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On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs

186 points by frostmatthew 12y ago

fhadley 12y ago
I don't read a lot of techcrunch to be honest, so maybe this is their standard fare and isn't worth the time I'll take to write this. On the other hand, I dislike that this man just painted my entire industry as xenophobes, without so much as a quote from the party in question. Is this acceptable now? I certainly reject the idea of a world in which psuedo-journalistic conjecture is taken at face value, without so much as an anonymous source.
- mrottenkolber 12y ago
  It's usually better to not go TC et al. I just wanted to see how to write an article from an HN threads a few hours earlier.
lotsofmangos 12y ago
I was working a minimum wage factory job in an area where it is very easy to get a job not that long ago, (it took 4 days from the phone call) and I asked my line manager if they had problems hiring. 'Yes', I was told, hiring was a major problem and keeping staff on was really difficult. I asked why they though that was. Apparently they think it is because state benefits are too high. edit - I'm still working it, I am rubbish with cash. They are not bad people, but they honestly cannot see that they may actually save money by paying slightly more. I am planning to point this out in the next week or two, but luckily I have nearly sorted my cash-flow issue, so I can afford the license.
- zanny 12y ago
  I always have fun telling executives "how much are you spending each week?" "oh, so you aren't paying your employees even half that, and that is before taxes, rent, etc" "you have a labor shortage why, again?"
  - Terr_ 12y ago
    CTO flies back and forth from home every 2-3 weeks... Rest of company has travel freeze. Bah.
- marincounty 12y ago
  I'm curious about the town you are talking about. I've seen the finances of people who rely on state benefits, and in the Bay Area--unless you have a bunch of kids(afdc) and were lucky enough to find section 8 housing; the state benefits are not enough to keep a room--you can eat though. I know too many homeless people who tried to get state benefits, and the help they recieved was tiny, and had a time limit. My best friend who passed away was on SSDI. He knew he was lucky he qualified for SSDI, but he was always broke. I saw his checks and it was just enough to get through the month. People used to rib him about buying a cup of coffee at Starbucks, at the expense of The Federal Government, but they had no idea just how little money he was receiving.
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    Am in the south west of the UK. 2 to 3 days a week of crap work covers my rent and most of my food and gives me loads of free time for pissing about on my own stuff. I avoid benefits, not through any particular ideology but more because I find them more trouble than they are worth. I sometimes earn decent money, but I find I get stressed as hell in offices and I don't get motivated enough by money to make up for it, so I am avoiding those kind of jobs for a bit.
twelvechairs 12y ago
What the article neglects to mention is that if the US doesn't capture workers (and SF doesn't work to lower living costs) its inertia for the tech industry (which admittedly currently seems unstoppable) will wane and other countries will pick up the slack.
waterlesscloud 12y ago
It would be helpful to have some concrete examples of companies who are hurting from this shortage. What projects, specifically, are they not getting done? What specific requirements are they not able to find in potential employees? Why, specifically, is training not an option? How, specifically, is inability to get this project going hurting them? What specific compensation are they offering? If you want some trust, you're going to need to be forthcoming with specifics, not vague talk about top 5% coders and "We need 30 more great programmers".
- mgkimsal 12y ago
  "Why, specifically, is training not an option?" That would take too much time! Better to spend years lobbying to expand incoming worker numbers vs spending less time training people in the skills you need (short term). Longer term look to invest in education programs here too, but hey, that costs money. Better to keep billions overseas, then complain about the state of the country's education system, than pay taxes on the money and have those taxes help better the very country you're complaining about.
- amerliore 12y ago
  Training is seen as competitive suicide, because while you bear the costs of training, your competitors can then poach your trained employees by offering a salary that is less than your total cost for that employee but more than the salary you pay that employee. X = cost to train employee Y = salary of employee Competitor pays Z such that Y < Z < Y+X and puts you out of business. The second factor is that if you raise wages for one person, then the rest of your workforce expects those wages. So a 10% salary increase for one person quickly becomes an across the board 10% bump on your personnel costs. Bribing, lobbying, paying PR firms, pulling the wool over people's eyes is all judged to be a smaller expense and a worthwhile cost-saving measure. The economically viable solution is to have schools do the training, but universities are likely not the best model for getting good tech workers.
  - pm24601 12y ago
    > Training is seen as competitive suicide, because while you bear the costs of training, your competitors can then poach your trained employees by offering a salary that is less than your total cost for that employee but more than the salary you pay that employee. Then I guess the company will just have to do without. Seriously, if the need is so great then maybe, just maybe the company should do the training and should reward employees for staying. Otherwise, maybe the need really isn't so great.
michaelochurch 12y ago
"VCs" aren't responsible at all, as far as I can tell, for the Google/Apple/et-al wage-fixing that cost the trust of engineers. That shouldn't be pinned on them, and it certainly shouldn't be pinned on Paul Graham. What VCs do that is wrong is that they've created a culture of co-funding and collusion-- a feudal reputation economy-- which thwarts independence in decision making and generates a small set of big winners before startups can start hiring and get to the market. Comparing notes on who they like and who they don't is sleazy and creates an in-crowd that is mostly incompetent, but it's not illegal, and it's a subtle-enough offense that average engineers (who probably have little interest in being founders, anyway) dislike them. As for why they do this, it comes from the fact that building a good portfolio, though technically their job, is a game at which feedback cycles are slow. You might have a strategy that is going to make 40% annual returns (on average) each year, but if macroeconomic events take you down over 3 years, you don't get to prove yourself. So, the VCs have (justifiably) learned that their career benefit is maximized not by building the best portfolio, but by having association (even if the percentage they end up with is tiny) with the very-rare "home runs" that happen every 5 years or so. That requires them to spread information around and create the culture of co-funding, much like an academic department where 20 names get on a paper when 2 researchers did most of the work. It's not that we "don't trust" the technology elite. We know what their economic interests are and we trust them to pursue them. And that's fine, if this pursuit involves openly advocating what is best for them and what they believe is best for us and for the country. What's not morally OK is lying to the government about a "talent shortage". If they want to come out and say, "our economic interests favor <X>, and here's why we think our interests are aligned with yours", I'd be fine with that. Just don't fucking lie. Immigration is a complex topic and there's no simple answer. "Talent shortage" is a lie, and the ethical status of claiming one exists actually is black-and-white: it's fucking wrong. There's no talent shortage when it's this hard for women, or minorities, or people over 40, or people who spent their careers outside of California, to get themselves taken seriously in tech. The problem with FWD.us is that they're using their wealth to get access to government officials, and then lying to them, with the intention of bringing economic changes that may or may not harm us, but we've been left out of the discussion.
- S4M 12y ago
  You really shouldn't use any opportunity to bring on your usual thesis - VCs collude to fund only startups created by "connected" founders - when it is so out of topic.
jacobolus 12y ago
