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Paul Graham: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In
An anonymous reader writes: Y Combinator's Paul Graham has posted an essay arguing in favor of relaxed immigration rules. His argument is straight-forward: with only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. can only expect about 5% of great programmers to be born here. He says, "What the anti-immigration people don't understand is that there is a huge variation in ability between competent programmers and exceptional ones, and while you can train people to be competent, you can't train them to be exceptional. Exceptional programmers have an aptitude for and interest in programming that is not merely the product of training."
Graham says even a dramatic boost to the training of programmers within the U.S. can't hope to match the resources available elsewhere. "We have the potential to ensure that the U.S. remains a technology superpower just by letting in a few thousand great programmers a year. What a colossal mistake it would be to let that opportunity slip. It could easily be the defining mistake this generation of American politicians later become famous for."
Graham says even a dramatic boost to the training of programmers within the U.S. can't hope to match the resources available elsewhere. "We have the potential to ensure that the U.S. remains a technology superpower just by letting in a few thousand great programmers a year. What a colossal mistake it would be to let that opportunity slip. It could easily be the defining mistake this generation of American politicians later become famous for."
with only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. can only expect about 5% of great programmers to be born here
The vast majority of excellent programmers were born before electricity was harnessed. What a waste!
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Show me how do you measure what a great programmer is?
Why do you want them to come to the US when you can work remotely?
So true, if read objectively
Is that most of us firmly get now that the H1B is about cheapening the value of the good and decent developers, not bringing in developers who are productive wunderkinden. That's why the anti-immigration tone in this country is going through the roof. Good for productivity? Why the fuck should the average American across the spectrum care about that if it doesn't translate into a better standard of living for them?
.. so we can pay them less than what their American counterparts would expect to earn! #norealtechshortage
I love the Idea, we are looking for the top 5%. We need the elite of the programming world to immigrate to the US and help us keep the US are the top of our game.
Seeing as we agree on that, then I am sure you will agree that the best way to get exceptional programmers, is to offer them exceptional wages. So lets work together to change the H1B's requirement and to require that all H1B's are paid in the top 1% of the pay scale.
Let's first try with upper management and see how it goes.
Let's reduce the percentage of women STEM even more.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03...
Companies aren't importing those creme-de-la-creme programmers that we just must have in our country because we are apparently sorely lacking. They are importing labor that despite supposed protections is cheaper (and from what I've experienced socially easier to push around)
My big question is why are you so concerned with bringing them here? The average American corp seems to have no problem having the work done elsewhere anyway so what is the difference if they are sitting in an office here vs. an office in Hyderabad or Bangaluru?
I have no problem with immigration in-general but this whole "we need more h1bs to fill a dire need" BS is just utter hogwash.
TFS assumes that all great programmers actually want to live in the US.
We will have to import the great programmers because we shipped all the entry level jobs overseas. To use a baseball analogy, all the farm teams and minor leagues have been shipped out of the country, so where do we get the next generation of major league players from?
1. People aren't born great at anything.
2. You don't have to live in the US to be a programmer.
3. It's not the US vs the world in programming.
4. Why should we allow more people to come to the country, work for pennies and be happy about it? It depresses our (Americans!) wages.
90 % of the current domestic and foreign programmers capabilities are useless, going the way of the dodo bird
to open dev shops in more than one country instead of trying to colocate every exceptional programmer in the greater San Jose area.
VCs like Mr. Graham here have a vested interest in driving down the wages of U.S. employees so they can extract a greater amount of value from the companies they invest in. Those exceptional programmers who are missing from the pipeline are choosing to go into finance and other professions where they can make huge sums of cash with their natural talent because anti-competitive and anti-worker agreements between tech companies, such as the recent and absolutely massive "anti-poaching" agreements, have suppressed wages to the point where good talent is choosing to go elsewhere.
If they want more talented programmers in the United States, then pay them more. The petroleum industry suffered a shortage of talent a while ago, raised their wages, and now there's no shortage of petroleum engineers and other related roles. It's disingenuous at best to continue to assert that immigration rules are causing a tech shortage. It's simple laws of supply and demand: tech companies aren't willing to pay tech workers enough to make it worth their while. Letting in cheaper foreign laborers to drive the prices down further for everyone is only good for two groups of people: CEOs, and venture capitalists.
By that logic, the USA should only have 5% of the world's wealth, or a CEO should only earn his percentage of a corporation's revenue...
