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

Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 655 posts

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#231

Post by codeonfire »

ulfw wrote: post #126
tartle wrote: post #28

"I asked the CEO of a startup with about 70 programmers how many more he'd hire if he could get all the great programmers he wanted. He said "We'd hire 30 tomorrow morning." Evidence-based policy proposal at its finest :)

Then why doesn't he hire them IN country X (say India, China). Only pros. No visa issues. Salaries even lower. Excellent people...

Thirty people are more than enough to open a dev office. The real debate is US start-up managers don't want to live in India or China but want to hire foreign labor. We are essentially talking about a very narrow topic about a very small vocal complain-ey minority in one country who want to reframe the debate as helping the smart immigrants of the world.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#232

Post by rifung »

oe wrote: post #125
khyryk wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reasonable way to let more "great programmers" in is to let more of all kinds of programmers in.

Or maybe interview them before hiring? :)

The problem is that it's extremely difficult to identify whether someone will excel at a job just through an interview. Even if someone really impresses everyone during the interview phase, it's totally possible that once they get hired they'll hate whatever you have them do and just do a mediocre job at it.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#233

Post by mrottenkolber »

fsloth wrote: post #219
mrottenkolber wrote: post #167

What I take away from the HN/Startup/Recruiting drama: * Companies don't know how find good people (they think they know how to attract them, but honestly, how can they tell? They don't notice the ones they fail to attract, which I'd argue is most people) * Companies are unable to produce (e.g. educate) good people * They want to solve their failures by increasing the search space of people I have no sympathy at all…

You are basically saying that programming is not engineering but a (highly technical) craft and the best way to foster talent in it is to utilize the age old master/apprentice relationship? If so I agree. Universities do give the necessary theoretical muscles for a lots of things but they surely do not prepare for the craftmanship aspects (beyond informal cultural indoctrination, if any). I wonder if there could be a…

I never really did academia so I wouldn't know. To be honest, I think the age of academia is over. I have more against these institutions than I see value in them. I say get rid of them, we can do better.

Why can't we teach "theoretical muscle" outside of universities? Wait, was the purpose of universities to maintain the state's control of education? Have they been putting thoughts in chains? Kept science away from the masses? I am highly critical... ;)

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#234

Post by arohner »

vjz wrote: post #91
edw519 wrote: post #41

...and while you can train people to be competent, you can't train them to be exceptional. Why not? Every exceptional programmer I've ever met was unexceptional at one time. Something happened for them to become exceptional. I personally believe that while that "something" is most often "doing", "training" is often a big part of the equation. And that training is more often than not training their beliefs as much as…

Programming ability (similar to other STEM abilities) are power-law distributed, rather than Gaussian [1]. From this, it follows that training has very high probability of producing competent programmers but very low probability of producing exception programmers. [1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042813...

Not necessarily. Surely there are people out there who have the potential to be exceptional, but never reach it, because they never got started, never realized they'd be exceptional, etc. Converting the potential exceptionals into actual exceptionals, is a very big win.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#235

Post by craigyk »

danmaz74 wrote: post #108

It looks to me like the solution to the problem is simple. Just have a "high tech visa" with no number limit, but one simple requirement: The company requesting the job needs to be offering something like 150% (or 200% or whatever makes sense) the average salary of the US workforce, or in their state. This will ensure that the visa will only be offered for skills that are difficult to find in the USA (or the specific…

an excellent suggestion, also possibly a bidding process... but I'm sure none of the US tech companies will champion this option because there is already room to do this unofficially within the current program... 50,000+ yearly visas gives a lot of overhead above just seeking "truly exceptional" talent.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#236

Post by wallflower »

mrrrgn wrote: post #135

This concept of a "great programmer" is something I find very suspicious. A competently trained engineer who works with distributed systems may implement a trivial fix and save her company tens of thousands of dollars in AWS bills. Someone with a strong background in programming languages might implement a PHP -> C++ cross-compiler and double the throughput of her company's web servers. The capability to recognize th…

> and eventually someone will have the idea.

Having read the HipHop paper, I am pretty sure that most people would not have been able to contribute meaningfully to that type of revolutionary project. Execution is everything.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#237

Post by NhanH »

gaadd33 wrote: post #215
fsloth wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I concur. Basically the gradient in the price of labour between countries is driven up to a point by immigration policies. In the general sense increasing the pool of candidates will lower wages. I suppose what PG is after is creating a policy of allowing 'black swan standard' programmers of outstanding skill more in to the US using a different mechanism than the current H1B?

I'm pretty sure that already exists in the form of an O-1 visa. However I doubt the vast majority of programmers who get an H1B come close to meeting the standards for an O-1 visa. So yeah, if you are a really great programmer and the rest of the world knows this, then any employer in the US can help you get an O-1 visa based off of that. If your programming prowess isn't well demonstrated, then yeah, you have to go…

No it isn't. For great programmers, the O-1 visa is basically a hack that we use to get in the US. It was not intended to be used that way for programmer (you can note that the criteria fits more for profile of a reasonable successful working in entertainment industry, athlete etc.)

You will need to be something like a top 1% programmers, working on things that are semi-public to qualify for the O-1, but any decent (top 25%? I'm pulling number out of my ass) fashion models can probably get in.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#238

Post by pastProlog »

wrs wrote: post #104
sz4kerto wrote: post #29

Hm, an article from pg I don't really agree with (even if I am benefiting from EU's open labor market). There are plenty of 'exceptional' programmers out there with not exceptional salaries. Anybody is free to hire one. There are a couple of problems though: - they're hard to identify - they might be exceptional in one situation and mediocre in another situation. The fact you are doing great at company X and task Y d…

Paying more will just shuffle around the exceptional programmers who are already in the US. But pg's point is that the US should be trying to attract more exceptional programmers. And the more the better, because they don't just add talent, they multiply it. (That's one thing that makes them "exceptional".) The secret sauce of Silicon Valley is not just the exceptional people, it's that they're all in the same place.

There already is a program to bring in exceptional programmers - the H1-B visa program. The 100,000 people it is bringing in a year is not enough? There are more exceptional programmers out there?

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#239

Post by pgeorgi »

OmarIsmail wrote: post #105
buro9 wrote: post #44

There is more than immigration in the way of non-US programmers moving to the US: 1) Immigration 1) Health care 3) Living standards (some part cost of rent, some part accessible lifestyle, some part relationships and future plans, etc) I'm a London programmer and yes immigration is an issue, but health care (for themselves and their partner) is joint #1 on that front. It's hard not to look on US healthcare as being t…

Any reputable tech company (or startup) will provide health insurance and or sufficient wage so that you and your partner will be able to afford more than adequate insurance. It's not the upper-middle class programmers that get screwed by the US' ridiculously evil and horrible health care system. It's the 99% that make less than 100K/year.

> Any reputable tech company (or startup) will provide health insurance

... which generates another dependency on the employer (beyond the work visa thing).

I know the history of the employer-pays-for-health-care model in the US, but really: it's broken, fix it.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#240

Post by yxhuvud »

cpwright wrote: post #61

The big issue I have with this essay is that, while I believe it is true that letting in exceptional foreign programmers would benefit the economy and that probably does not overly hurt many exceptional American programmers; I don't see how just opening up the H1B program would achieve that. Instead, I believe you might get some fraction of those exceptional programmers to come to America; but you would probably get…

Or maybe they should do away with the quotas. Why must immigration be limited at all?
Post reply on HN