On one of the previous threads about this topic, someone suggested that accepting H1-B applicants in order from higher to lower salaries instead of based on a lottery would clear up a lot of the lottery spots that currently go to the below-market-wage-indentured-servant type shops to be used for more deserving companies and applicants. Seems like a solid change to me, without an obvious downside. (But I am not an expert and haven’t done any detailed analysis, so maybe this would have negative consequences I’m not anticipating.) Another change that might be a big improvement, it seems to me, is to let H1-B visa holders more easily change jobs once they’re here, without so much risk or paperwork hoops to jump through. If it were easier for H1-B workers to switch jobs, then abusive employers would have less leverage to exploit them (forced overtime, below-market wages, etc.).
- bradleyjg 12y ago
  As much as it may sometimes seem like it is, the H1-B isn't a programming or IT visa. It's applicable to a wide range of specialty occupations, across the entire nation. The suggested change would block out virtually all applicants from many other professions.
  - nitrogen 12y ago
    Regardless of the industry, if the H-1B is designed to allow employers to hire specialists they can't find locally, then a salary-sorted approval process should still be desirable. Machine shops fighting over top-1% welders with deep materials science knowledge should be no different to software shops fighting over top-1% developers with deep computer science knowledge.
    - bradleyjg 12y ago
      That'd be fine if the applicant pool was first sorted by profession and geography and like compared against like. But how do you decide the distribution of visas across those sub-groups?
      - 12y ago
joshAg 12y ago
I think one way to fix the trust issue outlined here would be not tying the H1B visa to a specific job, but instead giving it for a defined period of time, eg 5 years, and not making it dependent on the employer. I know at least a few people on H1B visas who celebrated getting a green card with 2 weeks notice and a nice $20k/year raise to do the exact same job at a competitor.
hw 12y ago
Instead of a 'shortage of workers', the situation should be more adeptly described as a 'shortage of skilled workers'. I do think there are tech workers floating around, but the really good ones are hard to come by. Extending immigration helps, but does not solve it, as only a bunch of the pool are actually good talent. Maybe immigration needs to be tweaked to help filter down the pool even more, for example, raising the minimum H1B wage for its skill levels. A disparity in the minimum wage only enables companies to bring in workers that are 'meh' and only pay the minimum cause it's cheap labor, albeit not top talent. Question for the anti-immigration folks is, if immigration was reduced or stopped entirely, would that necessarily result in higher wages for everyone else? Are talented engineers really not being able to find a job that wants to pay what they want? Are the decent, run-of-the-mill engineers not able to find a job that pays market or slightly below market? Would companies then outsource even more anyway?
- cellis 12y ago
  >> would that necessarily result in higher wages for everyone else? Unless companies like Google relocate ( to where? ) then yes, wages would absolutely rise, because they don't allow WFH [1], ergo the only engineers available would be those in the Bay Area, NYC, etc. No, they wouldn't outsource critical infrastructure to places like India or China, who hacked them. I also don't see them picking up and leaving and going to e.g. Vancouver. I think the only way to address this "great engineer" thing without American engineers crying foul is to gasp introduce standardized testing that all the American tech companies -- who can't get the amazing talent -- agree upon and then select the 99th percentile of the candidates that pass it and pay them in the 99th percentile of wages for the bay area. This would be an objective measure and Americans wouldn't be suspicious of whatever criteria VCs/founders use to measure "great programming ability". Make the interviews and the criteria public, bring it to the light, then people would be more inclined to believe them. Right now I simply hear a bunch of hand-wavey math and see a bunch of rich people whining about how they don't have engineers to build their things. Yes, I know there are flaws with standardized tests, but it's the best of bad things. [1] Most companies. Yahoo notoriously, but most companies aren't in favor of allowing WFH.
  - 12y ago
gsibble 12y ago
This whole set of lies really makes me angry. Ever notice how it's only the most powerful of powerful who complain about "talent shortage"? Those who have the most to gain from reducing technology salaries? Sure, you might hear about it being a competitive market with high salaries and all, but that's what it's supposed to be! Engineering talent is in high demand and salaries are supposed to go up! If anything, they aren't going up enough. Programer's salaries as a whole have stayed nearly even since 1992 [1]. Furthermore, profit margins in the technology sector are remarkably high with very little spent on HR compared to another highly profitable sector: banking. Highly skilled STEM graduates frequently choose to go into finance because they can make more over a longer career without a cap on their income. The ratio of revenue to HR costs at tech companies and finance companies is way out of whack. If tech wants the best workers, there are plenty of willing and capable Americans ready to pick up the work. Just fucking pay for it. Stop lying through your teeth that this is about talent. It isn't. It's about your stockholders. That's why you only hear the most powerful bitching about it since they are the only ones who would benefit. [1] http://www-tc.pbs.org/prod-media/newshour/photos/2013/07/18/IT_average_salaries-unemployment_chart_business_desk.jpg http://www-tc.pbs.org/prod-media/newshour/photos/2013/07/18/...
- mgkimsal 12y ago
  " but that's what it's supposed to be! Engineering talent is in high demand and salaries are supposed to go up!" And this is the other half of the labor/capital equation, doing its damnedest to keep expenses low and profits high. It's supposed to work like this. :/
- blazespin 12y ago
  Agreed, it is brutal how awful the zucks and pgs of the world argue about this. What I find bizarre is aren't they aware of how dishonest / douchey they come off when they fail to mention the impact on wages? There is a way to solve the immigration problem. Create a system where the companies can hire people if they poney up 50k. That way there will be minimal impact on salaries and companies can get all the super stars they can afford.
- curiousDog 12y ago
Spooky23 12y ago
The whole premise of this "crisis" is that folks want to have their cake and eat it too. Feels to me like this is more about convenience for financiers. It's easier to do due diligence when everything you do goes through the same funnel a few minutes away from your office. Much easier than flying to Denver, New York or Chicago. Instead of importing more workers into the overcrowded and expensive valley, maybe export the jobs to one of the other cities in the US with skilled workers. At this point, New York City is practically a cheap market.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
jacquesm 12y ago
This whole immigration thing sounds like an excellent opportunity for someone to put together a better way to work remotely. We're all supposed to be internet savvy, why can't we come up with something better than skype and github? Is something better even required? Why the emphasis on getting people into the country? We're selling virtual presence solutions to industry and telepresence to doctors and we're trying for surgeons. IT is the easiest job to do from a remote location. I work with people every other day that I've never even met in person and I have never visited the co-location of a large chunk of the server hardware that I've worked with over the last couple of years. Why the accent on physical presence?
- ricardobeat 12y ago
  I believe we have plenty of tools that do a great job of facilitating communication, project management and work activities for remote workers. What is missing is the willingness from companies to accept these workers, not the tools.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  Deficient management skills. And worse, management that won't acknowledge it's deficient. Managing a remote team is a skill, or more accurately a set of skills. No, you probably can't do it well right out of the gate. Yes, you'll probably have to work harder at it than you would having a team in one open plan office. Yes, it will take you time to learn. But if you're really being held back by a lack of engineering talent, if that's genuinely keeping you from being more successful, you'd be much better off if you put the time and effort into learning it.
- zaroth 12y ago