Somehow I think the analogy doesn't hold the other way around.
Why stop at programmers? If the US can only expect about 5% of great programmers to be born here it's reasonable to assume that only 5% of greatness in any field will be born here.
I don't know what Paul Graham does for a living but I expect that he'll be more than willing to increase the hiring of people working in that area so that we can get the best.
Oh wait......
THen we'd have to pay them what they are worth, and not rely on the indentured servant system.......
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
In my career I have repeatedly seen the great IT people be near impossible to work with. All that great work usually comes with a bad attitude, lack of documentation, and a me vs the world mentality. I know that's not true for all people but it is for many of them. I've found if you have a solid team that works together and receives regular training yyou'll get consistently good work out of them. Something you won't get with Paul's attitude.
...while you can train people to be competent, you can't train them to be exceptional.
Two things:
First off, American companies love programmers that are merely "competent" -- or that don't even meet that standard. That's why jobs keep getting shipped overseas to shops that can hire three incompetent programmers for the cost of one good programmer here in the US. The tech companies' actions speak louder than their words here.
Second, while you might not be able to train everyone to become exceptional, it's safe to say that most people with the ability to become exceptional will not do so without training. Mr. Graham is relying on the argument that the only way to get more exceptional programmers in the US is to import them. That is flat-out not true.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
If they vote Democrat, maybe they might have a chance to get in under Obama. But I doubt if their numbers would be large enough to interest either political party.
So, tough luck. Get in line with the other talented professionals who attempt to entry the country legally.
Illegal immigrants with large voting blocks are preferred!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Is he going to pay them the same as a US developer and treat them fairly? Isn't that the whole point of the new visas, to essentially outsource to underpaid countries but with the benefit of locality? Do you really want a race to the bottom for the programming behind your traffic lights, pacemakers and automobiles? Would he support bringing CEOs and startups over to take the rest of our jobs? If we find a better CEO than him for $15,000/year will he kindly step aside?
I just about never comment here and I am not even a programmer, but that statement is deeply insulting. The US is hiring abroad for one reason: they are cheaper. Just like the US has done for so many other jobs. (What I do is overlook programmers code for security issues, so I do keep up on code quality issues. And this could not be more bunk. In fact, at least one of my jobs was deeply inspired because of offshoring development. )
The US made a lot of safety standards starting really heavily in the 70s in manufacturing, though many standards including such things as worker's rights have been evolving - like with the rest of the "first world" since the 19th century. What they get, besides really cheap people overseas who live on bare sustenance, is the capacity to bypass all of those rules and regulations designed for worker safety, and for worker goodwill.
That this devastates the nation economically in the long haul, that it devastates the country fundamentally does not matter to these guys who are in for short haul profits.
Even if it did, it does not matter, because the savings is so large for them, though the quality of code significantly drops.
What is being done is not about a few significant code artists, as everyone well knows, but is about base, average coders who simply will work for far less then their American versions. Of course, there is avenue for pundits or would be pundits to lie about this, there is money in it for them to do so.
with only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. can only expect about 5% of great programmers to be born here.
IQ is not uniformly distributed worldwide. If the US's median IQ (assuming that IQ is a good proxy for coding skill, which is probably true) is higher than the non-US median IQ, then the figure is probably higher than 5%.
What Paul Graham says is absolutely true. But further to any H1B reform, you need a bit more fundamental attitude change as well. Speaking as someone who is closer to the US than most (Canada), I think the Silicon Valley powers that be are way too hung up on American institutions. In my case, I went to the University of Waterloo in Canada. Not b/c I couldn't get into one of the top US schools had I tried (e.g. did well in math contests, including scoring 9/15 on the AIME), but due to various circumstances, going to Waterloo is what made the most sense for me and my family at the time. And there were many other students who "settled" for a local school instead of going to the US as well. Anyway, my point here is not to "talk about my self" - but to simply point out, there are people who "could have" gotten into the top US schools if the circumstances were different. Just b/c people from different backgrounds/schools doesn't mean they are of a lesser standard than someone who may have graduated from a MIT or a Stanford. They could be worse, or sometimes, they could even be better. But, as things stand now, if you try to make waves in the valley, someone coming from MIT, Stanford, etc. has a certain artificial "aura" that may not be shared by alumni from some of the foreign (but locally reputed) schools - at least for the first stage of the process. This attitude has to change as well.
