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Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

paulgraham.com

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Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#181

Post by govindkabra31 »

ulfw wrote: post #86

Here are the H1B Top Ten visa sponsors: 1 Infosys 32,379 $76,494 2 Tata Consultancy Services 8,785 $66,113 3 Wipro 6,733 $69,953 4 Deloitte Consulting 6,165 $98,980 5 Ibm 5,839 $87,789 6 Accenture 5,099 $70,878 7 Larsen & Toubro Infotech 4,380 $59,933 8 Microsoft 3,911 $113,408 9 Hcl America 3,012 $81,376 10 Satyam Computer Services 2,249 $73,374 How many of those are America's top tech companies who are in dire need…

This is recognized as a problem, and is an issue that immigration reforms attempt to address.

Every company ends up competing on "H1B lottery" with large body shops. So a startup with 1-2 application has very little chance of making it through compared to others with lot more lottery tickets.

I will also point out a closely related issue. The craziness that full 100% quota of the H1B visas for the year gets disbursed on one day in the year (practically speaking, on April 1. Though full approval process takes a few months). This makes it hard for a startup that wants to hire someone in December, but has to wait 4 months to apply (April 1), and 8 months for the new hire to actually start working (Oct 1).

And therefore, there is a need for a reform here of the current regulations.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#182

Post by SCHiM »

While I do agree in the general sense with what is being said, I very much dislike it when numbers are abused to strengthen a subjective argument. It feels like you're abusing facts and lying.

>"Which means if the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly distributed"

This is a pretty big assumption, there are huge cultural differences between, for example, India and the US. Who says that these differences could not enormously sway the distribution of great talent?

The next argument made is that since the US only has about 5% of the worlds population it also follows that only 5% of the worlds great programmers are naturally available there. However, apart from the question of potential, there's also the question of opportunity. I'd wager that the standard of living in the US is substantially higher than in most other parts of the world. Which leads me to suspect, but not to prove, that that 5% of 'all great programmers available' is actually quite a bit higher.

It's obvious that no matter how good you _could_ be with a computer, you won't be able to sharpen your skills if you don't have the means and those means are more readily available in the US than in China.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#183

Post by pastProlog »

petilon wrote: post #143
tsotha wrote: post #114

>The technology companies are right. What the anti-immigration people don't understand is that there is a huge variation in ability between competent programmers and exceptional ones, and while you can train people to be competent, you can't train them to be exceptional. What Paul Graham doesn't understand is hardly any of the H-1B people companies are importing are exceptional, and half of them aren't even competent…

Please read footnote [2] in Paul Graham's article. He is against the importation of low-cost programmers. He is only for the importation of exceptional programmers, regardless of where they were born.

> Footnote [2]: it is dishonest of the anti-immigration people to claim that companies like Google and Facebook are driven by the same motives

Profit? Who is being dishonest here?

How is being against an H1-B indentured servant coolie visa being one of the "anti-immigrant" people?

I guess the women's groups who protest that Russian, Mexican and Brazilian strippers are being imported into Tenderloin clubs are anti-immigrant as well.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#184

Post by iolothebard »

tsotha wrote: post #114

>The technology companies are right. What the anti-immigration people don't understand is that there is a huge variation in ability between competent programmers and exceptional ones, and while you can train people to be competent, you can't train them to be exceptional. What Paul Graham doesn't understand is hardly any of the H-1B people companies are importing are exceptional, and half of them aren't even competent…

Not to mention, there's nothing preventing companies from hiring this mythical 95% and allowing them to work remotely.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#185

Post by keenerd »

loteck wrote: post #166

This may be the least inspiring, least visionary solutions for one of the tech industry's challenges I've ever read from PG. That's unfortunate. The tech industry's hostility to the basic concepts of training and employee development, which have long since been implemented in every other long-lasting trade and industry, need to change. That change needs to start with the industry's most prominent leaders and foremost…

On the plus side, it is nice to see that HN is not a rah-rah PG echo chamber.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#186

Post by jschwartzi »

delive wrote: post #106
YuriNiyazov wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh please. When the server is on fire at 3am, PagerDuty wakes California employees with the same success rate. Surely you can put in your employment agreement that the reason you are paying American wages to someone in a much cheaper location is because they can be woken up at any time. The finance industry has operated this way for decades.

