Yeah, let's prioritize blind progress over employing local citizens.
Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In
51–60 of 655 posts
Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In
#52If someone is smart and wants to work in the US there should be no barriers to doing so. I don't deserve any job or salary if someone else can do it better or cheaper. We are all human beings in the sense of our right to fair work and wage. Who wants to wake up in the morning and think "thank goodness some lawmaker is forcing someone smarter/better than me to live in poverty so I can have this cushy job"? PG is right…
It is amazing to me how the same group of people can rail against rent seekers in a thread about uber or airbandb and then turn around in a thread on immigration and act like their own rent seeking is pure and good and right. I guess it is all a matter of whose ox is being gored.
Exactly. What those people don't understand is how much this hampers the kind of ambition and projects that can get built.
Unlike Musk's HyperLoop, the barrier for software is not materials and resources, it's simply minds. If you're working on a crappy, bloated codebase it's because some business person likely accurately assumes that a rewrite would be risky and slow (b/c of the supply and quality of labor).
Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In
#53The value proposition needs to be right.
So far, tech companies only propose to let people come and work, for 3 to 6 years. There is no guarantee made to the exceptional programmer that the company will apply his/her green card, and hence facilitate the actual act of immigration. Until The company applies and the application is approved, we are talking just about work visas and not about immigration.
The only reasonable way to immigrate at this moment is through family, which means come and get married to a citizen.
If you don't do that, then you are totally dependent at the whim of the sponsoring company, which might decide at some point during those 6 years that you are not exceptional anymore and hence you should pack and close down all your stuff (apartment, bank accounts, etc) within 30 days (at some point not even these 30 days were not guaranteed).
If we discuss about having talent coming in, then the discussion has to clarify what the value on the table is.
Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In
#54I am surprised by this. It would be so much more efficient to concentrate on building technology that makes working with people around the world as seamless as working with them in the same office.
This is why I'm so bullish on virtual reality.
We don't need to physically touch each other, but occupying the same "space" has a demonstrable increase in productivity and efficiency. Fortunately that "face time" I think can be mostly resolved in a immersive virtual environment.
You also get a lot of other great benefits when working in a virtual environment (why limit yourself to one 24" screen...). For me it's a matter of when, not if knowledge workers spend most of their working day in a VR environment.
Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In
#55> And since good people like good colleagues, that means the best programmers could collect in just a few hubs. Maybe mostly in one hub. Owner of prestige hub wants it to be more prestigous, and wants your policy support to make it happen. No where is this spelled out as a conflict of interest. Ycombinator seems similar in many ways to the Law Firm partner/prestige system, or the university prestige system, or the sc…
Ask any VC, would you be willing to make a deal that grows the wider economy, but has a 99% chance of impoverishing you personally? Then ask why that is the deal he offers everyone else, and tries to get written into law...
Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In
#56There is more than immigration in the way of non-US programmers moving to 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 t…
Completely agree. I don't have any desire to live in the states.
Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In
#57YC has a big advantage over US: they are not geographically bound to one place.
Say nothing changes in a decade. There's nothing that's fundamentally stopping YC from starting branches in SE Asia, Europe or Canada.
Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In
#58> The US has less than 5% of the world's population. Which means if the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly distributed, 95% of great programmers are born outside the US. This assumption is repeated throughout the essay, but I'm not particularly convinced it's true. Why would the qualities be evenly distributed between first world countries such as the US where programming is respected and well…
There's also the assumption that all these companies have a burning need for exceptional talent, which is nonsense. Most companies are not doing anything exceptional, and there'd be no reason to pay exceptional programmer wages when you could pay competent programmer wages.
99% of startups do not need someone to "invent things an ordinary programmer would never even think of." They need someone to write bog-standard uninteresting[1] Javascript/RoR/whatever for their webapp which, to be sure, might be making our lives better but isn't doing anything technically special.
To me the "handful" of consulting firms he mentions is massively downplayed. Most H1Bs, however talented, are being sucked up by those firms or by firms engaging in similar strategies, not startups. PG's goal would be just as well accomplished by focusing on the crackdown than opening the H1B gates wider - if we do that, then the usual suspects will simply and gladly suck up proportionally more.
[1]EDIT: Uninteresting is probably not quite the right word. Even well-understood, solved problems can and are really interesting to some of us. But you don't need to find them interesting to re-solve them efficiently and competently.
Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In
#59If someone is smart and wants to work in the US there should be no barriers to doing so. I don't deserve any job or salary if someone else can do it better or cheaper. We are all human beings in the sense of our right to fair work and wage. Who wants to wake up in the morning and think "thank goodness some lawmaker is forcing someone smarter/better than me to live in poverty so I can have this cushy job"? PG is right…
The problem with the way you're conceptualizing the problem is that while no one 'deserves' anything, the real effect here will be to allow the owners of businesses to play people with no negotiating power off each other to lower their costs.
So while you don't 'deserve' any guarantees, why do you think the owner of a business 'deserves' to be able to hire a captive employee? (They're deported if they quit, and they make less money than an equivalent employee without that handicap)
If anyone with the power and podium wants to be honest about this topic, they need to champion immigration reform in terms of 1) allowing immigrants to quit or switch jobs while staying in the states. 2) Require that immigrants are paid the exact same wages as an American with the same title in the company.
Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In
#60> The US has less than 5% of the world's population. Which means if the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly distributed, 95% of great programmers are born outside the US. This assumption is repeated throughout the essay, but I'm not particularly convinced it's true. Why would the qualities be evenly distributed between first world countries such as the US where programming is respected and well…
Do you honestly believe USA is a first world country in terms of availability/affordability of high quality welfare, healthcare and education systems?