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>Another possibility is that U.S. immigration laws act as a protectionist barrier to prop up programmer compensation. It seems impossible for this to last (why

jcadam 9y ago
Truth be told, most software development doesn't require a high amount of intelligence, skill, or innate talent. I'm not afraid of a superior person taking my job. They would be no better at it than I am. I would probably be more productive if I were less intelligent (or on booze, but employers frown on that).
- ryanianian 9y ago
  This is wrong. Even simple software requires a radically different way of thinking than the way most are trained. I've taught 6th graders how to code and it is clear that the way of approaching problems and creating solutions (i.e. creative thinking, intellectual curiosity, and willingness to collaborate and ask questions) really separates the students from who "get it" and thse who don't. Don't sell it short because the industry has made tools and languages that abstract over some of the simpler concepts for entry-level tasks.
  - randomdata 9y ago
    Perhaps he means in relation to other careers? As someone who is both a software developer and a farmer, software isn't exactly easy, but in comparison to the knowledge and skill required to farm successfully, it is a breeze.
    - ryanianian 9y ago
      This is quite interesting - I'm actually quite curious about what makes farming more intellectually challenging and difficult than programming, especially from somebody who does both. (Honest curiosity!)
      - jcadam 9y ago
        My grandfather was a farmer. By necessity he was also forced to become a competent mechanic, carpenter, electrician, and plumber (did I miss any?). Farmers are the most self-sufficient people you'll ever meet.
        ryanianian 9y ago
        They've always been (incorrectly) characterized in what I've seen in media/pop-culture as hardworking but relatively simple. The more I learn about the difficulties of modern farming and what it takes to succeed, the more respect I have. I'd love read a blog from somebody with career-level experience in both software-engineering and farming. I'm sure I/we could learn a lot.
        s73v3r_ 9y ago
        Business person, maybe economist when you take into account prices for crops and deciding what to grow.
      - SamBam 9y ago
        I would imagine it's the constant problem-solving with real-world, "dirty" problems. You can't take the fact that your crops are failing through a debugger and reason about it line-by-line. You can't quickly run another simulation. You can't insert a single solution at one point and know that it won't affect the rest of the application. Your answers are always based on fuzzy data, experience, and intuition. Your solutions will always affect the local ecosystem of the crops, and cause hard-to-predict chain reactions. ...but I'm not a farmer, so I'm just guessing.
        9y ago
  - notyourday 9y ago
    I disagree, GP is absolutely correct. The reason people think that programming or software engineering is hard is because they were told that it is hard. US and the West in general has this strange culture where those that are supposed to know (teachers, parents, professors) like to tell those who are learning (students, children, etc) that whatever is done is hard. Math, apparently, is hard. Algebra is hard. Trigonometry is hard. Geography is hard. Physics is hard. It does not matter what it is - if it is worth doing it is all "hard". Students that "get it" are the ones who managed to ignore the "hard" label. That's it. In the industry I keep hearing that everything is hard: Dev: "Logging is a solved problem at the rate we are looking at - it is what, 100 messages per second?" VP of Eng: "I dont know man. Logging is hard. We should outsource it." SRE: "Just build images and spin them up" CTO: "That's hard. We should outsource it" Dev: "Lets fix this reliability issue. We keep getting disconnects and it does something wacky to our API" CTO/VP Eng: "That's hard. Lets just see if we can spin up enough instances not to notice" Most of stuff that we do is not hard.
    - mrguyorama 9y ago
      I completely disagree. Every single subject I've ever struggled with in a school setting was described to me as "No don't worry, it's actually really easy" which was a problem. If I'm struggling to understand something that is so easy, maybe I'm just dumb.
    - ryanianian 9y ago
      Algebra is hard - it's an abstract problem-space. It takes learning problem-solving! I've seen brilliant middle-school kids struggle with it because it's a way of thinking that has to be learned. Don't cut yourself or others short by saying these things you think are easy are easy by their very nature. Doing any of those things you describe with effectively in a mid/large-scale engineering organization with many competing tech priorities is not something an amateur or simpleton could do with any real success. I can put seeds in the ground, but that doesn't make me a farmer. But also - maybe larger point - many of the things that are not coding/math/science are also quite hard. My father fixed auto-bodies for a living and he made some incredibly difficult, detail-oriented, craftsmanship tasks look dumb-simple. He asked me to tape off a car once so it could be painted - something he thought a 13 year old should be able to do because it was "so easy" was a complete disaster. He forgot how second-nature it had become to him. So..just because you think it's easy doesn't mean it is. And just because it's hard doesn't mean it's fairly characterized in popular-opinion as being as hard as it actually is.
  - dlwdlw 9y ago
    Does it have to be though? I'm sure reading/writing were thought the same for women/blacks/etc.. at some point in history.
    - zbentley 9y ago
