31–40 of 655 posts
If you put all the engineers at Facebook, Apple, Google into a typically-sized college football stadium, they would barely fill it. The new digital economy is not inclusive for everyone, most everyone who does not produce technology is a spectator (e.g. walking down the street swiping their phone, sitting in a bar swiping their phone v. writing apps or infrastructure software). The reality is that the Apple/Google/Fa…
If someone is smart and wants to work in the US there should be no barriers to doing so. I don't deserve any job or salary if someone else can do it better or cheaper. We are all human beings in the sense of our right to fair work and wage. Who wants to wake up in the morning and think "thank goodness some lawmaker is forcing someone smarter/better than me to live in poverty so I can have this cushy job"? PG is right…
I wonder what the all up cost of getting someone an H1B visa is currently? Is this an annoying bureaucratic hurtle or a real barrier to talent entering the US? My perception is that the cost is around $20k (lawyers/filing fees) + some uncertainty due to the lottery. Is that a barrier to a person that's worth paying $100k+?
So you have to take them through the entire process before April 1st - so realistically Jan/Feb/March, and then you won't actually be able to have them in house until October. Large companies can weather that kind of delay just fine, but a 5 person startup?
"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 :)
I am surprised by this. It would be so much more efficient to concentrate on building technology that makes working with people around the world as seamless as working with them in the same office.
It would, if it would work. 90% of the technology is already there, in the form of email, videoconferencing, shared docs, DVCS, etc. The problem is that the remaining 10% will probably mean the difference between the success or failure of your organization, and so until somebody can make brilliant chance creative ideas happen between people on different continents as easily as they happen over dinner, people will sti…
I can see this argument work when the team is like 4-5 people, but the moment you are at 15 and above, it all breaks.
Another great essay by Paul Graham that spells out the idiotic state of the current US immigration system in a clear manner. It is fucking unbelievable that even in the comments here there are still people complaining about foreign programmers driving salaries down or taking jobs from US citizens. Paul Graham is right and any intelligent person can see this.
For example, me. PG is partially wrong, objectively. About the only thing his essay has correct is that there exists intelligent, very good programmers outside the US.
The collusion suit that big tech companies recently settled, the wage stagnation even in our industry, and a wide variety of other facts suggest that keeping wages low is in fact a very important goal to technology companies, and that they will do anything--including illegal collusion--to keep them low.
If anything the notion that there just aren't enough qualified (well-qualified) workers in the US to fill tech positions is at best an extraordinary claim that PG's essay fails by a wide margin to substantiate.
We already have visas specifically targeted at letting in exceptional talent: the O (temporary) and E (permanent) series. Of course, the tech industry lobbying is not generally speaking around those visas, but rather H1-B. So I don't think it is entirely correct to assert that industry wants more "genius visa" types, they want more journeymen (gender-neutral; the kind of staff that are competent but not exceptional,…
If this statement about how all the great workers are not US was true then they could outsource all programming outside the US easily just like call centers. This article is just more propaganda to pay programmers the same wage as minimum wage.