  Tele-presence has a long way to go, and the network infrastructure too, but it will obviously, eventually, get to the point where it's indistinguishable from being in the same room, minus the physical contact. But to your point, it's not even a given that would help much. Even with that, you still suffer mostly from time zones. You're just not going to collaborate the same ways with someone on the other side of the planet. That just means barriers to entry and more opportunity for those brave enough to try and ultimately get a system that works for them. I think there's a remote-work bias which isn't fully born out from the evidence. It helps if you can somehow start with perfectly trustworthy peers, because I think a large part of hiring local is keeping tabs and keeping control. If you already know people who happen to be remote, versus trying to hire someone you've never met before remotely, the former can work perfectly fine, the later is [currently] nearly impossible. There's probably legal and tax issues to deal with too, but I'm going to hand wave assume they do not negate the potential benefits and could just as easily work out in favor of the foreign independent contractor vs. local salaried employee.
Animats 12y ago
There's a huge "purple squirrel" problem. Employers expect to be able to hire someone who knows Drupal, PHP, and Ubuntu. They don't want to retrain someone who knows Methode, Java, and Red Hat, even those do the same job. Few employers have the capability to train any more. Whenever you encounter an employer whining about this, ask them "How many people do you have in offsite training right now?" If the answer is zero, tell them you've found their problem.
- morgante 12y ago
  I don't know how you can realistically expect startups to invest in employee training.
  - beachstartup 12y ago
    we're a startup and we've sent multiple people to offsite training. in general it only costs a couple thousand bucks per class per employee including room and board.
    - morgante 12y ago
      Interesting. Were they otherwise experienced developers who you just needed to train in your particular toolchain, or have you hired inexperienced developers and trained them to be more experienced?
      - spc476 12y ago
        There's training expenses regardless of who you hire. There's training in the work flow and the software stack you use (which you haven't mentioned at all on any of the job posts you mentioned elsewhere). It's never "slot right in and be 100% productive from minute one."
      - beachstartup 12y ago
        both, although the second type you mention just happens on the job, there isn't really a "get better at everything" class, that's just called work experience. training classes for specific software is either free (depending on the type of business relationship between the two companies) or $500-$5k with a big cluster around $1500. anything outside of that range is really rare. hotel/flight/car is usually about $1k+ combined in the US. classe usually last a day or two.
maerF0x0 12y ago
One part of the immigration problem that is keeping wages is high is the fact that spouses/dependents cannot work. Want to bring in an ace programmer? You'll have to pay double (or just "more") because her husband cannot work in the "land of the free" ... If they're from a country with free healthcare, education or any other benefit, you'll have to pay for that because it was part of their "compensation" before . I've posted before about the cost of coming to the bay area: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8533781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8533781
chvid 12y ago
I wonder how long time this will live on the frontpage of HN before it gets "censored" to back as the discussion of PG's piece did? With the all internet's "direct communication" and "netizens democracy" it is funny how we cannot have a non-bullshit discussion about a subject like this.
- dang 12y ago
  There are 339 points and 636 (!) comments on that story. How anyone can call that "censored" is beyond me. No moderator touched that post at all.
JabavuAdams 12y ago
There's something interesting missing from this discussion -- do the most-skilled international developers want to move to the US? The US's reputation is at a low ebb. I mean, I like visiting, and I would love to work on some of the projects that are only available in the US, but the idea of actually living there? That's a really tough sell.
- joshAg 12y ago
  Enough do. For example, the line for people from India with a master's degree (separate lines for bachelors or phd) to get a green card is more than 11 years long. That's the time from when they qualify to get a greencard to when they actually receive it and not counting the years it takes to qualify for a greencard. During that time they have to stay on h1b visas, which can apparently be renewed indefinitely if the holdup is the backlog in the line for greencards.
- alecco 12y ago
  Better be a hell of a big compensation. US laws and treatment of foreigners by law enforcement is quite crazy. Spying on my email and all cloud assets, no problem since I'm not US citizen. Even Obama said we have no rights to privacy. And nobody in US bat an eyelash when they hear that kind of xenophobic explanation.
sosuke 12y ago
Just on the subject of programmer salaries, I was talking with someone who had much more experience in the computing industry than myself and he pointed out something I'd never known. He said that programmer salaries from pre-bubble days was six-figures, and that we're still in that range, and not higher is proof that salaries have been kept low. Six-figures today is not what six-figures was worth in 1998. Inflation alone from $100,000 1998 to 2014 is $144,877.91 using http://www.usinflationcalculator.com http://www.usinflationcalculator.com And yes, I don't trust anyone who cries foul about a shortage of workers and then offers 40% under market wages, anecdote of course.
- michaelochurch 12y ago
  What seems to be happening is that Silicon Valley wages are flat or down (relative to 1998) but the rest of the country is improving. There actually is good news here, though it might seem otherwise if one takes a Valley-centric approach. In 1998, software engineers in the Midwest generally didn't make six figures. $70,000 was a strong salary for a mid-career (5-10 years) engineer. The $100-140k figures were limited to the Bay Area and New York (around Wall Street) and possibly Chicago (also finance). In 2014, engineers in the Bay Area have lost ground relative to the housing market, and have lost social position relative to well-connected "serial founders" and investors... but on the other hand, you can now work in any of the top ~20 hubs and make 80-95% of what you'd make in the Bay Area.
  - Bahamut 12y ago
    That is not true - my compensation has grown by about 100% moving from DC to the Valley a half year ago, and it still isn't as high as I believe it should be. From what I understand, DC is one of the better areas in the country for tech as well.
- no_wave 12y ago
  By Paul Graham's description in that "Let in the 95%" article, companies are standing around with their dicks in their hands hoping that they find "the best" engineers, but on the cheap. If a company wants to hire 30 more "great" engineers, but isn't bumping up their pay to get at least 15 at a higher rate instead... there's something really off happening. It's standard economic theory that wages are sticky. I think for a while, at least the past three years, junior developers (especially in web dev) have been overvalued and seniors undervalued. From my recent job search, I think this is starting to change, which is why the whole "not enough engineers" is reaching a fever pitch (ie, we can't find seniors at the traditionally understood market rate, as everyone realizes seniors are a better buy right now). As it stands, career programmers in the US who are good but not celebrities generally try to move into management/consulting/whatever because their career stalls otherwise. Solve that problem (PAY MORE) and we've got our programmers.
winter_blue 12y ago
A fundamental question not being answered is: Who gets to come to America? Right now, our system massively favors immediate relatives and refugees, and only lets in a trickle of everyone else. If you are a person who wishes to move to the US, don't have relatives here, and are not a refugee -- then good luck, because you'll have a really hard time getting in. Stories of people who literally sell everything to get a chance to live here, like that of Claudia Mendoza, bring tears to ones' eyes: http://app.fwd.us/stories/429 http://app.fwd.us/stories/429 Now her husband was probably not among the 1% in his field. But he was hard-working person, valued by his colleagues, who added and contributed to our society. He and his family were kicked out of the country, for not winning the H-1B lottery. So to people who oppose skilled worker immigration, I have a question: Should only refugees and people with family relations be admitted? Should everyone else be completely blocked off? People who oppose skilled worker immigration are essentially advocating this.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- walterbell 12y ago
