8 ms·

Immigration to increase the supply of programmers

83 points by soundsop 12y ago

davidw 12y ago
And why should we artificially restrict the supply of immigrants? It's not like it's a zero-sum game, something that Greenspun ought to realize. http://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-jobs/ http://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-jobs...
- lackbeard 12y ago
  Nowhere in this blog post does he say that the supply of immigrants ought to be restricted...
  - davidw 12y ago
    He sure seems to imply that paying far above market salaries is the best way to get good programmers, rather than immigration. Maybe I'm reading it wrong? I don't think the economics of that add up, though, long term. If there are a bunch of people willing to work, and an artificial barrier, that barrier will only work for so long before people route around it.
    - paulmd 12y ago
      This post seems to imply that there is a single "market salary" for programmers. That's not really the case anywhere - a green intern doing web programming is never going to have an equal salary to a greybeard doing consulting in esoteric niche areas (eg COBOL in banking systems). There's always diminishing returns for superstar talent in any field - a Fortune 25 CEO gets paid how much more than a manager at Wendy's? The collusion between the big tech companies to drive down salaries for top personnel strongly suggests that the market salary for these people is actually higher than what they're currently paid. They're grade-A talent in a hot field, the fact that their salaries are high doesn't mean they're above-market.
    - geebee 12y ago
      Actually, I didn't read it that way. I saw this as a dispute on a point of logic, rather than a broad statement about the best way to get programmers. Paul Graham makes the following claim: "if you talk to startups, you find practically every one over a certain size has gone through legal contortions to get programmers into 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." Phil Greenspun makes the common (common because, in my opinion, it's so sensible) argument that perhaps a "shortage" exists because the market rate is too low to draw people into the field - that if you raised the price to well above what it currently costs to get a programmer, you'd draw considerably more people into the field. Greenspun claims that Graham's argument is based on the flawed notion that "there is no way that if companies nationwide paid programmers more than the BLS’s median pay of $74,280 per year (source), additional Americans would be attracted to this field." Part of the problem with Greenspun's retort is that PG claims to be talking only about an extreme elite, not the run of the mill programmers. However, the logic still stands in my opinion. Have you seen what elite people earn in other fields? I guess if you think that it's impossible to get someone who would otherwise have gone to med, law, or finance into programming by offering more money at a comparably elite level of talent, you'd agree that the supply of people is fixed and doesn't respond to market signals. That seems to be the basis of the disagreement.
      - davidw 12y ago
        Oh, I agree that the supply of people is not fixed, and does respond to incentives. But I have done open source software long enough to realize that a lot of great programmers are outside the US, and that creating artificial barriers is not a good solution, long-term.
- 31reasons 12y ago
  It is not zero-sum ? companies like Google, Facebook pick 1 out of 100 programmers, if there was 10 fold increase in programmers, they would start picking 1 out of 1000. Instead of complaining shortage of programmer it makes sense to build software development processes around "average" programmers rather than insisting on superstar programmers. How many other fields do that ? Have you read an ad about hiring only superstar plumber,pilot,electrician,nurse? Even if its true that your company will benefit from so called 10x programmers why not train people to be 10x or give degrees to people who are only 10x. Just increasing the pool of 1x while insisting on hiring 10x doesn't make sense.
  - davidw 12y ago
    > It is not zero-sum No, it really isn't. Read my article and the linked economic research. > if there was 10 fold increase in programmers There has been a 10 fold increase in programmers since 50 years ago, but more than a 10 fold increase in the amount of programming work, so salaries have done just fine. Also, those programmers are already there, in other countries, so artificial barriers can only create so much salary disparity before companies will pursue other options. At that point, why were you bothering trying to keep them out in the first place? Read the linked article: it is not a zero-sum game.
  - palakchokshi 12y ago
    Angie's List does explicitly that, showing you superstar plumbers, electricians, doctors, etc. If I am given the choice to hire a great plumber vs. an average plumber I would always hire a great plumber if I can afford him. Your argument that development processes should be built around average programmers is like saying open heart surgical procedures should be designed around average surgeons.
    - 31reasons 12y ago
      We humans are greedy species. If given opportunity we would always hire superstar (even janitors or hamburger flippers) especially if they don't cost any extra. If you can find superstar, great! but stop crying "shortage" if you are not in the business of open heart surgery. EDIT: And yes every average heart surgeon is capable of doing heart surgery otherwise they would not get a degree in the first place. There is no such thing as 10x heart surgeon.
discardorama 12y ago
How about "raises to increase the supply of programmers" instead?
- pen2l 12y ago
  Exactly. I'm really confused about this situation of VCs having their cake, and eating it too. Why and when did we just stat accepting the assumption that these companies and VCs are entitled to as many "superstar" programmers as they want at the salaries that they want? I've been arguing for 10 years that AMA needs to increase the supply of doctors in this country. I'm of the opinion we don't have a lot of doctors... if we had more, then in certain contexts healthcare would become a competitive field where the patient wins. That hasn't happened. And that's an area where we do definitely want change, because healthcare is a serious issue. Tech industry has not produced, in my opinion, anything extraordinarily remarkable that truly helps people in substantive ways. Indeed, the highlight of the industry is massive wealth by the VCs and founders by duping customers by way of exploiting their cognitive biases (or "advertising", if you would). If they were doing things in a clean way that actually benefited the customer without emptying his or her wallet, I would maybe be sympathetic to their cries for getting top talent. But after all of that colluding to suppress the wages of the very people they want more of? Wow, the balls that they have.
