6 ms·

As someone who has been working as a software developer for five years since graduating, the claims made by this article are completely contrary to my personal

by skwirl 14y ago

As someone who has been working as a software developer for five years since graduating, the claims made by this article are completely contrary to my personal experience. Finding good developers is hard. We spend months trying to hire for positions, sometimes interviewing dozens of people, before we find someone. And we pay well, use modern technologies, have a great group of existing developers, and don't expect anyone to work more than 40 hours a week. If you are a GOOD developer, the opportunities for you are endless. And the bar for being a "good" developer is NOT very high relative to the range of abilities found among all software developers. Even horribly incompetent developers do not seem to have much trouble finding work (they do have trouble finding work at this company... usually). I think the reason why roughly one third of "computer and information science" graduates aren't working in their field is because they themselves chose not to work in this field. The work isn't for everyone. I know quite a few people who majored in CS, were able to grind through it to get their degree, but can't stand the thought of doing this for a career. Their motivations for going into the field out of high school vary, and many are misguided, but how can you really hold a 17 year old to making a 40 year life decision? We need more good developers. If we were allowed to hire more international developers, I can tell you we would not hire one crap developer "because they are cheap." A crap developer does not just do less quality work than a good developer, they do NEGATIVE work that costs the company more than the salary difference between them and a good developer. From a self concerned strategic standpoint, the U.S. should use the opportunity of immigration reform to steal good developers from other countries. We are a country of immigrants, and immigration will always be important to us. Let's use it to capture the best and brightest from the rest of the world. That is how we stay on top.

