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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

#171

Post by sumedh »

mnglkhn2 wrote: post #53

The value proposition needs to be right. So far, tech companies only propose to let people come and work, for 3 to 6 years. There is no guarantee made to the exceptional programmer that the company will apply his/her green card, and hence facilitate the actual act of immigration. Until The company applies and the application is approved, we are talking just about work visas and not about immigration. The only reasona…

> we are talking just about work visas and not about immigration.

Moving to a different country under work visa is also immigration.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#172

Post by gaius »

moocow01 wrote: post #79

How about Silicon Valley first working on actually optimizing the use of the current labor pool by letting in the REAL other 95% of programmers meaning ... - Anyone over 40 - Anyone who doesn't fit the profile of a 25 year old white male Until this happens in any real manner, these sort of pleas are just politics as usual for economic gain.

Yes, the truth is it doesn't matter how many women, ethnic minorities etc you hire, if they are all 20-something graduates of the same 10 CS programmes.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#173

Post by aheppenstall »

I think a lot of those talking about cheap labour really don't understand how the current US immigration system works. Maybe large companies have other options but as a startup founder I've been through the H1-B process and it is anything but cheap and easy. Legal costs are in excess of $5k and the you must pay the employee a prevailing wage. For my cofounder this was in excess of $180k and thus as a series seed startup we simply can't afford to exercise the visa.

I absolutely understand the need to protect US jobs but the situation isn't very good when two cofounders can't stay in the country after raising almost $1m in seed capital and employing US citizens.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#174

Post by pastProlog »

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…

Yes. Over 100,000 H1-B's are coming over every year. This keeps discussing exceptional programmers. You mean we need more than 100,000 exceptional programmers coming over every year? The reality is that the idea that even 10,000 of these people are exceptional programmers is a laugh.

Every year 100,000 H1-Bs can come in. To believe this article, we'd have to pretend that we have a big wall up preventing these dozens or hundreds of exceptional programmers from immigrating to the US, and completely ignore the existence of the H1-B visa and the hundreds of thousands pouring in every year.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#176

Post by OmarIsmail »

gaius wrote: post #140
OmarIsmail wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Businesses die when they run out of money. Paying your programmers 3-500K/year is a sure fire way to run out of money really quickly. And while a great programmer is obviously worth it, most companies (at the early stage) have so many external factors that even a great programmer isn't enough, they need the time to iterate and find product market fit. You know the whole lean startup thing. So how do you circle that s…

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 keep buying more square footage and driving up the prices until there's literally no way any other business can continue to exist.

See, by artificially limiting things you can create a situation where only people that are already in an advantageous position will strengthen that position. Now, if you want only big tech companies to exist and not see the innovation brought forth by small companies then sure continue supporting and advocating for restrictive policies. If you actually care about the long term future of what the human race is capable of then you'd want to remove all artificial restrictions and let the more natural "survival of the fittest" of the market iterate towards new innovations and technology.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#178

Post by polskibus »

Why don't SV companies hire programmers abroad by opening tech centers abroad? That's what other tech companies do, either directly or via outsourcing companies like SII or EPAM. Quality control is mostly a matter of pay - if it is good enough, you will get the same quality of work as in US.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#179

Post by jerdavis »

I see PG's resume, but I seriously wonder how many programmers he's interviewed, hired, managed, and fired in the last 5 years. How often has he thought about what to pay his engineers in relation to their output and others in the group. How much experience does he personally have with offshoring? I bet not that much actually.
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