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

How Paul Graham Is Wrong

ma.tt

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 206 posts

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#11

Post by evansolomon »

brogrammer90 wrote: post #3
tptacek wrote: post #2

The idea that remote work is a solution to immigration is also a meme on Twitter. I'm not sure I understand it. A San Francisco tech company can employ developers in Krakow to work remotely without dealing with visas. But those developers either need to be 1099 contractors, or loaned out from an outsourcing firm. Both options are poor. Outsourcing firms for obvious reasons (introducing a middleman that serves no purp…

Do you know how Automattic, Github, and say Basecamp do it?

Automattic "employees" outside of the US and Canada are contractors.

(I used to work at Automattic)

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#12

Post by Vekz »

jfaucett wrote: post #10

The author is forgetting that this is very unattractive for remote developers. Maybe not so bad if you live in a country without decent health insurance and retirement, but for others you'd lose these benefits by becoming a contractor. EDIT: being more explicit I was specifically thinking of remote workers from other countries when writing this statement. Obviously, remote work within the U.S. wouldn't make you a con…

The article didn't say anything explicitly about remote contractors. The two companies it did reference Automattic and Github have remote full time employees.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#13

Post by jamiemchale »

Isn't there a tremendous upside to being physically co-located? Even if the teams are remote, are the founders not usually located in a 'tech hub' city (SF, NY, etc.)?

Matt says to let people 'live someplace remarkable', but for most of the world that want to work in technology SF is someplace remarkable.

The benefits of using group collaboration tools are still available, but you have other people working on overlapping problems on your doorstep, support and service companies, and access to intelligent finance.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#14

Post by rifung »

jfaucett wrote: post #10

The author is forgetting that this is very unattractive for remote developers. Maybe not so bad if you live in a country without decent health insurance and retirement, but for others you'd lose these benefits by becoming a contractor. EDIT: being more explicit I was specifically thinking of remote workers from other countries when writing this statement. Obviously, remote work within the U.S. wouldn't make you a con…

Excuse me for being completely ignorant of this kind of thing, but why does working remotely automatically mean you are a contractor? Is it not possible to work remotely as a normal employee?

Perhaps there needs to be a distinction between remote workers elsewhere in the US and international ones as well. I imagine there are many talented developers elsewhere in the US that don't want to live in SV.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#15

Post by untothebreach »

So much this. I have pretty much stopped clicking on the HN posts from HN companies looking for employees, because almost none of them offer remote work. Which is too bad, because there are quite a few HN companies that I would love to work for.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#16

Post by photomatt »

tptacek wrote: post #2

The idea that remote work is a solution to immigration is also a meme on Twitter. I'm not sure I understand it. A San Francisco tech company can employ developers in Krakow to work remotely without dealing with visas. But those developers either need to be 1099 contractors, or loaned out from an outsourcing firm. Both options are poor. Outsourcing firms for obvious reasons (introducing a middleman that serves no purp…

Just because someone is on a different kind of contract (say a monthly retainer paid by wire, versus employee of US company paid with direct deposit) doesn't mean you need to treat them differently. Every "Automattician" at Automattic is viewed the same regardless of how their employment contract happens to work, and as you scale larger you can set up subsidiaries overseas to directly employ people. (We look at this once we have about 5 people in a given country.)

Also remote work doesn't mean overseas, there is amazing talent all over the USA too that doesn't happen to live in the SF area.

I really liked this sentence: "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."

There are about 7 million people in the Bay area, 322M in the US total, so let's say 98% of the great people in the US are born outside of Bay area. There are no visa issues moving between cities or states in the US, but many many other barriers that have nothing to do with visas.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#17

Post by acgourley »

Paul Graham is deferring to his portfolio founders' words and actions. Does author believe all these smart and highly incentivized founders are wrong, too? I hope he realizes how strong that claim is and that by doing so he should accept the burden of proof.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#18

Post by jfaucett »

Vekz wrote: post #12
jfaucett wrote: post #10

The author is forgetting that this is very unattractive for remote developers. Maybe not so bad if you live in a country without decent health insurance and retirement, but for others you'd lose these benefits by becoming a contractor. EDIT: being more explicit I was specifically thinking of remote workers from other countries when writing this statement. Obviously, remote work within the U.S. wouldn't make you a con…

The article didn't say anything explicitly about remote contractors. The two companies it did reference Automattic and Github have remote full time employees.

How does github do it then? Wouldn't said company need to be registered in the country where the employee lived full-time and worked? Otherwise how are taxes, insurance, healthcare, etc going to be handled?

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#19

Post by TimPC »

jfaucett wrote: post #10

The author is forgetting that this is very unattractive for remote developers. Maybe not so bad if you live in a country without decent health insurance and retirement, but for others you'd lose these benefits by becoming a contractor. EDIT: being more explicit I was specifically thinking of remote workers from other countries when writing this statement. Obviously, remote work within the U.S. wouldn't make you a con…

Getting SF type pay in a place with rural US type cost of living makes it quite easy to afford decent health insurance and your own personal retirement savings. Not everyone can be a contractor, and there is a lot more planning and responsibility with managing the larger pool of money yourself and getting the key things you need, but saying it's very unattractive is extreme. In fact, I'd be more comfortable with funding my own retirement by setting aside money out of higher pay than hoping the government is in a financial position to make good on it. I've seen a lot of aggressive reductions of pensions in the past 10 years and for people taking lower pay to get those pensions over a lifetime of work it's been grossly unfair and life altering. At the same time they are nearly powerless to do anything about it, if it's your money it's a little more stable (assuming you don't have it in the bank of an unstable country that could seize it).
Post reply on HN