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Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

• thesz 12y ago
  1) By training you will uncover latent great programmers. 2) By training you will raise overall education level, making life easier and more pleasant for everyone in country (any country, not only US). Either I getting old or PG getting sloppy. His latest essays do not stand a bit of critique.
• zerooneinfinity 12y ago
  That or they can pay foreign programmers a lot less and drive the average rate down for everyone.
  • andrewliebchen 12y ago
    Or pay them the same as American workers and allow that money have an amazing effect on the world. Or we can continue only hiring Americans. Those $100 hoodies aren't going to buy themselves.
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    • amerliore 12y ago
      So the laws of supply and demand don't apply to labor markets? Increasing the supply lowers the price. Are you disputing this?
• neaanopri 12y ago
  We shouldn't restrict expansions to digital talent.
• YuriNiyazov 12y ago
  I am surprised by this. It would be so much more efficient to concentrate on building technology that makes working with people around the world as seamless as working with them in the same office.
  • spyspy 12y ago
    All the technology in the world won't prevent the person on the other side of the world from being asleep when I need to talk to them.
    • YuriNiyazov 12y ago
      Oh please. When the server is on fire at 3am, PagerDuty wakes California employees with the same success rate. Surely you can put in your employment agreement that the reason you are paying American wages to someone in a much cheaper location is because they can be woken up at any time. The finance industry has operated this way for decades.
      • delive 12y ago
        I don't think waking someone up every night at 3am for a question/idea is 'seamless' or productive at all. Delayed email for when they wake up is what we generally deal with, but it definitely creates friction when working across large time zones.
        • YuriNiyazov 12y ago
          Every night is certainly excessive, but I don't have brilliant unplanned conversations with my teammates every day either.
        • jschwartzi 12y ago
          The possibility for misunderstanding is much greater too. You and your colleague might speak perfect English, but you may still have trouble conveying to them exactly what the problem is with the vibrating mirror assembly is that's causing it to wobble without just showing them. That's difficult to do over email, and a conversation of that nature can take weeks, while if you're in the same office it might take hours.
          • YuriNiyazov 12y ago
            I can see how the situation you are describing works in theory, but the example you are giving is weak. Every device I own has a video camera; I am sure yours do too.
• kohanz 12y ago
  There exists no practical, reliable method to identify the "great" programmers from the rest (other than by employing them or working with them over a significant amount of time). Many of them interview poorly. If you could actually identify these people, you'd have a billion dollar idea. So that implies that in order to grant entry to the "great" programmers, the door needs to be wide open to everyone. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it doesn't appear to be addressed by PG.
  • jleyank 12y ago
    FWIW, truly exceptional programmers can always be hired under things like the O-1 visa (unless tech isn't included in "sciences" or "business"). I assume that they mean people like Linus or Bill Joy when they mean "great programmers", not somebody who can sling Javascript 20 hours a day... Or, are all the companies looking for these rockstars looking to help them immigrate to the US, rather than spend a few years solving problems? Cuz I think they're not...
  • mbesto 12y ago
    I bring up this point everytime the debate comes up. The talent war is real. The immigration problem is real. But I have yet to see anyone (myself included) present a valid solution.
  • bengali3 12y ago
    agreed, imagine how many great programmers could be made instead of bought & traded?
  • zodiac 12y ago
    You could, for example, grant entry to programmers whose sponsors would be willing to pay very high salaries for them. Sure, you end up with false negatives (there are some great programmers who for some reason wouldn't be able to command those salaries), but hopefully it's not high enough to matter. Eg: 5% of great developers are in the US and 95% are outside. Assuming we have a false negative rate of 50% (a great programmer has a 50% chance of not being recognized as one), the policy would potentially let 47.5% of great developers in, which would potentially increase the number of great developers in the US by about 10x. The actual increase will be lower because not all of them will want to work in the US.
• andyl 12y ago
  "American technology companies want the government to make immigration easier because they say they can't find enough programmers in the US." Clarification: can't find enough American programmers willing to work for low foreign wages.
  • gaius 12y ago
    And, ageism.
    • michaelvkpdx 12y ago
      This is so screamingly correct. Let's go see the startups hire some old COBOL (or now, VB) programmers and train them on the new stacks, before we listen to anymore of this "there's not enough programmers in the USA" garbage.
      • wallflower 12y ago
        I used to be shocked at the 9-to-5 programmers. Those who code during the day and go home and (egads!) do not code on side projects. The day of the company Halloween party was always the most jarring. All these 9-to-5 programmers would bring in their kids for the parade. For one afternoon, young, naive me saw that the true meaning of life is your impact on the world. These kids were the world for their parents. Coming back to retraining, I think some of us in the bubble lose fact of how much dedication is involved to successfully learn something new and become productive. Retraining is hard and, more importantly, not everyone wants to willingly do it.
        • gaius 12y ago
          Someone whose motivation is looking after their family will do anything to do so. Even JavaScript.
          • winestock 12y ago
            I will quote you on this. I don't care if you mind; it's just so good.
• Terr_ 12y ago
  > The only explanation is that they're telling the truth: there are just not enough great programmers to go around. Hardly the only explanation. First, the "career fakers" are unlikely to be seeking international relocation, which means that imperfect interviewing/hiring systems don't exhibit their latent flaws as much. Second, "post-purchase rationalization" becomes a factor: "I went through this effort in the past, it must have been worth bit." Third, how much more time is spent vetting a single international hire, versus the same attention to a local candidate? If the outcome is better, how much of that is due to a deeper engagement by the company?
• xiaoma 12y ago
  >The US has less than 5% of the world's population. Which means if the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly distributed, 95% of great programmers are born outside the US. This assumption is repeated throughout the essay, but I'm not particularly convinced it's true. Why would the qualities be evenly distributed between first world countries such as the US where programming is respected and well paid vs failed states like Nigeria or the war-torn Congo?
  • andrewliebchen 12y ago
    I guess he thinks your born with the qualities of great programming. So, the meritocracy really can't exist then?
  • rjberry 12y ago
    It's a nature vs nurture argument. I think Paul believes certain programmers have some innate quality that means they're magnitudes better than others. As it's innate it's not related to culture. As in you could give certain people as many opportunities and as much education as you like but they will only ever achieve mediocrity.
  • donall 12y ago
    Well, he does say "if"... I think PG's point is that some people are naturally great, regardless of their environment. So, yes, Congo or Nigeria or whatever have a bunch of guys who might have been great programmers if given the opportunity. But in less extreme cases, i.e. most of the world, those naturally gifted folks find their way into a compsci program or start hacking on an old machine and teach themselves or whatever. So even if only half of the 95% of people born with great aptitude are found in places with modern amenities and good education systems, that's still 9x more than here in the US.
    • SwellJoe 12y ago
      "So even if only half of the 95% of people born with great aptitude are found in places with modern amenities and good education systems, that's still 9x more than here in the US." Half is extremely optimistic. China and India contain a significant portion of the world's population, and there are significant populations in those nations that have never owned a computer. Longterm, it is likely that many of these nations will produce significantly more good people in STEM fields, since the US education system is almost laughably bad at teaching STEM and at convincing students that STEM is worth learning. If that trend of US students going into arts and humanities more than STEM fields, particularly among women and minorities, we're unlikely to see an improvement in this situation. I'm anti-border, and I think anyone should be able to work anywhere they want. But, I think the message should have two prongs: 1. Importing talent is mandatory and has no downside for Americans (except for Americans that don't like brown people) or the American economy. 2. Educating kids in STEM fields has to improve and kids, particularly girls and people of color, need better guidance about entering these fields. Both issues are pretty urgent, I think.
• cma 12y ago
  > And since good people like good colleagues, that means the best programmers could collect in just a few hubs. Maybe mostly in one hub. Owner of prestige hub wants it to be more prestigous, and wants your policy support to make it happen. No where is this spelled out as a conflict of interest. Ycombinator seems similar in many ways to the Law Firm partner/prestige system, or the university prestige system, or the scientific publisher prestige system.
  • gaius 12y ago
    Ask any VC, would you be willing to make a deal that grows the wider economy, but has a 99% chance of impoverishing you personally? Then ask why that is the deal he offers everyone else, and tries to get written into law...
• austenallred 12y ago
  I really want to believe this, but I'm not sure that I do. Of course the tech companies want to hire people from overseas; being able to hire someone from India for half the cost but have them live in the US so there's some level of accountability/trust is a no-brainer. Huge new, cheap talent pool. But, if I'm an entry-level, US-based programmer, what I see are floods of cheap talent, some with questionable skills, coming over to compete for my job. On the surface it seems as simple as a conflict of interest between employees and the companies that employ them. Supply/demand. Dig a little deeper and the argument becomes that the top programmers we're bringing over are going to start great companies. That makes sense; part of the reason the United States is so powerful is selection bias: If we create an environment the hardest-working and smartest people in the world want to come to, the end result is a lot of great companies that create enough jobs for everyone. Elon Musk isn't starting Tesla or SpaceX in South Africa (where he's from). So we create an all-star selection of the human race in one country, make laws that are favorable to people coming/staying, and the economy explodes. What I'm not clear on is what the effect of opening the doors to programmers would be. Would truly great companies be started enough that the entire economy is shored up, or would it just dilute the talent pool to the extent that being a programmer isn't a "special" job you get paid $150,000/year for being decent at? The long-term, macro result of this would be interesting.
  • droopyEyelids 12y ago
    To me the most interesting way of framing this is in terms of the changes that'll happen to the owners of businesses. The question of the talent of the new employees is secondary when you realize they will have to move countries in order to be tied to a specific job on penalty of getting their visa revoked. So suddenly, you create an unlimited class of employees with no bargaining power, and can play them against your native employees. This would be bad enough, but H1B visa holders usually make 20% less than their equivalent American coworkers.
    • sampo 12y ago
      > tied to a specific job on penalty of getting their visa revoked. This is true if you hire from third world. I am from Northern Europe, and having a visa revoked and going back to my home country would not be a threat to me. I'd just happily move back home, and find a job there.
• raintrees 12y ago
  Recognizing other countries' education/qualification/certifications would assist, as well (once they are here). I have spoken with a few people directly that had to start over once living in the US, their previous efforts were discounted.
• dasil003 12y ago
  I think it's a bit disingenuous to not even mention cost in this article. Clearly a lot of companies are using H1-Bs to save money more than to find great programmers. Even ones that genuinely want exceptional programmers may not even have the capability to identify great programmers.
• wittgenstein 12y ago
  Another great essay by Paul Graham that spells out the idiotic state of the current US immigration system in a clear manner. It is fucking unbelievable that even in the comments here there are still people complaining about foreign programmers driving salaries down or taking jobs from US citizens. Paul Graham is right and any intelligent person can see this.
  • Iftheshoefits 12y ago
    People can disagree with PG (and you) and also be intelligent. For example, me. PG is partially wrong, objectively. About the only thing his essay has correct is that there exists intelligent, very good programmers outside the US. The collusion suit that big tech companies recently settled, the wage stagnation even in our industry, and a wide variety of other facts suggest that keeping wages low is in fact a very important goal to technology companies, and that they will do anything--including illegal collusion--to keep them low. If anything the notion that there just aren't enough qualified (well-qualified) workers in the US to fill tech positions is at best an extraordinary claim that PG's essay fails by a wide margin to substantiate.
• xiaoma 12y ago
  >So they claim it's because they want to drive down salaries. But if you talk to startups, you find practically every one over a certain size has gone through legal contortions to get programmers into the the US, where they then paid them the same as they'd have paid an American. Why would they go to extra trouble to get programmers for the same price? The only explanation is that they're telling the truth: there are just not enough great programmers to go around. And yet most start-ups pay programmers far less than they pay their lawyers.
  • oldspiceman 12y ago
    Which is interesting because there is such an oversupply of lawyers in the states.
    • UK-AL 12y ago
      Because wages are partly set by cultural expectations rather than pure supply demand.
  • ryoshu 12y ago
    The reason why tech companies will go through legal contortions is because they don't want to raise the salary floor. If a company can only find a great developer for $100k/yr in the US, but they can find a great developer for $50k/yr through H1B, it makes financial sense to lobby as long as the cost of lobbying is < $50k/yr. If the company is pg's example: ($100k - $50k) * 30 workers each year? Hell yeah I'm going to lobby for more foreign workers. It's not about finding great developers. It's about finding great developers at a lower price.
    • turar 12y ago
      What you described is illegal according to H-1B provisions.
  • cubano 12y ago
    Programmer's don't keep them out of jail if and when they do something that may or may not be illegal.
• wallflower 12y ago
  If you put all the engineers at Facebook, Apple, Google into a typically-sized college football stadium, they would barely fill it. The new digital economy is not inclusive for everyone, most everyone who does not produce technology is a spectator (e.g. walking down the street swiping their phone, sitting in a bar swiping their phone v. writing apps or infrastructure software). The reality is that the Apple/Google/Facebook level (and aspiring) companies want the H1B limit raised so that they can attract the best in the world. However, there are companies with profit-based motives. Infosys, Wipro et al. extensively abuse the H1B system and create a system of indentured servitude for, mostly, the non-Apples of the world. The companies that aren't shining stars - but like most other companies need software maintained and built to sustain their business. Not every talented non-US Facebook employee wants to live in their home country. In some cases, the home country has rampant inflation/unemployment/bad schools/crime. America is still very much the land of opportunity, despite its flaws. Consulting agencies almost always reach a point where they can't maintain quality and simultaneously pursue greater revenues (because they can't hire enough good people). What usually happens, sadly, is that the revenues take precedence and they start diluting the overall work quality. You still can't beat the power of face to face human interaction unless you build something like The Matrix - where every one inside it is a hologram.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
• itg 12y ago
  Read: We don't want to train workers or pay them a good salary. We expect them to know everything beforehand and be content with crappy wages, then wonder why the brightest kids are going into fields like medicine and high finance.
  • khyryk 12y ago
    And even then, most of those who are in fact "great programmers" would probably not get offers.
• strommen 12y ago
  Sure, sounds great. But out of all the people that would love to immigrate to the USA, how can we possibly distinguish the "great" programmers from the merely competent (or less)? Hiring is already an extremely difficult problem for the most sophisticated technology companies in the country. We can't possibly expect a government agency to do it well at all.
• iamwil 12y ago
  Why would the distribution of great programmers around the world assumed to be even? Is it because of widely accessible programming resources for cheap through the internet?
• cykho 12y ago
  I wonder what the all up cost of getting someone an H1B visa is currently? Is this an annoying bureaucratic hurtle or a real barrier to talent entering the US? My perception is that the cost is around $20k (lawyers/filing fees) + some uncertainty due to the lottery. Is that a barrier to a person that's worth paying $100k+?