      I suspect I'm ideologically closer to you than to some of the more libertarian commenters on this thread, but that comment is both a false comparison, intensely reductive, and, I think, needlessly divisive. No-one is arguing that certain groups have greater aptitude or learning ability for programming; they're arguing that certain individuals might differ.
- lr4444lr 9y ago
  I don't know what type of code you write, or where you went to school, but I had a professor who actually put the exam score distribution on the whiteboard after each test in a second level CS class, and the bimodal distribution was stark. And these are people motivated or interested enough to spend their academic career pursuing it beyond intro level washout.
52-6F-62 9y ago
I think that’s a touch more complex a problem than you’re making it out to be. Maybe you were born in the right place for the economical opportunity for someone born “lower” (please be generous with my terms here), but maybe it’s that these others were born “higher” to a place where higher education is easier to accumulate granting them a severe advantage competitively should you have to compete in an economic arena on the same level. Or do we accept that being born to an economic disadvantage due to whatever factors mean you should be solely relegated to your caste of manual labour, service occupations, or direct servitude? Second to that problem is what value does higher education really have in application in what are varied circumstances. My understanding was the founding of the US was quite counter to that idea— and it’s one ideal that many countries have thankfully sought to incorporate. Though I think you’re on to a problem—one that includes the consideration that current rules don’t exactly line up with the values we might wish to pursue as a (human, global) society. Partly because it might be necessary in what appears to be a period of transition.
dipppy 9y ago
Seriously. A lot of comments in here are "Well it's hard so we deserve it!". There are thousands of developers making fractions of what their equally talented counterparts make in the US.
- d0lph 9y ago
  Offshore developed code is not usually the same quality. Not that we all deserve huge salaries, but code quality important.
  - kimdcmason 9y ago
    "Offshore developed code is not usually the same quality." American exceptionalism and absolutely wrong.
    - d0lph 9y ago
      I speak primarily from experience.
      - kimdcmason 9y ago
        Anecdotes are not data.
        d0lph 9y ago
        To be honest I thought it was common knowledge, but I assume there exists no such study of code quality between countries.
      - ivm 9y ago
        As an "offshore developer", I have worked on multiple US projects with low quality code written by US developers. Should I assume that American code is usually low quality?
        evilduck 9y ago
humanrebar 9y ago
> In that sense it feels perversly exploitative and priveleged to make so much more money than practically anyone else on earth due to nothing but the physical location I was born. Is it perverse to go swimming because you were born near a beach? Is it perverse to visit the Louvre if you are Parisian? Is it perverse to go to a good university because the universities in Elbonia aren't good? You're not entirely wrong, but that's a very limited view on how the world works. It's not all random. We're not all rolling dice and separating into "haves" and "haven'ts". Once upon a time: Somebody's parents moved to the coast. Somebody's predecessors funded and built the Louvre (and managed to keep priceless things safe despite war, disease, famine, etc.). Various parties spent decades (or centuries!) of history recruiting and utilizing world-class talent, raising world-class capital reserves, and building world-class facilities for their universities.
- d0lph 9y ago
  This is why people don't like the concept of privilege, it seems almost built to shame people for having more due to circumstances.
  - wfo 9y ago
    If people don't like the concept, they don't really understand it. The way the word is often used and even the word itself, absolutely that ruffles some feathers and rightly so. They do studies, if people are given massive advantages (e.g. rolling two dice instead of one in monopoly and starting with double the cash) that are obvious and explicit, people will still believe they deserved to win, they earned their victory. Recognizing a lot of your success is because of dumb luck (yes you worked hard, but millions of others worked just as hard or harder and weren't lucky) is a good way to stay humble, and to remind yourself to stop pretending you "deserve" what you have -- we all live in a fundamentally (intentionally) unjust economic system where "desert" has no meaning but we try to superimpose it on our lives because of a need to believe things are fair. Privilege is a word that can be a good way to remember that. It can also be used as a rhetorical weapon to bludgeon people. The word itself is terrible and I hate it: it is not a "privilege" in my view to be treated decently, to have a chance at success, to not be discriminated against or assaulted by police or have to face anything that the poor, minorities, women face. It is a right. Everyone has the right to be treated the way straight rich white men are and have been for centuries and using the word "privilege" conjures up this notion that they are getting something they do not deserve: rather, they should be viewed as the model, the goal, they are getting something that we all deserve to have as well alongside them.
christophilus 9y ago
This is true. I recently applied for a job in the US and one in the UK. In the US, I got a ridiculously good salary offer. The UK job's compensation was maybe half what the US job offered. My cost of living is also lower than the folks in London, so it's just perverse no matter how you slice it. I honestly don't think it will last, though. Economically, it just doesn't make sense. My recommendation to any of my fellow US developers: save as much as you can while the money is good.
