All of this helps to explain the third dirty little secret: A lot of the jobs that are starting to go abroad today are very high-end research jobs, because not only is the talent abroad cheaper, but a lot of it is as educated as American workers—or even more so. In China, where there are 1.3 billion people and the universities are just starting to crack the top ranks, the competition for top spots is ferocious. The math/science salmon that swims upstream in China and gets itself admitted to a top Chinese university or hired by a foreign company is one smart fish. The folks at Microsoft have a saying about their research center in Beijing, which, for scientists and engineers, is one of the most sought-after places to work in all of China. “Remember, in China when you are one in a million– there are 1,300 other people just like you.”
The brainpower that rises to the Microsoft research center in Beijing is already one in a million.
Consider the annual worldwide Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. About forty countries participate by nominating talent through local affiliate affairs. In 2004, the Intel Fair attracted around sixty-five thousand American kids, according to Intel. How about in China? I asked Wee Theng Tan, the president of Intel China, during a visit to Beijing. In China, he told me, there is a national affiliate science fair, which acts as a feeder system to select kids for the global Intel fair. “Almost every single province has students going to one of these affiliate fairs,” said Tan. “We have as many as six million kids competing, although not all are competing for the top levels... [But] you know how seriously they take it. Those selected to go to the international [Intel] fair are immediately exempted from college entrance exams” and basically get their choice of any top university in China. In the 2004 Intel Science Fair, China came home with thirty-five awards, more than any other country in Asia, including one of the top three global awards.
Microsoft has three research centers in the world: in Cambridge, England; in Redmond, Washington, its headquarters; and in Beijing. Bill Gates told me that within just a couple of years of its opening in 1998, Microsoft Research Asia, as the center in Beijing is known, had become the most productive research arm in the Microsoft system “in terms of the quality of the ideas that they are turning out. It is mind-blowing.”
Kai-Fu Li is the Microsoft executive who was assigned by Gates to open the Microsoft research center in Beijing. My first question to him was, “How did you go about recruiting the staff?” Li said his team went to universities all over China and simply administered math, IQ, and programming tests to Ph.D.-level students or scientists.
“In the first year, we gave about 2,000 tests all around,” he said. From the 2,000, they winnowed the group down to 400 with more tests, then 150, “and then we hired 20.” They were given two-year contracts and told that at the end of two years, depending on the quality of their work, they would either be given a longer-term contract or granted a postdoctoral degree by Microsoft Research Asia. Yes, you read that right. The Chinese government gave Microsoft the right to grant postdocs. Of the original twenty who were hired, twelve survived the cut. The next year, nearly four thousand people were tested. After that, said Li, “we stopped doing the test. By that time we became known as the number one place to work, where all the smart computer and math people wanted to work... We got to know all the students and professors. The professors would send their best people there, knowing that if the people did not work out, it would be their credibility [on the line]. Now we have the top professors at the top schools recommending their top students. A lot of students want to go to Stanford or MIT, but they want to spend two years at Microsoft first, as interns, so they can get a nice recommendation letter that says these are MIT quality.” Today Microsoft has more than two hundred researchers in its China lab and some four hundred students who come in and out on projects and become recruiting material for Microsoft.