  • OmarIsmail 12y ago
    The problem isn't the cost. Most tech companies (in SF/the Valley) at least will gladly pay the 10K in legal costs (amortized over 2-4 years, that's a small percentage of fully loaded cost). The problem is the cap. If you try to bring in a talented person then you're rolling the dice. 50% chance they get H1-B - oh and you can't apply until April 1st, and you don't find out for 2 weeks (if you expedite) or 3 months (if you don't). And if you DO get the visa then they're not allowed to start working until October 1st. So you have to take them through the entire process before April 1st - so realistically Jan/Feb/March, and then you won't actually be able to have them in house until October. Large companies can weather that kind of delay just fine, but a 5 person startup?
• volkadav 12y ago
  We already have visas specifically targeted at letting in exceptional talent: the O (temporary) and E (permanent) series. Of course, the tech industry lobbying is not generally speaking around those visas, but rather H1-B. So I don't think it is entirely correct to assert that industry wants more "genius visa" types, they want more journeymen (gender-neutral; the kind of staff that are competent but not exceptional, or else they would be here on an E-series). Why ever would they spend lobbying dollars unless there was an expectation that spending $X on Congress today will save them $Y (Y > X) in wages in the future? Don't get me wrong, I've greatly valued the talented non-US folks I've had on my teams over the years. But I'd rather we gave them an easy path to citizenship if they want to be here rather than giving more of them the opportunity to be borderline indentured servants. Then they could fully enjoy the benefits of the society they're contributing to, including labor flexibility and the ability to bargain for a fair market wage. I'm sure the free-market enthusiasts running large tech companies or venture capital firms love that idea.
  • seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    H1B does offer a path to citizenship, and I've never known an H1B not to at least get a greencard (some choose not to take the next citizenship step for good reasons). Contrast this to my Chinese working visa, which has no path to being a citizen (not that I would want that being a U.S. citizen).
  • mightybyte 12y ago
    > Why ever would they spend lobbying dollars unless there was an expectation that spending $X on Congress today will save them $Y (Y > X) in wages in the future? Because those X lobbying dollars could make it possible for them to get people that allow them to create things that are much more valuable than $X (after subtracting wages) that they wouldn't have been able to create otherwise.
  • bradleyjg 12y ago
    The problem with employment based 2nd and 3rd priority are the per country quotas, especially for people that count against the Indian quote. The EB2 quota is currently in 2005 for Indians. As for EB1 (alien of extraordinary ability), it isn't a terrible good fit for programmers. The rules require an alien to meet 3 of 10 categories, but many of them are either wholly inapplicable to the industry, or only cover a narrow subset of it.
• grandalf 12y ago
  If someone is smart and wants to work in the US there should be no barriers to doing so. I don't deserve any job or salary if someone else can do it better or cheaper. We are all human beings in the sense of our right to fair work and wage. Who wants to wake up in the morning and think "thank goodness some lawmaker is forcing someone smarter/better than me to live in poverty so I can have this cushy job"? PG is right that most programmers are not all that bright. This limits the state of the art in our industry far more than most people realize. [edit]: I can't believe this thread is getting hijacked by people who oppose PG's view on this and are downvoting comments in support of it!
  • bradleyjg 12y ago
    It is amazing to me how the same group of people can rail against rent seekers in a thread about uber or airbandb and then turn around in a thread on immigration and act like their own rent seeking is pure and good and right. I guess it is all a matter of whose ox is being gored.
    • grandalf 12y ago
      Exactly. What those people don't understand is how much this hampers the kind of ambition and projects that can get built. Unlike Musk's HyperLoop, the barrier for software is not materials and resources, it's simply minds. If you're working on a crappy, bloated codebase it's because some business person likely accurately assumes that a rewrite would be risky and slow (b/c of the supply and quality of labor).
      • Iftheshoefits 12y ago
        > Unlike Musk's HyperLoop, the barrier for software is not materials and resources, it's simply minds. If you're working on a crappy, bloated codebase it's because some business person likely accurately assumes that a rewrite would be risky and slow (b/c of the supply and quality of labor). < No, the business person knows it will cost money to rewrite and simply doesn't want to commit the resources. It almost certainly has nothing to do with the supply and quality of labor.
• tartle 12y ago
  "I asked the CEO of a startup with about 70 programmers how many more he'd hire if he could get all the great programmers he wanted. He said "We'd hire 30 tomorrow morning." Evidence-based policy proposal at its finest :)
  • gaius 12y ago
    ... And he could, if he simply out-bid his competitors.
    • OmarIsmail 12y ago
      Businesses die when they run out of money. Paying your programmers 3-500K/year is a sure fire way to run out of money really quickly. And while a great programmer is obviously worth it, most companies (at the early stage) have so many external factors that even a great programmer isn't enough, they need the time to iterate and find product market fit. You know the whole lean startup thing. So how do you circle that square?
      • gaius 12y ago
        This is true of any commodity - salaries for your talent, square feet of office space, kilowatts for your technology, you name it. It's called business. And it's not at all clear why you, I or anyone else should subordinate our own best interests, to make this guy richer.
        • OmarIsmail 12y ago
          But you understand the world isn't that simple right? Imagine you lived on a land with 100 square feet. You wanted to open a store, but the big supermarket (because they started early) already has 60 square feet and the price of the other 40 square feet is astronomical. So you can only rent out 5 square feet. Well, you can't do much with 5 square feet, and that big market is making lots of money with theirs. So they keep buying more square footage and driving up the prices until there's literally no way any other business can continue to exist. See, by artificially limiting things you can create a situation where only people that are already in an advantageous position will strengthen that position. Now, if you want only big tech companies to exist and not see the innovation brought forth by small companies then sure continue supporting and advocating for restrictive policies. If you actually care about the long term future of what the human race is capable of then you'd want to remove all artificial restrictions and let the more natural "survival of the fittest" of the market iterate towards new innovations and technology.
• sz4kerto 12y ago
  Hm, an article from pg I don't really agree with (even if I am benefiting from EU's open labor market). There are plenty of 'exceptional' programmers out there with not exceptional salaries. Anybody is free to hire one. There are a couple of problems though: - they're hard to identify - they might be exceptional in one situation and mediocre in another situation. The fact you are doing great at company X and task Y does not guarantee you'll be a rockstar at company W and task Z. - you don't want to pay for them. "I asked the CEO of a startup with about 70 programmers how many more he'd hire if he could get all the great programmers he wanted. He said "We'd hire 30 tomorrow morning." Well, if they're really exceptional and they worth 100x more than the others then pay them $5M/year and they're going to come to you. I know this won't happen, and the reason for that is exactly the fact that you have no clue how much they're going to worth for you. You could even pay only $500k/y to these excellent guys but no startup does that because they're not sure. So please let's forget these stories about rockstar programmers and whatever. It's simple: if US could tap the international talent pool without restrictions then labor costs would go down by 50% OR it'd be easier to find good ones quickly at the same price, therefore one of the biggest risk factor in startups would be less of a problem. I completely support this argument, by the way. Don't dilute this debate with 10x (1000x?) programmers and companies who'd hire 30 people tomorrow morning at the market price (??) if they could find them. *Edit: I have zero problem with downvotes but I'm genuinely interested in counterarguments, so please explain where am I wrong. :)
  • wrs 12y ago
    Paying more will just shuffle around the exceptional programmers who are already in the US. But pg's point is that the US should be trying to attract more exceptional programmers. And the more the better, because they don't just add talent, they multiply it. (That's one thing that makes them "exceptional".) The secret sauce of Silicon Valley is not just the exceptional people, it's that they're all in the same place.
    • hsitz 12y ago
      Parent poster has a point that the difficulty of actually identifying the exceptional programmers poses a major problem here. P.G. has actually written about this himself, arguing that great programmers are the only ones who can identify other great programmers, and that they can only do this if they have collaborated with them on actual work. See the 'Recognition' section in "Great Hackers" essay, http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html: "So who are the great hackers? How do you know when you meet one? That turns out to be very hard. Even hackers can't tell."
• chmartin 12y ago
  "it's easy to imagine cases where a great programmer might invent things worth 100x or even 1000x an average programmer's salary" ... yet they get paid maybe 1.5x
  • SwellJoe 12y ago
    Unless they start a startup. But, H1B doesn't make it easy for a startup founder to come to the US, since it requires the startup to already exist and be funded in order to go through the H1B process. So, it's a chicken and egg problem. My co-founder is in the US on a visa that was sponsored by Google (and he still works for Google). Had that not been the case, he might still be in Australia (we probably could have made it happen had we needed to...but, he might not have had the motivation to come here without the Google job). What I'm trying to say is that H1B does tend to lend itself to indentured servitude. Foreign workers here on a visa are less likely to seek other employers, because they have a visa to keep renewed, or they have to seek citizenship (which is a whole other pile of problems). That probably does depress the industry baseline salary. But, my desired solution is not to reduce the number of indentured servants, but to kill the limits on their freedom to work that makes them indentured servants.
• FlipFlopsb 12y ago
  "The US has less than 5% of the world's population. Which means if the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly distributed, 95% of great programmers are born outside the US" That is some very flawed thinking right there. If this statement about how all the great workers are not US was true then they could outsource all programming outside the US easily just like call centers. This article is just more propaganda to pay programmers the same wage as minimum wage.
  • mightybyte 12y ago
    Not true. The legal landscape in some (many?) other countries gives companies much less recourse against IP violations. When you hire programmers, you typically have to give them access to a substantial portion of your code base if you want them to be productive. For overseas programmers, their country needs to have IP laws with enough teeth so you can be reasonably confident that your programmers aren't going to take your code and run. This is not an issue with call center workers.
• zerr 12y ago
  Meanwhile, why don't get better at management to allow remote work? ...
  • xasos 12y ago
    It's been tried in the past, but it hasn't been that successful. Technology has come a long way in decreasing communication boundaries, but it won't replace (at least for the next 5-10 years) the latent need to have employees in office. It's not only about the work produced, but also the interactions between the team. Both Yahoo[1] and Reddit[2] have banned remote working. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/why-marissa-mayer-told-remote-employees-to-work-in-an-office--or-quit-2013-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/why-marissa-mayer-told-remote... [2] http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/04/why-reddits-new-no-remote-worker-policy-is-upsetting http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/04/why-reddits-new-no-remote-...
• edw519 12y ago
  ...and while you can train people to be competent, you can't train them to be exceptional. Why not? Every exceptional programmer I've ever met was unexceptional at one time. Something happened for them to become exceptional. I personally believe that while that "something" is most often "doing", "training" is often a big part of the equation. And that training is more often than not training their beliefs as much as training their skills. Many of the best programmers I've even known never imagined themselves being able to do what eventually became their norm. For a lot of them, all it took was the guidance of a caring mentor or trainer to see the possibilities. Regardless of where programmers come from, I take it as a serious responsibility to help them become what they can be. Not saying "can't" is the first step.
  • bwaxxlo 12y ago
    You become exceptional by being curious and never satisfied. I don't think you can teach that. I mean, you can blurt it out to people all day but it takes intrinsic motivation to stay awake until 2am because you want to chase some random thing down the rabbit hole.
    • larrys 12y ago
      "motivation to stay awake until 2am because you want to chase some random thing down the rabbit hole." Agree. Obsession and curiousity is important. To me you either have that or you don't have that. (Edit: Of course it depends on the subject for sure. You can be curious about one thing but "phone it in" about something else.) I'm not a programmer but I can write some things that are helpful to me. The other day I made some tea and I then thought "hmm I will buy a timer on Amazon". Then I though "no let me write something that I can use from the shell to tell me when N time period is up and what it is up for". [1] I then probably spent the next hour or so writing this little routine when all I had done was getup to make tea. Because even though I am not a programmer I decided it was more interesting than what I was working on at the time (which is also pretty interesting). Back to something that I do know about (negotiation and strategy) I go with your first sentence for sure. [1] In other words instead of using the iphone timer or any number of other ways to do the same exact thing I just decided it was more fun to write something to do what I wanted. And it was fun. And when I showed it to my wife that evening (as an example of why I think our 10 year old should do programming) she couldn't understand why I thought what I did was fun to do.
• buro9 12y ago
  There is more than immigration in the way of non-US programmers moving to the US: 1) Immigration 1) Health care 3) Living standards (some part cost of rent, some part accessible lifestyle, some part relationships and future plans, etc) I'm a London programmer and yes immigration is an issue, but health care (for themselves and their partner) is joint #1 on that front. It's hard not to look on US healthcare as being the worst possible product of US politics and that starts to impact the standard of living thing. Most non-US programmers I know come from societies where we're happy to pay more in tax to have a more civilised society and life. You may fix immigration, but to make the US an attractive place to want to relocate to far more needs to be fixed.
  • oldspiceman 12y ago
    Completely agree. I don't have any desire to live in the states.
  • donall 12y ago
    Just my $0.02: I agree with all of your criticisms. Despite that, I am an immigrant programmer living in California. I couldn't find any work in Europe that was as interesting and challenging as what I do here (obviously there are good companies there, but none aligned with my interests and were hiring). I routinely turn down opportunities to interview for companies that are far more appealing propositions than anything I encountered in Europe.
  • sampo 12y ago
    > It's hard not to look on US healthcare as being the worst possible product of US politics and that starts to impact the standard of living thing. It would be nice, if there were some rough guidelines, how much more I'd need to ask salary in the US, that would cover the extra fees for insurance and health care, that I get for free in most Western European countries?
    • briandear 12y ago
      Health care isn't free in ANY country. You pay for it, even if indirectly. The high taxes and high 'social charges' in a place like France results in much lower salary. One could argue, that in France your purchasing power is much less than someone in the US paying for health insurance out of pocket. Rails devs in France might make 35k euros per year, so one could argue that, compared to a $120k salary in the US, that you're making substantially less in France, despite almost "free" healthcare. If you also add in, for example, in Paris the cost of accommodation, the higher cost for things like food and consumer goods, that 35k salary is looking pretty bleak. One could ask yourself if approximately $80k less is worth 'free' university and 'free' healthcare plus higher costs for pretty much everything. I'm not saying either place is better (however I do happen to live in France,) but there's no such thing as "free" healthcare or "free" education.