zameerb 12y ago
What we need is a new 'SAT' tailored to find top notch coders
- UK-AL 12y ago
  Top notch programmers come from curiosity, building a fair few complicated projects and a little bitter experience so you know how to avoid problems and be realistic
jqm 12y ago
Maybe what we really need is an increase in VC's? Possibly grant resident status to anyone (with lot of money of course... after all, it's only the exceptional we are talking about here) who wants to fund and run a VC company? Because there are lots of great programmers who simply can't get funding. I wonder how PG would feel about that?
- davidw 12y ago
  > Possibly grant resident status to anyone (with lot of money of course... after all, it's only the exceptional we are talking about here) who wants to fund and run a VC company? Because there are lots of great programmers who simply can't get funding. That already exists in various forms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-2_visa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-2_visa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EB-5_visa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EB-5_visa I don't think PG would have any problems with that, because investing in startups is not a zero-sum game, which is one of the reasons why there are so many investors in the bay area. It's not like they seek out "investor free" territory, such as eastern Montana.
- pm90 12y ago
  You can get a GC in the US if you can prove that you have $1 million invested in the US. Yes, its as simple as that. More rich people not moving is probably because if you're rich, you already have a good lifestyle.
  - foobarqux 12y ago
    I think it can be as low as $250k if invested in certain areas.
whiddershins 12y ago
What if the qualities that make a drug dealer are economic, but the qualities that make a GREAT drug dealer may be a mix of environment and genes? If you want the most amazing, ruthless, and efficient black market for drugs, you must have the largest possible number of drug dealers participating in the system, so the most talented and motivated drug dealers have the opportunity to be the best they can be. The author of this post is missing some of Graham's core arguments, and it makes me want to go back and reread the original essay. Perhaps it is PG's fault for conflating concepts, as people seem to be raising valid points (startups should be able to hire great programmers if they would just pay more) while missing that the core thesis is undeniable: if there are more programmers participating, more greatness will emerge. It is probably not even linear. If you track the history of martial arts proficiency, the ones that are in fashion seem to produce a higher overall average of ability, with the "greats" in that martial art always arising when many many people are participating in that art, and there is a rich ecosystem that supports learning and competition. i.e. Judo in the 1970s, or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in the early 2000s. I see this anecdotally and in published research, where pockets of artists, writers, and musicians have created a wildly disproportionate amount of forward looking work when there are many of them in the same area creating all at once. Even if startups paid more, it would not significantly increase the total number of great programmers. Google, Apple, and Facebook already DO pay "more" and I think these companies are in exactly the same boat as the startup in the essay - they would happily keep hiring as many great programmers as they can find. If that is true, the number of jobs available to great programmers is not proved to be finite.
- peterchon 12y ago
  What makes a great programmer? And what does this great programmers do? We have had and still have a vast number of great programmers in US and churning our more and more, but what do they do? is it greatness that they seek? if so, why are more programmers involved in scientific research? I really want to agree with your views, but for now it seems that immigration is an issue for one market sector, and last time I looked, that market sector isn't out to change the world.
peterchon 12y ago
I'm an immigrant, served in USMC, after service had to pay and take a test to become a citizen (funny right? can die for the country but won't let me be a citizen). I love my country(both), but when did immigration become something to benefit the corporations?
- bilbo0s 12y ago
  I'm a bit confused by your question ??? Immigration, at the root, has always been about economic necessity in North America. Why would it be any different now ?
  - peterchon 12y ago
    Maybe I'm just naive. But I'd like to think that immigration is for a greater cause than for companies to make more money.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- mhurron 12y ago
  Everything in the US is for the benefit of corporations.
patio11 12y ago
I think the subtext of "I would hire thirty great programmers tomorrow!" is "I would hire thirty great programmers tomorrow! They just need to think 55 hours a week is a nice relaxing pace, have impeccable pedigrees, and be capable of spinning up within single-digit weeks. Also, we're looking for top-of-the-skill-curve at a combination of five technologies, two of which are fairly niche. For a variety of reasons we'd strongly prefer if they were located in one particular geographic area where we happen to be in vicious, frothy competition with a hundred firms trying to hire exactly this profile of people." This happens to be very similar to the rough description that Wall Street is looking for in certain niches of programmers. I have not heard Wall Street loudly complaining about the impossibility of finding Haskell programmers who can code against FIX and also have PhDs in physics. I rather strongly believe this is because Wall Street institutionally believes in market prices and, unlike Silicon Valley, is willing to tolerate the market telling them that the market clearing price for hiring this type of programmer times thirty is $200k base plus a $600k bonus as opposed to $120k base plus an equity grant with expected value in the $X0k range.
- ryanSrich 12y ago
  > $120k base plus an equity grant with expected value in the $X0k range. Or not even $120k. You'd be surprised at what some SV companies get away with. Take a look at angel list and you'll commonly see wages lower than $100k for experienced developers. I'd say the only epidemic that exists in the US's technology field is a lack of adequate compensation, not a lack of talent.