"with only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. can only expect about 5% of great lawyers to be born here"
"with only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. can only expect about 5% of great teachers to be born here"
"with only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. can only expect about 5% of great CEOs to be born here"
"with only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. can only expect about 5% of great parents to be born here"
"with only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. can only expect about 5% of great ax-murderers to be born here"
"with only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. can only expect about 5% of great plumbers to be born here"
"with only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. can only expect about 5% of great piano-tuners to be born here"
"with only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. can only expect about 5% of great cricketers to be born here"
"with only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. can only expect about 5% of great chicken-feather-pluckers to be born here"
"with only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. can only expect about 5% of great [insert job title here] to be born here"
Spoken like a rich a-hole!! I'm a middle of the pack developer and I don't want the world's top talent coming over and taking my job. I like programming and I like a comfortable salary. If he wants to ship jobs overseas then good for him and good for America, but screw him if he wants to better the long term at my expense. I've only got this one life and I'm not rich.
Why not tak about e.g. gardeners or houskeepers or taxi-drivers. Just say "Let the market sort it out."
And when you are the one that is controling the market, that is what you would say. (Looking at e.g. Microsoft.)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
We need some kind of computer link with other countries so this vast potential can be tapped until the immigration thing gets worked out. If only there were a way to connect with people from other countries we could communicate system requirements over this new "network" and they could in turn send the completed projects back through the mail in a thumb drive or something. We can solve this problem! It is 2014, come on people let's solve this!
If the women who are being frightened away from STEM careers by the disgusting American Pig male programmer hegemony, Just wait until they experience the way some of these other countries male programmers act toward women.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
If they come to the US, the US can tax their income. If they work remotely, their home country gets all the income tax.
Good to see Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC backers are singing the same tune: Tech Looks To Obama To Save Them From 'Just Sort of OK' US Workers.
I stopped reading after this quote:
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.
The author doesn't get into the details of what qualities that would be (program in C at 5 years old?) so his argument could be made for any profession or job. Just replace "great programmer" for "great lawyers" and you could make the same argument. Immigration has its place but is not the only answer to filling US with great programmers. We have tons of people (great programmers even) getting their MBAs because that is where the money and security lies. Why not take a look at what is so attractive about an MBA and apply that to attract great programmers here in the US.
Can't we simply send the mediocre 95% of programmers out of the country? Then we would have 100% awesome programmers!
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Clearly, Paul Graham is somewhat passionate about importing more great talent... but, how do you determine that the targeted talent is indeed exceptional?
If the U.S. were to import 5000 'exceptional' programmers, and only 5% of programmers are indeed 'exceptional', then the U.S. would need to import 100 THOUSAND programmers in order to achieve an attendance of 5000 'exceptional' ones. That's 1/10th of a MILLION programmers... plus their families (at a 2:1 ratio of dependent family members to every programmer)... this easily becomes a quest to import 300,000 persons (spouse + 1 child + 1 programmer) for the sole objective of achieving 5000 'exceptional' programmers... per year.
To improve the efficacy of Paul Graham's plea, broadly-acceptable benchmarks would need to be established. However, those tests will simply beget a wider generation of programmers trained to study for the test instead of studying for exception... and as the tech-laden world evolves over time, the previous generation will have trained for an outdated benchmark exam (that Novell NetWare certification is sure coming in handy these days)...
first of all, i find it amazing that tech people still think that they are so damn important. so much so
that a limitation on the number of programmers will become the 'defining mistake of a generation'
more importantly, the primary thing holding back technical organizations is not raw talent,
its not training, its the crappy context in which we're expected to create. no mandate, no
latitude to do whats right, no opportunity to sit back and think about the big picture.
just spend too little time adding this crappy little feature that doesn't make any sense. bolt it onto a
shitpile of similar hacks years deep, with no time or resources to test it properly.
fix that.
From the 2nd footnote of this post:
There are a handful of consulting firms that rent out big pools of foreign programmers they bring in on H1-B visas.
That is a stunning level of understatement. I'd go so far as to say it is a lie - it is an unimportant technical truth designed to obscure the reality of the situation.
In 2012, all 10 of the top 10 H1B employers were offshore outsourcing companies.
In 2013, 50% of all H1B visas went to offshore outsourcers.
So there may well be only a small number of of these "bad actors" who abuse the H1B system, but they account for the majority of H1B visas.