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• cletus 12y ago
  This is nothing new. The problems with work visas in the US are: 1. Cheap bodyshops consuming much of the quota; and 2. Immigration being tied to an employer. (2) is a direct cause of (1). For those that don't know, sponsorship for a green card basically involves two stages. Labor Certification ("LC") is the first and most time-consuming stage. It involves "proving" you can't find a US citizen to fill the job. There is then a queue with a quota system based on country of _birth_ (not citizenship). For countries with a high number of immigrants (eg Mexico, Phillipines, India, China), the queue can be _years_ long. During that time the employee is essentially an indentured servant. Employers can and do exploit this situation. The Department of Labor can add to this by randomly auditing a particular application, which will add a minimum of 1-2 years to the process. Sometimes this is for cause but the DoL's stated policy is to prevent petitioners from "gaming" the system so they disguise their auditing criteria by randomly selecting applications to audit. The second stage is basically a formality: filing for adjustment of status. So for a period of 10 years or more the employee may be in no position to leave, no position to negotiate and will quite possibly have to work under abominable conditions for substandard wages. The LC process ostensibly has a prevailing wage determination step to ensure the employee isn't being victimized. Trust me, it's a joke. Startups here, as a general rule, aren't the problem. These nameless bodyshops paying $50,000/year or less for a warm body to contract out to a Fortune 500 company for $500/hour are. If you kept the current green card quotas and simply made H1B visas portable and immigration essentially automatic when your number (in the queue) is up then you'd end a lot of these problems.
  • winter_blue 12y ago
    H1B workers can switch jobs -- your point (2) is not true. During the first 6 years or until the LC is filed, H1 workers can work for any employer in their field of study. After the LC has been filed, they can switch jobs as long as the job title/requirements are substantially similar (thanks to the American Competitiveness in the Twenty-First Century Act). And the recent executive action by Obama will make it even easier for post-LC workers to change jobs. I have yet to meet someone on an H1 who felt tethered down to their employers. Almost every H1 worker I know has switched jobs at some point. This whole idea of the "indentured H1 worker" is complete lie, and anyone making it is being dishonest. It's just a cover-up for their hatred for immigrants -- a lie fabricated to cloak their hatred as concern.
• droopyEyelids 12y ago
  > American technology companies want the government to make immigration easier because they say they can't find enough programmers in the US. Anti-immigration people say that instead of letting foreigners take these jobs, we should train more Americans to be programmers. Who's right? What a biased 'framing' pile of bullshit. Let as many programmers in as you want. Just give them the right to quit their job without deportation, and ensure they're paid the exact same wages as an American. Thats the only honest solution to this problem. It'd make everyone happy except for the very people pushing to open immigration.
  • winter_blue 12y ago
    The H1B visa already guarantees: 1. You can take up any job related to your major (in college). 2. You are required by law to be paid the same or higher wages as Americans, for your job position/title. Almost every H1 worker I know has switched jobs at some point. The whole idea of the "indentured H1 worker" is completely fabricated. My suspicion is that it's a cover-up that allows anti-immigration people cloak their hatred for immigrants as concern. Basically, during the first 6 years (or until a greencard application is filed), H1 workers can work for any employer in their field of study. After the greencard application, they're job choices are slightly narrowed down to jobs that are substantially similar to their previous one. However, recent executive action by Obama will make it easier for workers with pending greencard applications to change jobs.
• windlep 12y ago
  Two immediately obvious problems in this set of arguments: 1) There'd be more great programmers if they wouldn't all divide themselves amongst so many startups, the vast majority of which will fail. Some other VC's have pointed out this problem as well. Less start-ups overall would increase the amount of great programmers available, and maybe more of them would succeed. 2) PG himself has said that great programmers grew up coding. PG's own population argument misses this as the greatest populations (India / China) do not have the wealth for kids to grow up coding. As people trying to increase the diversity of programmers have pointed out, getting this type of upbringing is hard even in America if you're not a well-off (generally white) male. There's plenty of talent here in America, but let's be honest, its harder to utilize. It's much much easier to just import talent from countries that have education systems and cultures that do better at creating programmer talent than to fix America's deficiencies.
  • grandalf 12y ago
    There'd be more great programmers if they wouldn't all divide themselves amongst so many startups This is a silly argument that suggests that some wise arbiter ought to choose which startups get to exist. In reality, startup engineering skills are unique and involve a sense of architecture, efficiency, and often making due with insufficient time/resources. Everyone working in a startup is getting some of this experience. great programmers grew up coding It's 2014, many people in other nations did grow up coding. One doesn't have to ahve had a TI-994A in the house to be considered "advantaged" in this respect anymore. For the past 10 years, any browser with a js console qualifies. The point of PG's essay is that there shouldn't be barriers. Let the startups at least have the option of hiring various engineers and let them learn from that how to best hire, rather than having to scrape the bottom of the barrel in the US.
  • pcurve 12y ago
    There are many problems with PG's arguments. 1. It's painfully obvious that he doesn't talk anybody in the trench. 2. If H1B Visas used the way it was intended, there would be no issue with finding those great talents. Instead, H1B Visas are used my large consultancies and corporations for tapping cheap labors. 3. There are strong programming talents in Western and Eastern Europe, but they are not knocking down embassies to come to the U.S. despite much better job prospects and higher pay. Because quality of life is inferior. 4. You don't need a company full of 'great programmers'.
• duaneb 12y ago
  Yeah, let's prioritize blind progress over employing local citizens.
• aristus 12y ago
  Or, perhaps, companies should become smarter about recruiting and hiring the large-but-unknown "false negatives" that are generated by their current process. Easier to implement, a competitive advantage, and you don't have to run a lobbying campaign. All you have to do is prick a few egos. Oh, wait... that's why.
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• mnglkhn2 12y ago
  The value proposition needs to be right. So far, tech companies only propose to let people come and work, for 3 to 6 years. There is no guarantee made to the exceptional programmer that the company will apply his/her green card, and hence facilitate the actual act of immigration. Until The company applies and the application is approved, we are talking just about work visas and not about immigration. The only reasonable way to immigrate at this moment is through family, which means come and get married to a citizen. If you don't do that, then you are totally dependent at the whim of the sponsoring company, which might decide at some point during those 6 years that you are not exceptional anymore and hence you should pack and close down all your stuff (apartment, bank accounts, etc) within 30 days (at some point not even these 30 days were not guaranteed). If we discuss about having talent coming in, then the discussion has to clarify what the value on the table is.
  • sumedh 12y ago
    > we are talking just about work visas and not about immigration. Moving to a different country under work visa is also immigration.
    • EduardoBautista 12y ago
      No, immigration implies you are going to stay there. Being on a work visa you will always have the uncertainty that you will have to leave the country.
      • sumedh 12y ago
        Did some google search and yes you are right. I just assumed that moving on a work visa also falls under immigration.
• oskarth 12y ago
  YC has a big advantage over US: they are not geographically bound to one place. Say nothing changes in a decade. There's nothing that's fundamentally stopping YC from starting branches in SE Asia, Europe or Canada.
• cpwright 12y ago
  The big issue I have with this essay is that, while I believe it is true that letting in exceptional foreign programmers would benefit the economy and that probably does not overly hurt many exceptional American programmers; I don't see how just opening up the H1B program would achieve that. Instead, I believe you might get some fraction of those exceptional programmers to come to America; but you would probably get many more less-than-exceptional programmers (which pg called competent) competing with less-than-exceptional, but competent Americans (or those who could be trained to be competent). On balance, I'm unconvinced this would help. Potentially, instead of having a lottery, the government should just run a dutch auction for the same sized quota. If someone is truly exceptional, it would be worth paying for them. You'd also end up naturally giving American programmers a bit of a home-field advantage; because their cost would not be burdened with the additional cost of winning an auction.
  • yxhuvud 12y ago
    Or maybe they should do away with the quotas. Why must immigration be limited at all?
• ta75757 12y ago
  Paul Graham is fighting for his side. I hope any developers here are smart enough to fight for theirs. He's arguing that the same companies who colluded illegally to drive down the wages of the "best" programmers, now have no interest in lowering their wages when they're arguing for increased immigration. LOL.
  • OmarIsmail 12y ago
    Paul Graham is representing the startups that he's invested in - not Apple, Google and FB. The BigCos are already big enough to have international offices to mitigate these immigration issues. A 20 person startup doesn't.
    • pastProlog 12y ago
      > From the essay: But it is dishonest of the anti-immigration people to claim that companies like Google and Facebook are driven by the same motives. An influx of inexpensive but mediocre programmers is the last thing they'd want; it would destroy them. Eric Schmidt not only illegally colluded in a conspiracy to drive down programmer salaries, his e-mails say things like "this may be illegal so delete this e-mail". I guess I'm one of those "dishonest" wealth-creating worker bees who read these subpoenaed e-mails where I spin the "dishonest" narrative that I actually believe what Eric Schmidt said about his attempts to secretly and illegally drive down his programmer's salaries.
      • OmarIsmail 12y ago
        Trying to keep the wages low of people you know are good is a different issue than trying to hire people from other countries. Now, BigCos may still want good people they bring from the outside to have low wages, but that doesn't change the fact that they still want to (and can't) bring in good people from the outside.
        • cottonseed 12y ago
          It's simple supply and demand. You bring in more people, wages drop. Collusion and immigration policy are two tools to achieve the same goal.
• Khelavaster 12y ago
  I hope the qualities that make someone a great programmer aren't evenly distributed. I hope that the American education system effectively develops those qualities on average better than any other country in the world.
• michaelvkpdx 12y ago
  Part of the reality of founding a company in the United States, and taking advantage of the freedoms and protections being in the USA offers, is that you have to work with the USA labor force. If you don't like it- well, go international. Fast food restaurants don't get to import the best burger-slingers from Germany. Software companies have to live in the same space. And it's complete and utter BS to suggest that there's no way we can make up for the gap in our education system. You have to invest in the society, and it takes time to train people. Railroads in the 1890's didn't suddenly wake up with a million trained workers at their disposal, and they didn't have the option of importing trained workers from the UK where railroads were booming. Part of the limits of their expansion was the need for training- and when they didn't train, they ended up with dead workers (25,000 out of a force of 1 million killed on the job in 1900 alone). If someone wants to come to the USA on their own volition, and take their oath of citizenship- fantastic! We should all welcome them. But it is not up to corporations to dictate terms of citizenship at their convenience.
  • smtddr 12y ago
    >>Fast food restaurants don't get to import the best burger-slingers from Germany. Software companies have to live in the same space. I don't agree with this. The tech industry is beautiful & far-reaching in large part because it doesn't have the restrictions of proximity to the degree of many other industries. I would hate to see artificial limits placed on it to force the same conditions as traditional Brick and mortar businesses.
    • gaius 12y ago
      You mean like, say, clothing or electronics manufacture, in which conditions for workers are a global race to the bottom?
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      • smtddr 12y ago
        I wish I had a counter-argument to why this wouldn't happen with the software engineering industry. My gut feeling tells me it can't happen, but I have no data.
• moocow01 12y ago
  How about Silicon Valley first working on actually optimizing the use of the current labor pool by letting in the REAL other 95% of programmers meaning ... - Anyone over 40 - Anyone who doesn't fit the profile of a 25 year old white male Until this happens in any real manner, these sort of pleas are just politics as usual for economic gain.
  • gaius 12y ago
    Yes, the truth is it doesn't matter how many women, ethnic minorities etc you hire, if they are all 20-something graduates of the same 10 CS programmes.
  • kenjackson 12y ago
    This is very true. Our industry has cultural issues that need to be fixed to unlock the potential out of those people who are already in this country. PG may have a valid point down the line, but it is really not near the top of the pressing causes of labor shortage of the exceptional.
• rglullis 12y ago
  One thing that I don't get about the critics (especially the liberal-inclined) from H1B programs is: even if opening the gates ends up resulting in cheaper labor, what is wrong about that? If the gates were open, the ones coming here to work for cheap won't be taking your jobs at the next startup fad. They will be working doing the things that Americans don't want to do: improving network infrastructure, doing boring TPS reports in biotech firms, basic IT, local (better) tech support, maybe modernizing your craptastical banking systems. None of the Americans that complain about H1B ever seem to realize that. You guys seemed perfectly fine to have the Chinese building your railroads and to have the hispanics taking care of your children or to work in the kitchen of your favorite restaurant. So much so that you seem to be okay with giving amnesty every 10-20 years to undocumented immigrants. No need to worry, the status quo will not be challenged.
  • droopyEyelids 12y ago
    What is wrong is that cheapness is enforced by making those laborers a second class citizen- they need to stay with the company that sponsors their visa or they get kicked out of the country. Thats also the only reason why they're cheaper. Because, by law, their employers have stripped them of the only negotiating right an employee usually has- the ability to switch jobs. This would be unethical enough if it existed in a vacuum, but instead it exists in context of citizens trying to get jobs, lowering their value while pitting them agains the workers without rights.
    • davidw 12y ago
      So we should let people come and give them more rights to switch jobs. Simply keeping people out is not the answer.
      • droopyEyelids 12y ago
        Yes that is the point I'm making. That is not the point Paul Graham, Zuckerberg, or FWD.US are making. And if they aren't making that point, it's not going to be in the bill that gets passed through congress.
• ulfw 12y ago
  Here are the H1B Top Ten visa sponsors: 1 Infosys 32,379 $76,494 2 Tata Consultancy Services 8,785 $66,113 3 Wipro 6,733 $69,953 4 Deloitte Consulting 6,165 $98,980 5 Ibm 5,839 $87,789 6 Accenture 5,099 $70,878 7 Larsen & Toubro Infotech 4,380 $59,933 8 Microsoft 3,911 $113,408 9 Hcl America 3,012 $81,376 10 Satyam Computer Services 2,249 $73,374 How many of those are America's top tech companies who are in dire need of foreign engineers? The Top 3 by far are Indian outsourcing, sorry, 'consulting' companies. http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2014-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2014-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx
  • slantedview 12y ago
    This says it all.
  • petilon 12y ago
    By all means, write to your elected representatives to cut down on importation of cut-rate programmers. But know that this doesn't disprove Paul Graham's point. He is against the importation of cut-rate programmers too (see his footnote [2]). He is only for the importation of top-notch programmers.
    • pastProlog 12y ago
      The H1-B visa IS supposed to be for top-notch programmers. That's what it exists for.
    • ulfw 12y ago
      And how do you identify a 'top-notch' programmer as a government organization dealing with visas? Seriously. I'd argue 95% of hiring managers in SV can't identify a top programmer. The problem could be solved easily if H1-Bs could only be given to companies registered and headquartered in the USA. That would get rid of the Wipros and Infosyses etc.
      • seanmcdirmid 12y ago
        That would also get rid of most foreign countries from operating in the states, since they couldn't get visas for management, trainers, or whatever. Maybe you just meant Indian companies?
• CaptG 12y ago
  I'm new to HN, and would consider my self a competent developer. How does a competent developer become an exceptional one?
