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What you touched at the end is part of a bigger problem, I think - people who write something as inconsequential as a shopping website, or Yet Another Chat App,

What you touched at the end is part of a bigger problem, I think - people who write something as inconsequential as a shopping website, or Yet Another Chat App, are not worth $150,000/year. Maybe one out of one-hundred of those folks could use their talent on something that demands a wage like that outside of the absurdity that is the Bay Area. I don't feel the talent pool will be diluted so much as your run-of-the-mill developer won't be expecting a six-figure salary coming out of college anymore.

pastProlog 12y ago
Yes. Over 100,000 H1-B's are coming over every year. This keeps discussing exceptional programmers. You mean we need more than 100,000 exceptional programmers coming over every year? The reality is that the idea that even 10,000 of these people are exceptional programmers is a laugh. Every year 100,000 H1-Bs can come in. To believe this article, we'd have to pretend that we have a big wall up preventing these dozens or hundreds of exceptional programmers from immigrating to the US, and completely ignore the existence of the H1-B visa and the hundreds of thousands pouring in every year.
- kaykay 12y ago
  Where did you get the > 100000 H1B's number?
  - pastProlog 12y ago
    The US State Department, this page has a graph of H1-B visa issuances and links to some of the reports - http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/law-and-policy/statistics/graphs.html http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/law-and-policy... The US Citizenship and Immigration Services web page has numbers as well.
  - Terr_ 12y ago
    Easy enough to find through the Wikipedia citations. 153,223 visas were issued in 2013, although some of that is to continue the presence of people who were already here in previous years... It's not all new arrivals.
- briandear 12y ago
  So the problem isn't the immigration restriction, it's the lack of screening. Using PG's logic, all of those 100,000 should be 'exceptional' or else we're wasting tens of thousands of visa slots that should be going to the 'exceptional.' And how is 'exceptional' determined? We should let everyone in with the hope that some percentage happens to be exceptional? What about the non exceptional? What would that do to the overall quality of coding if you 'dump' 95,000 unexceptional programmers with the intent of harvesting 5,000 exceptional ones. Is it fair to suggest that the Infosys recruiters aren't hiring 'exceptional' but lower cost? I get recruiter emails all the time; several per day, yet never once have I received an email from Accenture, Infosys or any similar company known for hiring lots or foreign workers. So interesting that their shortage obviously isn't such that they'd resort to bugging me. Of course, maybe my years of experience and companies I worked for would indicate that that I would not be as cheap as the thousands they bring over from India. Nor would I put up with being locked into a position as an effective indentured servant. So many it isn't that there's a shortage of engineers but a shortage of ones that are willing to work under conditions common to those who desire to import more labor. Facebook doesn't necessarily want to hire more imported devs, but an increase of supply would allow them to have a larger talent pool at a lower cost. Of course, this discussion is a bit old school.. With remote working, geography is somewhat irrelevant. Perhaps instead if changing immigration instead PG promoted companies embracing a remote culture -- then you could have the best of the best with minimal beareaucratic entanglements. After all, given that, according to PG, it's about 'exceptional' talent, working remotely shouldn't require the same level of management overhead as would a lower quality dev 'sweatshop.' However the fact that isn't even being discussed makes one believe that this isn't about finding 'exceptional' talent as much as it's about lowering the scarcity of developers willing to work for lower wages than they might have received otherwise. Under the PG logic, we ought to simply open the floodgates to all people, because inevitably from the multitudes there's bound to be a few geniuses. But, does the cost of those geniuses outweigh the costs to everyone else? Should we strip mine the Rocky Mountains to find an ounce of gold? I don't know the answer to the question and I am not advocating either way, however when a company like Facebook begins asking for something, I question the motives -- I don't think Facebook has a talent shortage at all, they have a desire to pay less for their inputs. Which is a fair desire; however we shouldn't just blindly allow policy decisions to happen just because some tech 'leaders' ask for it. It is and always has been about the bottom line.
rgbrgb 12y ago
> something as inconsequential as a shopping website, or Yet Another Chat App Alright so first off, 150k will give you a comfortable upper middle class lifestyle in SF/SV (assuming you have no dependents, in which case it's just middle class). It's really not the astronomical salary that you seem to be imagining. Secondly, it is completely impractical to pay people based on the "difficulty" of their work. Difficulty, even if we can agree on a definition, does not correlate with revenue. Revenue is traditionally where salaries come from. Intuitively, if person X in a team of n people writes an app that produces profit Z, then it would make sense for person X to get something on the order of Z/n -- not 100k because it's just a chat app. This is not actually how it works because of some artificial constraints. I believe the calculation in most cases looks more like pay = 120k + 20k if in expensive city + MIN(.01 * profit, 150k).
- frostmatthew 12y ago
  > Alright so first off, 150k will give you a comfortable upper middle class lifestyle in SF/SV...It's really not the astronomical salary that you seem to be imagining. If we're going to say we shouldn't limit ourselves to 5% of workers then perhaps we shouldn't limit ourselves to 5% of the land. There's plenty of places in the country where 150k would be a very comfortable salary.
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- pastProlog 12y ago
  Also throw in all the college debt they require you to pile on before being hired, not to mention the hours spent studying instead of working. And that it is a cyclical feast or famine industry where it ping pongs between 70 hour weeks of deadline crunches and post-dotcom, post-bank bust periods where no one is hiring. And that the career of many ends at 40. Plus as you mentioned, the San Francisco rents for those requiring you work in the city.
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pastProlog 12y ago