FWIW -- The way these offshore guys work is that they bring people in to "train up" in preparation for the work moving off-shore, at which point those H1B holders go back home along with the job.
To use a baseball analogy, all the farm teams and minor leagues have been shipped out of the country, so where do we get the next generation of major league players from?
Same place NFL and NBA get their players: college.
Maybe Paul Graham should go and live (and capitalize) the part of the world with the 95% of the awesomest programmers and leave this (apparent) intellectual backwater he calls home. I mean, what's he doing slumming here if 15-20% of the great worldwide programmers are bouncing around China and another 15-20% are making magic in India. If he wants to leverage brainpower, he should go where the brains are.
Oh, and I hope he doesn't let the door hit him in the ass on the way out.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Companies don't want the exceptional 5%, they want the cheapest 5% that is slightly above average. They don't look past the per-head cost to find the hidden costs of bad code, poor design, and higher maintenance.
The amount of great programmers who don't want to live in the USA.
The best programmers are already around. They live in Western Europe (and also Eastern Europe), the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and demand a high salary because to become a great programmer requires major investments in time, formal education, practice, not to mention innate intelligence. There is no shortage of great programmers where programmers are needed.
What there is a shortage of is managers who are willing to pay programmers what they're worth. For many companies your programmers are your company. They're responsible for all of your income and pay your executives' salaries. For many companies your programmers bring in millions of dollars each. For most companies programmers are working for lesser positions in IT, and they make sure that your computer infrastructure is safe and reliable where failures would cost you millions of dollars.
The best programmers from outside of this region have made it here already. There are plenty of international students at our best universities.
What you're actually looking for is a group of inferior programmers with low salary demands who you can exploit until they get wise, followed by a new batch of programmers that you can exploit, and so on.
The situation is quite clear to programmers living outside of Silicon Valley. There are plenty of programmers in the United States who could do great work for you there, but for many of us you'd have to double or triple our pay just for us to maintain our current standard of living. A friend of mine knows two people making just a bit below one hundred thousand dollars a year who couldn't afford to come home to see their families for Christmas.
And aren't they desperately needed OVER THERE if they do exist? What a jerkoff this guy is.
Mass immigration is GENOCIDE.
While I believe that you intended that as a joke, it actually reflects the reality that he missed.
Becoming a programmer requires that a certain amount of infrastructure exist to provide the education necessary. So , no, we aren't talking about 95% vs 5%.
Secondly, the companies pushing for more visas are NOT doing it because they're looking for the best and the brightest from around the world. They're doing it to drive the price of programming down.
It's fucking PROGRAMMING. It can be done ANYWHERE in the world. If company X wants to hire the top 20 programmers in India then they can do that. And those programmers can work from home (in India). They are the best, right?
if you are a blogger looking for attention, supporting mass immigration gets you noticed by the corporate media. The more immigrants the corporations can cram into america, the higher their profits, the higher the GDP, and the more money the corporations will spend on advertising in the media.
Paul Graham's incorrect argument assumes that all countries will produce great programmers in equal proportions to their populations. He couldn't be more spectacularly wrong.
People from other countries where tribalism (Pakistan), extreme deference to authority (China), and extreme elder worship (India) are the rule, fall to the ingenuity, independence, creativity, and innovation of Americans, every, single, time. The majority of the cultural and genetic makeup of the continent for its first 500 years was that of people willing to risk their lives to come here, work hard, be independent, and make their own way. The effects of that are not easily undone. Paul Graham has fallen into the fallacy of thinking that all countries are the same, all cultures the same, all people the same, and thus their outputs should all be the same. What a dolt!
My company has an Indian subsidiary that we use to handle some of our simpler engineering issues at lower cost. And that's the point. They handle the simple issues, because even their best engineers can't be trusted with our complicated issues. We have to solve those ourselves.
So while the US may only have 5% of the world's population, it's not inconceivable that we could be producing 95% or better of the great programmers already.
With only 5% of the worlds population, the U.S. could expect to have about 5% of the worlds prison population.
However, as a matter of fact, it has 25% of the worlds prison population.
and why should we care about what he says? His sentiment--at least out of context of the full article (which I won't waste my time on)--is completely idiotic. The thing about most companies--and I really mean MOST--is that they don't WANT great programmers, they just want warm bodies that can get the mostly-mundane work done. What does the world revolve around anymore? The internet, i.e. web applications. And what is most web application development, honestly? Fucking mundane. So why would you WANT a "great mind" working on that shit, when all of the personality issues and potentially-high salaries go along with it?
