Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

I think PG's point is that some people are naturally great, regardless of their environment. So, yes, Congo or Nigeria or whatever have a bunch of guys who might have been great programmers if given the opportunity. But in less extreme cases, i.e. most of the world, those naturally gifted folks find their way into a compsci program or start hacking on an old machine and teach themselves or whatever. So even if only half of the 95% of people born with great aptitude are found in places with modern amenities and good education systems, that's still 9x more than here in the US.

1) Immigration

1) Health care

3) Living standards (some part cost of rent, some part accessible lifestyle, some part relationships and future plans, etc)

I'm a London programmer and yes immigration is an issue, but health care (for themselves and their partner) is joint #1 on that front. It's hard not to look on US healthcare as being the worst possible product of US politics and that starts to impact the standard of living thing.

Most non-US programmers I know come from societies where we're happy to pay more in tax to have a more civilised society and life. You may fix immigration, but to make the US an attractive place to want to relocate to far more needs to be fixed.

1. Cheap bodyshops consuming much of the quota; and

2. Immigration being tied to an employer.

(2) is a direct cause of (1).

For those that don't know, sponsorship for a green card basically involves two stages.

Labor Certification ("LC") is the first and most time-consuming stage. It involves "proving" you can't find a US citizen to fill the job. There is then a queue with a quota system based on country of _birth_ (not citizenship). For countries with a high number of immigrants (eg Mexico, Phillipines, India, China), the queue can be _years_ long. During that time the employee is essentially an indentured servant. Employers can and do exploit this situation.

The Department of Labor can add to this by randomly auditing a particular application, which will add a minimum of 1-2 years to the process. Sometimes this is for cause but the DoL's stated policy is to prevent petitioners from "gaming" the system so they disguise their auditing criteria by randomly selecting applications to audit.

The second stage is basically a formality: filing for adjustment of status.

So for a period of 10 years or more the employee may be in no position to leave, no position to negotiate and will quite possibly have to work under abominable conditions for substandard wages.

The LC process ostensibly has a prevailing wage determination step to ensure the employee isn't being victimized. Trust me, it's a joke.

Startups here, as a general rule, aren't the problem. These nameless bodyshops paying $50,000/year or less for a warm body to contract out to a Fortune 500 company for $500/hour are.

If you kept the current green card quotas and simply made H1B visas portable and immigration essentially automatic when your number (in the queue) is up then you'd end a lot of these problems.

1) There'd be more great programmers if they wouldn't all divide themselves amongst so many startups, the vast majority of which will fail. Some other VC's have pointed out this problem as well. Less start-ups overall would increase the amount of great programmers available, and maybe more of them would succeed.

2) PG himself has said that great programmers grew up coding. PG's own population argument misses this as the greatest populations (India / China) do not have the wealth for kids to grow up coding. As people trying to increase the diversity of programmers have pointed out, getting this type of upbringing is hard even in America if you're not a well-off (generally white) male.

There's plenty of talent here in America, but let's be honest, its harder to utilize. It's much much easier to just import talent from countries that have education systems and cultures that do better at creating programmer talent than to fix America's deficiencies.