  There's also 50,000 annual "diversity visa" immigrants from countries with low immigration rates to the US.
  - winter_blue 12y ago
    For someone wishing to move to the U.S. the diversity lottery is a non-option, as the odds of winning it is a tiny fraction of 1%. Practically speaking, if you're not being persecuted, and don't have immediate relatives in the US -- you can only come as a skilled worker. It's the only route available to the vast majority of those who wish to come here. And the US is incredibly hostile to skilled workers by allocating a tiny number of visas for skilled workers. For comparison, Australia with 1/15th the US population lets in nearly as many skilled workers as the US does in a year -- i.e. approximately 15 times as many, per capita.
    - walterbell 12y ago
latcampbell 12y ago
"We don't have exceptional programmers and hence we may be fucked" sounds like an excuse to me. A successful manager or leader is supposed to make an average team do great things. If a manager starts moaning for lack of great talent, I would suspect he is looking for excuses. Perhaps some introspection is needed.
unimportant 12y ago
A call for immigration reform is almost always an attempt to reduce wages and to avoid having to train people, instead of a real shortage. The likely result of open borders would be something like London startup salaries, which are extremely low (measured by what the amount of money buys you in London) for people that aren't on the upper end of the skill range with years of experience. Entry level salaries will barely get you by and you'll have to live in a shared apartment for 5 years or so until you can afford to rent a place on your own (if you're smart enough to up your skill-set in that time). This is due to a small startup ecosystem and the ability for most Europeans to access the UK's job market.
hyp0 12y ago
Yes, if the best engineers really have x100 or x1000 productivity, why aren't employers offering higher salaries? There's been high-profile high-tech anti-poach collusion, and Ed Catmull (pixar) even claimed it's for the best. But without that, there would be implicit collusion anyway. It's obvious to employers that an arms-race to attract talent is not going to benefit anyone (who is an employer). But what would happen if wages did rise to their natural level? First, it would attract people to the profession. Second, the most-profitable companies would end up with the best engineers because only they could afford to outbid everyone else (and resources end up in the hands of those most able to utilize them). Startups, being poor, will find it difficult to attract excellent salaried, non-equity talent ("inequitable"?) Thirdly and sadly, it would also mean less development work would occur (because it costs so much, and employers have limited money). But I have a feeling you'd end up with even more open source projects; and more people working on startups (to fill the gaps).
fw109 12y ago
This is my perspective as a much-maligned foreign worker. I lost the lottery of birth, and was born to lower middle class parents in a third world country. But I worked hard in school, and got a scholarship at a respected private university in the US. I worked hard in college, and got a decent offer from a big tech company. When I start next year right after graduating, I will earn more in one year than my father earns in five. Even with cost of living differences, I calculated that I will have a far better standard of living than I was used to. Perhaps my university gave me the scholarship to boost its diversity figures. Perhaps my company is paying less than it would have to in some imaginary world in which foreign workers with H1Bs were not allowed -- then again, if that were the case, I would never get that job (I'm smart, but not "extraordinary" enough to get an O-1 visa). But it doesn't matter. Whatever the reasons, I stand to win, living a much better life than back home. So for those of you with inflated senses of self-worth complaining about people like me, why don't you go cry to your mommy about how you should have taken a Wall Street job instead, so that you could have earned a lot more money while fucking over the world economy. Because fuck the rest of the world, right?
- zo1 12y ago
  >"So for those of you with inflated senses of self-worth complaining about people like me, why don't you go cry to your mommy about how you should have taken a Wall Street job instead, so that you could have earned a lot more money while fucking over the world economy. Because fuck the rest of the world, right?" You're more than welcome to cut your upcoming now-1st-world salary that you boast about and give most of it to a third-world charity or something. Because otherwise, you're also saying "fuck the rest of the world". When you understand why you won't do that, then you'll understand why others won't as well. No, seriously, you can't just ask others to do good, you have to do good yourself as well. Until then, all you're saying is that you expect others to take a hit in their advantage so that your opinions on what matters are satisfied. Without even considering that maybe they're doing what they think matters already, and all you're really complaining about is that it's not the same as yours. Edit. I'd like to add something about your "birth-lottery" comment. >"I lost the lottery of birth, and was born to lower middle class parents in a third world country." I don't agree at all. If anything, you WON the "lottery" over probably billions of other people, ones that are born into families that do not support their offspring as much as it sounds like yours did to you. You may not be lucky enough to be born in a fancy 1st world country, but that's just entirely besides the point because you're succeeding, despite your claim that you lost some imaginary lottery.
PhoenixWright 12y ago
Training is a big problem in tech. When I graduated college two years ago I couldn't find an entry level job anywhere. Every company wanted at least 1 year of experience. I finally found a place that would give me a shot but also massively underpaid me. Two years later and I am a dev lead on a major project and they are begging me to stay (although they refuse to give me more money). I'm actually getting calls from big valley companies that turned down my new grad app like nothing. Why don't tech companies (or any company really) invest in their workers and help them attain new skills and career advancement?
- pm24601 12y ago
  > Why don't tech companies (or any company really) invest in their workers and help them attain new skills and career advancement? Because they don't actually want the "skill shortage" solved. There actually is no skill shortage. Companies create the "skill shortage" by making the job requirements so impossible that no one applies: "speaks Mandarin, programs in Java 7.1 and .Net 6.5, is able to travel 80% of the time, is a Backbone.js guru...." Just look at the laundry list of "must-haves" in a job posting now a days to really get the true picture. If companies really wanted to solve their "skill shortage" they would look for talent that could be trained to the exact technology rather than demanding that every possible candidate already know the tech stack.
- mahyarm 12y ago
  Its pretty much the same reason why most people buy houses that are already built and renovated vs. building it themselves from a single empty plot of land. It's far more of a sure thing that you can move into immediately vs. possibly not move into at all. You can choose an potential employee to train who may not 'just get it' for a cost far higher than hiring the experienced guy would cost. It's like building a house with cost overruns that your construction loan won't cover anymore and you cant get any more money. You end with a huge useless debt that YOU have to pay now and a useless half-finished house that most people don't want to buy. Also when you train employees, you get these retention contracts that can create a perverse incentive for and employee to take advantage of or a deal as an employee that you wouldn't want to take, because you'd have to pay for a training cost subject to the whims of an employer firing you.
ninavizz 12y ago
No, no, no, no, no, no, no to more immigration as a solution to a perceived lack of workers. https://t.co/pCv7JgF7mF https://t.co/pCv7JgF7mF
melindajb 12y ago
The fact is that investors want a free market for labor, but will not accept a free market for capital. Otherwise anyone could invest in any company without silly "accredited investor" rules, which serve only to keep the cost of capital high enough to generate desired returns from the money changers.