I'm just going to say it: Now, take the average Indian worker. I mean the ones that are from there and were educated there. They are hard working, team players, willing to work unpaid overtime, and just not that good. BUT, they are about perfect for tech support and, you guessed it, mundane work like web application development.
It's no mystery why the companies that are actually innovating the most want the most innovative-thinking people. If you look at who has been truly innovating over the last several years, Google comes to my mind. Not Microsoft or even Amazon really, at least from a purely technical perspective. But who's the most guilty of this H1B visa crap? It's just an interesting correlation.
There are few jobs for great programmers. Great programmers tend to work best on an independant task and can put out an ungodly amount of functional code in the same time as a whole team of "competent" programmers.
But that's not the kind of work most companies need done. What they need done are huge applications (primarily web based nowadays) that can only be accomplished through teamwork, because the sheer volume of work required is far beyond that of any one programmer by themselves.
So the vast majority of jobs only look for (and barely pay for) merely "competent" programmers. They're not looking for and not interested in hiring "top talent" if they can get 2-3 "bodies" for the same price.
I agree with most of the posters that if you want to attract top talent you need to pay top wages. But for every company that wants to hire a "Linus Torvalds", there are a thousand that want to hire "Joe Coder" instead.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Why let the 95% in? If they are so great they can manage without the United States. Excuses are just that excuses.
Do we want the 5% of programmers born in the US to be able to command good salaries, or do we want the tiny number of company owners to command massive profits on the backs of their poorly paid programmers?
Why presume that programmers (or anyone) have to travel from distant lands to the US in order to have an impact? Why not stay in whatever country they currently reside and try to have an impact there? Granted there might be more cutting edge stuff going on here (or there might not -- I could make a case that stuff happens everywhere), but in countries on the verge of being first world, wouldn't there be more to do there? At very least, wouldn't there be more low hanging fruit?
I guess I'm asking, why should we all compete for the subset of opportunities contained within the US? What, there are no opportunities elsewhere? (Actually I know there are, as I worked in India for awhile as a contractor, and have turned down jobs in Germany and Turkey.)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
If you're that concerned about the exceptional programmers, you could start by not making the visas a form of indentured servitude. Allow anyone with a visa to switch jobs, as long as they remain gainfully employed. That way the exceptional programmers can find the highest salaries, which of course mark the most efficient use of these programmers. The reality of the current visa program is not to find exceptional programmers, but to find cheaper ones. It's funny how all the capitalists don't believe that raising salaries wouldn't get them more domestic exceptional programmers.
Consider how many potential exceptional programmers in the United States are lost because they don't have an opportunity to learn programming due to crappy overcrowded schools. Why not fund primary and secondary schools appropriately and have affordable colleges. Of course there's an accidental overshoot, not only would you have more exceptional programmers, you'd have more exceptional doctors, writers, scientists and engineers.
Finally, what Bill Gates said in Saudi Arabia where women weren't allowed in the main auditorium or allowed to work in general. No country can become great if it doesn't use half of its people. Fix the continual discouragement of women in school, and provide decent day care for women with children and you'd have a lot more exceptional programmers.
Way to go for offending programmers who spent their whole lives working hard in the US, were born in the US, and pay out-outrageous taxes in the US. Thanks a bunch... #$%@#$%#@(!!!!
But let's not apply it too narrowly. The top 2%-5% in a *lot* of fields are substantially better than the next 10%. I see a lot of people here complaining about H1B abuses, and I agree that's real, but I think that attracting the top 5% would broaden opportunities for everyone. The catch is to do it in a way that aligns the incentives with the objectives, and I think there's a simple way to accomplish that:
Any company that pays an H1B employee at or above the 95th salary percentile for *domestic* labor can have an H1B that doesn't count against the annual visa quota. At least five American workers in the same band at the same company have to certify under penalty of perjury that the band level for the job is appropriately selected. That way the incentives match the objectives.
Folks: losing your job to an underpaid foreigner who is basically getting treated as slave labor is bad for both of you. Bringing in people who will open up opportunities to create new products or manage new groups is one way to stimulate demand. If they have to be *paid* at the 95th percentile, they won't get brought in willy-nilly.
