6 ms·

Here we go again on the immigration thing. Very disappointing. It's as simple as this: If you increase supply to meet a demand, then prices will go down. That b

Here we go again on the immigration thing. Very disappointing. It's as simple as this: If you increase supply to meet a demand, then prices will go down. That benefits businesses and, in turn, VCs. Two things, specifically, irritate me about Paul's and Sam's argument in favor of immigration reform. 1. It's stated with this phony "non-discrimination" angle. "How dare you xenophobes deny others the right to come into the country and compete for jobs?" My (and others') opposition to immigration reform is based on a desire to stop the ever-progressing tilt of power and leverage towards businesses and away from labor. To suggest that we are scared of competition (or worse) is offensive. 2. The idea that there aren't enough engineers to go around is simply not true. I know several capable engineers (myself included) who have struggled to find work because companies (a) want you in a tech hub already (b) seem unwilling to train someone from 90% to 100% to do the job and (c) want to pay as little as possible. It feels lazy. "We really don't want to relocate and train folks, so let's just change the immigration laws."

UK-AL 12y ago
I don't mind immigration if its universal for every profession, lawyers, accountants, doctors, vcs, accelerators, financial people etc etc Most immigration reformers only want very specific immigration for their specific industry. Which kind of highlights whats its really about, AKA Price of labour. That i don't agree with. If it increases supply universally, that's good because income is relative. If it increases supply to screw a specific group, then no. I also think in the end, they will bite themselves in the butt. Software development will end being seen as a mediocre commodity job, anyone decent will move into other professions.
thaumaturgy 12y ago
It's been frustrating to see this cross-talk between the two "camps" on the immigration issue. You're right, the most common criticism of PG's (and now Sam's) stance on immigration reform has been that it would be used to depress domestic wages for software engineers, and they keep not addressing that directly, which makes it easy for critics to continue beating that particular drum. (Some other people, including dang at the top comment in the thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8799572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8799572, have rebutted that aspect of the call for immigration reform.) And perception is part of the problem too. On one side, you have some VC and incubator people saying there just isn't enough talent domestically, and on the other, you have people who say they are talented and looking for work and not getting anywhere. We really need a good argument in favor of immigration reform. PG's essay really didn't help matters; there needs to be something written with some specific ideas, some on-the-record statements from hot companies that can't find talent, and a direct response to the critics on the wage issue, at the least. Something that would meet the desired standards for long-form content submitted to HN if it didn't come with a recognizable byline. I'm still on the fence on this thing. California is the leading exporter of agriculture in the U.S. in part because of a huge, cheap immigrant labor force. That helps to keep the cost of food low, which benefits a lot of people and benefits California quite a lot overall. It also keeps the cost of agricultural labor low. It's pretty unlikely that that is the sort of immigration that PG and others are agitating for, but without any specifics, that's only an assumption.
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  For all the talk of ending racism in the Valley they have blinders when it comes to hiring and would rather have more immigration than fix the problem by training and hiring the poor minorities that are citizens.
  - humanrebar 12y ago
    I agree that companies should hire more innately smart people and then train them for their niches. I think the charge of racism is a bit of a leap in this context.
    - happyscrappy 12y ago
      It is kind of telling that companies would rather import engineers from Dehli than train ones from Oakland.
- humanrebar 12y ago
  > We really need a good argument in favor of immigration reform. I don't know. I'm not a pollster, but simple and easy immigration for skilled workers (doctors, scientists, entrepreneurs, etc.) is pretty popular. Likewise, background checks for employment, voting, and a few other things are pretty popular. Generally open borders and expansion of flawed programs (like H1B) have mixed popularity at best. The problem is that politicians that are pro-background-check and pro-skilled-immigration. Just like in a lot of issues these days, I feel like there's a lot of consensus around a middle ground, but partisans on both sides are loathe to actually approach that middle ground.
jcdavis 12y ago
I don't mind increasing immigration, but lets fix the existing H1B system first. Notice how none of these "increase immigration" posts by VCs talk about removing the ties between people and their employer? Of course not, because companies (and thus VCs) benefit from employees not being able to freely change jobs
bdcs 12y ago
>It's as simple as this: If you increase supply to meet a demand, then prices will go down. This thesis statement is overly reductionist. In fact, immigration increases wages for domestic workers in the long-run[1-3]. Therefore, every argument you make against immigration is actually for it (as pg and sam campaign for). [1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w12497 http://www.nber.org/papers/w12497 [2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w14188 http://www.nber.org/papers/w14188 [3] http://www.hamiltonproject.org/papers/what_immigration_means_for_u.s._employment_and_wages/ http://www.hamiltonproject.org/papers/what_immigration_means...
- bokonist 12y ago
  You say "in fact" but the papers you site are the farthest things from "facts" that are imaginable. They are academic models that are at the same time, grossly simplified and grossly over-complicated, that have all sorts of debatable assumptions, with the whole thing being obfuscated in academicese, thus making any sane evaluation of the logic completely impossible. Did you actually read these papers? Did you understand the models and the math? Do you agree with the models? Why? Do you agree with the assumptions behind the model? Why? Relevant: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/
  - bdcs 12y ago