  • wallflower 12y ago
    Why do you want to become an exceptional one? I'm going to give you an alternative answer. There is a hard limit on our personal abilities. There comes a point where a lead developer matures by bringing on people onto their team who are better at X. I really like this comment from an AskHN from jlcfly several weeks ago. I hope most of us embrace this philosophy as the reality is programming as an art is much more important than programming as a rote skill. "Teach them to be better than you. That may seem counterproductive. I have a type A personality, and I have decent coding skills. I've been in your situation a number of times. I also know there's these mythical expert developers out there that I can't seem to find (or afford). So, what to do? A few years ago I realized that if I continue down this path, I'll end up with some serious health issues due to the stresses that come along with having a reputation for being a really good developer. So, I decided that instead of searching for developers better than me, I would teach developers I work with how to BE better. It's taken a lot of patience. And it's taken me quite a bit to LET GO of my way of doing things. I had to take my ego out of the picture. (VERY hard to do.) Nowadays, I realize that developers don't have to BE better than me. I simply have to ALLOW them to do what they do without being so obsessive about it. Turns out, even junior developers really CAN do good work. They just need a little guidance that only comes with experience, and then they need me to get out of their way." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8649415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8649415
    • superalanliu 12y ago
      "There is a hard limit on our personal abilities." Reading this makes me think of fixed vs growth mindset. Also, I feel that the 'hard limit' is way beyond the 'exceptional' line. So anyone can work and become exceptional. I feel like the 'hard limit' applies if you want to be #1 or something not the .01%.
      • 12y ago
• stinos 12y ago
  But, is it really necessary that all, or most, those exceptional programmers are concentrated in one country? Becasue in the end that's what is being advocated here: keep the US a technological 'super'power. Why is that needed (honest question)? How about diversity?
• slantedview 12y ago
  Paul's entire argument is a strawman. H1B isn't about hiring "great programmers". It IS about importing cheap labor. This fact has been proven many times, with actual data rather than rhetoric, yet we still find ourselves having this same argument over and over. Here's a nearly 10 year old study that lays it out: http://www.cis.org/PayScale-H1BWages http://www.cis.org/PayScale-H1BWages
  • dang 12y ago
    > Paul's entire argument is a strawman. H1B isn't about hiring "great programmers" You use the word "strawman" and without skipping a beat replace his argument with one (about H1Bs) that he obviously isn't making.
• jarsin 12y ago
  Please tell me how the startup you mention identifies great programmers. I would not be suprised at all that they are yet another company that thinks solving trick programming questions under pressure is what makes someone great vs not great. sorry but i call bs on your startup that cant find great programmers.
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• dangoldin 12y ago
  Using the same argument we should be investing more in the groups that traditionally haven't been into programming - women and minority groups. They are already US citizens without needing a visa sponsorship.
• Tarrosion 12y ago
  I generally find PG very convincing, but not here. Opening up immigration would have major side effects, though probably it would help companies hire top programmers. But rather than bear that cost, would we as a society be better off if we tried to educate children better, get more kids hooked on being makers, whatever it is you believe is important? Fundamentally, making the 95-to-5 population comparison only makes sense if the 5% is at or near maximum utilization. And it's not at all obvious that American potential talent is that heavily utilized. As an aside, it's also not at all obvious to me that we can't teach exceptional programming, at least for some people. In fact, the idea that top programmers are vastly better than merely good programmers is also not obvious to me. Think about lifting things: Perhaps I can lift 50kg and some one else 52kg. If the task is to lift a 51kg object, the other person is infinitely better than me. But if the task is just to lift moderate weight objects, we are indistinguishable. Similarly it seems plausible that for most tasks "very good" programmers are indistinguishable from"great" ones.
  • OmarIsmail 12y ago
    Do you think YC startups are lying when they say they're struggling to hire? It is obviously in our best interests to hire every great programmer we come across - no matter what. If you really think that there are some great developers out there who are struggling to find a job in the US please send them my way or send them to ANY of the YC startups and they'll be hired within 2 weeks. How long do you think it takes to teach someone to be an exceptional programmer? 5 years? 10 years? How long has Facebook been around? How long have most small tech companies been around? Yes, in 10-20 years after all the parents today are telling their children to get into software we'll have a glut of developers. But right now, there's obviously not enough. And the quickest way out is to relax the limits on immigration. If the US doesn't do it, then it's a great opportunity for another attractive first-world country to take the lead. Maybe Canada will.
    • Roboprog 12y ago
      Stop trying to shove more people into the SF bay area peninsula? A 100K/yr salary won't buy, or even rent, much of a place for a family to live in near Palo Alto or San Francisco. But it sure will in Sacramento. ... or Fresno, or Portland, or Seattle, or Denver, or Phoenix, or Boise, or Minneapolis, ... The tech industry needs to think outside the Silicon Valley box, and consider that while people should be grouped together for networking and other multiplier effects, it might be time to have more than one town in which to do business - a location that is not so closed in with outrageous real estate costs. I almost took a job in Mtn View a few years ago, but wanted a 50% salary increase (vs Sacramento) to compensate for housing. So, it didn't happen.
• bmdavi3 12y ago
  In high school, part of the reason I chose computer programming as my future career is because I like it, and part of the reason is that I knew not a lot of other people did, or could do it well. I didn't know what the world would be like in 20 years, but I figured that was a good way of giving myself a chance at having a good job down the road. Computer science courses in college were much tougher than in most other majors, and there were many, many nights I'd be coding away to finish a project while my friends were out partying, playing video games, etc. I like art, history, and music too, but I figured it was worth it, just a few more years and it would pay off. Now, just as it is starting to pay off, people are trying to change the rules. I've been trying to get my 10 year old nephew interested in science and math, encouraging him, so he can make the same choices down the road if he wants to. But if the plan is to swoop in at the last minute and remove the rewards for delayed gratification, maybe I should tell him to have a blast and do whatever. Either allow full immigration for people in any career (best option), or have the same stifling limits for all careers (distant second). Don't cherry pick who's going to have their careers dis-proportionally affected.
  • amerliore 12y ago
    Why are Computer Scientists forced to play by different rules than every other decent job? American electricians don't have to compete with Chinese electricians. Can you imagine American doctor/lawyer/engineer associations allowing their bosses to lobby to let cheap and desperate foreigners flood into their country and undercut all their jobs, drive down wages, reduce the value of their educations? It's ridiculous that computer scientists are being asked to work against their own financial best interest, while VCs are explicitly in the game of maximizing their own profit at all costs (including the willingness to sacrifice all decency and compassion, put entire industries into homelessness and poverty, destroy the social safety net, turn the middle class into indentured servants...) If this isn't class warfare, what is? You have a near-billionaire VC writing essays to convince the lower classes to work directly against their own financial best interest in favor of his own financial best interest. No competent businessman would allow a cheap competitor to flood into his market and ruin his business. Why do VCs expect computer scientists to allow their labor market to be destroyed?
• danmaz74 12y ago
  It looks to me like the solution to the problem is simple. Just have a "high tech visa" with no number limit, but one simple requirement: The company requesting the job needs to be offering something like 150% (or 200% or whatever makes sense) the average salary of the US workforce, or in their state. This will ensure that the visa will only be offered for skills that are difficult to find in the USA (or the specific State). No problem of driving salaries down.
  • craigyk 12y ago
    an excellent suggestion, also possibly a bidding process... but I'm sure none of the US tech companies will champion this option because there is already room to do this unofficially within the current program... 50,000+ yearly visas gives a lot of overhead above just seeking "truly exceptional" talent.
    • danmaz74 12y ago
      Big tech companies can play the lottery, smaller ones can't. And I don't see any need for a bidding process, which implies a fixed quota, a fixed closing date for the bidding, and a lot of uncertainty. Just require the salary to be high enough to show you really need the skill, not to cut costs, and have a process with a guaranteed timing and outcome.
  • dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp 12y ago
    This is a great suggestion, especially if we accept the authors suggestion that hiring agents are only interested in exceptional foreign programmers, not the merely competent ones. Also, what's a good ratio of exceptional programmers to competent programmers within an organization? Not all important code needs to be written by a clever architect.
  • briandear 12y ago
    Actually, the state should also be irrelevant. Because if you can't find a programmer in your state then there's the rest of the country. The 150% idea is great -- it would create an incentive to only try to hire the exceptional, which is what PG wants right? I'm unconvinced; it feels like this is just a tech leader attempting to lower the cost of labor as opposed to increasing the quality -- otherwise he'd be promoting maximizing the quality of the 100k already coming in as opposed to increasing tr raw number of entrants. The only benefit to increasing supply is to lower wages. "Finding the exceptional" is a Trojan horse for lowering costs. As I've mentioned before, he's advocating a strip mining approach as opposed to a more surgical improvement in the quality of imports. Perhaps another means is to have a fixed number of visas as we do now, but auction them off to companies. The sweatshop companies wouldn't benefit because it would cost more than it saves and the other companies would then be far more selective, thus increasing the percentages on finding that 'exceptional' developer unicorn everyone seems to be chasing. I don't have the right answer, but I'm certain it isn't "let more people in and hope the 5% are among them."
• davismwfl 12y ago
  To me the main failure and what negates the argument to me is that 95/5% population. Yes, I agree that the US makes up a small percentage of the global population and to think we have the best, smartest or only of anything is stupidly arrogant and extremely short sighted. However, to assume that of the 7 billion people on the planet and the 6.7 billion that are not in the US are comparable in education, opportunity, training and ability is just not realistic either. While I agree too that greatness can't be taught necessarily, it also can't exist without education, drive and opportunity. The problem is when you use misleading statistics to make your argument it causes intelligent people many times to negate the validity of the entire argument. While I don't have a problem with h1b's overall, I do have an issue when startup's and other companies argue they can't find anyone in the US. Having managed a large development team at one time and having used large numbers of H1B's, what I learned was that H1B's are far less job mobile and far more tied to the organization sponsoring their entry. Which is of course one of the core reasons companies like them. It makes competing for the same resources far cheaper and keeps wages lower overall. In most situations when demand increases and supply decreases, cost goes up across the board (e.g. salaries). In tech, the salaries don't increase as much as the cost to the lawyers to get more H1B's to help keep the pay lower.
• tsotha 12y ago
  >The technology companies are right. What the anti-immigration people don't understand is that there is a huge variation in ability between competent programmers and exceptional ones, and while you can train people to be competent, you can't train them to be exceptional. What Paul Graham doesn't understand is hardly any of the H-1B people companies are importing are exceptional, and half of them aren't even competent. It's not even about getting enough labor to fill open positions. It's about flooding the market with low cost labor so US technical people lose market pricing power. These companies don't even know if there's a US citizen who's qualified for the job. I mean, this kind of stuff goes on all the time: >The contention of the DoJ in this indictment appears to be that Mr. Cvjeticanin was defrauding companies seeking to hire IT personnel, yet for all those hundreds of ads — ads that for the most part never ran and therefore could never yield job applications — nobody complained! http://www.cringely.com/2013/07/18/so-thats-how-h-1b-visa-fraud-is-done/ http://www.cringely.com/2013/07/18/so-thats-how-h-1b-visa-fr...
  • slantedview 12y ago
    "These companies don't even know if there's a US citizen who's qualified for the job" This. I really think we're talking about different things though. Clearly, as has been proven, the H1B program is about importing cheap labor. This is a fact, like gravity. I'm sure that entrepreneurs like Paul would love to attract more excellent engineers, but our current immigration mechanisms aren't the way to do it, and really, that's not even what they're for (regardless of what their advocates say, again, based on fact).
  • petilon 12y ago
    Please read footnote [2] in Paul Graham's article. He is against the importation of low-cost programmers. He is only for the importation of exceptional programmers, regardless of where they were born.
    • pastProlog 12y ago
      > Footnote [2]: it is dishonest of the anti-immigration people to claim that companies like Google and Facebook are driven by the same motives Profit? Who is being dishonest here? How is being against an H1-B indentured servant coolie visa being one of the "anti-immigrant" people? I guess the women's groups who protest that Russian, Mexican and Brazilian strippers are being imported into Tenderloin clubs are anti-immigrant as well.
• larrys 12y ago
  "American technology companies want the government to make immigration easier because they say they can't find enough programmers in the US. " I think the question is who are the technology companies that want the government to make it easier. Is it "traditional established" companies that can't get quality programmers because anyone good is off trying to hit the lottery at a startup? Or is it the startups (trying to hit the lottery) who can't recruit? Either way the question is if the chance of a startup working is considered mid to low (failure rate) then what happens to all of this exceptional labor down the road? The assumption that the current demand (startups) will last for a long time isn't necessarily correct. Being in business many years (longer than PG iim and it should matter actually) I've seen plenty of cases where people make a demand assumption that later turns out to be the reason they go out of business (buy a new warehouse, expand the restaurant and so on).
  • OmarIsmail 12y ago
    That exceptional labor either moves to other businesses locally (good for the local economy) or it goes back home and you're back to where you were. Not sure what the downside is here? Educated, hardworking people are always a fantastic asset to any country. They're not the ones you need to be worried about no matter what the economic condition. This isn't about bringing in a lot of migrant farmers for permanent citizenship. My suggestion: New VISA. Similar requirements and restrictions as an H1-B (educated, employment based, dual intent so can be switched to a green card with enough time). Only companies (no subsidiaries) with more than 3 employees or 500K in the bank and less than 500 employees can apply. Don't have the same timing as an H1-B, make it like the O1 where visas can be processed and granted year round.
• tezza 12y ago
  What PG is stating is broadly true. It may be possible to eke out a few more % of programmers by teaching computing more widely. At the moment the bunch of programmers is fairly self-selecting, and there may be many more people who may be great programmers if exposed to the possibilities. For instance, some people who would normally become metal workers, stone masons, fine artists or mechanical engineers could make excellent programmers.