186 points by frostmatthew 12y ago

I don't read a lot of techcrunch to be honest, so maybe this is their standard fare and isn't worth the time I'll take to write this. On the other hand, I dislike that this man just painted my entire industry as xenophobes, without so much as a quote from the party in question. Is this acceptable now? I certainly reject the idea of a world in which psuedo-journalistic conjecture is taken at face value, without so much as an anonymous source.

mrottenkolber 12y ago
It's usually better to not go TC et al. I just wanted to see how to write an article from an HN threads a few hours earlier.

lotsofmangos 12y ago

I was working a minimum wage factory job in an area where it is very easy to get a job not that long ago, (it took 4 days from the phone call) and I asked my line manager if they had problems hiring. 'Yes', I was told, hiring was a major problem and keeping staff on was really difficult. I asked why they though that was. Apparently they think it is because state benefits are too high. edit - I'm still working it, I am rubbish with cash. They are not bad people, but they honestly cannot see that they may actually save money by paying slightly more. I am planning to point this out in the next week or two, but luckily I have nearly sorted my cash-flow issue, so I can afford the license.

zanny 12y ago
I always have fun telling executives "how much are you spending each week?" "oh, so you aren't paying your employees even half that, and that is before taxes, rent, etc" "you have a labor shortage why, again?"
- Terr_ 12y ago
  CTO flies back and forth from home every 2-3 weeks... Rest of company has travel freeze. Bah.
marincounty 12y ago
I'm curious about the town you are talking about. I've seen the finances of people who rely on state benefits, and in the Bay Area--unless you have a bunch of kids(afdc) and were lucky enough to find section 8 housing; the state benefits are not enough to keep a room--you can eat though. I know too many homeless people who tried to get state benefits, and the help they recieved was tiny, and had a time limit. My best friend who passed away was on SSDI. He knew he was lucky he qualified for SSDI, but he was always broke. I saw his checks and it was just enough to get through the month. People used to rib him about buying a cup of coffee at Starbucks, at the expense of The Federal Government, but they had no idea just how little money he was receiving.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  Am in the south west of the UK. 2 to 3 days a week of crap work covers my rent and most of my food and gives me loads of free time for pissing about on my own stuff. I avoid benefits, not through any particular ideology but more because I find them more trouble than they are worth. I sometimes earn decent money, but I find I get stressed as hell in offices and I don't get motivated enough by money to make up for it, so I am avoiding those kind of jobs for a bit.

twelvechairs 12y ago

What the article neglects to mention is that if the US doesn't capture workers (and SF doesn't work to lower living costs) its inertia for the tech industry (which admittedly currently seems unstoppable) will wane and other countries will pick up the slack.

waterlesscloud 12y ago

It would be helpful to have some concrete examples of companies who are hurting from this shortage. What projects, specifically, are they not getting done? What specific requirements are they not able to find in potential employees? Why, specifically, is training not an option? How, specifically, is inability to get this project going hurting them? What specific compensation are they offering? If you want some trust, you're going to need to be forthcoming with specifics, not vague talk about top 5% coders and "We need 30 more great programmers".

mgkimsal 12y ago
"Why, specifically, is training not an option?" That would take too much time! Better to spend years lobbying to expand incoming worker numbers vs spending less time training people in the skills you need (short term). Longer term look to invest in education programs here too, but hey, that costs money. Better to keep billions overseas, then complain about the state of the country's education system, than pay taxes on the money and have those taxes help better the very country you're complaining about.
amerliore 12y ago
Training is seen as competitive suicide, because while you bear the costs of training, your competitors can then poach your trained employees by offering a salary that is less than your total cost for that employee but more than the salary you pay that employee. X = cost to train employee Y = salary of employee Competitor pays Z such that Y < Z < Y+X and puts you out of business. The second factor is that if you raise wages for one person, then the rest of your workforce expects those wages. So a 10% salary increase for one person quickly becomes an across the board 10% bump on your personnel costs. Bribing, lobbying, paying PR firms, pulling the wool over people's eyes is all judged to be a smaller expense and a worthwhile cost-saving measure. The economically viable solution is to have schools do the training, but universities are likely not the best model for getting good tech workers.
- pm24601 12y ago
  > Training is seen as competitive suicide, because while you bear the costs of training, your competitors can then poach your trained employees by offering a salary that is less than your total cost for that employee but more than the salary you pay that employee. Then I guess the company will just have to do without. Seriously, if the need is so great then maybe, just maybe the company should do the training and should reward employees for staying. Otherwise, maybe the need really isn't so great.

michaelochurch 12y ago

"VCs" aren't responsible at all, as far as I can tell, for the Google/Apple/et-al wage-fixing that cost the trust of engineers. That shouldn't be pinned on them, and it certainly shouldn't be pinned on Paul Graham. What VCs do that is wrong is that they've created a culture of co-funding and collusion-- a feudal reputation economy-- which thwarts independence in decision making and generates a small set of big winners before startups can start hiring and get to the market. Comparing notes on who they like and who they don't is sleazy and creates an in-crowd that is mostly incompetent, but it's not illegal, and it's a subtle-enough offense that average engineers (who probably have little interest in being founders, anyway) dislike them. As for why they do this, it comes from the fact that building a good portfolio, though technically their job, is a game at which feedback cycles are slow. You might have a strategy that is going to make 40% annual returns (on average) each year, but if macroeconomic events take you down over 3 years, you don't get to prove yourself. So, the VCs have (justifiably) learned that their career benefit is maximized not by building the best portfolio, but by having association (even if the percentage they end up with is tiny) with the very-rare "home runs" that happen every 5 years or so. That requires them to spread information around and create the culture of co-funding, much like an academic department where 20 names get on a paper when 2 researchers did most of the work. It's not that we "don't trust" the technology elite. We know what their economic interests are and we trust them to pursue them. And that's fine, if this pursuit involves openly advocating what is best for them and what they believe is best for us and for the country. What's not morally OK is lying to the government about a "talent shortage". If they want to come out and say, "our economic interests favor <X>, and here's why we think our interests are aligned with yours", I'd be fine with that. Just don't fucking lie. Immigration is a complex topic and there's no simple answer. "Talent shortage" is a lie, and the ethical status of claiming one exists actually is black-and-white: it's fucking wrong. There's no talent shortage when it's this hard for women, or minorities, or people over 40, or people who spent their careers outside of California, to get themselves taken seriously in tech. The problem with FWD.us is that they're using their wealth to get access to government officials, and then lying to them, with the intention of bringing economic changes that may or may not harm us, but we've been left out of the discussion.

