Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 196 posts

Re: On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs

#121

Post by FranzVonSuppe »

amerliore wrote: post #46
curiousDog wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be nice if someone extrapolated how the wages would look like today if the H1-B program wasn't put into place. Would programmers be making WallStreet salaries? How would that have impacted the start-up ecosystem? Also, numerous H1-Bs are the core of companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc. How would things have looked without any of them?

And where would wages be if the biggest tech employers had not been blatantly colluding to depress wages, using illegal anti-competitive tactics? Paul Graham advocates for free trade when it will increase the value of his portfolio and the wealth of his friends. He doesn't say a word about how free trade has been undermined by the illegal collusion of Facebook, Google, and Apple.

I would just like to point out Facebook was not among the companies indicted for collusion.

Think what you will about Facebook, but it is on the high horse in this occasion.

Re: On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs

#122

Post by mahyarm »

jacquesm wrote: post #23

This whole immigration thing sounds like an excellent opportunity for someone to put together a better way to work remotely. We're all supposed to be internet savvy, why can't we come up with something better than skype and github? Is something better even required? Why the emphasis on getting people into the country? We're selling virtual presence solutions to industry and telepresence to doctors and we're trying fo…

A big part of it is timezones and language barriers. Unfortunately in tech, the big hiring pools of engineers are:

1. USA

2. Eastern Europe

3. India

4. China

5. Western Europe (Much smaller than the above)

And in this situation, usually the main office is in the USA, and sometimes the main office is in Europe. And then you have to synchronize with teams across very separate timezones. 5 minutes becomes 1 day and it become very frustrating.

Then on top of that, you have to deal with the culture and language differences that can make communications very difficult. You quickly start noticing people will organize into native-language social cliques very quickly and that can be a hard problem to manage. You can get to the point that you say you will fire them if they don't start communicating with other people in the company other than people in their native language.

Eventually with these remote workers, because of all of this separation, you'll want to eventually bring them into the main office. Then you have entire other suite of problems to deal with, since immigration authorities usually require you to go through a visa song and dance bring these guys temporarily into the main office that is pretty close to just importing them permanently into the main office anyway.

So to deal with this entire problem, they say screw it and try to import them into one time zone / black hole called the main office. Immigrating into one country starts creating a melting pot effect where their language skills improve, they integrate with the local culture and language of the main office better and you don't have timezone differences to deal with.

So you say, why not say remote workers but they have to be in the USA only? And there are many that do say that! Unfortunately, latin america just doesn't make a lot of software engineers, and you get laws like 'hire 10 mexicans for every foreign worker in your company' that prevent you from establishing an office in the same timezone at a place with freeform immigration policies, because it probably doesn't exist.

Re: On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs

#123

Post by fw109 »

amerliore wrote: post #112
fw109 wrote: post #95

This is my perspective as a much-maligned foreign worker. I lost the lottery of birth, and was born to lower middle class parents in a third world country. But I worked hard in school, and got a scholarship at a respected private university in the US. I worked hard in college, and got a decent offer from a big tech company. When I start next year right after graduating, I will earn more in one year than my father ear…

You won the birth lottery by having the IQ to do this kind of work. Software professionals would not be against immigration if VCs and their portfolio companies were not illegally suppressing wages using anti-competitive tactics. Employers are suppressing wages using both hard and soft collusion. If they stopped doing that no one would have an issue with letting more workers in. Still--the argument applies--why not j…

Yes, I agree with you about the brain drain. But it's complicated, isn't it? At the moment, there isn't the right sort of environment to build a successful software company in my country of origin. The usual suspects are there: corruption, lack of infrastructure. and so on. Things are improving, but there's a long way to go.

But I wasn't quite arguing that I would be giving back to my country of origin. That is not to say that I don't want to. I was just arguing for myself, and people like me: foreigners in search of a better life, regardless of the geographical location.

