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How Paul Graham Is Wrong

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Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#141

Post by mgkimsal »

timr wrote: post #130
falcolas wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As another veteran of working remotely, I disagree. Conscious use of collaboration tools offsets not being in the same office together nicely. Real time communication via Hangouts or Skype are at a level where you can hold a good conversation without having to be in the same physical location. Also, most offices (and businesses) are not really built to support proper collaboration and working conditions. As an exampl…

Thing I've learned through hard experience: programmers (and yes, I am one) generally over-value individual productivity and under-value communication. So yeah, you can "hold a good conversation" via Skype, but you still have to plan the call, set up a time, etc. There's friction to spontaneous collaboration, and spontaneous collaboration is what people really care about when they talk about the benefits of in-person…

Companies that want that sort of environment need to structure the entire business process around spontaneous collaboration, not just pay lip service to it.

The reason I didn't hit deadline X? 5 "spontaneous collaborations" happened at my desk in 3 days. Wait... I don't get my bonus because we missed the deadline? But... my collaborations helped the marketing dept hit their goal ahead of time, and they did it by coming to my desk and asking me questions. Oh... that'a a different budget?

If you want to foster that sort of behavior, make sure all of the aspects of the business line up in support of it, not just the facilities budget because "open plan" is cheaper than private offices with doors.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#142

Post by tptacek »

callmeed wrote: post #72
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…

Those aren't the options people are referring to on Twitter (at least not in the threads I've seen [0]). It's about hiring US/Canada based people and not forcing them to relocate. Using Slack, Skype, screen-sharing, co-working spaces, etc. to collaborate and stay on top of everything. The kind of companies you see hiring at: https://weworkremotely.com/ I'm doing it at a great startup now and it's awesome. I've got ki…

Oh, I think I see. The argument isn't that remote-work makes it easy to hire foreigners without dealing with visas. It's that you don't need to source workers from abroad if you can just source them from Tulsa. Totally valid point!

Thanks. (We're doing a startup from Chicago, with one very, very remote team member.)

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#143

Post by modzilla »

It is clear various tools can be effective or ineffective for companies and individuals – this is a very subjective topic. However, since many tech companies, who have subjectively decided they want to have all of their employees in the same physical location, have a talent shortage problem, it would seem only beneficial to modify our immigration policy to allow more of these highly skilled individuals to work in the US. There outcomes of making such changes are almost exclusively positive.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#144

Post by ha292 »

sgrove wrote: post #94
ha292 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd add that the PG post is a symptom of a disease. A disease that that is brewing in the echo-chambers of SV. Note also the recent post where PG claims that "mean people fail". The more the VC community gets un-hinged from the reality the quicker the inflation of the bubble and the crazier the assertions. Time to get out of the bubble.

What disease is that, (very) specifically? I'm having a hard time nailing down what you mean, and how you arrived at that conclusion, but think it would be worthwhile to understand more.

The disease is, to a large extent, myopic and self-serving reasoning. It goes like this: we want larger number of "highly skilled" developers to come to the US, preferably, permanently and preferably, working for VC-backed firms.

Let's think about the consequences.

If this is implemented, it will hurt the sender countries (brain-drain) and may even lower the salaries for people who are already here. I'll go back to the brain-drain again. The REST OF THE WORLD NEEDS DEVELOPERS TOO. Maybe even more than the US.

Once here, these people will toil long and hard and face very steep challenges in making serious money. Maybe 1-2% of them will see millions. Most will make sub-par wages as immigrants. Yes, H1-B wages are lower.

Meanwhile, VCs, since their bets are widely hedged will get to play many rounds of the same game increasing the odds of the payout.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#145

Post by gclaramunt »

jasode wrote: post #125
kareemm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of startups have ambitious goals and very hard technical challenges and you can't compete with a team made up of 99% remote workers. I see no evidence that this has ever been successfully done. MySQL was a 1B company and built with a remote team: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/03/07/1826212/former...

If you're bringing up MySQL as a counterexample, I think we've lost sight of the original conversation. The original Paul Graham essay[1] had a lot of focus on "startups". The companies in the early days scratching and clawing trying to make things work. I thought that was the context. MySQL was started by 3 guys in Sweden working in the same office. Even if they wanted to have everyone working remotely in 1995, ther…

While I concede that's not the "billion-dollar American startup that was built by a 100% virtual team", I've worked for a startup where half of the team was distributed across america and europe. It was an amazing team, highly collaborative and flexible, successfully tackling a hard problem. (I used to joke that the code base was CS funland: all the interesting problems in one place)

We failed mostly because our product was overly ambitious, solving a broad problem.

Yes, is just an anecdote, but my point is that distributed team can run circles around most of colocated teams and we wouldn't have been able to assemble that team if we insisted that everybody had to be on the same place.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#146

Post by JoeAltmaier »

ha292 wrote: post #144
sgrove wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What disease is that, (very) specifically? I'm having a hard time nailing down what you mean, and how you arrived at that conclusion, but think it would be worthwhile to understand more.

The disease is, to a large extent, myopic and self-serving reasoning. It goes like this: we want larger number of "highly skilled" developers to come to the US, preferably, permanently and preferably, working for VC-backed firms. Let's think about the consequences. If this is implemented, it will hurt the sender countries (brain-drain) and may even lower the salaries for people who are already here. I'll go back to t…

Hurt the sender countries? Maybe in some cases. But in many, opportunities were limited there. They come here, not just for money, but for meaningful work that engages their skills at a challenging level. Good for everybody.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#147

Post by gaius »

onedev wrote: post #90
7Figures2Commas wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is that investors might understand the businesses they invest in from 30,000 feet, but they frequently have no idea how their portfolio companies are actually run. If some of them went undercover and applied for jobs at their own portfolio companies, they'd probably have a different perspective about the "talent shortage."