S4M 12y ago
You really shouldn't use any opportunity to bring on your usual thesis - VCs collude to fund only startups created by "connected" founders - when it is so out of topic.

jacobolus 12y ago

On one of the previous threads about this topic, someone suggested that accepting H1-B applicants in order from higher to lower salaries instead of based on a lottery would clear up a lot of the lottery spots that currently go to the below-market-wage-indentured-servant type shops to be used for more deserving companies and applicants. Seems like a solid change to me, without an obvious downside. (But I am not an expert and haven’t done any detailed analysis, so maybe this would have negative consequences I’m not anticipating.) Another change that might be a big improvement, it seems to me, is to let H1-B visa holders more easily change jobs once they’re here, without so much risk or paperwork hoops to jump through. If it were easier for H1-B workers to switch jobs, then abusive employers would have less leverage to exploit them (forced overtime, below-market wages, etc.).

bradleyjg 12y ago
As much as it may sometimes seem like it is, the H1-B isn't a programming or IT visa. It's applicable to a wide range of specialty occupations, across the entire nation. The suggested change would block out virtually all applicants from many other professions.
- nitrogen 12y ago
  Regardless of the industry, if the H-1B is designed to allow employers to hire specialists they can't find locally, then a salary-sorted approval process should still be desirable. Machine shops fighting over top-1% welders with deep materials science knowledge should be no different to software shops fighting over top-1% developers with deep computer science knowledge.
  - bradleyjg 12y ago
    That'd be fine if the applicant pool was first sorted by profession and geography and like compared against like. But how do you decide the distribution of visas across those sub-groups?
    - 12y ago

joshAg 12y ago

I think one way to fix the trust issue outlined here would be not tying the H1B visa to a specific job, but instead giving it for a defined period of time, eg 5 years, and not making it dependent on the employer. I know at least a few people on H1B visas who celebrated getting a green card with 2 weeks notice and a nice $20k/year raise to do the exact same job at a competitor.

hw 12y ago

Instead of a 'shortage of workers', the situation should be more adeptly described as a 'shortage of skilled workers'. I do think there are tech workers floating around, but the really good ones are hard to come by. Extending immigration helps, but does not solve it, as only a bunch of the pool are actually good talent. Maybe immigration needs to be tweaked to help filter down the pool even more, for example, raising the minimum H1B wage for its skill levels. A disparity in the minimum wage only enables companies to bring in workers that are 'meh' and only pay the minimum cause it's cheap labor, albeit not top talent. Question for the anti-immigration folks is, if immigration was reduced or stopped entirely, would that necessarily result in higher wages for everyone else? Are talented engineers really not being able to find a job that wants to pay what they want? Are the decent, run-of-the-mill engineers not able to find a job that pays market or slightly below market? Would companies then outsource even more anyway?

cellis 12y ago
>> would that necessarily result in higher wages for everyone else? Unless companies like Google relocate ( to where? ) then yes, wages would absolutely rise, because they don't allow WFH [1], ergo the only engineers available would be those in the Bay Area, NYC, etc. No, they wouldn't outsource critical infrastructure to places like India or China, who hacked them. I also don't see them picking up and leaving and going to e.g. Vancouver. I think the only way to address this "great engineer" thing without American engineers crying foul is to gasp introduce standardized testing that all the American tech companies -- who can't get the amazing talent -- agree upon and then select the 99th percentile of the candidates that pass it and pay them in the 99th percentile of wages for the bay area. This would be an objective measure and Americans wouldn't be suspicious of whatever criteria VCs/founders use to measure "great programming ability". Make the interviews and the criteria public, bring it to the light, then people would be more inclined to believe them. Right now I simply hear a bunch of hand-wavey math and see a bunch of rich people whining about how they don't have engineers to build their things. Yes, I know there are flaws with standardized tests, but it's the best of bad things. [1] Most companies. Yahoo notoriously, but most companies aren't in favor of allowing WFH.
- 12y ago

gsibble 12y ago

This whole set of lies really makes me angry. Ever notice how it's only the most powerful of powerful who complain about "talent shortage"? Those who have the most to gain from reducing technology salaries? Sure, you might hear about it being a competitive market with high salaries and all, but that's what it's supposed to be! Engineering talent is in high demand and salaries are supposed to go up! If anything, they aren't going up enough. Programer's salaries as a whole have stayed nearly even since 1992 [1]. Furthermore, profit margins in the technology sector are remarkably high with very little spent on HR compared to another highly profitable sector: banking. Highly skilled STEM graduates frequently choose to go into finance because they can make more over a longer career without a cap on their income. The ratio of revenue to HR costs at tech companies and finance companies is way out of whack. If tech wants the best workers, there are plenty of willing and capable Americans ready to pick up the work. Just fucking pay for it. Stop lying through your teeth that this is about talent. It isn't. It's about your stockholders. That's why you only hear the most powerful bitching about it since they are the only ones who would benefit. [1] http://www-tc.pbs.org/prod-media/newshour/photos/2013/07/18/IT_average_salaries-unemployment_chart_business_desk.jpg http://www-tc.pbs.org/prod-media/newshour/photos/2013/07/18/...

mgkimsal 12y ago
" but that's what it's supposed to be! Engineering talent is in high demand and salaries are supposed to go up!" And this is the other half of the labor/capital equation, doing its damnedest to keep expenses low and profits high. It's supposed to work like this. :/
blazespin 12y ago
Agreed, it is brutal how awful the zucks and pgs of the world argue about this. What I find bizarre is aren't they aware of how dishonest / douchey they come off when they fail to mention the impact on wages? There is a way to solve the immigration problem. Create a system where the companies can hire people if they poney up 50k. That way there will be minimal impact on salaries and companies can get all the super stars they can afford.
curiousDog 12y ago

Spooky23 12y ago

The whole premise of this "crisis" is that folks want to have their cake and eat it too. Feels to me like this is more about convenience for financiers. It's easier to do due diligence when everything you do goes through the same funnel a few minutes away from your office. Much easier than flying to Denver, New York or Chicago. Instead of importing more workers into the overcrowded and expensive valley, maybe export the jobs to one of the other cities in the US with skilled workers. At this point, New York City is practically a cheap market.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

jacquesm 12y ago

This whole immigration thing sounds like an excellent opportunity for someone to put together a better way to work remotely. We're all supposed to be internet savvy, why can't we come up with something better than skype and github? Is something better even required? Why the emphasis on getting people into the country? We're selling virtual presence solutions to industry and telepresence to doctors and we're trying for surgeons. IT is the easiest job to do from a remote location. I work with people every other day that I've never even met in person and I have never visited the co-location of a large chunk of the server hardware that I've worked with over the last couple of years. Why the accent on physical presence?

ricardobeat 12y ago
I believe we have plenty of tools that do a great job of facilitating communication, project management and work activities for remote workers. What is missing is the willingness from companies to accept these workers, not the tools.
waterlesscloud 12y ago
Deficient management skills. And worse, management that won't acknowledge it's deficient. Managing a remote team is a skill, or more accurately a set of skills. No, you probably can't do it well right out of the gate. Yes, you'll probably have to work harder at it than you would having a team in one open plan office. Yes, it will take you time to learn. But if you're really being held back by a lack of engineering talent, if that's genuinely keeping you from being more successful, you'd be much better off if you put the time and effort into learning it.
zaroth 12y ago
Tele-presence has a long way to go, and the network infrastructure too, but it will obviously, eventually, get to the point where it's indistinguishable from being in the same room, minus the physical contact. But to your point, it's not even a given that would help much. Even with that, you still suffer mostly from time zones. You're just not going to collaborate the same ways with someone on the other side of the planet. That just means barriers to entry and more opportunity for those brave enough to try and ultimately get a system that works for them. I think there's a remote-work bias which isn't fully born out from the evidence. It helps if you can somehow start with perfectly trustworthy peers, because I think a large part of hiring local is keeping tabs and keeping control. If you already know people who happen to be remote, versus trying to hire someone you've never met before remotely, the former can work perfectly fine, the later is [currently] nearly impossible. There's probably legal and tax issues to deal with too, but I'm going to hand wave assume they do not negate the potential benefits and could just as easily work out in favor of the foreign independent contractor vs. local salaried employee.