I don't think waking someone up every night at 3am for a question/idea is 'seamless' or productive at all. Delayed email for when they wake up is what we generally deal with, but it definitely creates friction when working across large time zones.

The possibility for misunderstanding is much greater too. You and your colleague might speak perfect English, but you may still have trouble conveying to them exactly what the problem is with the vibrating mirror assembly is that's causing it to wobble without just showing them. That's difficult to do over email, and a conversation of that nature can take weeks, while if you're in the same office it might take hours.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#187

Post by qwerta »

I am from EU and moving to US would not bring me much improvements. Especially with a family it is very expensive there.

Perhaps US could first tap resources within its borders. There are 50 million people in 'fly-over' states which are sort of ignored.

And 1% of all men are in prison, perhaps allow them to learn (and graduate) while in prison. Right now they are not even allowed tv, not mentioning internet.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#188

Post by FLUX-YOU »

tsotha wrote: post #114

>The technology companies are right. What the anti-immigration people don't understand is that there is a huge variation in ability between competent programmers and exceptional ones, and while you can train people to be competent, you can't train them to be exceptional. What Paul Graham doesn't understand is hardly any of the H-1B people companies are importing are exceptional, and half of them aren't even competent…

I still don't know what differentiates an exception programmer from a good programmer from a competent programmer from a terrible programmer. Combine that with the fact that this definition has probably changed in the past 10-15 years anyway, so what are the odds that we have the same definition in the future that we do now?

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#189

Post by rgbrgb »

edgyswingset wrote: post #101
austenallred wrote: post #12

I really want to believe this, but I'm not sure that I do. Of course the tech companies want to hire people from overseas; being able to hire someone from India for half the cost but have them live in the US so there's some level of accountability/trust is a no-brainer. Huge new, cheap talent pool. But, if I'm an entry-level, US-based programmer, what I see are floods of cheap talent, some with questionable skills, c…

What you touched at the end is part of a bigger problem, I think - people who write something as inconsequential as a shopping website, or Yet Another Chat App, are not worth $150,000/year. Maybe one out of one-hundred of those folks could use their talent on something that demands a wage like that outside of the absurdity that is the Bay Area. I don't feel the talent pool will be diluted so much as your run-of-the-m…

> something as inconsequential as a shopping website, or Yet Another Chat App

Alright so first off, 150k will give you a comfortable upper middle class lifestyle in SF/SV (assuming you have no dependents, in which case it's just middle class). It's really not the astronomical salary that you seem to be imagining.

Secondly, it is completely impractical to pay people based on the "difficulty" of their work. Difficulty, even if we can agree on a definition, does not correlate with revenue. Revenue is traditionally where salaries come from.

Intuitively, if person X in a team of n people writes an app that produces profit Z, then it would make sense for person X to get something on the order of Z/n -- not 100k because it's just a chat app. This is not actually how it works because of some artificial constraints. I believe the calculation in most cases looks more like pay = 120k + 20k if in expensive city + MIN(.01 * profit, 150k).

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#190

Post by gaius »

OmarIsmail wrote: post #176
gaius wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true of any commodity - salaries for your talent, square feet of office space, kilowatts for your technology, you name it. It's called business. And it's not at all clear why you, I or anyone else should subordinate our own best interests, to make this guy richer.

But you understand the world isn't that simple right? Imagine you lived on a land with 100 square feet. You wanted to open a store, but the big supermarket (because they started early) already has 60 square feet and the price of the other 40 square feet is astronomical. So you can only rent out 5 square feet. Well, you can't do much with 5 square feet, and that big market is making lots of money with theirs. So they…

Do you understand that the world is not that simple? The only artificial shortage in play, is created by those self same companies - or unemployment in the US particularly among 40+ programmers would be 0%.

If you care about the long term future of the human race you would be fighting both ageism and indentured servitude.

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