Oh. Requiring those certifications would also put a fast end to the "captive Indian contracting company" practice, and would save a lot of visiting workers from slave trade types of abuses.
Jonathan S. Shapiro (The EROS Guy)
I suggest the motivations are different. The big corp has structure and methods (M&A) that allow it to survive even with average staff - if they really are looking for something exceptional, they'll find a way to get it. Example: Microsoft getting creator of C# - not a regular hire or business acquisition from what I remember. It was purely recognizing the exceptional talent and giving a position where they could do something with the talent.
Startups on the other hand are probable to if not fail, be slower to market - the efforts of few more exceptional people could mean something for the company.
In either case the argument will be that these exceptional people in US may be more aware of their value and outside US they might value themselves in terms of their local area rates. eg. I know my country has exceptional amount of exceptional programmers, so much infact that programmers are getting paid very poorly here. They have already figured this out but many don't wish to move to eg. US because unlike TV in 80's, TV noughties has shown that US is far behind in too many respects to be a nice place to live. And the places where US tech companies are located simply suck compared to where tech companies like to locate in these other countries.
The other thing that nobody has mentioned, exactly HOW do you measure whether someone IS an excellent programmer?
Define "excellence".
In all my years in this business, I knew quite a few people who designed and wrote code that was easy to read, worked, easily maintained, got it all done on time and were considered mediocre.
I have seen many times that one person's excellent programmer is mediocre to another.
Excellence is subjective.
When every decently skilled US programmer has a job, and there is still demand, let some foreigners in. This should apply to any industry. When there is a glut of labor, like there is now, close the borders.
Only 5% of the excellent programmers are in the US if you assume that all the factors that contribute to excellent programmers are randomly distributed. It's a statistically fallacy. I wouldn't expect most of Africa to produce many excellent programmers due to the large uneducated population. I also wouldn't expect China, or India to produce a directly proportional ratio of excellent programmers ether due to the massive illiteracy rate in their populations. I also wouldn't expect Middle Eastern countries with massive uneducated female populations to be able to produce the same ratio to their populations. I would expect the US, Japan, South Korea, and Europe to produce most of the worlds 5% of assumed excellent programmers due to the higher rate of educated citizens. There are a lot of assumptions, and unless you know all the variables involved, or made the necessary measurements you could also assume that 90% of the worlds top programmers were born and raised the any random country you pick, including the USA.
This.
IN my 20s an dearly 30s, I always received great reviews and was even called a "genius" once.
At about 36 years of age, overnight I turned into someone who "sucked" and didn't have the "skills".
When I asked what "skills" were those, I was told "skills". I never got an answer to why I 'sucked'.
So, when anyone who says that "if you have the skills, you can get a job", I just shake my head at the ignorance because one day, you will see that having "skills" is just part of the equation.
My wife is in medical and she thinks the IT/software development job market (employers) are all morons.
The ONLY STEM degree worth getting kids is under the 'M' heading - at least for now.
I got a Ph.D. in CS from one of the top 5 programs in the US. Went to work for Google, but due to some other circumstances I had opted for a J-1 visa during my studies, which only provided me with 18 months of training after graduation. The chances of getting an H1B in the lottery is around 2/3. I didn't get one and my 18 months academic training post graduation didn't last long enough to give me a second shot at the lottery.
End result: I had to get a transfer to an office in Europe. In other words, instead of getting a salary in the US, which would contribute to the US economy, I'm draining money from an American company into Europe. Oh, my Ph.D. studies were funded by US DOD.
Talk about a fucked up immigration system?
If the idea is to import the best of the best, well then the pay needs to be for that. You can't say you are after the best anything and then offer even average wages. The best can command high pay.
Now if that's not the idea, that's fair too, but stop trying to bullshit us about it. None of this "We only want the best but we want to bay substandard wages!" crap.
Instead if replacing comparatively-cheap programmers with cheaper overseas programmers, why not replace expensive middle and upper management with cheaper overseas middle and upper management? For what our CEO makes, I could hire a couple hundred engineers. But I bet I could find a guy from India who'd be happy to be our CEO for about what one engineer makes. And he'd be every bit as effective at it as our CEO is!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I admire Paul Graham tremendously. He is a world class LISP programmer, and for some reason that is the ne plus ultra to me.
I read every single word he writes, and treat it like the gospel.
But he is wrong on this topic. I have been working in this industry for over twenty years.