  - encoderer 12y ago
    Using job ads to gauge market salaries will leave you at a disadvantage. There aren't many engineers in the bay area taking work today at $100k or below. Those that are are usually right out of school, or working for a cause they believe in.
    - geebee 12y ago
      It's very hard to get real data, so I can't really fault you for the lack of a good cite. However, it's not like the companies claiming a shortage are exactly forthcoming with the data themselves. Here's a pretty eye-opening story about a journalist and professor trying to get good data to study the issue http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2013/09/20/profs-immigration-challenge-to-silicon-valley-let-me-observe-how-you-hire-tech-workers/ http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2013/09/20/profs-immigr... I find it remarkable that people make claims of shortages without sharing information about the skill set they need and the compensation they're offering. Well, I don't find it remarkable, in the sense that I don't find PR-speak especially surprising anymore. I guess I should say I find it galling.
ovi256 12y ago
Off topic, but the second comment from Jason is pure gold. He's calling Philip Greenspun (of Greenspun's tenth law fame), a "Harvard Lawyer of unknown programming provenance". I can see how blog hostnames can confuse people, but maybe google the author for context ? Besides, he's fighting the strawman of training, where Greenspun talked about economic incentives.
- gaius 12y ago
  I posted a comment to that effect a few minutes ago :-)
  - gaius 12y ago
    Hmm, which is now been deleted.
steven2012 12y ago
What the blog post is saying is essentially saying is that pg is crying about a broken market, when in fact the market is working perfectly, ie. people who could be great programmers would rather go to other higher paying professions because programmers' salaries don't pay as well. The OP basically says the CEO of the startup could get 30 great programmers if he just raised his salaries and benefits higher, which is what the market is telling him. For example, if that CEO paid his programmers $1M/yr, you don't think he would get 100 of the best programmers in the entire world? What he really is saying is that he wants great programmers at a lower cost, and that's basically what increasing immigration would do by increasing the supply. I personally have no problems with increasing immigration via H1B, but the OP makes an interesting point about economic incentives that push people to occupations. There are a lot of very smart people who would make great programmers that are going into finance, medicine, law, etc, because of higher prestige and better pay. Increasing immigration will increase the number of programmers, but if it is increased to the point where it affects wages, then people who would be great programmers would likely go to other professions rather than having to compete against immigrants for a comparatively lower wage, so it might be self-defeating in the long run.
- humanrebar 12y ago
  Agreed. What's more is that deflating the cost of programmers makes it less sensible to make programming teams more efficient. If programmers were paid like doctors, you would start to see the tech equivalent of nurses, lab technicians, orderlies, and physicians' assistants. In other words, if you were paying your best programmers $1M/yr, you would hire more personal assistants. And maybe there would be more demand for people who are (or can become) fluent in technology lingo, even if they can't write code themselves.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > If programmers were paid like doctors, you would start to see the tech equivalent of nurses, lab technicians, orderlies, and physicians' assistants. What do you think business analysts, testers, non-developer IT specialists, etc., are?
vasilipupkin 12y ago
I am all for letting talented people in. Clearly, everybody would benefit if the really talented programmers from all over the world could work where the eco-system is set up for them. However, tech companies generally complain about a general shortage of programmers. And I don't buy it because a shortage would manifest itself through large real wage increases and we don't see those. I also suspect talented programmers overseas are already working for us - remotely.
sauravc 12y ago
"People are born with an innate calling to drug dealing," What the hell is this author talking about? While the he's a pretty accomplished individual, he lost me with his shitty analogies based on false premises.
- thejaredhooper 12y ago
  That, and the included garbage at the bottom about child support, was pretty pathetic.
hkarthik 12y ago
Hypothetically, let's say every YC startup was to double the starting salaries for programmers they hired. So if they are paying $120K-$150K/year, they start paying $240K-$300K/year. At that salary, programmers are getting paid on par with lawyers, doctors, and bankers. To pay this much, assume every startup needs to raise double or triple the amount of capital. The $1 million angel round becomes a $3 million VC round. For the VCs, the $100 million doesn't cut it and they start wanting the $300 million or $1 billion exits to justify the volume of seeds to exits. The net effect is that the entire sector will need to de-leverage the risks they are currently taking. Entire business models that are currently considered fundable become completely impractical. VCs no longer spread the risk among many startups and start to rely on fewer, safer bets. Maybe in general, the whole sector would feel a little healthier instead of this constant up and down every few years. But in the short term, it would result in a lot of pain for the major players in SF and Silicon Valley today.
- gaius 12y ago
  I'm really sad that John Doerr won't make another billion dollars. Oh wait, no I'm not. You see, it won't change a thing. In the current low-interest-rate environment there is nowhere else for the money to go. VCs and startups could pay engineers fairly (i.e. at the price at which the market clears) without breaking a sweat. They just don't, out of naked greed. Except now they're running out of people naive enough to exploit, hence wanting to bring in more people, people who are indentured by their visa status.
  - waterlesscloud 12y ago
    That's the frustrating part about it all. Capital is sitting around instead of being applied properly to this critical issue, and then the people responsible for allocating the capital want to place the blame elsewhere.
  - ky3 12y ago
    startups could pay engineers fairly .... They just don't, out of naked greed. Also that idle hands are the devil's workshop. There's a fiduciary duty to channel disruption where it is due, while at the same time stabilizing the polity elsewhere.