- conanbatt 9y ago
  US Tech also makes a lot more money than UK tech. Starting with the big ones, ending with the amount of investment funding the area has.
- falafel 9y ago
  To be honest, I think if anything the trend will continue and the salaries will go up. There will still be a shortage of highly skilled developers who demand higher salaries. At my company we've been trying to hire a senior frontend developer for the last 6 months; it's hard, especially outside of major tech areas. Most people come unprepared, lie in their resumes, and suffer intensely from the Dunning Kruger effect. I don't see this trend of lying to get the job that pays good money to stop anytime soon. Out the 1.6M programmers employed in the US, I think a large portion still have the job because companies are desperate to hire, but don't know how hire for this industry.
  - christophilus 9y ago
    I disagree, but time will tell. I think that at some point companies will realize that it's 2018 and remote work is a (mostly) solved problem. Once that realization hits, the high salaries are going. I've worked remotely for the past 3 years. If you're open to remote work, the challenge isn't finding qualified employees. The challenge is turning off the firehose of qualified applicants once you post a job listing.
- freeone3000 9y ago
  Have you seen the revenues? Have you seen the stock prices? Besides that they obviously can afford to keep raising salaries to compete with each other, they also have to keep raising salaries to compete with the devs. Market entry has such a low barrier, they have to essentially pay every developer to not simply take their knowledge, walk out the door, and set up their own shingle.
mrkstu 9y ago
The job of government is to represent the interests of its citizens. Purposely lowering the standard of living of citizens via unlimited immigration is a great way to get yourself out of office.
galieos_ghost 9y ago
Someone in my family has fought for the US in every war since the civil war. They have fought, bled, and died for this country, paid taxes, and helped build it from a weak country to the most powerful civilization in human history. They did it because they wanted their children and grandchildren to have a better life. Why should I feel guilty about this?
- ForHackernews 9y ago
  Because you did absolutely nothing to earn having good family members? Most people feel at least sheepish about their own success when faced with others, no less deserving, who experience failure.
  - galieos_ghost 9y ago
    The point is that millions of people made sacrifices for themselves and their families which cumulatively created the greatest civilization in history. Why should we feel guilty about reaping the benefits of those sacrifices? Why should we feel obligated to hand over our prosperity to those who contributed nothing to it?
    - ryanianian 9y ago
      Don't feel guilty, but realize that you're not entitled to what you have - you got lucky being born to parents who worked so hard etc. Continue to work as hard as they did and appreciate their work.
      - atomicUpdate 9y ago
        > realize that you're not entitled to what you have That's ridiculous. The fact that his parents worked hard is what entitled him to the life he has, all the way up the chain to the ones that emigrated to America and earlier. This 'original sin' stuff that people are trying to push just because we are born in the US is crap.
yAnonymous 9y ago
Where's all the great Indian, Chinese and Eastern European software? Seriously wondering, because most software I saw from these regions was mediocre at best. The whole world uses operating systems, browsers and development tools made in western countries.
- yomly 9y ago
  My experience is that culturally, places outside of North America and West Europe have lagged in attitudes to software development. Tech is still referred to as "IT" and engineers are still seen as code-monkeys or a cost-centre. This is very much changing, especially in China, but I presume there is still some lag. The other thing worth bearing in mind is that Chinese products are very insular. They are slow to get localized if ever so unless you have a reason to be going out to download them, you are unlikely to ever be using them.
  - ashleyn 9y ago
    And with higher quality will come higher labour costs.
  - falafel 9y ago
    > places outside of North America and West Europe have lagged in attitudes to software development. This is right. From my experience working with an offshore team in India, the main problem is cultural. A large majority of the developers in India I've worked with have no interest in furthering their development carrier, but see it simply as a way to transition into management as fast as possible. In practice, this means that you can go from a junior developer to a project manager in the span of 2 years or so. 2 years is not enough time to solidify your knowledge and become the t-shaped programmer that this industry requires. I think one needs at least 5 years of work and experimentation in this field to reach the level where you can contribute positively to a company, without creating huge amounts of technical debt.
- ivm 9y ago
  Eh, nginx? All JetBrains IDEs? Yandex still beating Google locally? Ukraine being a huge outsourcing hub for US companies? China having ten clones for every service blocked by GFW?
tytytytytytytyt 9y ago
> And if the millions and millions of Indian, Chinese, and Eastern European programmers who are inifinitely more talented/driven/intelligent/educated than myself were able to simply move here and seek employment with no immigration restraints, I know that I would be out of a job instantly. Couldn't you say the same thing about other professions?
lr4444lr 9y ago
Ask the other side of the equation: why don't their countries have well-heeled tech companies attracting capital and ideas with the same investment opportunity so that they can live a comparable lifestyle to you where they come from?