• pastProlog 12y ago
  > Anti-immigration people Like the author? He wants a tranche of immigration slots to open and for that tranche, indirectly if not directly, to block immigrants from Mexico, Honduras, Nigeria, and so forth. These slots are effectively only open to Indians, Chinese, and a trickle from other countries. So this H1-B proposal is anti-immigrant. It means immigration only from mostly two countries. Of a certain class of person. In order to cut the wages of US programmers and force them to work more non-FLSA hours. > Exceptional programmers This is risible. I worked with a Chinese H1-B hire who told me he had never touched a computer until he got to the US. While that may have been anomalous, research on the H1-B immigration program ( http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/h1b.html http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/h1b.html ) shows that it is not the best and brightest immigrating. The millionaire and billionaire angels and VC's want to flood the US with indentured servants chained to their H1-B visa. Look at the top H1-B sponsors - they are for Tata's indentured servants, not for people doing bleeding edge compiler/AI/whatever work. > you can train people to be competent, you can't train them to be exceptional Perhaps not, but I've met plenty of people with the capability to be exceptional programmers, but during non-flush times companies want programmers to have a BSCS, and with public colleges become more selective and raising their rates, they never get a chance to do so. The millionaires and billionaires get tax cuts on their capital gains, so the training they require for this work becomes more costly to the worker, and in fact more workers can't afford it, so a shortage develops. So then the parasite millionaires want to suck off of India's free IIT program instead of restoring US education to the level it used to be. > how many more he'd hire Yes, times are flush now. How many was he hiring in 2008-2009? How many in 2001-2002? When the economy goes into the toilet again, there will be millions of indentured servants still here on H1-B visas. How many 40 or 50 year old programmers is he willing to hire? Or are we supposed to pay and take out big loans for our college, work 60 hour weeks in our 20s and 30s with the carrot of options while paying San Francisco rents, suffering through the post-dotcom and bank failure recessions, only to be cast aside at 40? We hear about supply and demand from the oracles of economics all the time, but somehow this NEVER applies to salaries going up. I mean I am open to hiring programmers right now as well - seriously. You'll be paid minimum wage and the output will have to be spectacular. As soon as the economy dips you'll be gone. We the programmers work. We are the creators of wealth. I have been studying biology recently, including species which have become parasites. As one species becomes more parasitic on another, it changes form completely. It usually gains hooks and suckers to latch on to the working species it is a parasite off of, and the parasite devotes its body to eating and sexual reproduction. In our modern times, the angels, the accelerators, the VC's are the parasites. These "job creators" expropriate the surplus labor time of we the programmers, the network/system/database admins etc. who do all the work and create all the wealth. The LP's of the big VC firms are the type of polo-playing Phillips Andover heirs you can see in the documentary "Born Rich". Something I know the 20-something unkempt dorks who go to Python conferences know nothing about, although they are the ones ultimately being given their marching orders and who are getting profits sucked off their labor. These heirs have set up additional financial hurdles to getting a BSCS at a public college over the years, and the parasites now want to parasitically suck of of India's free IIT universities and turn their graduates into H1-B coolies over here. > we should train When the hell was the last time a tech company really trained its employees? Aside from the odd week-long class here or there? What a farce. Companies haven't trained for decades, and the parasites who use companies to parasitically suck off the labor of those of us who actually work have reworked public US colleges to be more financially impossible to get through than they used to - then they whine they can't find more "exceptional" US programmers. What a farce.
• beejiu 12y ago
  Anybody who travels 4,000 miles to a new country to work in, and to live with people they have never met, have proven themselves to be the sort of motivated person you want to hire.
  • sumedh 12y ago
    That is actually a good point.
• shamney 12y ago
  what about the countries that are then deprived of this talent?
  • sumedh 12y ago
    Its called Brain Drain and its a real issue.
• mrrrgn 12y ago
  This concept of a "great programmer" is something I find very suspicious. A competently trained engineer who works with distributed systems may implement a trivial fix and save her company tens of thousands of dollars in AWS bills. Someone with a strong background in programming languages might implement a PHP -> C++ cross-compiler and double the throughput of her company's web servers. The capability to recognize these improvements does not require some inborn spark of genius. Rather, it requires the prerequisite experience in some programming sub-field. Experience which can be learned. Moments of rare insight do happen - "hey what if we cross-compile all this crappy PHP to C++?" - but these are a matter of random chance: get enough folks with programming language expertise working on a strictly PHP codebase and eventually someone will have the idea. The "born programmer" is a myth. A great programmer is often a person with a high level of training in some particular sub-fields, and/or, a person who is very savvy regarding the craft of building software (i.e. "The Pragmatic Programmer").
  • wallflower 12y ago
    > and eventually someone will have the idea. Having read the HipHop paper, I am pretty sure that most people would not have been able to contribute meaningfully to that type of revolutionary project. Execution is everything.
    • mrrrgn 12y ago
      >I am pretty sure that most people would not have been able to contribute meaningfully to that type of revolutionary project. I agree with you totally. Didn't a lifetime of learning lead to that achievement though? The concept of cross compilation between languages had been around for some time prior to HipHop. They developed their knowledge and executed on it; but other people could, and would, have made the same connection under similar circumstances. They were experts with a specific set of skills. Not just born to be "great programmers."
    • rewqfdsa 12y ago
      What advances in computer science were necessary for HipHop? It's a bog-standard JIT system of the kind we'd been building for years. Sure, it's well-executed, but it's hardly a "revolutionary project" to those who weren't born yesterday.
• vegabook 12y ago
  Basically this proposition makes complete sense if you're an employer, and complete nonsense if you're not. Of course the seductive argument of the bosses is that economic growth will benefit, but the post-crisis economy is proving to concentrate all returns to capital, and none to labour. It's no wonder that those who champion it the most have nothing to worry about to feed and house their families for the rest of their lives.
• Torgo 12y ago
  Fix the obvious, rampant fraud first, otherwise you're dumping water into a bucket with a giant hole in the bottom. If you can't stop fraud then you can't stop more fraud when the numbers are increased.
• wheels 12y ago
  I agree with the basic thrust of the argument, but there are a couple of sticking points: The first thing that caught me reading through the comments section here is that a lot of folks complain about immigrants pushing down wages. While there are certainly places that happens, I don't think that's what Paul's talking about here. However, there is another form of that which does happen -- immigrants do stabilize wages, even at startups, and wage fluctuation dictates some of which businesses are tenable and which aren't (and where they're tenable and where they aren't -- some businesses that would make sense in Dehli wouldn't make sense in San Francisco). For the CEO mentioned, as salary goes to infinity, so to does his ability to hire as many great developers as he would like. To hire 30 developers the next day, there exists a salary which would make that possible. It's just that his business would probably not be tenable paying that much. So, I think there's a component missing to the essay: how much wage stabilization is desirable via immigration? There's already a salary gap between working as a developer in the Bay Area vs. working almost anywhere else. How large should the ratio be allowed to grow? How much of being the hub is defined by having wages that are a small multiplier of wages elsewhere in the world for the same positions? Second, the title seems a bit unfortunate. There's obviously not a uniform distribution of great programmers around the world. There's probably a pretty strong correlation between the distribution of home computers a decade ago and the home countries of great developers. The distribution not being uniform isn't really important to the point being made (it's fair to assume that most great programmers weren't born inside the US), but since it's implied so prominently in the title, it's harder to give it a pass.
• JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Enlightened self-interest. Great people increase opportunity. To the degree that happens, this is a good idea. In the short term there will be supply/demand issues and some folks will get hurt.
• jacquesm 12y ago
  Why limit this to programmers? It's not as if we're some kind of privileged and special sub-species of humanity. People should be allowed to move around the globe at will without those pesky borders. That would be one way to get us out of the hole we're in. Drawing arbitrary lines for certain professions and not for others only further deepens the gap. Companies have long ago figured out ways to go trans-national, simply by opening up offices in low wage countries. Another, easy solution if you want more talent is to pay more.
  • cottonseed 12y ago
    I agree. While I disagree with the central claim of this essay (it's not about wages), I also think the US should have open borders (as it once did), although I also realize that that is never going to happen.
  • melindajb 12y ago
    This is so true. salaries could drop fast if people could work from anywhere. Lots of people would take a pay cut to live in a less expensive part of the country near family with better schools and quality of life.
• slantedview 12y ago
  Re this footnote: "An influx of inexpensive but mediocre programmers is the last thing they [Google and Facebook]'d want; it would destroy them" If this is the case, why aren't Google and Facebook coming out strongly against our current H1B mechanism which is demonstrably little more than a tool for importing cheap labor?
• j_baker 12y ago
  I have a ton of issues with this post. For starters, the idea that some people are just inherently exceptional programmers and others can only be competent is elitist. Is it any wonder that every programmer in Silicon Valley thinks they're God's gift to the programming world? We've been taught that to be hirable we have to be "10x" engineers who spend all of our free time hacking. But ok, maybe you don't agree with me on this point. You feel as though there truly is some kind of "master race" of programmers who are inherently gifted in ways that nobody else can learn to be gifted. That still doesn't mean that you should agree with PG. Why do we need to import all of these engineers into Silicon Valley? One of the great benefits of Software Engineering is that it can be done from anywhere in the world. Why can't people choose to stay where they live? My suspicion is that it has more to do with entrepreneurial arrogance than anything else. Company executives simply want to build big empires with lots of programmers all under their thumb under one roof. So what happens? If you want to be an engineer, you have to come to Silicon Valley and displace someone who already lives in the Bay Area. It's displacement that breeds displacement. Ok, maybe you still don't believe me. You think that we need exceptional engineers and they have to be in the Bay Area. The immigration policies that tech companies are pushing for aren't based on merit. The STEM visas only apply to people who are schooled in the US. In other words, the people who will be coming to the US on these new visas aren't coming here because they are one of the exceptional engineers tech companies fawn after. They're here because they have parents who can afford to send them of to the US to fancy schools. We're not getting the "poor and huddled masses" that made this nation great anymore. Is it any wonder people in the Bay Area hate us? We're elitist, we displace people, and we're importing people from affluent backgrounds.
  • kar2014 12y ago
    I'm all for remote work and offshoring but those things have insidious effects. See how Dell lost to Asus. http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-current-relationship-between-Asus-and-Dell-Does-Dell-still-outsource-to-them http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-current-relationship-betwee...
  • douche 12y ago
    >For starters, the idea that some people are just inherently exceptional programmers and others can only be competent is elitist. It may be elitist, but that doesn't make it incorrect. There is a floor level of intellect and memory that is required to program effectively, and those that are born with more of those gifts have more potential to be a good programmer. It still requires work to hone those skills, but that work is more effective if you're starting from a higher floor. I could practice playing basketball as many hours as Lebron James or Kevin Durant, but they are always going to have inherent advantages over me.
• loteck 12y ago
  This may be the least inspiring, least visionary solutions for one of the tech industry's challenges I've ever read from PG. That's unfortunate. The tech industry's hostility to the basic concepts of training and employee development, which have long since been implemented in every other long-lasting trade and industry, need to change. That change needs to start with the industry's most prominent leaders and foremost thinkers.
  • keenerd 12y ago
    On the plus side, it is nice to see that HN is not a rah-rah PG echo chamber.
• mrottenkolber 12y ago
  What I take away from the HN/Startup/Recruiting drama: * Companies don't know how find good people (they think they know how to attract them, but honestly, how can they tell? They don't notice the ones they fail to attract, which I'd argue is most people) * Companies are unable to produce (e.g. educate) good people * They want to solve their failures by increasing the search space of people I have no sympathy at all here. If you want good people you have to pick them up early and educate them. A startup however wants great people now, and they are supposed to be a great match by pure chance. This is classic irrational dream-thinking. You have to be pretty proud of yourself to expect all the good things will come to you just like that. I suggest an alternative (my) approach, I call it the "secret elite ninja clan" approach: 1. Find out what skills are required in your industry. 2. Become a good at teaching these skills. 3. Find a pupil (as motivated as possible, no skills required) 4. Educate that pupil until a) they are as good as you are or better / b) they loose interest and leave you 5. Make money by utilizing the resulting skills. Also test your pupil's new talents. 6. Make pupil a partner if possible, return to step 1. Also important: If you meet someone, figure out how that person can generate value, don't get cornered by your expectations. Improvise, diversify. I am currently with my third pupil (first two were not motivated enough) and she seems to have it in her blood. I think if we keep up we can "grow" a pretty good company of really good people in a decade or so. Of course, there won't be a CEO, or a product, just really good hourly rates.
  • arjie 12y ago
    Someone else can always offer 20% more than you if they use you to train. This may work on the small scale where you build lasting relationships, but on the scale of large companies? You'd rapidly gain a reputation of being a springboard, and not a place people join to do their best work.
    • mrottenkolber 12y ago
      20% more of what? How am I used to "train"? I'd argue we'd gain a reputation of being really good, and that we improve together. That's not something you can buy. It might not be obvious, but while creating a great agency, this also implies creating a great workplace of my own. So if I feel like abandoning ship I know I have to change something. Also, what's better than building lasting relationships? I'd stay "small scale" awesome anytime over being just another asset of a "large company". I'd argue that we live in a time where you don't have to be "centralized large" anymore to achieve big things. Rather we should figure out how to do even better with loose organization paradigms.
• aheppenstall 12y ago
  I think a lot of those talking about cheap labour really don't understand how the current US immigration system works. Maybe large companies have other options but as a startup founder I've been through the H1-B process and it is anything but cheap and easy. Legal costs are in excess of $5k and the you must pay the employee a prevailing wage. For my cofounder this was in excess of $180k and thus as a series seed startup we simply can't afford to exercise the visa. I absolutely understand the need to protect US jobs but the situation isn't very good when two cofounders can't stay in the country after raising almost $1m in seed capital and employing US citizens.
• rweichler 12y ago
  What about the 95% of great companies overseas?
• polskibus 12y ago
  Why don't SV companies hire programmers abroad by opening tech centers abroad? That's what other tech companies do, either directly or via outsourcing companies like SII or EPAM. Quality control is mostly a matter of pay - if it is good enough, you will get the same quality of work as in US.
• jerdavis 12y ago
  I see PG's resume, but I seriously wonder how many programmers he's interviewed, hired, managed, and fired in the last 5 years. How often has he thought about what to pay his engineers in relation to their output and others in the group. How much experience does he personally have with offshoring? I bet not that much actually.
• SCHiM 12y ago
  While I do agree in the general sense with what is being said, I very much dislike it when numbers are abused to strengthen a subjective argument. It feels like you're abusing facts and lying. >"Which means if the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly distributed" This is a pretty big assumption, there are huge cultural differences between, for example, India and the US. Who says that these differences could not enormously sway the distribution of great talent? The next argument made is that since the US only has about 5% of the worlds population it also follows that only 5% of the worlds great programmers are naturally available there. However, apart from the question of potential, there's also the question of opportunity. I'd wager that the standard of living in the US is substantially higher than in most other parts of the world. Which leads me to suspect, but not to prove, that that 5% of 'all great programmers available' is actually quite a bit higher. It's obvious that no matter how good you _could_ be with a computer, you won't be able to sharpen your skills if you don't have the means and those means are more readily available in the US than in China.
• qwerta 12y ago
  I am from EU and moving to US would not bring me much improvements. Especially with a family it is very expensive there. Perhaps US could first tap resources within its borders. There are 50 million people in 'fly-over' states which are sort of ignored. And 1% of all men are in prison, perhaps allow them to learn (and graduate) while in prison. Right now they are not even allowed tv, not mentioning internet.