tokenadult 12y ago
Philip Greenspun is notorious for being intentionally provocative in his online essays, but here he makes a thoughtful contribution to the literature by picking apart one of the weakest points in Paul Graham's recent essay. The essay by pg appears to assume that programmers are born and not made and they are born in equal rates by population in all parts of the world. Greenspun correctly challenges that kind of naive genetic determinism and suggests that people around the world, in many occupations, respond to incentives, so that people who are within reach of incentives to become better programmers will tend to become better programmers, while people not offered incentives to become better programmers will choose other career trade-offs. Our fellow participant in this discussion davidw makes the good point that immigration in general is good for countries in general. So my basic policy predisposition is for the United States to have very open borders to immigration, and to impose few requirements on immigration. (All of my ancestors came to North America under rules like that, after all.) My wife was readily able to immigrate to the United States under the "immediate relative" category of immigrants after we had been married for more than a year overseas. My oldest son has sometimes considered moving away from the United States to settle in another country (he has looked specifically at some other countries), and what he has found is that his programming skills help open doors to permanent residence and settling in other countries to immigrate, but especially so for people with college degrees rather than on-the-job training in programming. It is still the case today that the United States is by far the most desired country to settle in for immigrants from all around the world.[1] And a lot of people achieve that desire. I know first-generation immigrants from India, China, Russia, Korea, Vietnam, Ghana, Haiti, Australia, Pakistan, Turkey, the Philippines, Romania, Poland, Somalia, Argentina, Ecuador, Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, and a variety of other countries here in Minnesota, where the climate is anything but inviting. My inclination is to welcome even more immigrants than the United States welcomes now (for one thing, that improves the variety of local ethnic restaurants and grocery stores) but the United States already receives more net immigrants from all the rest of the world than any other country on earth, so I can understand why my fellow voters might not think that the United States has a shortage of immigrants. To make a strong policy case for immigration reform takes a more nuanced and tightly reasoned factual argument than Paul Graham made in his recent essay. [1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/161435/100-million-worldwide-dream-life.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/161435/100-million-worldwide-drea...
tessierashpool 12y ago
I guarantee you, open your doors to remote programmers, and you will get more top-quality prospects than you can possibly hire. You're restricting your hiring pool to people who are willing to live in a small, overpriced, and absurdly overrated city. It's a wonderful place, don't get me wrong. But expecting every single great programmer in the world to live in that one tiny city is just ridiculous. By Paul Graham's own arguments, they wouldn't all be able to fit.
big_astrocyte 12y ago
I'm not sure if I want to see any particular country progress as much as I want to see tech and the world at large progress. I also agree with the fact that when a lot of people skilled in one particular domain gather at one place, amazing things happen!! But would a small area 100% full of programmers be better or worse than something like SV? At what point does the innovative progress being produced by a city start to plateau? 25% full of high earning programmers, 50% full of high earning programmers, 75% full of high earning programmers? The point that I'm trying to make is that, without a lot of empirical evidence, I think it would be a much better idea to try and create more such centers across the world. Thus, for those focusing strictly on tech progress (as opposed to American progress) it might be a better idea to let the US immigration laws be the way they are, while encouraging VCs to travel a bit more (even to other American cities, for starters) and helping the amazing culture travel to other cities. I can't understand why we focus on one particular country instead of combined innovation of the world! The future doesn't lie in Silicon Valley being 100% full of programmers from across the world. It is just not big enough!! The future lies in a 1000 silicon valleys having a certain threshold of programmers. Just a thought.
dang 12y ago
HN has recently had multiple extensive threads about PG's immigration essay and the questions raised by it. In such cases, we demote follow-up posts as duplicates unless they contain significant new information. Please note that this criterion depends neither on what the particular topic is, nor the opinions people express, nor who they agree or disagree with. It has to do with avoiding repetition. The reason for this practice is that without it, the same vociferous discussions would recur on the front page every day, and that would fail to gratify intellectual curiosity.
- alayne 12y ago
  Your moderation is getting too heavy handed. People are interested in this topic and you are unilaterally killing discussion. It's not like the site is being taken over as it was with some of the NSA topics.
- krapp 12y ago
  With all due respect, you appear to be confusing "intellectual gravity" with "novelty."
  - dang 12y ago
    I don't think I said gravity? But by all means, find more substantive stories. Historical material is especially welcome here, and so are out-of-the-way pieces with no obvious relevance except that they're interesting.
    - krapp 12y ago
      Fair enough. Pushing down discussions because they don't make the frontpage varied enough still just doesn't seem right to me. I understand that space is limited and nobody ever checks beyond page 1 but still - making threads harder to find doesn't seem to serve the interests of anyone who might actually be interested in those discussions.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  PG says this issue is crucial to the very future of America. So it's only worth one day of discussion?
dennisgorelik 12y ago
Philip Greenspun forgot to mention that if immigration restrictions persist, then potential immigrants who cannot enter the US due to immigration restrictions would make less than they would do in the US. Is that discrimination against potential immigrants fair?