NkVczPkybiXICG 14y ago
If you pay well enough, finding good developers isn't that hard. Many "good" programmers I know would very likely jump ship at their current job for 600k/year. You've just got to find a better middle ground.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
FD3SA 14y ago
The above commenter has nailed it: "If you pay well enough, finding good developers isn't that hard." The incentives here are incredibly obvious to spot. Facebook/Google can either pay a star developer 600k/yr for the duration of his stay, or bring a foreign indentured developer and train him for 60k/yr. The choice here may not be obvious, but the reality is that both of these strategies are employed. Most top tech companies have executives which are paid 10 to 100x the base developer salary, because they manage a hive of indentured foreign workers who can do the menial dev work. These executives essentially become "Architects". This is the best case scenario, in the worst case, the architects are also trained or outsourced. The economics of this situation are very simple to understand, and explain why most companies employ the dual strategy to significantly reduce their costs. Green card holders have the option of negotiating for more compensation as they gain experience, but foreign workers without status do not have this option. As such, they are a far better bargain over the long run, assuming both are of equal ability as fresh new grads.
mjmahone17 14y ago
The issue with the H1-B is that those workers are then close to trapped in a specific company at specific terms. It would almost certainly be better to allow employers to sponsor immigrants for a green card, or a 6-year residency card or something of that ilk, because then the employee can leave a bad working environment/move to where they are better suited. Additionally, it is problematic that the government is encouraging developers to come and put people out of work. Fundamentally, that's what tech jobs are supposed to do: by making things more efficient, you have fewer people making more money. Funnily enough, immigration into the US has traditionally been to fill lower-class working roles. The slave trade was the first and most obvious example of this, but we also have Chinese, Irish and southern European immigrants in the 19th century. If immigration is what made our country an economic powerhouse (and at the very least, the slave trade was one of the primary contributors to our capitalist development), then we should be encouraging all immigrants, not just those who can be immediately identified as "strategically important."
- VLM 14y ago
  "and at the very least, the slave trade was one of the primary contributors to our capitalist development" You're going to get the amateur historians all wound up with talk like that. A better explanation was the Whitney cotton gin enabled mechanized processing about a century before the Rust mechanized harvester was invented, so you had explosive growth in a couple strategies for providing human cotton pickers ranging from ownership pre civil war to indentured servitude / peasanthood after the civil war. The gin wasn't enough to kick industrialization into high gear, although I'm sure it helped a tiny irrelevant bit. By the time they (the people) were made obsolete by the Rust Harvester, and shipped up north to the factories, we already had the worlds biggest factories to ship them to... so much for that argument. The south has never amounted to anything from an industrial standpoint until very recently and even that's a bit of a stretch. Or if you were alluding to the earlier triangle of unhappiness (whatever it was called, triangle of something miserable anyway) then we had pretty much maxed out molasses/rum/human transportation well before the industrial revolution. The limiter was like how much land can you cultivate in the Caribbean and how many slaves can you ship there, they didn't have industrialization in the new england rum distillation industry as a limiter to growth at that time so there was no pressure for improvement. Distillation is not much of a motivator for industrialization anyway. Every couple years I alternate between brewing/distilling doesn't get enough credit for industrialization and thinking they already get too much credit. A pretty good argument overall, other than getting the relevance of slaves in capitalism all wrong.
VLM 14y ago
If your anecdote contradicts statistics about a very large group, do you think your location and company are a typical representation of the entire country? Based on anecdotal report you probably either work in NYC in finance or Bay Area in tech and therefore you'd probably find it easier to import a "foreigner" from Ohio rather than the other side of the world. There is nothing wrong with perhaps 5% of a populating having opportunities (err, uh, kinda), as long as that is not being used to promote policy for the 95% of the population who don't have similar opportunities.
potatolicious 14y ago
This article makes the fundamental mistake almost all other articles of its topic do: it assumes that software development is a monolithic entity, when it is instead a collection of extremely dissimilar camps. Part of this is the fault of government - in almost all statistics the $200K systems architect at Google is rolled into the same column as the $45K coder pounding out VB6 apps for the company intranet. This article is even worse than most, since it lacks any real data on programmers, and instead uses data for all STEM fields. This is a little like measuring the average height of people in Texas using data from all over the world. It's just lazy. The more accurate title is: "top level developers in extreme shortage, mid level developers less so, USA swimming with underemployed low level developers" And this reflects the reality on the ground. You have companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, et al, who are desperately trying to bring in foreign labor at the $150-200K levels (and beyond, I'm starting to see comp packages towards $300K), showering them with lavish perks that the rest of the tech industry hasn't even heard of, much less the rest of America. Then you have the flip side, with companies like Infosys and WiPro bringing in cheapo labor at $50K a pop and renting them out at exorbitant rates, using the terms of the H-1B to hamper and exploit their employees knowing they have little recourse. You also have domestic low-skill IT workers who, despite exploding demand, have not seen their wages rise significantly. Anyone who talks about tech immigration in the US who doesn't acknowledge these two sides is either woefully uninformed or has a vested agenda. The reality is that we need to expand immigration in the former category and hit the brakes on the latter, but this also doesn't fit nicely into the "immigration is purely a means for exploitation" narrative that some people are trying to spin. Schools are very good at producing crappy programmers, and not very good at producing top-notch programmers. This is not a surprise, nor is it unique to America. The "look at all of these unemployed STEM graduates" argument is useless without also looking at whether or not said STEM graduates actually qualify for the jobs they seek. Simply shoving a shiny, rolled-up piece of paper at someone doesn't automatically make them competent.
- VLM 14y ago
  "The more accurate title is: "top level developers in extreme shortage," Vs the article "134,780 H1-B visas that were approved in 2012." A good analogy to the debate is we're talking about a shortage of, and reasonable desire to import any legendary epic level multi-platinum award winning rock star, but in actual practice we're importing anyone who's ever touched a guitar in order to keep domestic wages low by pushing unemployment higher than it should be. They are two separate issues.
stevvooe 14y ago
Agreed that the articles reasoning is weak surrounding the "takin' o'r jerbs!" arguments; the cost of a lousy developer is insurmountable. However, the comparison with H-1B and indentured servitude is what is all to accurate in my personal experience. It's stomach churning to watch an individual, often a friend, be squeezed into an uncomfortable situation by an employer because of the conditions of their visa. H-1B visa's tip too much of the balance in employer/employee negotiations to the employer's favor.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
tbrownaw 14y ago
I know quite a few people who majored in CS, were able to grind through it to get their degree, but can't stand the thought of doing this for a career. Their motivations for going into the field out of high school vary, and many are misguided, but how can you really hold a 17 year old to making a 40 year life decision? 17 is just a year away from being able to get married or join the army. Those seem like a bit bigger deal, especially since you can switch majors before graduating (for example my first roommate, who switched from CS to... something to do with business I think).
Joe_Knapp 14y ago
What is a good developer? What is your definition? How do you determine that in the hiring process?