    >Did you actually read these papers? The abstracts and figures, yes. >Did you understand the models and the math? Do you agree with the models? Why? No I didn't read them fully. >Do you agree with the assumptions behind the model? Why? Yes! Because they are the most cited papers on the topic of wages and immigration (I believe citations to be the best metric we got for quantifying consensus amongst experts). I also learned about them from sources I trust (e.g., The Economist, econ blogs). I'm sure we both agree immigration and wages are very complex issues and I believe we should consult the academic consensus before deviating from it. I'm not saying they're right, but we better have a good argument if we say otherwise. >the papers you site are the farthest things from "facts" that are imaginable Please realize you're calling me out for citing the-most-highly-cited peer-reviewed economic articles. In your other comments in this thread (which, perhaps unsurprisingly, disagree with my argument) you cite nothing, but rather present your personal views and, perhaps, a false dichotomy. Although my argument may be wrong, at least they're cited (by me and over 2000 other peer-reviewed articles, for what its worth). EDIT: Here's the The Economist on wages and immigration written for the lay person, lest I may Euler you. "None of these studies is decisive, but taken together they suggest that immigration, in the long run, has had only a small negative effect on the pay of America's least skilled and even that is arguable. If Congress wants to reduce wage inequality, building border walls is a bad way of going about it." http://www.economist.com/node/6771382 http://www.economist.com/node/6771382 and here http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/10/immigration http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/10/immigrat...
morgante 12y ago
Regarding your contention that there is a large class of qualified engineers who are somehow unable to find work, I just don't buy it. If the reason they can't find work is because employers are unwilling to offer relocation, why on earth would those employers be pursuing the even more costly and complicated relocation of foreign workers? In general, I genuinely think there is a domestic talent shortage. Of the talented developers I talk to about new opportunities, a majority are overseas—if we could bring them in easily, we'd readily do so (and pay them market rate). But the visa process is so tenuous and expensive at this point that it's incredibly challenging for startups to even consider that route. Moreover, I'll put my money where my mouth is. You say you're a capable engineer. If you email morgante@cafe.com and convince me of that, I'd be happy to offer (a) relocation, (b) training in our stack, and (c) NYC market salary.
- nostromo 12y ago
  > I'll put my money where my mouth is. [...] market salary That's his point though. Salaries should rise. If you can't find an employee at the market rate, it's no longer the market rate and you need to pay more, or get creative. I'd like to buy AAPL shares at last year's market rate, but I'm having a hard time finding any takers.
  - morgante 12y ago
    > If you can't find an employee at the market rate, it's no longer the market rate and you need to pay more, or get creative. We actually pay slightly above market. Not dramatically, because that would be untenable for VCs and business stakeholders, but incrementally—over time, that's how prices should increase.
- fivedogit 12y ago
  I accept your challenge. My latest project is a chrome extension for Hacker News. Let me know what you think. http://hackbook.club http://hackbook.club http://github.com/fivedogit/hackbook-chromex http://github.com/fivedogit/hackbook-chromex http://github.com/fivedogit/hackbook-backend-SQL http://github.com/fivedogit/hackbook-backend-SQL
TimPC 12y ago
I don't view point 1 as phony: it's not written in the language of a direct attack, and it's fair that you have other concerns but it's also a very legitimate concern that the accident of birth has a huge factor on people's life outcomes and the current policies magnify this. While correlation is not causation it's also true that the US's highest periods of growth corresponded to its most open innovation policies. 2. There are category issues here. Sam and Paul tend to e focused on early stage start-ups -- often you have one employee on a platform and you need them to have solo-ownership of that technology stack -- you simply can't train someone because you don't have someone senior to them on that stack. As you get larger, the cost-benefit of changing changes, but it's still important to take on training in manageable sizes: many companies are hiring 30 engineers with 4 junior positions -- maybe they can get that to 8/30 but I think if you inject too much inexperience in a culture you get too many problems in the code base. Some of the biggest bottlenecks to hiring juniors are other engineers: no one wants to do excessive overtime as a salaried work because they are training someone -- anyone who has on-call time wants to be confident it's going to be rare that they are responding to crisis and this tends to result in not wanting to put out fires from certain categories of mistakes. The other issue is that for training to generate a good return on spend for company, employees need to stick around, and furthermore if their value was negative or less than salary during the training they need to stick around at below market rate for their current skills. Good juniors tend to grow at incredible rates, justifying $20K/year but it's hard for companies to effectively budget and act to retain these people. The net result of high turnover and environments that are poor for training is to bias towards seniority: it seems a bit backwards to fix this by restricting talent so aggressively that start-ups are forced to hire more junior people -- they already have significant risk without having inexperienced people solo entire platforms.
- datasage 12y ago
  You have two types of companies. 1. Companies who value innovation and what to get the best talent possible. Money is not really an issue, its all about talent. 2. Other companies are just using immigrants to cut costs. Immigrants here on a work visa do have somewhat less leverage than a US citizen worker when negotiating salary.
humanrebar 12y ago
> 1. It's stated with this phony "non-discrimination" angle. "How dare you xenophobes deny others the right to come into the country and compete for jobs?" Actually, the quote is: > I don’t think I deserve special rights because I happened to be born here, and I think it’s unfair to discriminate on country of birth. Other than Native Americans, all of our families are fairly recent immigrants. ...and the factor not considered here is legacy. Including Native Americans, many Americans have fathers, grandfathers, uncles, and even some female relations who fought and possibly died in U.S. uniforms, partly for their families. And it's a general point. Your grandmother might have founded the local library. Your great uncle might have built the local rec center as part of the Lions Club. So you don't deserve special rights for being born in the U.S. Your predecessors left you with special privileges through various forms of sacrifice over the years. To be clear, I'm very pro immigration, especially when it comes to bureaucratic nonsense (H1B), but I think a lot of people are (ironically) missing an entire cultural perspective on this issue.