83 points by soundsop 12y ago

And why should we artificially restrict the supply of immigrants? It's not like it's a zero-sum game, something that Greenspun ought to realize. http://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-jobs/ http://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-jobs...

lackbeard 12y ago
Nowhere in this blog post does he say that the supply of immigrants ought to be restricted...
- davidw 12y ago
  He sure seems to imply that paying far above market salaries is the best way to get good programmers, rather than immigration. Maybe I'm reading it wrong? I don't think the economics of that add up, though, long term. If there are a bunch of people willing to work, and an artificial barrier, that barrier will only work for so long before people route around it.
  - paulmd 12y ago
    This post seems to imply that there is a single "market salary" for programmers. That's not really the case anywhere - a green intern doing web programming is never going to have an equal salary to a greybeard doing consulting in esoteric niche areas (eg COBOL in banking systems). There's always diminishing returns for superstar talent in any field - a Fortune 25 CEO gets paid how much more than a manager at Wendy's? The collusion between the big tech companies to drive down salaries for top personnel strongly suggests that the market salary for these people is actually higher than what they're currently paid. They're grade-A talent in a hot field, the fact that their salaries are high doesn't mean they're above-market.
  - geebee 12y ago
    Actually, I didn't read it that way. I saw this as a dispute on a point of logic, rather than a broad statement about the best way to get programmers. Paul Graham makes the following claim: "if you talk to startups, you find practically every one over a certain size has gone through legal contortions to get programmers into 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." Phil Greenspun makes the common (common because, in my opinion, it's so sensible) argument that perhaps a "shortage" exists because the market rate is too low to draw people into the field - that if you raised the price to well above what it currently costs to get a programmer, you'd draw considerably more people into the field. Greenspun claims that Graham's argument is based on the flawed notion that "there is no way that if companies nationwide paid programmers more than the BLS’s median pay of $74,280 per year (source), additional Americans would be attracted to this field." Part of the problem with Greenspun's retort is that PG claims to be talking only about an extreme elite, not the run of the mill programmers. However, the logic still stands in my opinion. Have you seen what elite people earn in other fields? I guess if you think that it's impossible to get someone who would otherwise have gone to med, law, or finance into programming by offering more money at a comparably elite level of talent, you'd agree that the supply of people is fixed and doesn't respond to market signals. That seems to be the basis of the disagreement.
    - davidw 12y ago
      Oh, I agree that the supply of people is not fixed, and does respond to incentives. But I have done open source software long enough to realize that a lot of great programmers are outside the US, and that creating artificial barriers is not a good solution, long-term.
31reasons 12y ago
It is not zero-sum ? companies like Google, Facebook pick 1 out of 100 programmers, if there was 10 fold increase in programmers, they would start picking 1 out of 1000. Instead of complaining shortage of programmer it makes sense to build software development processes around "average" programmers rather than insisting on superstar programmers. How many other fields do that ? Have you read an ad about hiring only superstar plumber,pilot,electrician,nurse? Even if its true that your company will benefit from so called 10x programmers why not train people to be 10x or give degrees to people who are only 10x. Just increasing the pool of 1x while insisting on hiring 10x doesn't make sense.
- davidw 12y ago
  > It is not zero-sum No, it really isn't. Read my article and the linked economic research. > if there was 10 fold increase in programmers There has been a 10 fold increase in programmers since 50 years ago, but more than a 10 fold increase in the amount of programming work, so salaries have done just fine. Also, those programmers are already there, in other countries, so artificial barriers can only create so much salary disparity before companies will pursue other options. At that point, why were you bothering trying to keep them out in the first place? Read the linked article: it is not a zero-sum game.
- palakchokshi 12y ago
  Angie's List does explicitly that, showing you superstar plumbers, electricians, doctors, etc. If I am given the choice to hire a great plumber vs. an average plumber I would always hire a great plumber if I can afford him. Your argument that development processes should be built around average programmers is like saying open heart surgical procedures should be designed around average surgeons.
  - 31reasons 12y ago
    We humans are greedy species. If given opportunity we would always hire superstar (even janitors or hamburger flippers) especially if they don't cost any extra. If you can find superstar, great! but stop crying "shortage" if you are not in the business of open heart surgery. EDIT: And yes every average heart surgeon is capable of doing heart surgery otherwise they would not get a degree in the first place. There is no such thing as 10x heart surgeon.

discardorama 12y ago

How about "raises to increase the supply of programmers" instead?

pen2l 12y ago
Exactly. I'm really confused about this situation of VCs having their cake, and eating it too. Why and when did we just stat accepting the assumption that these companies and VCs are entitled to as many "superstar" programmers as they want at the salaries that they want? I've been arguing for 10 years that AMA needs to increase the supply of doctors in this country. I'm of the opinion we don't have a lot of doctors... if we had more, then in certain contexts healthcare would become a competitive field where the patient wins. That hasn't happened. And that's an area where we do definitely want change, because healthcare is a serious issue. Tech industry has not produced, in my opinion, anything extraordinarily remarkable that truly helps people in substantive ways. Indeed, the highlight of the industry is massive wealth by the VCs and founders by duping customers by way of exploiting their cognitive biases (or "advertising", if you would). If they were doing things in a clean way that actually benefited the customer without emptying his or her wallet, I would maybe be sympathetic to their cries for getting top talent. But after all of that colluding to suppress the wages of the very people they want more of? Wow, the balls that they have.