Re: On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs

#124

Post by morgante »

no_wave wrote: post #117
morgante wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In principle, I agree with most commentators on HN that if there were actually a shortage we'd expect to see salaries rising. Yet, in practice, it does seem that there's simply an absolute shortage of experienced developers. I've been hiring developers at my job for most of the past year, yet we have never had an offer turned down. Rather, we see only a trickle of applicants, very few of whom are event remotely quali…

Advertise the salary you're offering. If your positions look like 90k positions but you're offering 150k, how will an applicant know? EDIT: I noticed that you wrote in a nested comment that publicly listing salaries is a non-starter. I'm not sure why - at the very least you could list the smallest number you'd imagine offering a qualified applicant. Note that it's pretty strange to claim that you can't attract enough…

There are two major problems with listing salaries publicly.

1. We don't really want to make the huge salary discrepancies obvious to our non-tech employees. While it's theoretically true, publicly listing the difference wouldn't be great for morale.

2. There's a huge range, and where a particularly candidate falls in that range requires qualitative judgement. We consider everyone from talented new grads to senior developers with over a decade of experience, but the expected salary range can swing by as much as $100k—publicly listing such a big range isn't helpful for anyone. (Yes, I understand that we could theoretically have different job listings but our criteria are driven more by "how much smart shit can you get done" and "how much will you learn" than by years of experience or anything quantifiable on a careers page.)

> Note that it's pretty strange to claim that you can't attract enough skilled engineers even at higher salaries when you're keeping the fact that you pay higher salaries a secret. How do you expect this mechanism to work?

It's not that I think an unadvertised salary will by itself attract skilled engineers—I'm just using our experience as a counterfactual for the claim that there are loads of senior developers but we aren't willing to pay them enough. Note that in private conversations/outreach, we do try to be upfront about salary ranges.

Re: On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs

#125

Post by morgante »

mkozlows wrote: post #114
morgante wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, let's assume we were willing to offer substantially higher salaries than the market (though the practicalities of our funding certainly limits that to some degree). How would we communicate said information in a way that doesn't actively distort the hiring process? When was the last time you saw a job ad with salary listed?

Put it in the ad. It's not common, but it's not super-rare, either. And the main reason you don't do it is that you don't want to eliminate your chance at hiring someone at a below-market rate (or of alerting your below-market-rate current employees that they're being screwed and should be getting big raises). If you're committed to paying the rates you'd need to pay to get good talent, then put that upfront.

See above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8805687

Re: On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs

#126

Post by pm24601 »

PhoenixWright wrote: post #103

Training is a big problem in tech. When I graduated college two years ago I couldn't find an entry level job anywhere. Every company wanted at least 1 year of experience. I finally found a place that would give me a shot but also massively underpaid me. Two years later and I am a dev lead on a major project and they are begging me to stay (although they refuse to give me more money). I'm actually getting calls from b…

> Why don't tech companies (or any company really) invest in their workers and help them attain new skills and career advancement?

Because they don't actually want the "skill shortage" solved. There actually is no skill shortage.

Companies create the "skill shortage" by making the job requirements so impossible that no one applies:

"speaks Mandarin, programs in Java 7.1 and .Net 6.5, is able to travel 80% of the time, is a Backbone.js guru...."

Just look at the laundry list of "must-haves" in a job posting now a days to really get the true picture.

If companies really wanted to solve their "skill shortage" they would look for talent that could be trained to the exact technology rather than demanding that every possible candidate already know the tech stack.

Re: On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs

#127

Post by kmonsen »

morgante wrote: post #99
PhoenixWright wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am currently looking at jobs in NYC. With 2 years of experience I am fielding offers between 60k-80k in a cheap state to live in. Two comments above you make great points: (1) Developers should be making more than what they are and (2) Why should startups be entitled to cheap labor? That being said my point is if I had the 5+ years of experience you probably are looking for and was moving to NYC I would expect to b…

> (1) Developers should be making more than what they are As a developer, I'd love to agree with this. In fact, I do. But in our experience this isn't directly related to the talent shortage (again, we have never been unable to make a compelling offer to a candidate). > (2) Why should startups be entitled to cheap labor? I don't think they should be. All our senior devs have generous compensation which easily adds up…

150k is pretty bad for a senior dev in NYC fyi. Perhaps you have answered your own question.