Yes. Over 100,000 H1-B's are coming over every year. This keeps discussing exceptional programmers. You mean we need more than 100,000 exceptional programmers coming over every year? The reality is that the idea that even 10,000 of these people are exceptional programmers is a laugh. Every year 100,000 H1-Bs can come in. To believe this article, we'd have to pretend that we have a big wall up preventing these dozens or hundreds of exceptional programmers from immigrating to the US, and completely ignore the existence of the H1-B visa and the hundreds of thousands pouring in every year.

kaykay 12y ago
Where did you get the > 100000 H1B's number?
- pastProlog 12y ago
  The US State Department, this page has a graph of H1-B visa issuances and links to some of the reports - http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/law-and-policy/statistics/graphs.html http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/law-and-policy... The US Citizenship and Immigration Services web page has numbers as well.
- Terr_ 12y ago
  Easy enough to find through the Wikipedia citations. 153,223 visas were issued in 2013, although some of that is to continue the presence of people who were already here in previous years... It's not all new arrivals.
briandear 12y ago
So the problem isn't the immigration restriction, it's the lack of screening. Using PG's logic, all of those 100,000 should be 'exceptional' or else we're wasting tens of thousands of visa slots that should be going to the 'exceptional.' And how is 'exceptional' determined? We should let everyone in with the hope that some percentage happens to be exceptional? What about the non exceptional? What would that do to the overall quality of coding if you 'dump' 95,000 unexceptional programmers with the intent of harvesting 5,000 exceptional ones. Is it fair to suggest that the Infosys recruiters aren't hiring 'exceptional' but lower cost? I get recruiter emails all the time; several per day, yet never once have I received an email from Accenture, Infosys or any similar company known for hiring lots or foreign workers. So interesting that their shortage obviously isn't such that they'd resort to bugging me. Of course, maybe my years of experience and companies I worked for would indicate that that I would not be as cheap as the thousands they bring over from India. Nor would I put up with being locked into a position as an effective indentured servant. So many it isn't that there's a shortage of engineers but a shortage of ones that are willing to work under conditions common to those who desire to import more labor. Facebook doesn't necessarily want to hire more imported devs, but an increase of supply would allow them to have a larger talent pool at a lower cost. Of course, this discussion is a bit old school.. With remote working, geography is somewhat irrelevant. Perhaps instead if changing immigration instead PG promoted companies embracing a remote culture -- then you could have the best of the best with minimal beareaucratic entanglements. After all, given that, according to PG, it's about 'exceptional' talent, working remotely shouldn't require the same level of management overhead as would a lower quality dev 'sweatshop.' However the fact that isn't even being discussed makes one believe that this isn't about finding 'exceptional' talent as much as it's about lowering the scarcity of developers willing to work for lower wages than they might have received otherwise. Under the PG logic, we ought to simply open the floodgates to all people, because inevitably from the multitudes there's bound to be a few geniuses. But, does the cost of those geniuses outweigh the costs to everyone else? Should we strip mine the Rocky Mountains to find an ounce of gold? I don't know the answer to the question and I am not advocating either way, however when a company like Facebook begins asking for something, I question the motives -- I don't think Facebook has a talent shortage at all, they have a desire to pay less for their inputs. Which is a fair desire; however we shouldn't just blindly allow policy decisions to happen just because some tech 'leaders' ask for it. It is and always has been about the bottom line.

rgbrgb 12y ago

> something as inconsequential as a shopping website, or Yet Another Chat App Alright so first off, 150k will give you a comfortable upper middle class lifestyle in SF/SV (assuming you have no dependents, in which case it's just middle class). It's really not the astronomical salary that you seem to be imagining. Secondly, it is completely impractical to pay people based on the "difficulty" of their work. Difficulty, even if we can agree on a definition, does not correlate with revenue. Revenue is traditionally where salaries come from. Intuitively, if person X in a team of n people writes an app that produces profit Z, then it would make sense for person X to get something on the order of Z/n -- not 100k because it's just a chat app. This is not actually how it works because of some artificial constraints. I believe the calculation in most cases looks more like pay = 120k + 20k if in expensive city + MIN(.01 * profit, 150k).

frostmatthew 12y ago
> Alright so first off, 150k will give you a comfortable upper middle class lifestyle in SF/SV...It's really not the astronomical salary that you seem to be imagining. If we're going to say we shouldn't limit ourselves to 5% of workers then perhaps we shouldn't limit ourselves to 5% of the land. There's plenty of places in the country where 150k would be a very comfortable salary.
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pastProlog 12y ago
Also throw in all the college debt they require you to pile on before being hired, not to mention the hours spent studying instead of working. And that it is a cyclical feast or famine industry where it ping pongs between 70 hour weeks of deadline crunches and post-dotcom, post-bank bust periods where no one is hiring. And that the career of many ends at 40. Plus as you mentioned, the San Francisco rents for those requiring you work in the city.
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