by skwirl 14y ago

NkVczPkybiXICG 14y ago

If you pay well enough, finding good developers isn't that hard. Many "good" programmers I know would very likely jump ship at their current job for 600k/year. You've just got to find a better middle ground.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

FD3SA 14y ago

The above commenter has nailed it: "If you pay well enough, finding good developers isn't that hard." The incentives here are incredibly obvious to spot. Facebook/Google can either pay a star developer 600k/yr for the duration of his stay, or bring a foreign indentured developer and train him for 60k/yr. The choice here may not be obvious, but the reality is that both of these strategies are employed. Most top tech companies have executives which are paid 10 to 100x the base developer salary, because they manage a hive of indentured foreign workers who can do the menial dev work. These executives essentially become "Architects". This is the best case scenario, in the worst case, the architects are also trained or outsourced. The economics of this situation are very simple to understand, and explain why most companies employ the dual strategy to significantly reduce their costs. Green card holders have the option of negotiating for more compensation as they gain experience, but foreign workers without status do not have this option. As such, they are a far better bargain over the long run, assuming both are of equal ability as fresh new grads.

mjmahone17 14y ago

The issue with the H1-B is that those workers are then close to trapped in a specific company at specific terms. It would almost certainly be better to allow employers to sponsor immigrants for a green card, or a 6-year residency card or something of that ilk, because then the employee can leave a bad working environment/move to where they are better suited. Additionally, it is problematic that the government is encouraging developers to come and put people out of work. Fundamentally, that's what tech jobs are supposed to do: by making things more efficient, you have fewer people making more money. Funnily enough, immigration into the US has traditionally been to fill lower-class working roles. The slave trade was the first and most obvious example of this, but we also have Chinese, Irish and southern European immigrants in the 19th century. If immigration is what made our country an economic powerhouse (and at the very least, the slave trade was one of the primary contributors to our capitalist development), then we should be encouraging all immigrants, not just those who can be immediately identified as "strategically important."

VLM 14y ago
"and at the very least, the slave trade was one of the primary contributors to our capitalist development" You're going to get the amateur historians all wound up with talk like that. A better explanation was the Whitney cotton gin enabled mechanized processing about a century before the Rust mechanized harvester was invented, so you had explosive growth in a couple strategies for providing human cotton pickers ranging from ownership pre civil war to indentured servitude / peasanthood after the civil war. The gin wasn't enough to kick industrialization into high gear, although I'm sure it helped a tiny irrelevant bit. By the time they (the people) were made obsolete by the Rust Harvester, and shipped up north to the factories, we already had the worlds biggest factories to ship them to... so much for that argument. The south has never amounted to anything from an industrial standpoint until very recently and even that's a bit of a stretch. Or if you were alluding to the earlier triangle of unhappiness (whatever it was called, triangle of something miserable anyway) then we had pretty much maxed out molasses/rum/human transportation well before the industrial revolution. The limiter was like how much land can you cultivate in the Caribbean and how many slaves can you ship there, they didn't have industrialization in the new england rum distillation industry as a limiter to growth at that time so there was no pressure for improvement. Distillation is not much of a motivator for industrialization anyway. Every couple years I alternate between brewing/distilling doesn't get enough credit for industrialization and thinking they already get too much credit. A pretty good argument overall, other than getting the relevance of slaves in capitalism all wrong.