• btilly 12y ago
  A big problem with the current H1B system is that companies like Infosys are supposed to pay what they claim is market rate, but have every incentive to lie about the true market rate. The problem that Paul would like fixed is that there are a lot of really good programmers who startups would rightly like to hire but can't. Paul would like to eliminate the cap. But this makes the first problem worse. If you solve the first, then removing the cap makes perfect sense. So how do we solve the first? My proposal is that any company wanting import an employee can, but has to post a significant bond for the cost of deporting the employee if there are problems. That immigrant is free to transfer employment. At the end of a year, if that immigrant left to go to another company, the original employer loses the bond and owes the difference between the immigrant's current income and the original one. Under this proposal there is a disincentive to bring in an immigrant unless said immigrant really is paid above market rate for their skills. Locals may not like the competition, but people will be hiring immigrants because they think they are better, and not because they are cheaper than the market.
• rfrey 12y ago
  There's a number of comments here disputing the "even distribution" assumption pg makes. The disagreements are wrong because pg did not say that great programmers were evenly distributed, just that the qualities that make great programmers are. Some of those qualities are, IMO, curiosity; a mathematical inclination; attention to detail; an ability to quickly move between levels of abstraction; and so on. I have no trouble believing those qualities might be evenly distributed among all humans. Of course, in many places people with those qualities might not choose to study programming, because the local culture and economics do not reward that path. An established and reliable migration path to a place where it is valued might change those choices though.
• michaelvkpdx 12y ago
  Typical self-service from yet another rich VC. Founders don't want to do anything to improve US society as a whole. Investment in education? Retraining workers whose skills have become dated? No- that's expensive and doesn't benefit the rich as much as another steady supply of below-market cost labor. It's funny that so many of the VC's and Valley elite rail against the ills of the earth resource extraction companies (oil, coal, gas, etc...) yet see no harm in doing the same sort of scorched-earth work with human resources.
• johnohara 12y ago
  The US has less than 5% of the world's population. Which means if the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly distributed, 95% of great programmers are born outside the US. That is the question isn't it -- are those qualities "evenly distributed" around the world? Africans make up a lot less than 5% of the great marathoners in the world. Does that mean the remaining 95% of great marathoners in the world live outside of Africa? There are usually a whole host of other intangibles associated with exceptional performance, which are sometimes directly undermined by a change in physical location.
• trothamel 12y ago
  Isn't this what E-1 and E-2 visas are for?
• 23david 12y ago
  Skilled programmers are able to generate incredible economic value, and companies having difficulty hiring should consider whether they are undervaluing programmers when they set salary ranges. It's possible to quickly test this by simply adjusting the salary ranges upwards until good candidates start accepting job offers. Believe me... it works.
• tdicola 12y ago
  Why can't this argument be flipped on its side, if 95% of the best programmers are outside the US then why aren't the venture capitalists investing in and building companies outside the US? Surely we should see 95% of their portfolio companies are outside the US too...
  • sago 12y ago
    This. I thought that all the way through too. Why is it not reprehensible to be advocating a policy that sucks the talent out of the rest of the world for the glory of Uncle Sam? There are exceptionally talented people all over the world, VCs need to get on planes more.
  • JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    95% of the VCs are in ONE TOWN. Its not a USA vs the world problem. Its just a concentration of wealth problem. And hey, its not like the best programmers are sheep being herded into the US. They have to apply. Don't they get a say? In a one-world view it doesn't matter where they work.
• tomohawk 12y ago
  There are a lot of things that should probably be fixed in the immigration system/laws, but starting out by labeling one side "anti-immigration" is probably not the best place to start. If you have something to say that is worthwhile, there is no need to apply labels to people who may think differently.
• 23david 12y ago
  As PG states: it's easy to imagine cases where a great programmer might invent things worth 100x or even 1000x an average programmer's salary. If this is true, rational companies should be willing to pay salaries between 100-1000x of average for great programmers. All hail the $100M/yr rockstar programmer. I can't wait to see the cool things that will come out of a greater distribution of wealth to hackers, geeks and programmers. Think of all the neat kickstarter campaigns that will get funded... and all of the startup ideas that can find angel funding. And all the open-source and Makerspaces and rockets etc, etc.
  • throwawaymsft 12y ago
    Exactly. Wall St. is where you can get paid proportional to performance -- and that's where you see people earning $100M/yr. With software, employers are happy to capture the value of the 1000x programmer and pay them marginally more than the 1x one.
• tw04 12y ago
  The anti-immigration people aren't trying to keep the elite programmers out. The technology companies aren't trying to get the elite programmers in. The technology companies are trying to pay slave wages to mediocre programmers rather than pay competitive wages to Americans. I've watched it first hand from the sidelines. I'm not a programmer but I work directly with them on a daily basis. VERY, VERY few of the immigrants I've seen coming in are what I would consider remotely in the realm of elite. Elite programers can find a job in any country, and they can make a ton of money in any country. That's the beauty of the internet, there's absolutely no reason they need to come to the US to flourish. The people trying to come here aren't the elites.
• cottonseed 12y ago
  Even the "need" for exceptional programmers is really about companies getting a good deal on labor: > it's easy to imagine cases where a great programmer might invent things worth 100x or even 1000x an average programmer's salary. Wouldn't it be nice to hire people that are 100-1000x more productive while only paying them marginally more?
• DontBeADick 12y ago
  > But if you talk to startups, you find practically every one over a certain size has gone through legal contortions to get programmers into the the US, where they then paid them the same as they'd have paid an American. The whole argument hinges on this unverified anecdote. Sorry, but your personal experience isn't universal.
• 1971genocide 12y ago
  A lot of people in this thread seem to be really short sighted. Yes every tech worker's salary will drop significantly if the United States allowed more open immigration laws. But think about this - what would have happened if elon musk, vinod khosla,Sundar Pichai though the united state was not worth the trouble ? Silicon Valley would prolly exist but wouldn't have the monopoly on software that it has. I am not an american but I am really happy that the united states government has strong anti-immigration laws. This might not be an popular opinion but the United States has mooched off talent from the rest of the world without paying for it. It has actually allowed rapid development of the start-up scene in my country who are in direct competition with the bay area. The best part is unlike the bay area most of the tech workers are able to save a majority of their money as the living cost is dirt cheap compared to the disgusting wealth extraction from the young and talented that happens in the bay area. Now just for a second imagine if these tech hubs grow and take a large market share from the likes of google and facebook ? As a student of Computer science who doesn't happen to be the the united states all this is really good news and I wish the govt doesn't listen to PG as it results in the 95% to decentralize the wealth generated from technology from the hands of PG and silicon valley. ( And I am of the believe that power is always best kept in the hands of the many compared to the hands of the few )
  • gaius 12y ago
    every tech worker's salary will drop significantly if the United States allowed more open immigration laws. But think about this - what would have happened if elon musk, vinod khosla,Sundar Pichai See, this is just crazy. Why would you or I or anyone want to make ourselves materially worse off, so some guys we've never met, and who couldn't care less about us, can become richer than the dreams of avarice? Politicians say, what's good for the economy is good for everyone, but it just isn't true.
    • 1971genocide 12y ago
      The thing you are suggesting leads to a frighting conclusion. Are you saying that you are against people like elon musk from doing what he does ? He wasn't born into wealth and was middle class just like you and me but was just too damn smart. The free market rewarded him for his smartness and we are all better off because of it. Yes he became really rich but the net sum of wealth he provided in return has made everyone else much richer than him. You are making the wrong conclusion that you are worse off "materially" if such smart individuals didn't innovate. In fact you and everyone else in america would be slightly poorer. Most countries do not even have a "good economy" that they can brag about. The fact that you want a larger portion of the massive wealth these people have brought to america is an really entitled opinion to have. America is an an midst of an economic boom which is almost a miracle obama has pulled ( compared to its EU/Asian/SouthAmerican Counterparts ) . If you are unhappy that america is also home to some of the richest and smartest individuals on the planet and you are trying to compare yourself to their standard and saying "Uhh, I want some of that" then its a problem of mentality and not about wealth/immigration/politics/etc.
• thesz 12y ago
  1) by educating you will uncover latent exceptional programmers and 2) by educating you will raise educational level and make life better for everyone in country (any country). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_correlations_of_criminal_behaviour#Socioeconomic_factors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_correlations_of_cri... http://www.commissiononhealth.org/PDF/c270deb3-ba42-4fbd-baeb-2cd65956f00e/Issue%20Brief%206%20Sept%2009%20-%20Education%20and%20Health.pdf http://www.commissiononhealth.org/PDF/c270deb3-ba42-4fbd-bae... Those two arguments are omitted from essay. I think it is a sign of sloppiness on PG's part.
• byEngineer 12y ago
  Well, they are so constrained of talent but then they treat you like shit. What gives?
• NhanH 12y ago
  It's kind of weird to see the same discussion being repeated over and over again, with people talking over each others with the same point, again over and over. How about this instead, let's say I'm Patio11 and I want to go to the US, how do I do that? I personally consider Patrick to be the top 1% in what he is doing. And from what I've seen in on of HN's thread last week, a lot of people are aspiring to be the same. Funny enough, after I typed the above paragraph, I just realized that I can't actually think of a good way to move to the US if I was Patrick. And I'd wager I know more about immigration (pertaining to tech works) than at least most people here, seeing that some of you quoting H1B as "over 100000 coming per years". H1B won't work, you can't have side project/ company on H1B while in the US. And I'm not particularly sure Kalzumeus Software will fit the profile for the investing/ job creators visa one. O visa is just iffy. (Special visas for country aside). I'm not sure if I'm a great programmers or not. But I'm young enough to hope that I could one day be one. Please, actually proposing solutions on how great programmers could come to the US, with current immigration laws or any changes you think should be made. Keep bashing the H1B is not productive. Or you can just come out and say "fuck you foreigners", in which case I will gladly reevaluate my plan. (And then there is still a whole discussion with the OPT system, for some reasons, I have not seen anyone discussing about foreigners graduate from US university, and then have to leave because of the immigration system. There are a whole lot of us too!)
  • davidw 12y ago
    patio11 is very much American, and could easily move to the US if he wanted to. Actually, now he can't because he's married to a foreign citizen, and the United States puts those people through all kinds of hassle and lengthly waits even if they are married to someone from the US.
    • NhanH 12y ago
      I know patio11 is American, that wasn't the point.
      • davidw 12y ago
        Fair enough - but it's distracting; you could write "someone like patio11". Your point is correct: you can't just up and move to the US easily even if you're good what you do, and you're a net positive for the economy.
• andrewmutz 12y ago
  I have a quick question for those arguing against PG's position: Do you genuinely believe that increasing the number of talented software engineers emigrating to the United States is bad for the United States? Or bad for you? In the same way that I would argue for public policy that benefits us all (not just me), I think we should have immigration policies that benefit everyone, not just Software Engineers.
  • hacknat 12y ago
    It could be bad for me and the US, no? Not saying it is, but it is an option. I'm skeptical a sane immigration bill can get passed. The current H1 visas are incredibly generous to the companies that get to sponsor them over the workers. I'd be in favor of a policy that was company agnostic and gave the workers a lot more freedom, such a bill would be good for me, the immigrants, and the U.S., but I sincerely doubt such a bill would ever get passed.
    • andrewmutz 12y ago
      I don't know what H1-B visas you are used to, but the current ones are completely owned by the worker. An employee sponsored by an H1-B can literally collect their first paycheck and immediately move to another employer. I'm not sure how much more freedom you want.
      • andrewmutz 12y ago
        Instead of downvotes, I'd love to see some data contradicting this. Here is information supporting it: http://www.h1base.com/visa/work/h1b%20visa%20transfer%20to%20a%20new%20employer/ref/1169/ http://www.h1base.com/visa/work/h1b%20visa%20transfer%20to%2... http://www.usavisanow.com/h-1b-visa/h1b-visa-resources/h-1b-transfer/ http://www.usavisanow.com/h-1b-visa/h1b-visa-resources/h-1b-...
  • waterlesscloud 12y ago
    Drive down the wages of your most talented citizens and yes, you hurt the entire country.
• xacaxulu 12y ago
  Read, drive salaries into the dirt.
• xacaxulu 12y ago
  It's incredible what shortages exist when you don't provide meaningful work, competitive wages or room for advancement. Time to import less demanding people.
• xigency 12y ago
  There are plenty of exceptional people who are not given any sort of meaningful opportunities.
• rayiner 12y ago
  I think very few people don't want the U.S. to let in exceptional programmers. But the fact is that "1%" programmers are 1% of the population. Tech companies have tremendous trouble identifying those 1% from the other 99%. The government is almost certainly going to do a worse job at that. And if the government delegates screening to the private sector, then the system is tremendously gameable. So the issue isn't whether we should let in those 1% programmers. It's wether it's worth it to let in 99 mediocre programmers for every exceptional one, or to create a system with tremendous incentives to import those 99 mediocre programmers in an effort to drive down wages, hoping we'll get some exceptional ones in the process.
  • dllthomas 12y ago
    It seems like the government could substantially delegate this by simply putting a high floor on salary permissible for incoming workers.
• andyidsinga 12y ago
  >> [2] .. An influx of inexpensive but mediocre programmers is the last thing they'd want; it would destroy them i wonder if the great amout of inexpensive mediocre programmers everywhere else will wtill have a similar a similar effect over the next 50 years.
• voidlogic 12y ago
  IMHO the real issue isn't that they many companies can't find great programmers, its that they only want great programmers who live in their locality. For many (most?) startups in the valley, if you aren't living in the greater SFO area, or willing to relocate there, they are not interested. They are dinosaurs living in the past, fighting distributed collaboration. (Which is ironic as they are technology companies). Importing people from overseas to the bay area is actually the hard way of solving the problem. From first hand XP, I can tell you going distributed has made hiring top notch talent 10x easier. And if I hire someone overseas, they don't have to move... Again, IMHO all the excuses like "culture" are bullshit, if your culture depends on holding hands as a group every day, your company culture is already fatally weak.
  • tolmasky 12y ago
    Warning, anecdotal data ahead: I would not want to work under remote conditions again. In my career I have worked mainly under "startup conditions". At Apple on iPhone, everyone lived in the same place and worked non stop on the product, same as when I left to start a company. On my second company, I had many remote workers. The reality I experienced is that there was at least a 2-3x slowdown. When people are on different time zones, what used to take 5 minutes can become a 1 day turnaround through email and waiting for the other person to be up. Perhaps it works under certain scales, but when you're trying to be nimble it's just one more needlessly complex factor. What ended up happening is everyone got on a in between sleep schedule which was pretty bad for everyone's outside of work life.
