31–40 of 119 posts
I'm an immigrant, served in USMC, after service had to pay and take a test to become a citizen (funny right? can die for the country but won't let me be a citizen). I love my country(both), but when did immigration become something to benefit the corporations?
Immigration, at the root, has always been about economic necessity in North America. Why would it be any different now ?
I think the subtext of "I would hire thirty great programmers tomorrow!" is "I would hire thirty great programmers tomorrow! They just need to think 55 hours a week is a nice relaxing pace, have impeccable pedigrees, and be capable of spinning up within single-digit weeks. Also, we're looking for top-of-the-skill-curve at a combination of five technologies, two of which are fairly niche. For a variety of reasons we'd…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nowhere in this blog post does he say that the supply of immigrants ought to be restricted...
He sure seems to imply that paying far above market salaries is the best way to get good programmers, rather than immigration. Maybe I'm reading it wrong? I don't think the economics of that add up, though, long term. If there are a bunch of people willing to work, and an artificial barrier, that barrier will only work for so long before people route around it.
Paul Graham makes the following claim:
"if you talk to startups, you find practically every one over a certain size has gone through legal contortions to get programmers into the US, where they then paid them the same as they’d have paid an American. Why would they go to extra trouble to get programmers for the same price? The only explanation is that they’re telling the truth: there are just not enough great programmers to go around."
Phil Greenspun makes the common (common because, in my opinion, it's so sensible) argument that perhaps a "shortage" exists because the market rate is too low to draw people into the field - that if you raised the price to well above what it currently costs to get a programmer, you'd draw considerably more people into the field. Greenspun claims that Graham's argument is based on the flawed notion that "there is no way that if companies nationwide paid programmers more than the BLS’s median pay of $74,280 per year (source), additional Americans would be attracted to this field."
Part of the problem with Greenspun's retort is that PG claims to be talking only about an extreme elite, not the run of the mill programmers. However, the logic still stands in my opinion. Have you seen what elite people earn in other fields? I guess if you think that it's impossible to get someone who would otherwise have gone to med, law, or finance into programming by offering more money at a comparably elite level of talent, you'd agree that the supply of people is fixed and doesn't respond to market signals. That seems to be the basis of the disagreement.
What the hell is this author talking about? While the he's a pretty accomplished individual, he lost me with his shitty analogies based on false premises.
I think the subtext of "I would hire thirty great programmers tomorrow!" is "I would hire thirty great programmers tomorrow! They just need to think 55 hours a week is a nice relaxing pace, have impeccable pedigrees, and be capable of spinning up within single-digit weeks. Also, we're looking for top-of-the-skill-curve at a combination of five technologies, two of which are fairly niche. For a variety of reasons we'd…
So if they are paying $120K-$150K/year, they start paying $240K-$300K/year. At that salary, programmers are getting paid on par with lawyers, doctors, and bankers.
To pay this much, assume every startup needs to raise double or triple the amount of capital. The $1 million angel round becomes a $3 million VC round. For the VCs, the $100 million doesn't cut it and they start wanting the $300 million or $1 billion exits to justify the volume of seeds to exits.
The net effect is that the entire sector will need to de-leverage the risks they are currently taking. Entire business models that are currently considered fundable become completely impractical. VCs no longer spread the risk among many startups and start to rely on fewer, safer bets.
Maybe in general, the whole sector would feel a little healthier instead of this constant up and down every few years. But in the short term, it would result in a lot of pain for the major players in SF and Silicon Valley today.
I'm an immigrant, served in USMC, after service had to pay and take a test to become a citizen (funny right? can die for the country but won't let me be a citizen). I love my country(both), but when did immigration become something to benefit the corporations?
Our fellow participant in this discussion davidw makes the good point that immigration in general is good for countries in general. So my basic policy predisposition is for the United States to have very open borders to immigration, and to impose few requirements on immigration. (All of my ancestors came to North America under rules like that, after all.) My wife was readily able to immigrate to the United States under the "immediate relative" category of immigrants after we had been married for more than a year overseas. My oldest son has sometimes considered moving away from the United States to settle in another country (he has looked specifically at some other countries), and what he has found is that his programming skills help open doors to permanent residence and settling in other countries to immigrate, but especially so for people with college degrees rather than on-the-job training in programming.
It is still the case today that the United States is by far the most desired country to settle in for immigrants from all around the world.[1] And a lot of people achieve that desire. I know first-generation immigrants from India, China, Russia, Korea, Vietnam, Ghana, Haiti, Australia, Pakistan, Turkey, the Philippines, Romania, Poland, Somalia, Argentina, Ecuador, Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, and a variety of other countries here in Minnesota, where the climate is anything but inviting. My inclination is to welcome even more immigrants than the United States welcomes now (for one thing, that improves the variety of local ethnic restaurants and grocery stores) but the United States already receives more net immigrants from all the rest of the world than any other country on earth, so I can understand why my fellow voters might not think that the United States has a shortage of immigrants. To make a strong policy case for immigration reform takes a more nuanced and tightly reasoned factual argument than Paul Graham made in his recent essay.
[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/161435/100-million-worldwide-drea...
You're restricting your hiring pool to people who are willing to live in a small, overpriced, and absurdly overrated city.
It's a wonderful place, don't get me wrong. But expecting every single great programmer in the world to live in that one tiny city is just ridiculous. By Paul Graham's own arguments, they wouldn't all be able to fit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He sure seems to imply that paying far above market salaries is the best way to get good programmers, rather than immigration. Maybe I'm reading it wrong? I don't think the economics of that add up, though, long term. If there are a bunch of people willing to work, and an artificial barrier, that barrier will only work for so long before people route around it.
Actually, I didn't read it that way. I saw this as a dispute on a point of logic, rather than a broad statement about the best way to get programmers. Paul Graham makes the following claim: "if you talk to startups, you find practically every one over a certain size has gone through legal contortions to get programmers into the US, where they then paid them the same as they’d have paid an American. Why would they go…