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IMO if you are truly, actually, really serious about hiring the best of the best, you'll hire them wherever they live. Moving to the USA shouldn't be required o

IMO if you are truly, actually, really serious about hiring the best of the best, you'll hire them wherever they live. Moving to the USA shouldn't be required or necessary, particularly in software development. This is why the Internet was invented. Otherwise you're just hiring "the best people we could convince to move to {location} for {competitive salary}".

rglullis 14y ago
Orthogonal problems. In my case, they wouldn't need to convince me to move. They just need to help me find a legal way to stay. Yes, they could just as well try to have people working remotely, but then it's another set of arguments that need to be taken. Joel never wrote about how working remotely is "just as good" as working in a office environment geared towards developers - quite the opposite. So I could understand why FogCreek/SE would require people to work locally, but I still don't get why they can't put some effort to sponsor visas.
- codinghorror 14y ago
  I believe the visa issue is thorny, not just because of the money, but because of the logistics and lawyering and so forth. It'd be easier for everyone involved to just acknowledge, like GitHub does, that remote devs can be extremely kick ass. To be clear, Stack Exchange and Fog Creek are different animals in this area. But Joel is, at his heart, an "everyone must sit down to lunch at the same table or the entire company is doomed" kind of guy. Me, not so much.
  - rglullis 14y ago
    The logistics and lawyering and so forth is something that you will have to deal once. After that, the process is entirely reproducible. In fact, a company the size of FogCreek or SE should be able to just hire one immigration lawyer and get this done with. In fees to the government, a H1B application costs less than $1k (~$2.5k if you get the "expedited" process to bring the response time from USCIS from 3 months to 15 days), so the $5-10k range should actually include more than enough hours from a half-decent office that can deal with getting the paperwork and filling all the requirements from the government. The one thing that they could have used as an excuse not to do it: the fact that all the Googles and Microsofts around take all the quota of H1B applications and they are pushed out of it. That would've been valid until 2008, but since 2009 the quota hasn't been filled.

rglullis 14y ago

Orthogonal problems. In my case, they wouldn't need to convince me to move. They just need to help me find a legal way to stay. Yes, they could just as well try to have people working remotely, but then it's another set of arguments that need to be taken. Joel never wrote about how working remotely is "just as good" as working in a office environment geared towards developers - quite the opposite. So I could understand why FogCreek/SE would require people to work locally, but I still don't get why they can't put some effort to sponsor visas.

codinghorror 14y ago
I believe the visa issue is thorny, not just because of the money, but because of the logistics and lawyering and so forth. It'd be easier for everyone involved to just acknowledge, like GitHub does, that remote devs can be extremely kick ass. To be clear, Stack Exchange and Fog Creek are different animals in this area. But Joel is, at his heart, an "everyone must sit down to lunch at the same table or the entire company is doomed" kind of guy. Me, not so much.
- rglullis 14y ago
  The logistics and lawyering and so forth is something that you will have to deal once. After that, the process is entirely reproducible. In fact, a company the size of FogCreek or SE should be able to just hire one immigration lawyer and get this done with. In fees to the government, a H1B application costs less than $1k (~$2.5k if you get the "expedited" process to bring the response time from USCIS from 3 months to 15 days), so the $5-10k range should actually include more than enough hours from a half-decent office that can deal with getting the paperwork and filling all the requirements from the government. The one thing that they could have used as an excuse not to do it: the fact that all the Googles and Microsofts around take all the quota of H1B applications and they are pushed out of it. That would've been valid until 2008, but since 2009 the quota hasn't been filled.