    • mahyarm 12y ago
      How different are the time zones? What frustrates me about remote workers is they cluster around eastern europe or india/china with main offices in the USA. They're all hugely different time zones. I think remote workers who are in the same time zone area as the main office, say north or south america, might work better. But I don't know because I haven't had a chance to work on that kind of team.
    • voidlogic 12y ago
      Both working in and managing distributed teams is a skill that needs to be learned and homed. In comparison to my experiences, it seems like the distributed team you worked on was highly dysfunctional. I think I distributed startup spanning more the a handful of adjacent timezones is probably a mistake. Task assignment need to be done in a way that is cognizant of the people/timezone interdependencies. Even a non-startup might find it useful to break the various teams up by clusters of close timezones so that the regular work-flows don't experience this kind of lag.
• ChrisAntaki 12y ago
  > A great programmer doesn't merely do the same work faster. A great programmer will invent things an ordinary programmer would never even think of. > ... a great programmer might invent things worth 100x or even 1000x an average programmer's salary. I like how Paul slips in some encouragement for engineers wanting to start their own businesses.
  • zanny 12y ago
    I also highly doubt MS / Amazon / etc who want unlimited H1Bs would be paying these great programmers 100x or 1000x times their average programmers. Especially since they are not doing that right now. That implies either "average" programmers are being overpaid by a lot, or that great programmers are being taken advantage of. I highly doubt its the former, so hurrah for industry.
• fdesmet 12y ago
  pg may be right in some respects, but that doesn't mean his opposition is wrong. pg's argument cannot explain the reality that we've all seen: companies hire droves of H1B folks who are anything but exceptional. Only a fool fails to understand why.
• lukasm 12y ago
  Surprisingly, the solution is the free market. Make a pool of 5k visas with almost no requirements. Companies will bid on it. Add 50 visas for startup founders. Run this experiment for al least 6 years and measure the outcome. On the other hand, that maybe a good thing. If we have more "Silicon Valleys" there will be more innovations, more competition. We don't need one superpower a.k.a monopoly that comes with other risks like NSA. Price of starting a company is going down, markets are becoming more liquid therefore you don't need SV crazy money to get you going. What is more, you can reach ramen profitability faster outside SF, get more talent.
  • mohanmcgeek 12y ago
    6 years is a huge time scale. For reference: 10 years ago, China had trade deficits. The companies have a problem now, and it needs to be fixed now.
• dang 12y ago
  All: much of this thread is of low quality, below the standard that Hacker News discussion should adhere to, because it doesn't engage with what pg's essay actually says. It merely uses it as a trigger point for passions about other things, like H1Bs and Infosys. In other words it goes on a generic tangent, and generic tangents are the vectors we most need to avoid if we want discussions that are substantive instead of a handful of always-the-sames. When I see cases like this, I've been asking: would the Principle of Charity [1] have helped here? The answer is usually yes. In this case, the idea of pg lobbying to flood the market with cheap programming labor is not only demonstrably wrong from the article (which talks about a much smaller order of magnitude and endorses lowering H1B-style quotas), it fails a laugh test for anyone familiar with his arguments in general. The essay may be wrong, impractical, or impolitic; if you want to criticize it, there are plenty of legit criticisms you could make, starting with: how are we to objectively evaluate who the great programmers are, when it has often been argued (including by a certain essayist) that this can't be measured? But if you're going to dispute an article—any article—on Hacker News, you have a responsibility to engage with what it really says. The Principle of Charity is the best way I know of to formalize this requirement, and unless someone can make a case for any bad consequences of doing so, we're planning to add it officially to the HN Guidelines in the new year. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity and http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html
  • gpcz 12y ago
    If the comment quality has eroded, is that because the standards are too lax (in which adding a new rule will theoretically fix it), or is it because of an Eternal September-type issue? If it's an Eternal September issue, then you have an enforcement problem: the upvote/downvote system is democratic, so the community would be unable to police itself against the new rule. The obvious solution would be to have people "more equal" than others, but then there's a possibility of groupthink forming and/or resentment against perceived "censorship." These are classic problems of Internet forum governance. With all due respect to pg, one data point against the idea that it's just the standards being too lax is that this article was posted on Hacker News in the first place. The Hacker News guidelines state that most stories about politics are off-topic unless they are evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. I've never read tech news sites where the H1-B debate wasn't going on (I've been reading since 2001 or so), and based on the mountains of H1-B rhetoric I've read online, the arguments raised in the article are not new.
• Htsthbjig 12y ago
  Let's put an exemple of what PG is saying: Ellon Musk Ellon Musk is from South Africa, he was not born in America. He has created an enormous amount of wealth in the US. It is as simple as the US won't have self landing space rockets today without this man. Tesla would be bankrupt today, like Fisker. It seems clear to me after reading comments here that Americans feel entitled to the position of world rulers they enjoy today. As if the wealth they enjoy as hegemonic power was generated in America and not all around the world. Do you believe your salary is American generated? It is not. You print dollars that the world needs to use because it they don't sanctions are raised to them, or the US just invades them. But as PG is saying, the world using the dollar as world reserve could change overnight. You take your privileges for granted.
  • 1971genocide 12y ago
    I get the same feeling reading the comments in this thread. I can see why your comment would get down-voted. Most ppl in this thread do not want to hear the real fact that they are no different than the rest of the labour force. But because they grew up with an entitled expectation they cannot even imagine that someone out there can even be marginally talented as them.
    • amerliore 12y ago
      How does your logic apply to the superrich ownership class? Are they actually any more talented than the people they rule over? Why is questioning their wealth taboo, but undermining my modest career prospects virtuous?
  • ahomescu1 12y ago
    Minor nitpick: his name is spelled "Elon".
• rwallace 12y ago
  As an anti-immigration person, my position is not the one suggested by Paul Graham. I make no claims either way regarding the ease of training people to be programmers. My position is that we should put an end to this ridiculous 19th-century idea that you can only be a productive programmer if you are physically located in the US.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• epicureanideal 12y ago
  I think the best way to address everyone's concerns is to do a trustworthy study (trusted by both management and engineers) on the effects of opening the doors under different scenarios. How does the situation play out from everyone's perspective? If we open the doors too fast, do we get a huge drop in wages, everyone loses their houses, and students flee from tech education? Is there a rebound after N years? If we open the doors slower, are we able to maintain wages at their current level? After how many years have we fully absorbed the talent and / or the effects of importing more talent start to ADD to the compensation of current workers, based on the improved tech ecosystem? So, who can provide a model of what would happen at 3 month to 1 year intervals (I'd prefer shorter) in terms of salaries and rent, going out lets say 10-20 years? Also, maintaining wages at their current level may not be a good thing. It seems that they've been suppressed lately and so we'd be maintaining them at a suppressed level, but this is just to start the discussion.
• chetanahuja 12y ago
  Everybody seems to be discussing the pros and cons of H1-B and it's various misuses etc. It's very clear to anybody who's gone through the process (as I have, both as an employee and as an employer) that this is an extremely flawed process based on a mid-20th century model of industrial work in huge factories. But PG's essays is not about necessarily maintaining or expanding the existing flawed process itself. It's about the end goal of having a rational legal process to keep the tech ecosystem healthy. Some of the concrete ways I can think of that makes the situation better: 1) Right away, grant all tech degree holders from say, the worlds' top 200 universities immediate medium term visas equivalent to current OPT (Optional Practical Training periods which are short term). The current version of OPT allows about 18 months of work permit for jobs somewhat related to their degrees. An alternate, more politically palatable version of this might only include US universities and/or only post-graduate degrees. A very basic version of this idea can simply extend the term of the current OPT to say, 5 years. 2) Dissociate the granting of green cards to skilled employees from a particular employer. This is a major reason H1-B visa holders feel trapped with one employer (otherwise the mobility between jobs is pretty easy for H1-B holders). Let the skilled immigrant directly apply for permanent residency based on employable skills supported by, say, education, employment, compensation history so far in their careers. Make sure equity compensation is given weight here (to treat the startup ecosystem fairly). 3) Remove the per-country quotas on green cards. India and China having the same quota as say, to pick a random small country - Latvia, is ridiculous and quite possibly mirrors the old style racist immigration policies from the previous centuries. (1) and (2) will pretty much mitigate most of the issues foreign engineers face when participating the startup ecosystem. All three changes together will take away any motivation/power employers have over skilled employees in today's H1-B -> green card pathway based system. This should also assuage any valid wage suppression issues raised by some people on this forum.
• michaelochurch 12y ago
  I don't buy the overall argument here. Anti-immigration people say that instead of letting foreigners take these jobs, we should train more Americans to be programmers. I don't think most people who oppose the disingenuous invocation of "talent shortage" (while discriminating against women, minorities, and programmers over 40) by tech executives are "anti-immigration people". Immigration, at a reasonable rate, is a good thing. What the anti-immigration people don't understand is that there is a huge variation in ability between competent programmers and exceptional ones I hate being That Guy, but... [citation needed]. I don't exactly know who these anti-immigration people are, though. So they claim it's because they want to drive down salaries. But if you talk to startups, you find practically every one over a certain size has gone through legal contortions to get programmers into the the US, where they then paid them the same as they'd have paid an American. I don't think that it's just about driving down salaries. I think it's also about age discrimination (enabled by the ready availability of young programmers) and implicit expectations of obedience. In the US, you get talent or obedience but rarely both. Overseas, you have at least a chance of getting both (but if you're hiring on the cheap, the hit rate for talent is pretty low). He said "We'd hire 30 tomorrow morning." And this is one of the hot startups that always win recruiting battles. It's the same all over Silicon Valley. Startups are that constrained for talent. And yet they only want to hire pedigreed men under 40 who live in California... Somehow, I don't buy it. If you want more talent, raise wages. That's how economics works. Exceptional performance implies immigration. A country with only a few percent of the world's population will be exceptional in some field only if there are a lot of immigrants working in it. We're still the 3rd-largest country by population, and have some of the best land, and speak the dominant language... Still, I take no issue with what the H1-B program is supposed to be: high-talent immigration. I'm for that. But a true high-talent immigration would have, by definition, to be employer-independent, meaning that once you're in, you're in and can move about the economy just as easily as anyone else. One of the problems with the H1-B program is that it makes it hard for visa-holders to change jobs, and leaves them beholden to their employers because they can be deported if they're fired. If we're going to have a high-talent immigration program, we should have one... but that requires an unconditional "once you're in, you're in" policy, not some subordinate/contingent status. Technology gives the best programmers huge leverage I still haven't seen it. Upper-middle income is a nice improvement, but none of the people buying houses in Palo Alto or Mountain View are programmers. They're all VCs and product executives working 11-to-3 while the engineers do all the heavy lifting. We have the potential to ensure that the US remains a technology superpower just by letting in a few thousand great programmers a year. Why not just kill off the bro culture and the age discrimination? If we only need a few thousand more great programmers, then just making the industry more hospitable to women should do the job, right? If that's all we need, there's no reason we need our tech CEOs to lie to politicians about a "talent shortage" in order to get immigration policies changed. Again, I have no problem with high-talent immigration. I think that we absolutely should allow more upper-tier technical people (if at a level where they'll create more jobs than they take, and top programmers are at that level) into the country. But I don't think that the H1-B program, as it is structured, does the right thing. Once someone has it, it should be employer-independent.
• protomyth 12y ago
  First, characterizing anyone against the current H1B program as anti-immigration is a nice political tact but has nothing to do with the truth. It is a great way of framing the other side, but it is not a nice way to debate, but it is so common. The current H1B lowers prices of IT by mostly supplying body shop consultants to American corporations. Go look at the stats of who is getting the most H1Bs and the dirty tricks they are using to assure no citizen can apply for those positions. Now that the big players have been caught illegally colluding on depressing wages this is the next step to cheapen the wage pool. Second, the silicon valley folks could start recruiting a lot better. Since we talk about ageism[1] and sexism so much, perhaps some effort into recruiting could be spared. While we're at it, perhaps recruiting from other colleges that have programs[2]. Third, I'm all for legal immigration after all part of my family came that way, but I want the H1B program (and its hidden friends) removed. I want all the folks who came here and got degrees given first chance with NO indentured servitude to a single company. The American taxpayer had a hand in educating these students and it is high time we got value from it. Yes, we should speed up the path for STEM folks we need, but it should not be at a single company's whim. 1) It seems like hollywood actresses have about the same career length as programmers (30 is too old, 40 and 50 are un-hireable). 2) Microsoft in the 90's made it very clear they only wanted people from the school I attended for support since we had a nice midwestern accent.
• cryofan 12y ago
  I call on the local sheriff to investigate any promoters of mass immigration for treason. This is war. These immigrants are invaders, being brought in by the mega-corporations against the will of the people. This is an invasion, and the elite are on the side of the invaders. That is treason.
• bsbechtel 12y ago
  Wasn't it Ben Franklin that made a very similar appeal, regarding all occupations? The US should want the very best talent the world can produce, in every field, not just technology.
• swatow 12y ago
  I think it's useful to rephrase the emotive, and unclear language used in this debate (like "driving down prices") into the language of economics. Let's assume there are two types of programmers, normal and great. Now in a competitive market (which the labor market basically is, especially since the collusion issue has been dealt with), wages and employment levels are determined by supply and demand for each type of programmer. The current H-1B system allows in both kinds of programmers, increasing the supply of both kinds, and thereby lowering wages. It's important to note that pg makes a mistake when he conflates lowering wages, with H-1B employees earning less than Americans. In fact, if wages stayed the same then the H-1B program would have no effect. When startups complain they cant find the right people, what they mean is they can't afford the effective wage needed to steal people from Google or Facebook (there is always a number that would make them switch). Now in this framework, pg's proposal can be rephrased as "use H-1Bs to increase the supply of great programmers, instead of ordinary programmers". I agree this is a good proposal, because this gives the best tradeoff in terms of cost (i.e. whatever it is that makes the US limit immigration in the first place) vs benefit (reduced costs for employers). When analyzing this situation, it's very important to note that high wages are a bad thing in themselves. Just like high prices for milk are good for milk produces and bad for milk consumers, but given the option to create cheap milk (e.g. artificially) society should always take it. Some people like to compare programmers' situation to, for example, doctors. But to the extent that the AMA artificially limits supply, this is a bad thing for society. Trade unions or professional organizations that use political lobbying (or violence) to artificially limit supply, are harming society for their own benefit. People sometimes claim that tech is full of clueless nerds. I would argue that the "nerdiness" of tech workers also correlates with a decreased capacity for the self-deception needed to support AMA style unionization, and that this is a good thing. It might result in lower wages, all things being equal, but it also results in a better industry overall, and higher growth that itself creates higher wages.