Animats 12y ago

There's a huge "purple squirrel" problem. Employers expect to be able to hire someone who knows Drupal, PHP, and Ubuntu. They don't want to retrain someone who knows Methode, Java, and Red Hat, even those do the same job. Few employers have the capability to train any more. Whenever you encounter an employer whining about this, ask them "How many people do you have in offsite training right now?" If the answer is zero, tell them you've found their problem.

morgante 12y ago
I don't know how you can realistically expect startups to invest in employee training.
- beachstartup 12y ago
  we're a startup and we've sent multiple people to offsite training. in general it only costs a couple thousand bucks per class per employee including room and board.
  - morgante 12y ago
    Interesting. Were they otherwise experienced developers who you just needed to train in your particular toolchain, or have you hired inexperienced developers and trained them to be more experienced?
    - spc476 12y ago
      There's training expenses regardless of who you hire. There's training in the work flow and the software stack you use (which you haven't mentioned at all on any of the job posts you mentioned elsewhere). It's never "slot right in and be 100% productive from minute one."
    - beachstartup 12y ago
      both, although the second type you mention just happens on the job, there isn't really a "get better at everything" class, that's just called work experience. training classes for specific software is either free (depending on the type of business relationship between the two companies) or $500-$5k with a big cluster around $1500. anything outside of that range is really rare. hotel/flight/car is usually about $1k+ combined in the US. classe usually last a day or two.

maerF0x0 12y ago

One part of the immigration problem that is keeping wages is high is the fact that spouses/dependents cannot work. Want to bring in an ace programmer? You'll have to pay double (or just "more") because her husband cannot work in the "land of the free" ... If they're from a country with free healthcare, education or any other benefit, you'll have to pay for that because it was part of their "compensation" before . I've posted before about the cost of coming to the bay area: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8533781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8533781

chvid 12y ago

I wonder how long time this will live on the frontpage of HN before it gets "censored" to back as the discussion of PG's piece did? With the all internet's "direct communication" and "netizens democracy" it is funny how we cannot have a non-bullshit discussion about a subject like this.

dang 12y ago
There are 339 points and 636 (!) comments on that story. How anyone can call that "censored" is beyond me. No moderator touched that post at all.

JabavuAdams 12y ago

There's something interesting missing from this discussion -- do the most-skilled international developers want to move to the US? The US's reputation is at a low ebb. I mean, I like visiting, and I would love to work on some of the projects that are only available in the US, but the idea of actually living there? That's a really tough sell.

joshAg 12y ago
Enough do. For example, the line for people from India with a master's degree (separate lines for bachelors or phd) to get a green card is more than 11 years long. That's the time from when they qualify to get a greencard to when they actually receive it and not counting the years it takes to qualify for a greencard. During that time they have to stay on h1b visas, which can apparently be renewed indefinitely if the holdup is the backlog in the line for greencards.
alecco 12y ago
Better be a hell of a big compensation. US laws and treatment of foreigners by law enforcement is quite crazy. Spying on my email and all cloud assets, no problem since I'm not US citizen. Even Obama said we have no rights to privacy. And nobody in US bat an eyelash when they hear that kind of xenophobic explanation.

sosuke 12y ago

Just on the subject of programmer salaries, I was talking with someone who had much more experience in the computing industry than myself and he pointed out something I'd never known. He said that programmer salaries from pre-bubble days was six-figures, and that we're still in that range, and not higher is proof that salaries have been kept low. Six-figures today is not what six-figures was worth in 1998. Inflation alone from $100,000 1998 to 2014 is $144,877.91 using http://www.usinflationcalculator.com http://www.usinflationcalculator.com And yes, I don't trust anyone who cries foul about a shortage of workers and then offers 40% under market wages, anecdote of course.

michaelochurch 12y ago
What seems to be happening is that Silicon Valley wages are flat or down (relative to 1998) but the rest of the country is improving. There actually is good news here, though it might seem otherwise if one takes a Valley-centric approach. In 1998, software engineers in the Midwest generally didn't make six figures. $70,000 was a strong salary for a mid-career (5-10 years) engineer. The $100-140k figures were limited to the Bay Area and New York (around Wall Street) and possibly Chicago (also finance). In 2014, engineers in the Bay Area have lost ground relative to the housing market, and have lost social position relative to well-connected "serial founders" and investors... but on the other hand, you can now work in any of the top ~20 hubs and make 80-95% of what you'd make in the Bay Area.
- Bahamut 12y ago
  That is not true - my compensation has grown by about 100% moving from DC to the Valley a half year ago, and it still isn't as high as I believe it should be. From what I understand, DC is one of the better areas in the country for tech as well.
no_wave 12y ago
By Paul Graham's description in that "Let in the 95%" article, companies are standing around with their dicks in their hands hoping that they find "the best" engineers, but on the cheap. If a company wants to hire 30 more "great" engineers, but isn't bumping up their pay to get at least 15 at a higher rate instead... there's something really off happening. It's standard economic theory that wages are sticky. I think for a while, at least the past three years, junior developers (especially in web dev) have been overvalued and seniors undervalued. From my recent job search, I think this is starting to change, which is why the whole "not enough engineers" is reaching a fever pitch (ie, we can't find seniors at the traditionally understood market rate, as everyone realizes seniors are a better buy right now). As it stands, career programmers in the US who are good but not celebrities generally try to move into management/consulting/whatever because their career stalls otherwise. Solve that problem (PAY MORE) and we've got our programmers.