zameerb 12y ago

What we need is a new 'SAT' tailored to find top notch coders

UK-AL 12y ago
Top notch programmers come from curiosity, building a fair few complicated projects and a little bitter experience so you know how to avoid problems and be realistic

jqm 12y ago

Maybe what we really need is an increase in VC's? Possibly grant resident status to anyone (with lot of money of course... after all, it's only the exceptional we are talking about here) who wants to fund and run a VC company? Because there are lots of great programmers who simply can't get funding. I wonder how PG would feel about that?

davidw 12y ago
> Possibly grant resident status to anyone (with lot of money of course... after all, it's only the exceptional we are talking about here) who wants to fund and run a VC company? Because there are lots of great programmers who simply can't get funding. That already exists in various forms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-2_visa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-2_visa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EB-5_visa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EB-5_visa I don't think PG would have any problems with that, because investing in startups is not a zero-sum game, which is one of the reasons why there are so many investors in the bay area. It's not like they seek out "investor free" territory, such as eastern Montana.
pm90 12y ago
You can get a GC in the US if you can prove that you have $1 million invested in the US. Yes, its as simple as that. More rich people not moving is probably because if you're rich, you already have a good lifestyle.
- foobarqux 12y ago
  I think it can be as low as $250k if invested in certain areas.

whiddershins 12y ago

What if the qualities that make a drug dealer are economic, but the qualities that make a GREAT drug dealer may be a mix of environment and genes? If you want the most amazing, ruthless, and efficient black market for drugs, you must have the largest possible number of drug dealers participating in the system, so the most talented and motivated drug dealers have the opportunity to be the best they can be. The author of this post is missing some of Graham's core arguments, and it makes me want to go back and reread the original essay. Perhaps it is PG's fault for conflating concepts, as people seem to be raising valid points (startups should be able to hire great programmers if they would just pay more) while missing that the core thesis is undeniable: if there are more programmers participating, more greatness will emerge. It is probably not even linear. If you track the history of martial arts proficiency, the ones that are in fashion seem to produce a higher overall average of ability, with the "greats" in that martial art always arising when many many people are participating in that art, and there is a rich ecosystem that supports learning and competition. i.e. Judo in the 1970s, or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in the early 2000s. I see this anecdotally and in published research, where pockets of artists, writers, and musicians have created a wildly disproportionate amount of forward looking work when there are many of them in the same area creating all at once. Even if startups paid more, it would not significantly increase the total number of great programmers. Google, Apple, and Facebook already DO pay "more" and I think these companies are in exactly the same boat as the startup in the essay - they would happily keep hiring as many great programmers as they can find. If that is true, the number of jobs available to great programmers is not proved to be finite.

peterchon 12y ago
What makes a great programmer? And what does this great programmers do? We have had and still have a vast number of great programmers in US and churning our more and more, but what do they do? is it greatness that they seek? if so, why are more programmers involved in scientific research? I really want to agree with your views, but for now it seems that immigration is an issue for one market sector, and last time I looked, that market sector isn't out to change the world.

peterchon 12y ago

I'm an immigrant, served in USMC, after service had to pay and take a test to become a citizen (funny right? can die for the country but won't let me be a citizen). I love my country(both), but when did immigration become something to benefit the corporations?

bilbo0s 12y ago
I'm a bit confused by your question ??? Immigration, at the root, has always been about economic necessity in North America. Why would it be any different now ?
- peterchon 12y ago
  Maybe I'm just naive. But I'd like to think that immigration is for a greater cause than for companies to make more money.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
mhurron 12y ago
Everything in the US is for the benefit of corporations.

patio11 12y ago

I think the subtext of "I would hire thirty great programmers tomorrow!" is "I would hire thirty great programmers tomorrow! They just need to think 55 hours a week is a nice relaxing pace, have impeccable pedigrees, and be capable of spinning up within single-digit weeks. Also, we're looking for top-of-the-skill-curve at a combination of five technologies, two of which are fairly niche. For a variety of reasons we'd strongly prefer if they were located in one particular geographic area where we happen to be in vicious, frothy competition with a hundred firms trying to hire exactly this profile of people." This happens to be very similar to the rough description that Wall Street is looking for in certain niches of programmers. I have not heard Wall Street loudly complaining about the impossibility of finding Haskell programmers who can code against FIX and also have PhDs in physics. I rather strongly believe this is because Wall Street institutionally believes in market prices and, unlike Silicon Valley, is willing to tolerate the market telling them that the market clearing price for hiring this type of programmer times thirty is $200k base plus a $600k bonus as opposed to $120k base plus an equity grant with expected value in the $X0k range.