VLM 14y ago

If your anecdote contradicts statistics about a very large group, do you think your location and company are a typical representation of the entire country? Based on anecdotal report you probably either work in NYC in finance or Bay Area in tech and therefore you'd probably find it easier to import a "foreigner" from Ohio rather than the other side of the world. There is nothing wrong with perhaps 5% of a populating having opportunities (err, uh, kinda), as long as that is not being used to promote policy for the 95% of the population who don't have similar opportunities.

potatolicious 14y ago

This article makes the fundamental mistake almost all other articles of its topic do: it assumes that software development is a monolithic entity, when it is instead a collection of extremely dissimilar camps. Part of this is the fault of government - in almost all statistics the $200K systems architect at Google is rolled into the same column as the $45K coder pounding out VB6 apps for the company intranet. This article is even worse than most, since it lacks any real data on programmers, and instead uses data for all STEM fields. This is a little like measuring the average height of people in Texas using data from all over the world. It's just lazy. The more accurate title is: "top level developers in extreme shortage, mid level developers less so, USA swimming with underemployed low level developers" And this reflects the reality on the ground. You have companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, et al, who are desperately trying to bring in foreign labor at the $150-200K levels (and beyond, I'm starting to see comp packages towards $300K), showering them with lavish perks that the rest of the tech industry hasn't even heard of, much less the rest of America. Then you have the flip side, with companies like Infosys and WiPro bringing in cheapo labor at $50K a pop and renting them out at exorbitant rates, using the terms of the H-1B to hamper and exploit their employees knowing they have little recourse. You also have domestic low-skill IT workers who, despite exploding demand, have not seen their wages rise significantly. Anyone who talks about tech immigration in the US who doesn't acknowledge these two sides is either woefully uninformed or has a vested agenda. The reality is that we need to expand immigration in the former category and hit the brakes on the latter, but this also doesn't fit nicely into the "immigration is purely a means for exploitation" narrative that some people are trying to spin. Schools are very good at producing crappy programmers, and not very good at producing top-notch programmers. This is not a surprise, nor is it unique to America. The "look at all of these unemployed STEM graduates" argument is useless without also looking at whether or not said STEM graduates actually qualify for the jobs they seek. Simply shoving a shiny, rolled-up piece of paper at someone doesn't automatically make them competent.

VLM 14y ago
"The more accurate title is: "top level developers in extreme shortage," Vs the article "134,780 H1-B visas that were approved in 2012." A good analogy to the debate is we're talking about a shortage of, and reasonable desire to import any legendary epic level multi-platinum award winning rock star, but in actual practice we're importing anyone who's ever touched a guitar in order to keep domestic wages low by pushing unemployment higher than it should be. They are two separate issues.

stevvooe 14y ago

Agreed that the articles reasoning is weak surrounding the "takin' o'r jerbs!" arguments; the cost of a lousy developer is insurmountable. However, the comparison with H-1B and indentured servitude is what is all to accurate in my personal experience. It's stomach churning to watch an individual, often a friend, be squeezed into an uncomfortable situation by an employer because of the conditions of their visa. H-1B visa's tip too much of the balance in employer/employee negotiations to the employer's favor.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

tbrownaw 14y ago

I know quite a few people who majored in CS, were able to grind through it to get their degree, but can't stand the thought of doing this for a career. Their motivations for going into the field out of high school vary, and many are misguided, but how can you really hold a 17 year old to making a 40 year life decision? 17 is just a year away from being able to get married or join the army. Those seem like a bit bigger deal, especially since you can switch majors before graduating (for example my first roommate, who switched from CS to... something to do with business I think).

Joe_Knapp 14y ago

What is a good developer? What is your definition? How do you determine that in the hiring process?