  • karmajunkie 12y ago
    High wages are only a bad thing from the perspective of capital. From the perspective of the middle class, they distribute capital (and reward effort) more equitably.
• jleyank 12y ago
  Assuming linearity, there's 1/10 of the number of exceptional programmers in Canada vs the US (based on population). The educational system's are comparable, as are the social environments. Canadians can get TN visa to work in the US with a job offer and a CV at the port of entry, so there's no "paperwork problem". Although it's probably a bit more difficult than coming north as it's trivial coming north... So, if it's important to hoover up the rockstars from Canada, there's nothing stopping companies - they already have the weather advantage, and relo costs are pretty low for most singletons. The only negative is that the TN visa can't lead to a green card. But I doubt most startups are thinking "six years, get green cards for the staff".
• alecco 12y ago
  Why not both ways? We should seek to make countries open their immigration (not just USA) and we should create a worldwide union of IT workers to protect abuse like they do now with H1B.
• igonvalue 12y ago
  It seems plausible that there is a dearth of exceptional programmers, and that it would be difficult to rectify this by training more. But scarcity is a fact of life in any market; is there anything special about the labor market for high-end programmers? If the CEO that pg mentions really wanted 30 programmers tomorrow, why doesn't he attract them from other companies by offering them higher wages? Before you dismiss this as naive or impractical, let me point out that this approach has been empirically validated: Facebook was able to massively scale its developer workforce by poaching employees from Google.[0] I'm not even arguing for or against more immigration; it just seems strange to me that this essay is ignoring the elephant in the room, particularly when there's been a well-documented conspiracy among the biggest companies in the valley to suppress developer wages.[1] [0] http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/google-offers-staff-engineer-3-5-million-to-turn-down-facebook-offer/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/google-offers-staff-enginee... [1] http://pando.com/tag/techtopus/ http://pando.com/tag/techtopus/
• jeffdavis 12y ago
  "has gone through legal contortions to get programmers into the the US, where they then paid them the same as they'd have paid an American. Why would they go to extra trouble to get programmers for the same price?" I agree with the essay in general, but this seems like a fairly dumb question. Supply and demand says that a greater supply will tend to drive prices down. That may not really apply in this case, because a greater supply might result in a greater demand (for various plausible reasons); but the question just seems like a poorly-argued part of the essay.
• technoir 12y ago
  Some seem to believe that software developers are so focused on programming that they were never exposed to basic macroeconomics. If supply goes up, price goes down. It may be better for employers, and the economy as a whole depending on how you measure, but it is not in the best economic interest of those already selling their development labor.
• WalterBright 12y ago
  The irony of this is that the old USSR would not allow their highly educated people to leave, fearing brain drain. Then the US does not allow highly educated people in. And of course there was the post-WW2 gold rush to grab as many german scientists and engineers as possible, and I don't think the results of that for the US and the USSR are in dispute. It's like the other irony that we use tariffs to 'protect' domestic industry and embargoes to 'punish' foreign industry, yet they are merely different words for the same thing.
  • logicchains 12y ago
    >It's like the other irony that we use tariffs to 'protect' domestic industry and embargoes to 'punish' foreign industry, yet they are merely different words for the same thing. And the tragedy is that the majority of voters don't understand this, when it would only take a few hours of econ 101 to teach.
• WalterBright 12y ago
  The fascinating thing about the modern internet is it has made the development of the D programming language possible. The core development team consists of people from all over the world. They are highly competent, and few companies could afford to hire any of them, let alone convince them to relocate across the world. I just think it's awesome.
• DenisM 12y ago
  I thought a lot about it, and I think I found a simple solution: Keep the current h1b caps, and then auction off each visa to the highest bidder. The auction proceeds must go to the employee in question, with jail term for anyone trying to claw it back. What this will do is drive the wages for the immigrant engineers ever higher, by extension raising the wages of Americans as well. It will also make sure only the best ones can be brought in, stopping the "cheap import" problem, and the higher wage will give the best incentive to come. Resultingly, foreign companies will be drained of talent, and American companies will become even stronger against weaker adversaries, and employing much of the best talent in the world.
  • LetBinding 12y ago
    Except this will only help large employers like Google and completely screw startups. How do you compute wages when it is paid in terms of equity? 1% of Google was worth nothing in 1995. It's worth a lot today. How do you identify if a startup is the next Google when calculating wages for your auction? The only winners of your auction will be mega corps who will pay a huge salary upfront with no equity.
    • DenisM 12y ago
      It's not a net loss for startups - the ones past series B can easily price their options. The earlier stage ones will be cut out, that's true. To be honest, any effort to raise wages will cause that effect, and it's no reason to oppose better pay for engineers. On the other hand, an immigrant, once settled, will accumulate wealth and eventually become a startup founder herself, without as much need for investment. That would be a boon for the earliest stage part of the ecosystem.
  • solomatov 12y ago
    This won't work. H1B aren't only for software developers, but for different kinds of specialists. For example, doctors, who are having residency in US often use this visa. However, resident's salary is smaller than software developer's.
    • 12y ago
• jacalata 12y ago
  When I talk to startup founders, I find ones that offer me a 20% pay cut from my current job, a load of bullshit about how exciting their options are as the 156th employee, and a refusal to negotiate on salary, followed by seeing them in the paper complaining that there are no engineers in Seattle the week after I refuse their offer and tell them that it is too low.
• patronagezero 12y ago
  Surrender your welfare programs (social security, public schools, the postal office, health insurance, the war machine, NASA, etc) and I'll be on board with completely open immigration. Barring that, you're just another corporate shill looking to profit from the ignorance of the masses.
• Xatter 12y ago
  Maybe we should look at what the data have to say and then formulate our opinions from evidence? http://www.epi.org/press/epi-analysis-finds-shortage-stem-workers/ http://www.epi.org/press/epi-analysis-finds-shortage-stem-wo... http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-i... If you're going to dispute these findings I look forward to reading your peer reviewed published papers.
• spinlock 12y ago
  I seriously doubt the wisdom of a CEO who is willing to go from 70 to 100 programmers in one morning. What's he going to do after lunch?
• thomasfoster96 12y ago
  It's a bit disappointing that immigration descends to bring a shouting match over who's more patriotic far too often. Paul Graham's essay is actually pretty good - it tells gets that we're ending up in a world where the skilled workforce is not heavily biased towards stable, highly developed countries. Rather, countries like India, China, etc now have a skilled work force probably out numbering the long-time developed countries.
• silverlake 12y ago
  There are a number of problems with this argument. (1) Great programmers are not evenly distributed around the world because most places lack good educational systems. It makes sense that most are in 1st world countries. (2) Big companies have offices in India, China and elsewhere. Immigration policy does not prevent Google from hiring every great programmer on the planet. What's their complaint? (3) Do many companies need great programmers? Sorry, but your web/mobile app isn't rocket surgery. (4) For every single product on the planet the market finds a price to match supply & demand. Why are tech jobs different? $200k in SF is worse than $100K in Dallas. Increase salaries; problem solved. (5) PG says startups are DESPERATE! Yet they won't consider remote employees, so I guess they aren't that desperate. (6) No one can spot a "great" programmer in a pile of resumes. Maybe your interviews and hiring committees suck? The least controversial policy is 1st world countries give their foreign STEM grads Green Cards (or equivalent). The 2nd easy solution is to pay top programmers lots more money. If they are indeed worth "100X or even 1000X" more than the average, it makes economic sense to pay at least 5X more. Only hedge funds seem to understand this. Finally, any company with 200+ employees can put an office in India/China and hire everyone they want. You can either wait for politicians to change immigration laws, or make remote offices work. Which is more likely?
  • jqm 12y ago
    "Desperate" but won't hire anyone over 35 or who doesn't look like they "fit in", regardless of ability....
• sgnelson 12y ago
  My question is why should we only apply this to programmers? What about Mechanical engineers? What about Machinists (there is quite the demand and a very low supply of them if you talk to many manufacturers), what about Doctors, Nurses? Farmers? (there's not much demand that I've heard about the need for farmers, but I think they're important, so I'd like to bring them in to the Country.) Do we only let people in because of the skills they have? What about the next set of skills that will become more important in the future? What specific set of skills do we let in, which ones do we keep out? What about people who have the potential, but currently lack the skills? How do we find those people? I don't believe in exceptional programmers, I believe in exceptional thinkers. Programming is a skill, just like any other skill. Some people will be better at it than others. But it's a skill that can be taught. People who are more capable of being the "great thinkers," are more likely to be a better programmer than not, not because of the programming language they know, but because they're able to solve problems. If I ran a company, these are the people I want. But then we come full circle, who are these people, and do I only let them in because they're "special?" I also think that way too much attention is paid to what Paul Graham says. Yes, he was successful with certain things, but that doesn't mean he's all knowing and all wise. As to my biases, I'm all for immigration, but not so much for the H1B program (for ethical reasons, I'm not a big fan of the whole "he has skills that no one else has, so he gets the golden ticket to the chocolate factory. To me, that just means that he/she had a more privileged upbringing than 60-80% of the world. ie, access to clean water, food, education, electricity, computers.)
  • LetBinding 12y ago
    Uh.. H-1B visas are used to for mechanical engineers, nurses, doctors, and MBA grads all the time. The reason you don't know them is because this is a tech-focussed forum and the absolute number of these visas going to the other professions is fewer. But graduates of top civil engineering, nursing, biology, medical, neuroscience, physics, etc programs in the country primarily use the H-1B visa for post study employment.
• gstar 12y ago
  I wonder if it's as simple as population ratios for programming talent. Kenyan (distance) and Jamaican (sprinters) runners offer a counterpoint here, the world's best are all from tiny regions, in fact, some are from the same family, and most all train together. http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/11/01/241895965/how-one-kenyan-tribe-produces-the-worlds-best-runners http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/11/01/241895965/how-... http://elitetrack.com/blogs-details-4075/ http://elitetrack.com/blogs-details-4075/
• lukastsai 12y ago
  a mobile readable version: https://getscroll.com/r/6mzz6 https://getscroll.com/r/6mzz6
• pskittle 12y ago
  late to the party but hoping someone can answer a quick question. I'm one of those people trying to learn how to code. How i do I know i'm on track to being better than a competent programmer?
• inflagranti 12y ago
  I know I'll go of a on a tangent here, too, and won't directly address the PG posting, but it really saddens me that every time there is discussion about immigration on HN, it always degenerates into an us vs them argumentation between employer and employee and how each side can maximise their profit. Rarely anyone seems to care about the social or humanitarian angle of it, not to mention the historical significance to the US as a country. Is it really that controversial to allow other people that didn't win the birth-lottery a chance to work here if they proven themselves to be qualified enough? Isn't that what the US was founded on and what at least the H1B was exactly meant for? And can anyone really honestly argue that the 65k H1Bs that are awarded each year could put considerable pressure on the average wage in a country of 300M (especially considering the strict wage requirements which people seem to happily ignore in most arguments here). Why are people so upset about a few immigrants - fearing for their wages - when clearly the wage-fixing amongst Google, Apple & Co. had a much more severe influence? Isn't this obviously the typical spiel of blaming and fearing the immigrants for situations much better explained by internal actors that should be feared (and possibly punished)?
• cplease 12y ago
  I'm not sure what PG thinks is so holy about the software industry if his whole argument boils down to the fact that the USA has 5% of the world's population. By the same logic, 95% of the great plumbers, carpenters, electricians, accountants, lawyers, janitors etc. are abroad as well, let them in too as long as companies here want to hire them, until the USA has > 50% of the world population?
• angry_octet 12y ago
  At the core of PG's post are two related errors (1) that US companies, without immigration barriers, would choose to recruit these top 5% programmers, and (2) that these 5% would want to move to the US. Whether companies even can select out this 1-in-20 person is implausible, especially from overseas. The top 25% maybe. I can only ascribe (1) to an unreasoning faith in American capitalism and (2) to a lack of travel and living overseas. In my experience the 5% programmers are already taken. America does need to reduce the immigration admin burden to encourage innovation, but its only a part of the problem. And maybe American companies should try harder to innovate in other countries.
• fsloth 12y ago
  For an arguments sake: Perhaps what could be changed here is the scale of time from months to years and a shift in the chosen solution space from harvesting to nurturing? PG requests more star quality programmers right now. Perhaps a more fruitfull approach would be to figure out what makes great programmers great and figure out how to teach people to be more like them. I.e. hunter gathering for roots versus figuring out how to plant a vegetable garden. What is so great about good programmers? Love of quality, learning by doing - beyond a certain ability of concentration and verbal acuteness I'm fairly confident these could be taught to people in structured form far better than how the current institutions manage. Universities were created first and foremost to train people in complex but established and repetitive procedures - not to be crafting shops even though the latter would benefit learning the art of programming far better. Why not pour the funds required for lobbing into attempts at improving programmer education, I'm sure the ROI in the latter would far outpace the former in the long run.
• vproman 12y ago
  If depressing compensation isn't a goal of tech companies, than why the collusion between many of the large tech companies via their anti-poaching agreements? Compensate them with the benefits, environment and challenges that will keep them, instead of colluding to prevent their mobility through a free market. Also, if "natural born, exceptional" programmers are so rare, would you not have to invite 999 "competent" programmers, of which we supposedly need no more of, in order to get that 1 "exceptional" programmer which Graham claims we desperately need? So to get thousands of exceptional programmers, how many competent programmers would have to be invited into the workforce as well?
• bahmutov 12y ago
  You want great programmers? Exceptional? Why would any exceptional programmer go to US on H1B visa? It is such a short leash - no way anyone truly great would trade Europe or Asia for a chance to be a slave in a cubicle, ready to be fired at moment's notice. You want exceptional programmers, Paul? I will tell you a way to find the truly great ones, and promise that other developers will NOT be against it. Any developer can come here, provided that the hiring company: 1. Pays him / her $1,000,000 (1 million US dollars) per year, tied to inflation. I don't care how you search or decide, but that is the best indicator of a truly exceptional programmer - paying him / her a LOT. 2. If the contract is broken for any reason, the exceptional developer gets the severance package, for example a 6 months salary. Hmm, I do not see you or anyone else advocating for exceptional salaries to pay for an exceptional programming talent. Case closed.
• davidw 12y ago
  I decided to write about this myself, as a place to collect a lot of my thoughts on the errant economic and moral reasoning I see on these threads: http://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-jobs/ http://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-jobs...