wfo 9y ago
Instead of worrying about potential foreigners competing for your job, you should wonder why there are so few jobs out there: it's because the rich are hoarding them. The money for them, that is. There is so much work to be done, plenty of work for you and your Indian and Chinese friends to all have well-paying jobs. The reason we all don't have them is that we are just extremely bad at allocating resources: we choose the most inefficient method, market capitalism. We, essentially at random, select a tiny group of elite wealth hoarders who centrally plan and distribute nearly all of the world's wealth without any concern for social good or welfare or anything other than their continued accumulation of wealth and power. Then we beg them to give us jobs, to give us their table scraps and we fight each other for them, terrified at any moment our benefactors might take away our livelihood instead of rolling up our sleeves and getting to work.
- conanbatt 9y ago
  > it's because the rich are hoarding them The enemy are not foreigners man, the enemy are the rich!
- skybrian 9y ago
  I completely agree that the main problem is lack of spending money in the hands of people who actually need it. There's plenty of work to be done, if only the people who need it had money to pay for it. However, capitalism (in the form of Walmart and its suppliers, for example) does seem quite efficient at supplying material things to poor people. More spending power in the right places would go pretty far to fix the problem, along with boosting the economy.
  - wfo 9y ago
    Walmart's profit primarily comes from abuse of monopoly (which is not efficiency) and from government subsidies (they are the biggest welfare recipients in the world, since their workers require government welfare to survive while working so much for so little). Their profits come from economic coercion and exploiting public subsidies, not efficiency. Walmart's primary competitive innovation historically was union busting.
  - 9y ago
skybrian 9y ago
It seems like there should be more arbitrage? Google at least has engineering offices all over the world. If immigration barriers were the main issue, it seems like more companies should be doing the same.
jacobwilliamroy 9y ago
>Another possibility is that U.S. immigration laws act as a protectionist barrier to prop up programmer compensation. It seems impossible for this to last (why shouldn’t there by really valuable non-U.S. companies), but it does appear to be somewhat true for now. I find this quote confusing. Historically, the poaching of highly-skilled foreigners has been an important step in developing mere import substitutions into products which can be competitive on a global scale. The Tudor government (Henry VII-Elizabeth I) kicked off its finished-wool-import-substitution program by poaching skilled weavers and machinists from the low countries (e.g. Flanders, Holland, France). Then, as the export of finished wool goods grew, so did restrictions on the exportation of raw materials and the importation of finished wool. Nearly 100 years later, England had the ability to drive European countries to famine by simply banning the export of raw wool.[0] In the early 18th century, France started poaching British watchmakers, weavers and metalworkers; Britain responded by outlawing the emigration of skilled workers in 1719.[1] With that context, I find it odd to hear that U.S. immigration policy has started to work in opposition to the what I believe is the largest benefit of immigration. What incentive is there to keep highly skilled workers, along with their advanced knowledge, out of the U.S.? [0] - Chang, Ha-Joon. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2008. Print. pg. 40-42 [1] - Chang, Ha-Joon. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2008. Print. pg. 129
commandlinefan 9y ago
> U.S. immigration laws act as a protectionist barrier to prop up programmer compensation It's almost impossible to immigrate to England (much harder than the US), yet programmers in SF are far better compensated than those in London.
- lmm 9y ago
  > It's almost impossible to immigrate to England (much harder than the US), yet programmers in SF are far better compensated than those in London. Immigration per se may be hard, but working is much easier than the US; I know several Romanians working as programmers in London.
  - Symbiote 9y ago
    Immigrating to the UK from Romania (or the rest of the EU) is extremely easy. 1) Move there. You can do this even without a job. 2) Book an appointment with the Job Centre (usually used by people seeking work), where you must show your passport. (Start work if you like. Your employer may ask to see your passport, if you don't yet have the tax number.) 3) Tax number arrives a week or a few later; tell employer. The process is actually the same for British citizens without a tax number, e.g. a child born abroad who moves "home" to the UK.
eric_b 9y ago
I don't understand the self-loathing that is so popular these days. Somehow we've convinced a generation of perfectly decent human beings that they are "exploiting" the weak and that their "privilege" is oppressing the rest of the world, just by going about their business. You're a programmer. Maybe you're decent, maybe you're not. It is VERY unlikely that the "millions and millions" of "infinitely more talented" Eastern European/Indian/Chinese programmers you mention actually exist. And even if they did, there are many societal and economic reasons besides "US Immigration Laws" that would prevent them from coming here and taking your job for an order of magnitude less money.
s73v3r_ 9y ago
I don't completely disagree with you, but software development as a job is not purely based on how talented of a coder you are. There are many, many other aspects to the job that really have nothing to do with computers/computer science. Don't discount your other abilities that much.

