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How Paul Graham Is Wrong

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Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#161

Post by jleyank »

jasode wrote: post #38

>Use WordPress and P2, use Slack, use G+ Hangouts, use Skype, use any of the amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as previous generations of company did offline. I've been a 100% remote worker for 5+ years but I think we have to be honest here. All those teleconferencing/videoconferencing/virtualwhiteboards/etc are not as effective as everyone sharing the same physical workspace. Yes…

Couple of thoughts to throw out: (1) retention, keeping somebody in the family who has or wants to move out of SV/NYC. (2) Getting that 35x rockstar on board who's not interested in SV/NYC. (3) Stretching the $$ (of company or staff), as most parts of the US if not the world are cheaper than these two areas. (4) Customer proximity, in that there are markets that aren't the (western) US, etc.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#162

Post by jleyank »

larrys wrote: post #132
jasode wrote: post #38

>Use WordPress and P2, use Slack, use G+ Hangouts, use Skype, use any of the amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as previous generations of company did offline. I've been a 100% remote worker for 5+ years but I think we have to be honest here. All those teleconferencing/videoconferencing/virtualwhiteboards/etc are not as effective as everyone sharing the same physical workspace. Yes…

"are not as effective as everyone sharing the same physical workspace. Yes, they do help mitigate many issues of isolation and they do help collaboration but there's still some "bandwidth loss" when people are not in the same room or even down the hall from each other." Agree. Which, in fact, was one of the reasons that both Bell Labs and the Manhattan Project achieved what they did. (For sure a different time which…

"Which, in fact, was one of the reasons that both Bell Labs and the Manhattan Project achieved what they did."

Err, no. The Manhattan Project succeeded because it has most of the available physicists of the world, a blank-check budget, top priority and rather severe real-world pressure. No startup idea will ever have that kind of staff...

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#163

Post by dennisgorelik »

tptacek wrote: post #139
dennisgorelik wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is filing 1042-S mandatory? It may or may not be the case, but when foreign contractor works as a business entity then "Foreign Person’s U.S. Source Income" seems to be irrelevant.

Work with a US nexus is subject to withholding. More broadly, this article does a good job of summing up my concerns: http://www.whitecase.com/hrhottopic-0711/

Thanks - that's an interesting point of view.

If I were running a company with hundreds of employees&contractors that would be a point of concern.

However from a bootstrapped startup perspective that probably does not even worth investigating further.

Everyone is free to sue for anything. That's the cost of doing business.

Hiring foreigners directly as employees has many other risks in addition to having inevitable overhead.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#164

Post by dennisgorelik »

tptacek wrote: post #98
photomatt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How are you handling the tax implications of foreign workers? Are you doing something to withhold FICA/FUTA? I'm doing some research and I don't see the exception that says that workers that would otherwise be classified as full-time employees can instead be 1099 contractors simply because they're foreign; on the contrary, the SSA seems to say that you're required to ensure that foreign employees obtain social securi…

> the SSA seems to say that you're required to ensure that foreign employees obtain social security numbers

But you cannot issue Social Security Number (SSN) for foreigner without going through immigration process.

I think the same immigration process that would block employers from issuing SSN would also block any foreign contractor from winning "I was de-facto employee" case in court.

IANAL

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#165

Post by tptacek »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #164
tptacek wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you handling the tax implications of foreign workers? Are you doing something to withhold FICA/FUTA? I'm doing some research and I don't see the exception that says that workers that would otherwise be classified as full-time employees can instead be 1099 contractors simply because they're foreign; on the contrary, the SSA seems to say that you're required to ensure that foreign employees obtain social securi…

> the SSA seems to say that you're required to ensure that foreign employees obtain social security numbers But you cannot issue Social Security Number (SSN) for foreigner without going through immigration process. I think the same immigration process that would block employers from issuing SSN would also block any foreign contractor from winning "I was de-facto employee" case in court. IANAL

Exactly.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#166

Post by tptacek »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #163
tptacek wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work with a US nexus is subject to withholding. More broadly, this article does a good job of summing up my concerns: http://www.whitecase.com/hrhottopic-0711/

Thanks - that's an interesting point of view. If I were running a company with hundreds of employees&contractors that would be a point of concern. However from a bootstrapped startup perspective that probably does not even worth investigating further. Everyone is free to sue for anything. That's the cost of doing business. Hiring foreigners directly as employees has many other risks in addition to having inevitable o…

This is an example of what I think is a common and very damaging metafallacy in startup entrepreneurship: the basic business safeguards we don't pay attention to because they don't seem to matter until our companies get big.