winter_blue 12y ago

A fundamental question not being answered is: Who gets to come to America? Right now, our system massively favors immediate relatives and refugees, and only lets in a trickle of everyone else. If you are a person who wishes to move to the US, don't have relatives here, and are not a refugee -- then good luck, because you'll have a really hard time getting in. Stories of people who literally sell everything to get a chance to live here, like that of Claudia Mendoza, bring tears to ones' eyes: http://app.fwd.us/stories/429 http://app.fwd.us/stories/429 Now her husband was probably not among the 1% in his field. But he was hard-working person, valued by his colleagues, who added and contributed to our society. He and his family were kicked out of the country, for not winning the H-1B lottery. So to people who oppose skilled worker immigration, I have a question: Should only refugees and people with family relations be admitted? Should everyone else be completely blocked off? People who oppose skilled worker immigration are essentially advocating this.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
walterbell 12y ago
There's also 50,000 annual "diversity visa" immigrants from countries with low immigration rates to the US.
- winter_blue 12y ago
  For someone wishing to move to the U.S. the diversity lottery is a non-option, as the odds of winning it is a tiny fraction of 1%. Practically speaking, if you're not being persecuted, and don't have immediate relatives in the US -- you can only come as a skilled worker. It's the only route available to the vast majority of those who wish to come here. And the US is incredibly hostile to skilled workers by allocating a tiny number of visas for skilled workers. For comparison, Australia with 1/15th the US population lets in nearly as many skilled workers as the US does in a year -- i.e. approximately 15 times as many, per capita.
  - walterbell 12y ago

latcampbell 12y ago

"We don't have exceptional programmers and hence we may be fucked" sounds like an excuse to me. A successful manager or leader is supposed to make an average team do great things. If a manager starts moaning for lack of great talent, I would suspect he is looking for excuses. Perhaps some introspection is needed.

unimportant 12y ago

A call for immigration reform is almost always an attempt to reduce wages and to avoid having to train people, instead of a real shortage. The likely result of open borders would be something like London startup salaries, which are extremely low (measured by what the amount of money buys you in London) for people that aren't on the upper end of the skill range with years of experience. Entry level salaries will barely get you by and you'll have to live in a shared apartment for 5 years or so until you can afford to rent a place on your own (if you're smart enough to up your skill-set in that time). This is due to a small startup ecosystem and the ability for most Europeans to access the UK's job market.

hyp0 12y ago

Yes, if the best engineers really have x100 or x1000 productivity, why aren't employers offering higher salaries? There's been high-profile high-tech anti-poach collusion, and Ed Catmull (pixar) even claimed it's for the best. But without that, there would be implicit collusion anyway. It's obvious to employers that an arms-race to attract talent is not going to benefit anyone (who is an employer). But what would happen if wages did rise to their natural level? First, it would attract people to the profession. Second, the most-profitable companies would end up with the best engineers because only they could afford to outbid everyone else (and resources end up in the hands of those most able to utilize them). Startups, being poor, will find it difficult to attract excellent salaried, non-equity talent ("inequitable"?) Thirdly and sadly, it would also mean less development work would occur (because it costs so much, and employers have limited money). But I have a feeling you'd end up with even more open source projects; and more people working on startups (to fill the gaps).

fw109 12y ago

This is my perspective as a much-maligned foreign worker. I lost the lottery of birth, and was born to lower middle class parents in a third world country. But I worked hard in school, and got a scholarship at a respected private university in the US. I worked hard in college, and got a decent offer from a big tech company. When I start next year right after graduating, I will earn more in one year than my father earns in five. Even with cost of living differences, I calculated that I will have a far better standard of living than I was used to. Perhaps my university gave me the scholarship to boost its diversity figures. Perhaps my company is paying less than it would have to in some imaginary world in which foreign workers with H1Bs were not allowed -- then again, if that were the case, I would never get that job (I'm smart, but not "extraordinary" enough to get an O-1 visa). But it doesn't matter. Whatever the reasons, I stand to win, living a much better life than back home. So for those of you with inflated senses of self-worth complaining about people like me, why don't you go cry to your mommy about how you should have taken a Wall Street job instead, so that you could have earned a lot more money while fucking over the world economy. Because fuck the rest of the world, right?

zo1 12y ago
>"So for those of you with inflated senses of self-worth complaining about people like me, why don't you go cry to your mommy about how you should have taken a Wall Street job instead, so that you could have earned a lot more money while fucking over the world economy. Because fuck the rest of the world, right?" You're more than welcome to cut your upcoming now-1st-world salary that you boast about and give most of it to a third-world charity or something. Because otherwise, you're also saying "fuck the rest of the world". When you understand why you won't do that, then you'll understand why others won't as well. No, seriously, you can't just ask others to do good, you have to do good yourself as well. Until then, all you're saying is that you expect others to take a hit in their advantage so that your opinions on what matters are satisfied. Without even considering that maybe they're doing what they think matters already, and all you're really complaining about is that it's not the same as yours. Edit. I'd like to add something about your "birth-lottery" comment. >"I lost the lottery of birth, and was born to lower middle class parents in a third world country." I don't agree at all. If anything, you WON the "lottery" over probably billions of other people, ones that are born into families that do not support their offspring as much as it sounds like yours did to you. You may not be lucky enough to be born in a fancy 1st world country, but that's just entirely besides the point because you're succeeding, despite your claim that you lost some imaginary lottery.

PhoenixWright 12y ago

Training is a big problem in tech. When I graduated college two years ago I couldn't find an entry level job anywhere. Every company wanted at least 1 year of experience. I finally found a place that would give me a shot but also massively underpaid me. Two years later and I am a dev lead on a major project and they are begging me to stay (although they refuse to give me more money). I'm actually getting calls from big valley companies that turned down my new grad app like nothing. Why don't tech companies (or any company really) invest in their workers and help them attain new skills and career advancement?

pm24601 12y ago
> Why don't tech companies (or any company really) invest in their workers and help them attain new skills and career advancement? Because they don't actually want the "skill shortage" solved. There actually is no skill shortage. Companies create the "skill shortage" by making the job requirements so impossible that no one applies: "speaks Mandarin, programs in Java 7.1 and .Net 6.5, is able to travel 80% of the time, is a Backbone.js guru...." Just look at the laundry list of "must-haves" in a job posting now a days to really get the true picture. If companies really wanted to solve their "skill shortage" they would look for talent that could be trained to the exact technology rather than demanding that every possible candidate already know the tech stack.
mahyarm 12y ago
Its pretty much the same reason why most people buy houses that are already built and renovated vs. building it themselves from a single empty plot of land. It's far more of a sure thing that you can move into immediately vs. possibly not move into at all. You can choose an potential employee to train who may not 'just get it' for a cost far higher than hiring the experienced guy would cost. It's like building a house with cost overruns that your construction loan won't cover anymore and you cant get any more money. You end with a huge useless debt that YOU have to pay now and a useless half-finished house that most people don't want to buy. Also when you train employees, you get these retention contracts that can create a perverse incentive for and employee to take advantage of or a deal as an employee that you wouldn't want to take, because you'd have to pay for a training cost subject to the whims of an employer firing you.

ninavizz 12y ago

No, no, no, no, no, no, no to more immigration as a solution to a perceived lack of workers. https://t.co/pCv7JgF7mF https://t.co/pCv7JgF7mF

melindajb 12y ago

The fact is that investors want a free market for labor, but will not accept a free market for capital. Otherwise anyone could invest in any company without silly "accredited investor" rules, which serve only to keep the cost of capital high enough to generate desired returns from the money changers.