jcadam 9y ago

Truth be told, most software development doesn't require a high amount of intelligence, skill, or innate talent. I'm not afraid of a superior person taking my job. They would be no better at it than I am. I would probably be more productive if I were less intelligent (or on booze, but employers frown on that).

ryanianian 9y ago
This is wrong. Even simple software requires a radically different way of thinking than the way most are trained. I've taught 6th graders how to code and it is clear that the way of approaching problems and creating solutions (i.e. creative thinking, intellectual curiosity, and willingness to collaborate and ask questions) really separates the students from who "get it" and thse who don't. Don't sell it short because the industry has made tools and languages that abstract over some of the simpler concepts for entry-level tasks.
- randomdata 9y ago
  Perhaps he means in relation to other careers? As someone who is both a software developer and a farmer, software isn't exactly easy, but in comparison to the knowledge and skill required to farm successfully, it is a breeze.
  - ryanianian 9y ago
    This is quite interesting - I'm actually quite curious about what makes farming more intellectually challenging and difficult than programming, especially from somebody who does both. (Honest curiosity!)
    - jcadam 9y ago
      My grandfather was a farmer. By necessity he was also forced to become a competent mechanic, carpenter, electrician, and plumber (did I miss any?). Farmers are the most self-sufficient people you'll ever meet.
      - ryanianian 9y ago
        They've always been (incorrectly) characterized in what I've seen in media/pop-culture as hardworking but relatively simple. The more I learn about the difficulties of modern farming and what it takes to succeed, the more respect I have. I'd love read a blog from somebody with career-level experience in both software-engineering and farming. I'm sure I/we could learn a lot.
      - s73v3r_ 9y ago
        Business person, maybe economist when you take into account prices for crops and deciding what to grow.
    - SamBam 9y ago
      I would imagine it's the constant problem-solving with real-world, "dirty" problems. You can't take the fact that your crops are failing through a debugger and reason about it line-by-line. You can't quickly run another simulation. You can't insert a single solution at one point and know that it won't affect the rest of the application. Your answers are always based on fuzzy data, experience, and intuition. Your solutions will always affect the local ecosystem of the crops, and cause hard-to-predict chain reactions. ...but I'm not a farmer, so I'm just guessing.
      - 9y ago
- notyourday 9y ago
  I disagree, GP is absolutely correct. The reason people think that programming or software engineering is hard is because they were told that it is hard. US and the West in general has this strange culture where those that are supposed to know (teachers, parents, professors) like to tell those who are learning (students, children, etc) that whatever is done is hard. Math, apparently, is hard. Algebra is hard. Trigonometry is hard. Geography is hard. Physics is hard. It does not matter what it is - if it is worth doing it is all "hard". Students that "get it" are the ones who managed to ignore the "hard" label. That's it. In the industry I keep hearing that everything is hard: Dev: "Logging is a solved problem at the rate we are looking at - it is what, 100 messages per second?" VP of Eng: "I dont know man. Logging is hard. We should outsource it." SRE: "Just build images and spin them up" CTO: "That's hard. We should outsource it" Dev: "Lets fix this reliability issue. We keep getting disconnects and it does something wacky to our API" CTO/VP Eng: "That's hard. Lets just see if we can spin up enough instances not to notice" Most of stuff that we do is not hard.
  - mrguyorama 9y ago
    I completely disagree. Every single subject I've ever struggled with in a school setting was described to me as "No don't worry, it's actually really easy" which was a problem. If I'm struggling to understand something that is so easy, maybe I'm just dumb.
  - ryanianian 9y ago
    Algebra is hard - it's an abstract problem-space. It takes learning problem-solving! I've seen brilliant middle-school kids struggle with it because it's a way of thinking that has to be learned. Don't cut yourself or others short by saying these things you think are easy are easy by their very nature. Doing any of those things you describe with effectively in a mid/large-scale engineering organization with many competing tech priorities is not something an amateur or simpleton could do with any real success. I can put seeds in the ground, but that doesn't make me a farmer. But also - maybe larger point - many of the things that are not coding/math/science are also quite hard. My father fixed auto-bodies for a living and he made some incredibly difficult, detail-oriented, craftsmanship tasks look dumb-simple. He asked me to tape off a car once so it could be painted - something he thought a 13 year old should be able to do because it was "so easy" was a complete disaster. He forgot how second-nature it had become to him. So..just because you think it's easy doesn't mean it is. And just because it's hard doesn't mean it's fairly characterized in popular-opinion as being as hard as it actually is.
- dlwdlw 9y ago
  Does it have to be though? I'm sure reading/writing were thought the same for women/blacks/etc.. at some point in history.
  - zbentley 9y ago
    I suspect I'm ideologically closer to you than to some of the more libertarian commenters on this thread, but that comment is both a false comparison, intensely reductive, and, I think, needlessly divisive. No-one is arguing that certain groups have greater aptitude or learning ability for programming; they're arguing that certain individuals might differ.
lr4444lr 9y ago
I don't know what type of code you write, or where you went to school, but I had a professor who actually put the exam score distribution on the whiteboard after each test in a second level CS class, and the bimodal distribution was stark. And these are people motivated or interested enough to spend their academic career pursuing it beyond intro level washout.