UK-AL 12y ago

I don't mind immigration if its universal for every profession, lawyers, accountants, doctors, vcs, accelerators, financial people etc etc Most immigration reformers only want very specific immigration for their specific industry. Which kind of highlights whats its really about, AKA Price of labour. That i don't agree with. If it increases supply universally, that's good because income is relative. If it increases supply to screw a specific group, then no. I also think in the end, they will bite themselves in the butt. Software development will end being seen as a mediocre commodity job, anyone decent will move into other professions.

thaumaturgy 12y ago

It's been frustrating to see this cross-talk between the two "camps" on the immigration issue. You're right, the most common criticism of PG's (and now Sam's) stance on immigration reform has been that it would be used to depress domestic wages for software engineers, and they keep not addressing that directly, which makes it easy for critics to continue beating that particular drum. (Some other people, including dang at the top comment in the thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8799572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8799572, have rebutted that aspect of the call for immigration reform.) And perception is part of the problem too. On one side, you have some VC and incubator people saying there just isn't enough talent domestically, and on the other, you have people who say they are talented and looking for work and not getting anywhere. We really need a good argument in favor of immigration reform. PG's essay really didn't help matters; there needs to be something written with some specific ideas, some on-the-record statements from hot companies that can't find talent, and a direct response to the critics on the wage issue, at the least. Something that would meet the desired standards for long-form content submitted to HN if it didn't come with a recognizable byline. I'm still on the fence on this thing. California is the leading exporter of agriculture in the U.S. in part because of a huge, cheap immigrant labor force. That helps to keep the cost of food low, which benefits a lot of people and benefits California quite a lot overall. It also keeps the cost of agricultural labor low. It's pretty unlikely that that is the sort of immigration that PG and others are agitating for, but without any specifics, that's only an assumption.

