4 ms·

You should’ve just checked my profile. Yes, we run at the complexity of Google [0]. We do almost exactly the same thing with a bit different use case. There ar

• Amezarak 7y ago
  I'm sorry, and I don't mean this in a hateful way, but what you're saying is that you run at a level of complexity that requires top engineering talent you can't afford (since it would require FAANG levels of compensation) in the location you set up in, so you hire H1Bs. So yes, your business would not exist in a country with sane immigration visa laws and I believe the ethical thing to do would be to close. That doesn't mean your business might not be a great idea or be doing something good for the world. We could create a lot of great businesses if we could import infinite labor. There are other things you can ethically try besides closing. Are you sure you really need top engineering talent? I read your links and I'm not really convinced that this is true. It's certainly not an easy problem, but it doesn't seem like something that, say, a team of the top 50% of comp-sci graduates who can actually program couldn't solve. It also seems hard to understand how you're hiring the best talent out there, but remote is too hard - I agree there are problems with remote, but experienced, top talent employees are usually the ones that are going to do great. Even aside from that, are LA and Boulder the best places to have offices? There are literally millions of skilled programmers in the US, and most of them have no interest in moving to California or Colorado.
  • doh 7y ago
    > I believe the ethical thing to do would be to close. I don't think I have words. Ethical thing would be to close? Not hire immigrants, but close. Fantastic. > There are literally millions of skilled programmers in the US, and most of them have no interest in moving to California or Colorado. Are they? You make bombastic statements but the reality is, that there are not that many people anywhere. There is reason why EVERYONE is having hard time hiring. > a team of the top 50% of comp-sci graduates who can actually program couldn't solve Programing != building for scale. This is only something experience can teach, but was majority of developers never touched any meaningful scale.
    • Amezarak 7y ago
      > Are they? You make bombastic statements but the reality is, that there are not that many people anywhere. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks this. I did not make those numbers up. We can certainly agree that not everyone with a degree or experience is a good hire, but good talent is not one in a hundred. "Everyone" is not having a hard time hiring. There is a relatively decent labor market, but employers are having trouble for a variety of reasons that mostly has nothing to do with a lack of sufficient talent. Some factors: they have unreasonable requirements , such as years of experience in specific technologies; they can't or won't pay a competitive salary; they locate in high CoL cities where paying a competitive salary is even harder; they filter out people with bad hiring and interviewing processes; they demand excessive dedication (50+ hour weeks, for example); they don't post jobs where enough people are looking. [EDIT: Another good one that came up mind: the hiring process takes too long. One of the companies I work with now takes an average of six weeks simply to respond to a candidate!! I have had several people I know through my network put in and they all got jobs elsewhere before they were even contacted! This same company cannot understand why they have such trouble finding people - they also pay well below market rates.] I have been on the interviewer side of the table and made hiring decisions. I can tell you where I live, we don't really have problems. At my previous company, we didn't even pay well and got tons of great talent! (This did mean we had some high turnover, but there were always more.) > Programing != building for scale. This is only something experience can teach, but was majority of developers never touched any meaningful scale. I don't mean to demean what you do and again, you obviously know more about your product than I do, but no, scale is really not that hard, can be taught pretty readily, and the hardest problems of scaling are already solved by your cloud platform, which is half if not more of their value proposition in the first place. There are a lot of people operating at massive scales even without cloud services. It isn't that unusual. I sincerely think you should take a very close look about what your jobs really require and what most software engineers are actually capable of doing. I've no doubt it requires skill and experience. I just don't think it requires as much as you think it does.
      • doh 7y ago
        > We can certainly agree that not everyone with a degree or experience is a good hire, but good talent is not one in a hundred. It also not 1 of 2. And that's quite the gist of it. We get plenty of interest, but people fall off quickly through the hiring process. We don't care what their prior experiences are. We don't demand 50+ hour work week (in fact, we actively discourage people to work past that including commute). Still takes time to find people that can learn to build for scale. > I don't mean to demean what you do and again, you obviously know more about your product than I do, but no, scale is really not that hard, can be taught pretty readily, and the hardest problems of scaling are already solved by your cloud platform, which is half if not more of their value proposition in the first place. There are a lot of people operating at massive scales even without cloud services. It isn't that unusual. They do take a huge load off the plate. That doesn't mean you can easily build for scale. There are plenty of companies that can put a few millions of rows in table and serve hundreds of concurrent users. Very few can do that in orders of magnitude higher. That's where we operate. > I sincerely think you should take a very close look about what your jobs really require and what most software engineers are actually capable of doing. I've no doubt it requires skill and experience. I just don't think it requires as much as you think it does This is hard to argue. I'm doing this for 5.5 years now, so would guess that I know what we need at this point.
  • dang 7y ago
    > I believe the ethical thing to do would be to close That is over the top and provocative to the point of trolling. Please don't be this sort of internet warrior on HN. People have a right to discuss their work here without being harangued. First you told this user that their business is unethical and should be closed, and then downthread you told them "scale is really not that hard", i.e. in addition to having superior morals you know the mechanics of their work better than they do. That is quite a patronizing double-whammy. It doesn't help to repeat "I don't mean to demean you" in comments that are in fact demeaning. Comments like these disincentivize anyone from sharing details of what they do on HN, because who wants to be treated like that? If people stop sharing, that will make HN quite a bit worse. Therefore please don't post like this to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • scarface74 7y ago
    So yes, your business would not exist in a country with sane immigration visa laws and I believe the ethical thing to do would be to close. Who does it benefit if his company does not exist? How does it benefit the US economy if he either hires a remote developer from another country - where all the money stays overseas - or if, hypothetically, he moved his entire company to Canada?