52-6F-62 9y ago

I think that’s a touch more complex a problem than you’re making it out to be. Maybe you were born in the right place for the economical opportunity for someone born “lower” (please be generous with my terms here), but maybe it’s that these others were born “higher” to a place where higher education is easier to accumulate granting them a severe advantage competitively should you have to compete in an economic arena on the same level. Or do we accept that being born to an economic disadvantage due to whatever factors mean you should be solely relegated to your caste of manual labour, service occupations, or direct servitude? Second to that problem is what value does higher education really have in application in what are varied circumstances. My understanding was the founding of the US was quite counter to that idea— and it’s one ideal that many countries have thankfully sought to incorporate. Though I think you’re on to a problem—one that includes the consideration that current rules don’t exactly line up with the values we might wish to pursue as a (human, global) society. Partly because it might be necessary in what appears to be a period of transition.

dipppy 9y ago

Seriously. A lot of comments in here are "Well it's hard so we deserve it!". There are thousands of developers making fractions of what their equally talented counterparts make in the US.

d0lph 9y ago
Offshore developed code is not usually the same quality. Not that we all deserve huge salaries, but code quality important.
- kimdcmason 9y ago
  "Offshore developed code is not usually the same quality." American exceptionalism and absolutely wrong.
  - d0lph 9y ago
    I speak primarily from experience.
    - kimdcmason 9y ago
      Anecdotes are not data.
      - d0lph 9y ago
        To be honest I thought it was common knowledge, but I assume there exists no such study of code quality between countries.
    - ivm 9y ago
      As an "offshore developer", I have worked on multiple US projects with low quality code written by US developers. Should I assume that American code is usually low quality?
      - evilduck 9y ago

humanrebar 9y ago

> In that sense it feels perversly exploitative and priveleged to make so much more money than practically anyone else on earth due to nothing but the physical location I was born. Is it perverse to go swimming because you were born near a beach? Is it perverse to visit the Louvre if you are Parisian? Is it perverse to go to a good university because the universities in Elbonia aren't good? You're not entirely wrong, but that's a very limited view on how the world works. It's not all random. We're not all rolling dice and separating into "haves" and "haven'ts". Once upon a time: Somebody's parents moved to the coast. Somebody's predecessors funded and built the Louvre (and managed to keep priceless things safe despite war, disease, famine, etc.). Various parties spent decades (or centuries!) of history recruiting and utilizing world-class talent, raising world-class capital reserves, and building world-class facilities for their universities.

d0lph 9y ago
This is why people don't like the concept of privilege, it seems almost built to shame people for having more due to circumstances.
- wfo 9y ago
  If people don't like the concept, they don't really understand it. The way the word is often used and even the word itself, absolutely that ruffles some feathers and rightly so. They do studies, if people are given massive advantages (e.g. rolling two dice instead of one in monopoly and starting with double the cash) that are obvious and explicit, people will still believe they deserved to win, they earned their victory. Recognizing a lot of your success is because of dumb luck (yes you worked hard, but millions of others worked just as hard or harder and weren't lucky) is a good way to stay humble, and to remind yourself to stop pretending you "deserve" what you have -- we all live in a fundamentally (intentionally) unjust economic system where "desert" has no meaning but we try to superimpose it on our lives because of a need to believe things are fair. Privilege is a word that can be a good way to remember that. It can also be used as a rhetorical weapon to bludgeon people. The word itself is terrible and I hate it: it is not a "privilege" in my view to be treated decently, to have a chance at success, to not be discriminated against or assaulted by police or have to face anything that the poor, minorities, women face. It is a right. Everyone has the right to be treated the way straight rich white men are and have been for centuries and using the word "privilege" conjures up this notion that they are getting something they do not deserve: rather, they should be viewed as the model, the goal, they are getting something that we all deserve to have as well alongside them.

christophilus 9y ago

This is true. I recently applied for a job in the US and one in the UK. In the US, I got a ridiculously good salary offer. The UK job's compensation was maybe half what the US job offered. My cost of living is also lower than the folks in London, so it's just perverse no matter how you slice it. I honestly don't think it will last, though. Economically, it just doesn't make sense. My recommendation to any of my fellow US developers: save as much as you can while the money is good.

