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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

#421

Post by OmarIsmail »

gaius wrote: post #335
OmarIsmail wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know of any great 40+ programmers please send them my way. I think you are ascribing a conspiracy with something that can be much more easily explained. 40+ y/o programmers first started learning programming 20+ years ago when programming was more low level in general. Furthermore their skills were honed on broken processes and outdated technology. And, if a programmer has been in the industry for 20+ years an…

40+ y/o programmers first started learning programming 20+ years ago when programming was more low level in general. Furthermore their skills were honed on broken processes and outdated technology When you have been around technology for a little while you will see that the changes over time are superficial. There's actually not much you can do with a fancy Angular app now, that you couldn't do with an IBM 3270 termi…

Fundamentally programming is all the same: it's pushing around some 1s and 0s. But you'd have to be crazy to think the people in this industry haven't been standing on each other's shoulders and constantly refining existing ideas and developing new ones.

If anything, the pace of innovation has been accelerating.

This kind of "I've been coding banking systems that have been around for 20 years what do you know you little snot" faux-elitism is the exact attitude that makes certain kinds of developers absolutely horrible to work with. I hope you recognize that.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#422

Post by maxsilver »

santacluster wrote: post #403
dang wrote: post #327

All: much of this thread is of low quality, below the standard that Hacker News discussion should adhere to, because it doesn't engage with what pg's essay actually says. It merely uses it as a trigger point for passions about other things, like H1Bs and Infosys. In other words it goes on a generic tangent, and generic tangents are the vectors we most need to avoid if we want discussions that are substantive instead…

The plainly manipulative, superficial and dishonest argumentation of pg is the root cause of this. I pretty much stopped reading after: > where they then paid them the same as they'd have paid an American pg knows full well that the argument of those who feel immigrant programmers are used as cheap labor is that wages are currently either being artificially depressed, or there is no shortage, or both. By ignoring tha…

Agree completely.

Similarly, PG pretends that many companies are willing to go to extreme efforts to hire Americans. But I know about a dozen quality programmers who are "stuck" in the Midwest, because companies aren't willing to make them job offers in major tech hubs, even though they're applying to dozens and dozens of companies in San Francisco / Portland / Seattle / etc.

It's pretty clear that while PG's particular startup might not fit this mold (and the people PG typically talks to probably have honest intentions), the vast majority of these companies simply want cheap labor, and are hiding under this mythical "100x programmer" rhetoric to justify it.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#423

Post by igonvalue »

It seems plausible that there is a dearth of exceptional programmers, and that it would be difficult to rectify this by training more. But scarcity is a fact of life in any market; is there anything special about the labor market for high-end programmers? If the CEO that pg mentions really wanted 30 programmers tomorrow, why doesn't he attract them from other companies by offering them higher wages? Before you dismiss this as naive or impractical, let me point out that this approach has been empirically validated: Facebook was able to massively scale its developer workforce by poaching employees from Google.[0] I'm not even arguing for or against more immigration; it just seems strange to me that this essay is ignoring the elephant in the room, particularly when there's been a well-documented conspiracy among the biggest companies in the valley to suppress developer wages.[1]

[0] http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/google-offers-staff-enginee...

[1] http://pando.com/tag/techtopus/

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#424

Post by waterlesscloud »

dang wrote: post #401
waterlesscloud wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the essay just doesn't say what it wants to say very effectively. It starts right out painting people who disagree with its thesis as "anti-immigration". So no one should be surprised about the quality of conversation that results from that.

Let's assume you're right. The principle of charity is then doubly applicable: it would prevent the needle from getting stuck in that low-quality groove.

Charity has limits.

When you're using terms which are very heavily politically and emotionally loaded to label people who disagree with you, you're going to get that sort of response back.

You can't be deliberately uncharitable to people and then say, "But you should be charitable when you respond!"