ryanSrich 12y ago
> $120k base plus an equity grant with expected value in the $X0k range. Or not even $120k. You'd be surprised at what some SV companies get away with. Take a look at angel list and you'll commonly see wages lower than $100k for experienced developers. I'd say the only epidemic that exists in the US's technology field is a lack of adequate compensation, not a lack of talent.
- encoderer 12y ago
  Using job ads to gauge market salaries will leave you at a disadvantage. There aren't many engineers in the bay area taking work today at $100k or below. Those that are are usually right out of school, or working for a cause they believe in.
  - geebee 12y ago
    It's very hard to get real data, so I can't really fault you for the lack of a good cite. However, it's not like the companies claiming a shortage are exactly forthcoming with the data themselves. Here's a pretty eye-opening story about a journalist and professor trying to get good data to study the issue http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2013/09/20/profs-immigration-challenge-to-silicon-valley-let-me-observe-how-you-hire-tech-workers/ http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2013/09/20/profs-immigr... I find it remarkable that people make claims of shortages without sharing information about the skill set they need and the compensation they're offering. Well, I don't find it remarkable, in the sense that I don't find PR-speak especially surprising anymore. I guess I should say I find it galling.

ovi256 12y ago

Off topic, but the second comment from Jason is pure gold. He's calling Philip Greenspun (of Greenspun's tenth law fame), a "Harvard Lawyer of unknown programming provenance". I can see how blog hostnames can confuse people, but maybe google the author for context ? Besides, he's fighting the strawman of training, where Greenspun talked about economic incentives.

gaius 12y ago
I posted a comment to that effect a few minutes ago :-)
- gaius 12y ago
  Hmm, which is now been deleted.

steven2012 12y ago

What the blog post is saying is essentially saying is that pg is crying about a broken market, when in fact the market is working perfectly, ie. people who could be great programmers would rather go to other higher paying professions because programmers' salaries don't pay as well. The OP basically says the CEO of the startup could get 30 great programmers if he just raised his salaries and benefits higher, which is what the market is telling him. For example, if that CEO paid his programmers $1M/yr, you don't think he would get 100 of the best programmers in the entire world? What he really is saying is that he wants great programmers at a lower cost, and that's basically what increasing immigration would do by increasing the supply. I personally have no problems with increasing immigration via H1B, but the OP makes an interesting point about economic incentives that push people to occupations. There are a lot of very smart people who would make great programmers that are going into finance, medicine, law, etc, because of higher prestige and better pay. Increasing immigration will increase the number of programmers, but if it is increased to the point where it affects wages, then people who would be great programmers would likely go to other professions rather than having to compete against immigrants for a comparatively lower wage, so it might be self-defeating in the long run.

humanrebar 12y ago
Agreed. What's more is that deflating the cost of programmers makes it less sensible to make programming teams more efficient. If programmers were paid like doctors, you would start to see the tech equivalent of nurses, lab technicians, orderlies, and physicians' assistants. In other words, if you were paying your best programmers $1M/yr, you would hire more personal assistants. And maybe there would be more demand for people who are (or can become) fluent in technology lingo, even if they can't write code themselves.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > If programmers were paid like doctors, you would start to see the tech equivalent of nurses, lab technicians, orderlies, and physicians' assistants. What do you think business analysts, testers, non-developer IT specialists, etc., are?

vasilipupkin 12y ago

I am all for letting talented people in. Clearly, everybody would benefit if the really talented programmers from all over the world could work where the eco-system is set up for them. However, tech companies generally complain about a general shortage of programmers. And I don't buy it because a shortage would manifest itself through large real wage increases and we don't see those. I also suspect talented programmers overseas are already working for us - remotely.

sauravc 12y ago

"People are born with an innate calling to drug dealing," What the hell is this author talking about? While the he's a pretty accomplished individual, he lost me with his shitty analogies based on false premises.

thejaredhooper 12y ago
That, and the included garbage at the bottom about child support, was pretty pathetic.

hkarthik 12y ago

Hypothetically, let's say every YC startup was to double the starting salaries for programmers they hired. So if they are paying $120K-$150K/year, they start paying $240K-$300K/year. At that salary, programmers are getting paid on par with lawyers, doctors, and bankers. To pay this much, assume every startup needs to raise double or triple the amount of capital. The $1 million angel round becomes a $3 million VC round. For the VCs, the $100 million doesn't cut it and they start wanting the $300 million or $1 billion exits to justify the volume of seeds to exits. The net effect is that the entire sector will need to de-leverage the risks they are currently taking. Entire business models that are currently considered fundable become completely impractical. VCs no longer spread the risk among many startups and start to rely on fewer, safer bets. Maybe in general, the whole sector would feel a little healthier instead of this constant up and down every few years. But in the short term, it would result in a lot of pain for the major players in SF and Silicon Valley today.

gaius 12y ago
I'm really sad that John Doerr won't make another billion dollars. Oh wait, no I'm not. You see, it won't change a thing. In the current low-interest-rate environment there is nowhere else for the money to go. VCs and startups could pay engineers fairly (i.e. at the price at which the market clears) without breaking a sweat. They just don't, out of naked greed. Except now they're running out of people naive enough to exploit, hence wanting to bring in more people, people who are indentured by their visa status.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  That's the frustrating part about it all. Capital is sitting around instead of being applied properly to this critical issue, and then the people responsible for allocating the capital want to place the blame elsewhere.
- ky3 12y ago
  startups could pay engineers fairly .... They just don't, out of naked greed. Also that idle hands are the devil's workshop. There's a fiduciary duty to channel disruption where it is due, while at the same time stabilizing the polity elsewhere.