conanbatt 9y ago
US Tech also makes a lot more money than UK tech. Starting with the big ones, ending with the amount of investment funding the area has.
falafel 9y ago
To be honest, I think if anything the trend will continue and the salaries will go up. There will still be a shortage of highly skilled developers who demand higher salaries. At my company we've been trying to hire a senior frontend developer for the last 6 months; it's hard, especially outside of major tech areas. Most people come unprepared, lie in their resumes, and suffer intensely from the Dunning Kruger effect. I don't see this trend of lying to get the job that pays good money to stop anytime soon. Out the 1.6M programmers employed in the US, I think a large portion still have the job because companies are desperate to hire, but don't know how hire for this industry.
- christophilus 9y ago
  I disagree, but time will tell. I think that at some point companies will realize that it's 2018 and remote work is a (mostly) solved problem. Once that realization hits, the high salaries are going. I've worked remotely for the past 3 years. If you're open to remote work, the challenge isn't finding qualified employees. The challenge is turning off the firehose of qualified applicants once you post a job listing.
freeone3000 9y ago
Have you seen the revenues? Have you seen the stock prices? Besides that they obviously can afford to keep raising salaries to compete with each other, they also have to keep raising salaries to compete with the devs. Market entry has such a low barrier, they have to essentially pay every developer to not simply take their knowledge, walk out the door, and set up their own shingle.

mrkstu 9y ago

The job of government is to represent the interests of its citizens. Purposely lowering the standard of living of citizens via unlimited immigration is a great way to get yourself out of office.

galieos_ghost 9y ago

Someone in my family has fought for the US in every war since the civil war. They have fought, bled, and died for this country, paid taxes, and helped build it from a weak country to the most powerful civilization in human history. They did it because they wanted their children and grandchildren to have a better life. Why should I feel guilty about this?

ForHackernews 9y ago
Because you did absolutely nothing to earn having good family members? Most people feel at least sheepish about their own success when faced with others, no less deserving, who experience failure.
- galieos_ghost 9y ago
  The point is that millions of people made sacrifices for themselves and their families which cumulatively created the greatest civilization in history. Why should we feel guilty about reaping the benefits of those sacrifices? Why should we feel obligated to hand over our prosperity to those who contributed nothing to it?
  - ryanianian 9y ago
    Don't feel guilty, but realize that you're not entitled to what you have - you got lucky being born to parents who worked so hard etc. Continue to work as hard as they did and appreciate their work.
    - atomicUpdate 9y ago
      > realize that you're not entitled to what you have That's ridiculous. The fact that his parents worked hard is what entitled him to the life he has, all the way up the chain to the ones that emigrated to America and earlier. This 'original sin' stuff that people are trying to push just because we are born in the US is crap.

yAnonymous 9y ago

Where's all the great Indian, Chinese and Eastern European software? Seriously wondering, because most software I saw from these regions was mediocre at best. The whole world uses operating systems, browsers and development tools made in western countries.

yomly 9y ago
My experience is that culturally, places outside of North America and West Europe have lagged in attitudes to software development. Tech is still referred to as "IT" and engineers are still seen as code-monkeys or a cost-centre. This is very much changing, especially in China, but I presume there is still some lag. The other thing worth bearing in mind is that Chinese products are very insular. They are slow to get localized if ever so unless you have a reason to be going out to download them, you are unlikely to ever be using them.
- ashleyn 9y ago
  And with higher quality will come higher labour costs.
- falafel 9y ago
  > places outside of North America and West Europe have lagged in attitudes to software development. This is right. From my experience working with an offshore team in India, the main problem is cultural. A large majority of the developers in India I've worked with have no interest in furthering their development carrier, but see it simply as a way to transition into management as fast as possible. In practice, this means that you can go from a junior developer to a project manager in the span of 2 years or so. 2 years is not enough time to solidify your knowledge and become the t-shaped programmer that this industry requires. I think one needs at least 5 years of work and experimentation in this field to reach the level where you can contribute positively to a company, without creating huge amounts of technical debt.
ivm 9y ago
Eh, nginx? All JetBrains IDEs? Yandex still beating Google locally? Ukraine being a huge outsourcing hub for US companies? China having ten clones for every service blocked by GFW?

tytytytytytytyt 9y ago

> And if the millions and millions of Indian, Chinese, and Eastern European programmers who are inifinitely more talented/driven/intelligent/educated than myself were able to simply move here and seek employment with no immigration restraints, I know that I would be out of a job instantly. Couldn't you say the same thing about other professions?

lr4444lr 9y ago

Ask the other side of the equation: why don't their countries have well-heeled tech companies attracting capital and ideas with the same investment opportunity so that they can live a comparable lifestyle to you where they come from?