Paul Graham is a VC now, and is biased. He wants high valuations for his incubator companies (he gets a slice), and wants more cheap programmers like Zuckerberg and the rest (he never mentions all the idle programming talent still inside the U.S.).
As many have pointed out, his logic on the 5% is amusingly flawed.
Any programmer that is truly world-beating great is already inside the U.S. if he wants to come here; I have worked with legions of mediocre-to-very-poor programmers for many years here in the U.S. Even lousy programmers get here with no issues at all.
PG and his ilk have actually ruined the programming profession by lowering wages to the point that anyone with the brain power to be a great programmer is short-changing themselves economically by pursuing programming as a career.
The wages have not gone up in over a decade. I can hire world-class programmers anywhere in the world for really cheap. I hire them regularly for my side projects. As soon as they move here (anyone can if they want to, you don't even have to want to really badly the demand for cheap programmers is so high), they go from making sub-US wages to standard depressed US wages for programmers.
If you look at a chart of the highest paid professions and job titles in the U.S., you will find that there is no job title in the United States that has the word 'Engineer' or 'Programmer' or 'Software' in the job title that averages more than $100k a year.
Silicon Valley and Boston are expensive places to live. $100k is not good money anymore in those places, and has not been for a long time.
These realities are hard for software guys to accept. (Note I said 'Guys'. I agree that PG and his ilk are biased against women: and so are all the Indian programmers he wants to import: look at the statistics of who they fund)
Face facts, Slashdot: computer programming is becoming a crappy way to earn a living. Look at how many forces are arrayed against you earning a good living doing it: the world's richest men, both parties in the U.S. political system, the media, Silicon Valley as a whole, and SV lobbying groups like FWD.US and the "Teach girls to code" movement.
All cynical attempts to lower your wages. They are winning, big time.
640 MM people defecating outside in India; Only 15% internet penetration rate. Don't worry, PG was _not_ talking about Africa; look at his stats on Y combinator funding. It is not inaccurate to say they only fund male Asians and Jews.
"I can't help it; I always want to fund entrepreneurs that look like Zuck". Yes, because you are Jewish and white just like him, PG, and you are one of the most biased VC's in the country. It's not a crime, I just think you should stay out of politics if you are so biased. And immigration policy is politics.
I won't vote for any politician that expresses support for the foreign guest worker visa programs. I am tired of working with roomfuls of mediocre male Indian programmers.
If you are an American computer programmer, you should have a Plan B.
Don't let your children grow up to be computer programmers; It is a dead end career.
I know, I know, you are the exception. It will catch up to you, don't worry. These guys like PG have you directly in their crosshairs.
Glad he has revealed himself; His rhetoric taken along with his actions on this issue have ensured that his arguments are being met with stiff resistance. Not that it will matter much.
The next bubble bursting may stem the tide of Indian imports, maybe not.
"just by letting in a few thousand great programmers a year."
We already do that, and more. Immigration, right now, allows you to import some of the best of the best. Any argument to make it looser is talking about letting in large numbers of average workers, workers who are comparable to talent already available.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Canada needs to let the other 99.5% of Great Hockey Players in.
Just sayin'
Can't you just be content with what you've got? Because you've actually got quite a lot.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I call on local law enforcement everywhere to investigate and arrest for treason any rich person or CEO or journalist or politician who promotes mass immigration in any way. Mass immigration is an invasion. This is war. And the elites are aiding and abetting the invaders. STop them now!
I'll be on board once we let 95% of the worlds great managers in and lower their wages first.
Exceptional people are exceptional because of their obsessive unquenchable interest in a subject. Exceptional people don't need "training", they just need experience, and even without experience, can still be much better than "normals". A lot of training focuses on rules of thumbs, and dumbs down those rules of thumbs to the point of being "written in stone". There are so many things taught as "never do this", when really they mean, "you're too stupid to know when to do this correctly". Training can help, but much of it is a waste of time.
Instead of "training", what would work better is kind of an apprenticeship, where the exceptional programmer has another expereienced exceptional programmer to bounce stuff off of. The bigger issue is identifying those with the potential in the first place.
By this logic, US firms are doing a great disservice to themselves by limiting the availability of exceptional talent in the fields of executive managment and even public office positions. What's good for the goose, after all...