Banks will pay at least 2x more and large tech companies closer to that than what you are offering.

Note I'm not talking about truly great developers, merely good senior ones.

Re: On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs

#128

Post by mahyarm »

PhoenixWright wrote: post #103

Training is a big problem in tech. When I graduated college two years ago I couldn't find an entry level job anywhere. Every company wanted at least 1 year of experience. I finally found a place that would give me a shot but also massively underpaid me. Two years later and I am a dev lead on a major project and they are begging me to stay (although they refuse to give me more money). I'm actually getting calls from b…

Its pretty much the same reason why most people buy houses that are already built and renovated vs. building it themselves from a single empty plot of land.

It's far more of a sure thing that you can move into immediately vs. possibly not move into at all. You can choose an potential employee to train who may not 'just get it' for a cost far higher than hiring the experienced guy would cost. It's like building a house with cost overruns that your construction loan won't cover anymore and you cant get any more money. You end with a huge useless debt that YOU have to pay now and a useless half-finished house that most people don't want to buy.

Also when you train employees, you get these retention contracts that can create a perverse incentive for and employee to take advantage of or a deal as an employee that you wouldn't want to take, because you'd have to pay for a training cost subject to the whims of an employer firing you.

Re: On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs

#129

Post by eli_gottlieb »

morgante wrote: post #87
selmnoo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given that it's impossible to produce more senior developers in a 1-2 year timeframe, what alternatives do people suggest to immigration? Why do we operate under the assumption that these companies are entitled to as many unicorns as they want? Why shouldn't they just go out of business? After the whole collusion ordeal when it became abundantly clear that on one side there are VCs, founders, and C-levels who work…

The world isn't nearly as binary as that. I'm not a VC or founder. I'm a developer just like you, trying to deliver cool products—but doing so requires more developers. If my company was trying to suppress wages, or refused to pay above market, then I'd agree with you that we have no right to ask for more talent. But we're perfectly willing to pay for talent—we just can't find any. I wouldn't be surprised if the numb…

I'm going to concur with selmnoo, but be less rude about it: sorry, but those are the rules of the game. However hard a time you're having finding senior developers, the incentive to produce them domestically gets skewed downwards, making the problem worse in the long term, if we let you "patch" the issue temporarily with immigration rather than signaling higher demand to the market with rising salaries.

Of course, your firm can also do its own part to fix the problem directly: hire more junior candidates and train them up. Yes, I realize this is quite difficult for your situation, but consider that if few to no companies train junior developers into senior ones, that explains why there are so few senior developers on the market.

And then there's the housing shortages around NYC and SF that make land rent eat up most salary rises -- that's worth an entire post in itself.

Re: On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs

#130

Post by eli_gottlieb »

selmnoo wrote: post #85
morgante wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In principle, I agree with most commentators on HN that if there were actually a shortage we'd expect to see salaries rising. Yet, in practice, it does seem that there's simply an absolute shortage of experienced developers. I've been hiring developers at my job for most of the past year, yet we have never had an offer turned down. Rather, we see only a trickle of applicants, very few of whom are event remotely quali…

> Given that it's impossible to produce more senior developers in a 1-2 year timeframe, what alternatives do people suggest to immigration? Why do we operate under the assumption that these companies are entitled to as many unicorns as they want? Why shouldn't they just go out of business? After the whole collusion ordeal when it became abundantly clear that on one side there are VCs, founders, and C-levels who work…

On the one hand, everything you've said is more-or-less correct. On the other hand, there's an additional problem: as long as cities suppress the construction en masse of affordable housing, every attempt to raise salaries mostly just ends up raising rents, leaving employees only a tiny bit better-off than before.
Post reply on HN