to better mimic causal reasoning. Ascent says its cars will better understand their driving environment and be able to drive anywhere without the need of high-accuracy GPS and digital maps.
The second is that, in a bid to foster innovation, Ascent is cultivating a California work culture in the heart of Tokyo.
A glance around its ultracasual office in the city’s trendy Ebisu district illustrates Ascent’s outside-the-box thinking. The English-only workspace is populated almost exclusively by young non-Japanese programmers lured from around the world by Tokyo’s sleepless vibe, crime-free streets and cool cuisine. What’s more, paychecks often go further than in pricey Silicon Valley.
American co-founder Fred Almeida, a machine-learning expert, is a rare non-Japanese entrepreneur who set up shop in Japan for just those reasons. Ascent has 50 employees and expects to triple its ranks within a year. The company gets 700 resumes a week, Almeida says.”
Automotive News passage ends
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