They'd probably get rejected for jobs at their own portfolio companies. That's how out of whack hiring is.

Not sure why you're down voted, graduation year alone would get all VCs fall at the first reading of their CVs.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#148

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

timr wrote: post #130
falcolas wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As another veteran of working remotely, I disagree. Conscious use of collaboration tools offsets not being in the same office together nicely. Real time communication via Hangouts or Skype are at a level where you can hold a good conversation without having to be in the same physical location. Also, most offices (and businesses) are not really built to support proper collaboration and working conditions. As an exampl…

Thing I've learned through hard experience: programmers (and yes, I am one) generally over-value individual productivity and under-value communication. So yeah, you can "hold a good conversation" via Skype, but you still have to plan the call, set up a time, etc. There's friction to spontaneous collaboration, and spontaneous collaboration is what people really care about when they talk about the benefits of in-person…

>whereas organizations want to get a bunch of people working at a group optimum.

It's an exceptional and rare organisation where this is even remotely realistic as a goal.

The appearance of productivity is usually far more important than the reality - especially in mid/late corporations, where the most significant outputs are primate status plays and politics.

>what you see as interruption might be, from the context of the company you work for, be the most globally productive use of your time.

I think Joel Spolsky covered this neatly somewhere. If you kick a programmer out of The Zone with a distraction, you can lose whole hours of useful productivity.

No sane manager is going to want to do that without a really good reason.

>programmers nearly always err on the side of too little communication

That's because programmers like to be left in peace to work on small, relatively well-defined problems. Communication can be limited to progress and code reviews and goal-setting by team leaders. Everything else is noise.

The real problem with remote working is that too few corps understand it, and too many managers believe employees aren't functional adults who can work without constant supervision.

It's a management issue, not a programmer issue.

I think at some point we're going to see some faddy Harvard Review type write a faddy Harvard Review type book about remote, and it's suddenly going to become the new outsourcing. Because cheap.

But meanwhile - Paul Graham's problem is that he has a nostalgic hankering for a vision of SV and start-up culture that's already well on its way to being disrupted by the global talent he wants to move to the US.

If you're a world-class five percenter, why on earth would you want to move somewhere with insane living expenses and in-bred VC culture of the Valley when you can bootstrap and innovate around it elsewhere?

Does he really believe all that funding and schmoozing and presentation is essential to getting a business up and running on a planet with an Internet?

Graham maybe needs to consider the possibility that those five percenters aren't his future employees - they're his future direct competitors.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#149

Post by discreteevent »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #148
timr wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing I've learned through hard experience: programmers (and yes, I am one) generally over-value individual productivity and under-value communication. So yeah, you can "hold a good conversation" via Skype, but you still have to plan the call, set up a time, etc. There's friction to spontaneous collaboration, and spontaneous collaboration is what people really care about when they talk about the benefits of in-person…

>whereas organizations want to get a bunch of people working at a group optimum. It's an exceptional and rare organisation where this is even remotely realistic as a goal. The appearance of productivity is usually far more important than the reality - especially in mid/late corporations, where the most significant outputs are primate status plays and politics. >what you see as interruption might be, from the context…

The 5% thing in the original article doesn't add up for me at all. The top 5% of the programmers that I have come across are able to do things that the typical YC company doesn't need at all. He talks about someone who would hire 30 of them if they could. Really? What kind of team would that be? Could you keep them motivated doing all the bits and pieces a startup needs to do? Maybe they are building a new OS. (I doubt it)

It sounds a bit like people shooting the shit about great footballers or something where you up the ante to large it up ;)

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#150

Post by timr »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #148
timr wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing I've learned through hard experience: programmers (and yes, I am one) generally over-value individual productivity and under-value communication. So yeah, you can "hold a good conversation" via Skype, but you still have to plan the call, set up a time, etc. There's friction to spontaneous collaboration, and spontaneous collaboration is what people really care about when they talk about the benefits of in-person…

>whereas organizations want to get a bunch of people working at a group optimum. It's an exceptional and rare organisation where this is even remotely realistic as a goal. The appearance of productivity is usually far more important than the reality - especially in mid/late corporations, where the most significant outputs are primate status plays and politics. >what you see as interruption might be, from the context…

Pretty much nothing you've written here refutes what I'm saying. You're a programmer, so naturally, you assume that your optimal use is programming, and you draw conclusions starting from that assumption. But if you moderate that assumption a bit (you're also well-used as a planner, an organizer and as a communicator, among other things), you arrive at a different set of conclusions.

"The appearance of productivity is usually far more important than the reality"

No, that's just cynicism talking. Larger organizations care about your personal productivity, but they care less than small organizations. Part of the brilliance of modern corporations is that you don't always have to be at peak productivity as an individual in order for the company to profit. Which means, in turn, that you can do things like get sick or have a family without having to give up your job. The flip side of feeling less efficient is that you have some cushion when you actually are less efficient.

"I think Joel Spolsky covered this neatly somewhere. If you kick a programmer out of The Zone with a distraction, you can lose whole hours of useful productivity."

You obviously don't want to interrupt someone gratuitously, but the point is that your perspective on what's important can differ wildly from your employer's perspective. Keeping someone in "The Zone" is not the only goal. An employee in "The Zone" who is churning out "The Wrong Thing" is worse than no employee at all. So you need communication. And as soon as you need communication overhead, people are going to be interrupted. It's a cost of doing business.

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