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#425

Post by santacluster »

voidlogic wrote: post #297

IMHO the real issue isn't that they many companies can't find great programmers, its that they only want great programmers who live in their locality. For many (most?) startups in the valley, if you aren't living in the greater SFO area, or willing to relocate there, they are not interested. They are dinosaurs living in the past, fighting distributed collaboration. (Which is ironic as they are technology companies).…

How is it that every time someone makes this argument, they do it in such a superficial, arrogant and ignorant way that makes me not want to work with them, remotely or otherwise?

The bandwidth of personal IRL interaction adds enormous value. Yes, in many scenario's that value is not strictly necessary, or can be compensated.

But if you think it's bullshit, or something for "dinosaurs", you have a serious problem. Not just as a programmer, but as a human being.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#426

Post by jeffdavis »

"has gone through legal contortions to get programmers into the 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?"

I agree with the essay in general, but this seems like a fairly dumb question. Supply and demand says that a greater supply will tend to drive prices down. That may not really apply in this case, because a greater supply might result in a greater demand (for various plausible reasons); but the question just seems like a poorly-argued part of the essay.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#427

Post by nhjk »

dang wrote: post #327

All: much of this thread is of low quality, below the standard that Hacker News discussion should adhere to, because it doesn't engage with what pg's essay actually says. It merely uses it as a trigger point for passions about other things, like H1Bs and Infosys. In other words it goes on a generic tangent, and generic tangents are the vectors we most need to avoid if we want discussions that are substantive instead…

The article itself is of low quality. Entire sections are based on flimsy assumptions or are just plain false. I'll list a few here:

"The US has less than 5% of the world's population. Which means if the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly distributed, 95% of great programmers are born outside the US."

A huge portion of the world can't even feed itself let alone educate itself to the high standard of an "exceptional programmer" [1]. If we're in the business of making flimsy assumptions then here's mine: I suspect that the US produces the same amount of "exceptional programmers" as the rest of the world combined.

"But if you talk to startups, you find practically every one over a certain size has gone through legal contortions to get programmers into the the US, where they then paid them the same as they'd have paid an American." and "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." And this is one of the hot startups that always win recruiting battles. It's the same all over Silicon Valley. Startups are that constrained for talent."

If you can't hire someone at your expected price then maybe you should raise it. Maybe the market price has gone higher than what you perceive it to be. That CEO could find his 30 "10x" engineers in a heartbeat if he offered 300-500k. Its not your god given right to be able to hire x number of employees for the price you hired your previous employees at.

[1] http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats

In addition if you're going to claim an entire thread is of poor quality, back it up. And while you're looking for examples of poor quality, be sure to use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#428

Post by dang »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #424
dang wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's assume you're right. The principle of charity is then doubly applicable: it would prevent the needle from getting stuck in that low-quality groove.

Charity has limits. When you're using terms which are very heavily politically and emotionally loaded to label people who disagree with you, you're going to get that sort of response back. You can't be deliberately uncharitable to people and then say, "But you should be charitable when you respond!"

"Charity" as in the Principle of Charity has a specialized meaning. It isn't about being nice (though we should do that too). It's about keeping discussions substantive. Since that is the raison d'etre of Hacker News threads, I do indeed think we can expect HN commenters to be charitable in this sense.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#429

Post by prostoalex »

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 I see are floods of cheap talent, some with questionable skills, coming over to compete for my job

Let me be the devil's advocate and argue that even that is beneficial at the national policy level.

The alternative to cheap imported labor for a small company would be to hire a local guy, but for any medium to large company the alternative would be to hire a foreign consulting shop, and there are tons of companies working in the niche.

The "cheap" labor in programmer speak is usually around $50-70k salaries, adjusted for specific area, and I would rather have US capture the value of income taxes, sales taxes and other economic activity from that $50-70k than an outfit abroad.

Re: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

#430

Post by dllthomas »

rayiner wrote: post #293

I think very few people don't want the U.S. to let in exceptional programmers. But the fact is that "1%" programmers are 1% of the population. Tech companies have tremendous trouble identifying those 1% from the other 99%. The government is almost certainly going to do a worse job at that. And if the government delegates screening to the private sector, then the system is tremendously gameable. So the issue isn't whe…

It seems like the government could substantially delegate this by simply putting a high floor on salary permissible for incoming workers.
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