wfo 9y ago

Instead of worrying about potential foreigners competing for your job, you should wonder why there are so few jobs out there: it's because the rich are hoarding them. The money for them, that is. There is so much work to be done, plenty of work for you and your Indian and Chinese friends to all have well-paying jobs. The reason we all don't have them is that we are just extremely bad at allocating resources: we choose the most inefficient method, market capitalism. We, essentially at random, select a tiny group of elite wealth hoarders who centrally plan and distribute nearly all of the world's wealth without any concern for social good or welfare or anything other than their continued accumulation of wealth and power. Then we beg them to give us jobs, to give us their table scraps and we fight each other for them, terrified at any moment our benefactors might take away our livelihood instead of rolling up our sleeves and getting to work.

conanbatt 9y ago
> it's because the rich are hoarding them The enemy are not foreigners man, the enemy are the rich!
skybrian 9y ago
I completely agree that the main problem is lack of spending money in the hands of people who actually need it. There's plenty of work to be done, if only the people who need it had money to pay for it. However, capitalism (in the form of Walmart and its suppliers, for example) does seem quite efficient at supplying material things to poor people. More spending power in the right places would go pretty far to fix the problem, along with boosting the economy.
- wfo 9y ago
  Walmart's profit primarily comes from abuse of monopoly (which is not efficiency) and from government subsidies (they are the biggest welfare recipients in the world, since their workers require government welfare to survive while working so much for so little). Their profits come from economic coercion and exploiting public subsidies, not efficiency. Walmart's primary competitive innovation historically was union busting.
- 9y ago

skybrian 9y ago

It seems like there should be more arbitrage? Google at least has engineering offices all over the world. If immigration barriers were the main issue, it seems like more companies should be doing the same.

jacobwilliamroy 9y ago

>Another possibility is that U.S. immigration laws act as a protectionist barrier to prop up programmer compensation. It seems impossible for this to last (why shouldn’t there by really valuable non-U.S. companies), but it does appear to be somewhat true for now. I find this quote confusing. Historically, the poaching of highly-skilled foreigners has been an important step in developing mere import substitutions into products which can be competitive on a global scale. The Tudor government (Henry VII-Elizabeth I) kicked off its finished-wool-import-substitution program by poaching skilled weavers and machinists from the low countries (e.g. Flanders, Holland, France). Then, as the export of finished wool goods grew, so did restrictions on the exportation of raw materials and the importation of finished wool. Nearly 100 years later, England had the ability to drive European countries to famine by simply banning the export of raw wool.[0] In the early 18th century, France started poaching British watchmakers, weavers and metalworkers; Britain responded by outlawing the emigration of skilled workers in 1719.[1] With that context, I find it odd to hear that U.S. immigration policy has started to work in opposition to the what I believe is the largest benefit of immigration. What incentive is there to keep highly skilled workers, along with their advanced knowledge, out of the U.S.? [0] - Chang, Ha-Joon. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2008. Print. pg. 40-42 [1] - Chang, Ha-Joon. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2008. Print. pg. 129

commandlinefan 9y ago

> U.S. immigration laws act as a protectionist barrier to prop up programmer compensation It's almost impossible to immigrate to England (much harder than the US), yet programmers in SF are far better compensated than those in London.

lmm 9y ago
> It's almost impossible to immigrate to England (much harder than the US), yet programmers in SF are far better compensated than those in London. Immigration per se may be hard, but working is much easier than the US; I know several Romanians working as programmers in London.
- Symbiote 9y ago
  Immigrating to the UK from Romania (or the rest of the EU) is extremely easy. 1) Move there. You can do this even without a job. 2) Book an appointment with the Job Centre (usually used by people seeking work), where you must show your passport. (Start work if you like. Your employer may ask to see your passport, if you don't yet have the tax number.) 3) Tax number arrives a week or a few later; tell employer. The process is actually the same for British citizens without a tax number, e.g. a child born abroad who moves "home" to the UK.

eric_b 9y ago

I don't understand the self-loathing that is so popular these days. Somehow we've convinced a generation of perfectly decent human beings that they are "exploiting" the weak and that their "privilege" is oppressing the rest of the world, just by going about their business. You're a programmer. Maybe you're decent, maybe you're not. It is VERY unlikely that the "millions and millions" of "infinitely more talented" Eastern European/Indian/Chinese programmers you mention actually exist. And even if they did, there are many societal and economic reasons besides "US Immigration Laws" that would prevent them from coming here and taking your job for an order of magnitude less money.

s73v3r_ 9y ago

I don't completely disagree with you, but software development as a job is not purely based on how talented of a coder you are. There are many, many other aspects to the job that really have nothing to do with computers/computer science. Don't discount your other abilities that much.