happyscrappy 12y ago
For all the talk of ending racism in the Valley they have blinders when it comes to hiring and would rather have more immigration than fix the problem by training and hiring the poor minorities that are citizens.
- humanrebar 12y ago
  I agree that companies should hire more innately smart people and then train them for their niches. I think the charge of racism is a bit of a leap in this context.
  - happyscrappy 12y ago
    It is kind of telling that companies would rather import engineers from Dehli than train ones from Oakland.
humanrebar 12y ago
> We really need a good argument in favor of immigration reform. I don't know. I'm not a pollster, but simple and easy immigration for skilled workers (doctors, scientists, entrepreneurs, etc.) is pretty popular. Likewise, background checks for employment, voting, and a few other things are pretty popular. Generally open borders and expansion of flawed programs (like H1B) have mixed popularity at best. The problem is that politicians that are pro-background-check and pro-skilled-immigration. Just like in a lot of issues these days, I feel like there's a lot of consensus around a middle ground, but partisans on both sides are loathe to actually approach that middle ground.

jcdavis 12y ago

I don't mind increasing immigration, but lets fix the existing H1B system first. Notice how none of these "increase immigration" posts by VCs talk about removing the ties between people and their employer? Of course not, because companies (and thus VCs) benefit from employees not being able to freely change jobs

bdcs 12y ago

>It's as simple as this: If you increase supply to meet a demand, then prices will go down. This thesis statement is overly reductionist. In fact, immigration increases wages for domestic workers in the long-run[1-3]. Therefore, every argument you make against immigration is actually for it (as pg and sam campaign for). [1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w12497 http://www.nber.org/papers/w12497 [2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w14188 http://www.nber.org/papers/w14188 [3] http://www.hamiltonproject.org/papers/what_immigration_means_for_u.s._employment_and_wages/ http://www.hamiltonproject.org/papers/what_immigration_means...

bokonist 12y ago
You say "in fact" but the papers you site are the farthest things from "facts" that are imaginable. They are academic models that are at the same time, grossly simplified and grossly over-complicated, that have all sorts of debatable assumptions, with the whole thing being obfuscated in academicese, thus making any sane evaluation of the logic completely impossible. Did you actually read these papers? Did you understand the models and the math? Do you agree with the models? Why? Do you agree with the assumptions behind the model? Why? Relevant: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/
- bdcs 12y ago
  >Did you actually read these papers? The abstracts and figures, yes. >Did you understand the models and the math? Do you agree with the models? Why? No I didn't read them fully. >Do you agree with the assumptions behind the model? Why? Yes! Because they are the most cited papers on the topic of wages and immigration (I believe citations to be the best metric we got for quantifying consensus amongst experts). I also learned about them from sources I trust (e.g., The Economist, econ blogs). I'm sure we both agree immigration and wages are very complex issues and I believe we should consult the academic consensus before deviating from it. I'm not saying they're right, but we better have a good argument if we say otherwise. >the papers you site are the farthest things from "facts" that are imaginable Please realize you're calling me out for citing the-most-highly-cited peer-reviewed economic articles. In your other comments in this thread (which, perhaps unsurprisingly, disagree with my argument) you cite nothing, but rather present your personal views and, perhaps, a false dichotomy. Although my argument may be wrong, at least they're cited (by me and over 2000 other peer-reviewed articles, for what its worth). EDIT: Here's the The Economist on wages and immigration written for the lay person, lest I may Euler you. "None of these studies is decisive, but taken together they suggest that immigration, in the long run, has had only a small negative effect on the pay of America's least skilled and even that is arguable. If Congress wants to reduce wage inequality, building border walls is a bad way of going about it." http://www.economist.com/node/6771382 http://www.economist.com/node/6771382 and here http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/10/immigration http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/10/immigrat...