But these are some of the worst problems, because they submarine. You pour the money, sweat, and (most importantly) time into an enterprise, risking its total failure. You stick with it, your company gets its footing, you're poised to see a return. Then bam, disaster: some stupid thing you weren't careful about when you were 4 people explodes, counterfeiting your success.

You'd have been better off it exploded when you were just 4 people big. You'd have known you were screwed, and could have saved yourself the time and energy, and used the opportunity to move on to something that had a chance of succeeding. Instead: you lose 90-100% of your outcome to a lawsuit.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#167

Post by falcolas »

nostrademons wrote: post #160
falcolas wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that TheOtherHobbs covered most of the points really well, but I feel that this point needs a bit more direct discussion: > 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 work. If you value developer productivity at all, that little bit of friction i…

This still doesn't refute the point timr was making: sometimes the most productive thing you can do is stop a programmer from writing code . As a programmer (and an employee), what you're ultimately responsible for is happy customers and solved problems. If your code solves the wrong problem, it has negative value to the organization, as it's just something that all the other programmers will have to trip over later.…

> sometimes the most productive thing you can do is stop a programmer from writing code.

I have little to dispute about this statement, but I disagree that being colocated has any effect on this (unless stopping them 4-5 times a day will truly make the team more productive; at which point a manager needs to step in and fire that person ASAP).

> The value of colocated employees is being able to really quickly recognize and correct for when the code is solving the wrong problem.

How does colocation solve this where remote does not? Do you expect that your co-workers would somehow notice this from looking over someone's shoulder, as opposed to when you pull in a branch of code from your VCS?

Once you've pulled in the code and notice the problem, you can bring it up in the next scheduled standup or hit the little green button next to their name in Hangouts/Skype/...

I can not see how being colocated would do anything to help speed the discovery of this particular class of problem in a way which is not practical using modern telecommunication software. As a point of reference, I have personally pair coded (with anywhere from 2 to 5 people) with folks in England with great success.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#168

Post by nostrademons »

falcolas wrote: post #167
nostrademons wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This still doesn't refute the point timr was making: sometimes the most productive thing you can do is stop a programmer from writing code . As a programmer (and an employee), what you're ultimately responsible for is happy customers and solved problems. If your code solves the wrong problem, it has negative value to the organization, as it's just something that all the other programmers will have to trip over later.…

> sometimes the most productive thing you can do is stop a programmer from writing code. I have little to dispute about this statement, but I disagree that being colocated has any effect on this (unless stopping them 4-5 times a day will truly make the team more productive; at which point a manager needs to step in and fire that person ASAP). > The value of colocated employees is being able to really quickly recogniz…

From personal experience, the most common way this comes up is that you have a casual hallway conversation with a colleague, they ask "So what are you working on these days?", you tell them, and they respond with "You should talk to so-and-so, he worked on that a year ago and may have some insights" or "Have you heard about technology Foo that's designed just for that problem?" And then you follow up on that lead and realize that the project you just budgeted a week for (and will end up spending a month on, given all the unexpected problems that come up) can be solved in a couple days if you approach it slightly differently.

These are not hypotheticals - there have been numerous points in my career, ranging from being a sole technical cofounder to working in a 50K+ employee company, where a chance meeting has saved me weeks-to-months of implementation effort. And in each of those cases, the solution they suggested was not something I would've thought to look for on my own, because my starting assumption was that it needed code to solve. And similarly, it probably would not have been spotted until the feature was done and the time spent, because usually your coworkers' assumption when you embark on writing a solution is that the solution is necessary.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#169

Post by mikeleeorg »

Just to jump on the point of being physically co-located: I've done both. There are pros and cons to each. What I've found is: it all depends on the people in the company. Some work best when they're right next to you, able to share a drink after work to decompress. Others want to run to the beach to go surfing right after a meeting. Both can be equally talented, but vary significantly in their modus operandi.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#170

Post by grinnbearit »

ha292 wrote: post #158
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This used to be true in the old days. These days both India and China are extremely hot markets for good software engineers. Europe always had a shortage of developers. They are also not markets where people from other countries can go and work. So, that means all things being equal, when really good developers leave their countries they are depriving the local market of their talent. If you think of the equation thi…

Being one of those Indian developers, I'd happily switch with you (assuming you're one of those US devs)

Morally we'd both be better off, I would like a better quality of life (subjective I know) and you'd be able to contribute to Indian development.

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