How Paul Graham Is Wrong
1–10 of 206 posts
Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong
#2The idea that remote work is a solution to immigration is also a meme on Twitter. I'm not sure I understand it.
A San Francisco tech company can employ developers in Krakow to work remotely without dealing with visas. But those developers either need to be 1099 contractors, or loaned out from an outsourcing firm.
Both options are poor. Outsourcing firms for obvious reasons (introducing a middleman that serves no purpose whatsoever except to serve as a legal fig leaf). 1099 because (a) it creates a second class of employee and (b) because it's technically unlawful to classify full-time employees as contractors.
Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong
#3The idea that remote work is a solution to immigration is also a meme on Twitter. I'm not sure I understand it. A San Francisco tech company can employ developers in Krakow to work remotely without dealing with visas. But those developers either need to be 1099 contractors, or loaned out from an outsourcing firm. Both options are poor. Outsourcing firms for obvious reasons (introducing a middleman that serves no purp…
Do you know how Automattic, Github, and say Basecamp do it?
Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong
#4The idea that remote work is a solution to immigration is also a meme on Twitter. I'm not sure I understand it. A San Francisco tech company can employ developers in Krakow to work remotely without dealing with visas. But those developers either need to be 1099 contractors, or loaned out from an outsourcing firm. Both options are poor. Outsourcing firms for obvious reasons (introducing a middleman that serves no purp…
Do you know how Automattic, Github, and say Basecamp do it?
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Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong
#5The idea that remote work is a solution to immigration is also a meme on Twitter. I'm not sure I understand it. A San Francisco tech company can employ developers in Krakow to work remotely without dealing with visas. But those developers either need to be 1099 contractors, or loaned out from an outsourcing firm. Both options are poor. Outsourcing firms for obvious reasons (introducing a middleman that serves no purp…
Do you know how Automattic, Github, and say Basecamp do it?
In my experience I have encountered several firms that use oDesk with VERY healthy hourly pay to make up for healthcare benefits, retirement, etc. Equity becomes a mess, but the folks I talked to were definitely not 'second class citizens' in the company, and were just as respected as any non-remote dev.
Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong
#6Great points. I'm actually working on a longer piece with actual numbers as a follow up to remote working as a solution to the talent "shortage".
Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong
#7The idea that remote work is a solution to immigration is also a meme on Twitter. I'm not sure I understand it. A San Francisco tech company can employ developers in Krakow to work remotely without dealing with visas. But those developers either need to be 1099 contractors, or loaned out from an outsourcing firm. Both options are poor. Outsourcing firms for obvious reasons (introducing a middleman that serves no purp…
Remote work isn't a solution to immigration, and I'm not sure that was the point of the article.
For me remote is the solution to the so called talent shortage in the Valley. If companies were really interested in hiring the best developers they'd drop their archaic view of remote work and remove location-dicated working.
Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong
#8I am still convinced that before anyone can confidently determine if a talent shortage really exists, they must first fix the transportation issues. I've made this comment a few times already, but if I had a magic wand and made a BART-like bullet train materialize that connected San Francisco to San Jose, Danville, San Ramon, Mountain View, Palo alto, Cupertino, Foster City, the "out-of-reach"'ish areas of SF like where SF Zoo is and where the House-Of-Air is located, and the Persidio... we'd would be having a very different conversation.
In short, I believe it's the commute that engineers don't want causing a big part of all this gentrification and talent shortage talk. Personally, my Linkedin says I won't take any job that I can't walk to from a BART station. Google is an exception though; the whole GoogleBus at MacArthur BART situation.
Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong
#9Spot on! Seems the "shortage" isn't in labor but in deference to employees as people. Wouldn't you want a horde of folks willing to work 80+ hours for Ramen?
Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong
#10The author is forgetting that this is very unattractive for remote developers. Maybe not so bad if you live in a country without decent health insurance and retirement, but for others you'd lose these benefits by becoming a contractor.
EDIT: being more explicit I was specifically thinking of remote workers from other countries when writing this statement. Obviously, remote work within the U.S. wouldn't make you a contractor. But how would this work for non us-citizens?