morgante 12y ago

Regarding your contention that there is a large class of qualified engineers who are somehow unable to find work, I just don't buy it. If the reason they can't find work is because employers are unwilling to offer relocation, why on earth would those employers be pursuing the even more costly and complicated relocation of foreign workers? In general, I genuinely think there is a domestic talent shortage. Of the talented developers I talk to about new opportunities, a majority are overseas—if we could bring them in easily, we'd readily do so (and pay them market rate). But the visa process is so tenuous and expensive at this point that it's incredibly challenging for startups to even consider that route. Moreover, I'll put my money where my mouth is. You say you're a capable engineer. If you email morgante@cafe.com and convince me of that, I'd be happy to offer (a) relocation, (b) training in our stack, and (c) NYC market salary.

nostromo 12y ago
> I'll put my money where my mouth is. [...] market salary That's his point though. Salaries should rise. If you can't find an employee at the market rate, it's no longer the market rate and you need to pay more, or get creative. I'd like to buy AAPL shares at last year's market rate, but I'm having a hard time finding any takers.
- morgante 12y ago
  > If you can't find an employee at the market rate, it's no longer the market rate and you need to pay more, or get creative. We actually pay slightly above market. Not dramatically, because that would be untenable for VCs and business stakeholders, but incrementally—over time, that's how prices should increase.
fivedogit 12y ago
I accept your challenge. My latest project is a chrome extension for Hacker News. Let me know what you think. http://hackbook.club http://hackbook.club http://github.com/fivedogit/hackbook-chromex http://github.com/fivedogit/hackbook-chromex http://github.com/fivedogit/hackbook-backend-SQL http://github.com/fivedogit/hackbook-backend-SQL

TimPC 12y ago

I don't view point 1 as phony: it's not written in the language of a direct attack, and it's fair that you have other concerns but it's also a very legitimate concern that the accident of birth has a huge factor on people's life outcomes and the current policies magnify this. While correlation is not causation it's also true that the US's highest periods of growth corresponded to its most open innovation policies. 2. There are category issues here. Sam and Paul tend to e focused on early stage start-ups -- often you have one employee on a platform and you need them to have solo-ownership of that technology stack -- you simply can't train someone because you don't have someone senior to them on that stack. As you get larger, the cost-benefit of changing changes, but it's still important to take on training in manageable sizes: many companies are hiring 30 engineers with 4 junior positions -- maybe they can get that to 8/30 but I think if you inject too much inexperience in a culture you get too many problems in the code base. Some of the biggest bottlenecks to hiring juniors are other engineers: no one wants to do excessive overtime as a salaried work because they are training someone -- anyone who has on-call time wants to be confident it's going to be rare that they are responding to crisis and this tends to result in not wanting to put out fires from certain categories of mistakes. The other issue is that for training to generate a good return on spend for company, employees need to stick around, and furthermore if their value was negative or less than salary during the training they need to stick around at below market rate for their current skills. Good juniors tend to grow at incredible rates, justifying $20K/year but it's hard for companies to effectively budget and act to retain these people. The net result of high turnover and environments that are poor for training is to bias towards seniority: it seems a bit backwards to fix this by restricting talent so aggressively that start-ups are forced to hire more junior people -- they already have significant risk without having inexperienced people solo entire platforms.

datasage 12y ago
You have two types of companies. 1. Companies who value innovation and what to get the best talent possible. Money is not really an issue, its all about talent. 2. Other companies are just using immigrants to cut costs. Immigrants here on a work visa do have somewhat less leverage than a US citizen worker when negotiating salary.

humanrebar 12y ago

> 1. It's stated with this phony "non-discrimination" angle. "How dare you xenophobes deny others the right to come into the country and compete for jobs?" Actually, the quote is: > I don’t think I deserve special rights because I happened to be born here, and I think it’s unfair to discriminate on country of birth. Other than Native Americans, all of our families are fairly recent immigrants. ...and the factor not considered here is legacy. Including Native Americans, many Americans have fathers, grandfathers, uncles, and even some female relations who fought and possibly died in U.S. uniforms, partly for their families. And it's a general point. Your grandmother might have founded the local library. Your great uncle might have built the local rec center as part of the Lions Club. So you don't deserve special rights for being born in the U.S. Your predecessors left you with special privileges through various forms of sacrifice over the years. To be clear, I'm very pro immigration, especially when it comes to bureaucratic nonsense (H1B), but I think a lot of people are (ironically) missing an entire cultural perspective on this issue.