tokenadult 12y ago

Philip Greenspun is notorious for being intentionally provocative in his online essays, but here he makes a thoughtful contribution to the literature by picking apart one of the weakest points in Paul Graham's recent essay. The essay by pg appears to assume that programmers are born and not made and they are born in equal rates by population in all parts of the world. Greenspun correctly challenges that kind of naive genetic determinism and suggests that people around the world, in many occupations, respond to incentives, so that people who are within reach of incentives to become better programmers will tend to become better programmers, while people not offered incentives to become better programmers will choose other career trade-offs. Our fellow participant in this discussion davidw makes the good point that immigration in general is good for countries in general. So my basic policy predisposition is for the United States to have very open borders to immigration, and to impose few requirements on immigration. (All of my ancestors came to North America under rules like that, after all.) My wife was readily able to immigrate to the United States under the "immediate relative" category of immigrants after we had been married for more than a year overseas. My oldest son has sometimes considered moving away from the United States to settle in another country (he has looked specifically at some other countries), and what he has found is that his programming skills help open doors to permanent residence and settling in other countries to immigrate, but especially so for people with college degrees rather than on-the-job training in programming. It is still the case today that the United States is by far the most desired country to settle in for immigrants from all around the world.[1] And a lot of people achieve that desire. I know first-generation immigrants from India, China, Russia, Korea, Vietnam, Ghana, Haiti, Australia, Pakistan, Turkey, the Philippines, Romania, Poland, Somalia, Argentina, Ecuador, Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, and a variety of other countries here in Minnesota, where the climate is anything but inviting. My inclination is to welcome even more immigrants than the United States welcomes now (for one thing, that improves the variety of local ethnic restaurants and grocery stores) but the United States already receives more net immigrants from all the rest of the world than any other country on earth, so I can understand why my fellow voters might not think that the United States has a shortage of immigrants. To make a strong policy case for immigration reform takes a more nuanced and tightly reasoned factual argument than Paul Graham made in his recent essay. [1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/161435/100-million-worldwide-dream-life.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/161435/100-million-worldwide-drea...

tessierashpool 12y ago

I guarantee you, open your doors to remote programmers, and you will get more top-quality prospects than you can possibly hire. You're restricting your hiring pool to people who are willing to live in a small, overpriced, and absurdly overrated city. It's a wonderful place, don't get me wrong. But expecting every single great programmer in the world to live in that one tiny city is just ridiculous. By Paul Graham's own arguments, they wouldn't all be able to fit.

big_astrocyte 12y ago

I'm not sure if I want to see any particular country progress as much as I want to see tech and the world at large progress. I also agree with the fact that when a lot of people skilled in one particular domain gather at one place, amazing things happen!! But would a small area 100% full of programmers be better or worse than something like SV? At what point does the innovative progress being produced by a city start to plateau? 25% full of high earning programmers, 50% full of high earning programmers, 75% full of high earning programmers? The point that I'm trying to make is that, without a lot of empirical evidence, I think it would be a much better idea to try and create more such centers across the world. Thus, for those focusing strictly on tech progress (as opposed to American progress) it might be a better idea to let the US immigration laws be the way they are, while encouraging VCs to travel a bit more (even to other American cities, for starters) and helping the amazing culture travel to other cities. I can't understand why we focus on one particular country instead of combined innovation of the world! The future doesn't lie in Silicon Valley being 100% full of programmers from across the world. It is just not big enough!! The future lies in a 1000 silicon valleys having a certain threshold of programmers. Just a thought.

dang 12y ago

HN has recently had multiple extensive threads about PG's immigration essay and the questions raised by it. In such cases, we demote follow-up posts as duplicates unless they contain significant new information. Please note that this criterion depends neither on what the particular topic is, nor the opinions people express, nor who they agree or disagree with. It has to do with avoiding repetition. The reason for this practice is that without it, the same vociferous discussions would recur on the front page every day, and that would fail to gratify intellectual curiosity.

alayne 12y ago
Your moderation is getting too heavy handed. People are interested in this topic and you are unilaterally killing discussion. It's not like the site is being taken over as it was with some of the NSA topics.
krapp 12y ago
With all due respect, you appear to be confusing "intellectual gravity" with "novelty."
- dang 12y ago
  I don't think I said gravity? But by all means, find more substantive stories. Historical material is especially welcome here, and so are out-of-the-way pieces with no obvious relevance except that they're interesting.
  - krapp 12y ago
    Fair enough. Pushing down discussions because they don't make the frontpage varied enough still just doesn't seem right to me. I understand that space is limited and nobody ever checks beyond page 1 but still - making threads harder to find doesn't seem to serve the interests of anyone who might actually be interested in those discussions.
waterlesscloud 12y ago
PG says this issue is crucial to the very future of America. So it's only worth one day of discussion?

dennisgorelik 12y ago

Philip Greenspun forgot to mention that if immigration restrictions persist, then potential immigrants who cannot enter the US due to immigration restrictions would make less than they would do in the US. Is that discrimination against potential immigrants fair?