What about all the shitty programmers like me?
why don't they work from home overseas Isn't this why we have thisnewfangled intertubes thnolog?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Contrary to you pulling out the race card, there is an underlying problem with TFA's points. Primarily, that a Country can only be successful when taking care of itself FIRST. I realize that this takes some deep thought to comprehend, you are not going to get it if you continue to look at things as you proposed as a racial issue. It's not a racial issue, it's an economic issue.
Look long and hard at the US, and what happens when a country dumps out all of it's local income generation for "cheaper products". We are still told that this is the way it should be, but it's bullshit. That economic model only benefits the top .01% who already has way more wealth than they could ever spend. For the rest of society, we are shafted by the deal. Read Milton Friedman, perhaps you will understand.. if you can get over your simple belief that it's only bias that stops importing workers at any rate. Carol Quigley is another great read to understand how this is economic, not racial. Racial issues are what rich people use to keep us bickering with each other, arguing over who has the larger pile of sand.... while they polish their gold. (not all of it obviously, there are pure bigots but those people are easy to deal with in the grand scheme of things)
Today's economic model does not match what gave us tremendous growth and achievements. Henry Fords model was pure capitalism. Pay the worker well, they will buy the products. Not just the cars, but the furniture so that the furniture makers can afford cars too, and the guys in the restaurant, etc... Middle class income _IS_ the mobile income in society. Middle class people don't hoard, they spend what they make. When you take away the middle class income, the economy and growth all stagnates. This is the problem with the last 40 years of economic policy, the middle class has vanished and the top .01% have grown exponentially in wealth. That is factual, you can research the statistics. The US today is ranked 4th in the world for economic disparity (yes, we are worse than nearly every other country in the world). We are at the same level today as we were in 1928, but it looks better since we are printing out more and more fiat money as loans.
Importing workers does not make better programmers. Innovation and education makes better programmers, interest in societies development makes better programmers, and more importantly opportunity makes better programmers. If we don't have a positive economic outlook (which I will argue most people 30 and under have) then it does not matter who you bring in. Society needs to change, and the money has to get out of a few select hands and back into average people's hands. That is how we will see improvement, not by simply importing a few people at reduced wages further depressing wages for US workers.
Personally, I don't have anything against "globalization" if it's done where everyone prospers. That has not been happening with any of the Globalization that has occurred. The majority has suffered under the current policies, so I'm against the current economic policies that continue to pool wealth into few hands.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I was a developer for 15 years. My talent is in G2, making me tough to replace. I made the switch to leadership 3 years ago. I've watched the company undergo a disastrous reorganization and outsourcing attempt this past year. I saw my very best programmers opt out and seek employment elsewhere.
And somehow, some way, business is still getting done. Even with the relatively mediocre staff who remain, we're meeting the clients' needs. We're struggling with the 2 percent of our applications that need strong logistics and optimization people, but we'll get it under control.
Very few businesses need great programmers, and they only need them for very narrow slices of their organizational needs. For most things, average is sufficient, especially if your business is not producing software.
People not physically present in the US would fail the substantial presence test and so would be taxed as a non-resident alien.
Unless they're contractors who file tax on the foreign country's equivalent of form 1099.
It's easy to spot a demagogue when they strawman those who insist on having the concept of _borders_, into an "anti-immigration" crowd. I'm a legal immigrant to the United States who has become a citizen. I am pro-immigration, because it refreshes the gene pool and makes this country an amazing melting poit. However, legitimizing people who get here illegally without any filtering process, is exactly the same as erasing the concept of borders. This would've worked if my former homeland erased its border, because nobody wants to migrate to a country without toilet paper. However when it's done in a country which has an easily abused system of infinite handouts, attracting people like honey, it is self-destructive and insane. So before we start any arguments on "programming", let's filter out intellectually dishonest trolls like Paul Graham.
Not my choice, we got them in a deal with a VC. And I will tell you from experience that they're not all great programmers. A *few* of them were very good programmers, most of them were OK, and a few were very *bad* programmers. Just like everyone else. The idea that the H1B program just brings in technical giants is pure fantasy. This isn't 1980; if a CS genius living in Bangalore wants to work he doesn't have to come to the US anymore, there are good opportunities for him at home..
H1B brings in a cross section of inexperienced programmers and kicks them out of the country once they've gained some experience. I have nothing against bringing more foreign talent into the US, but it should be with an eye to encouraging permanent residency. I think if you sponsor an H1B and he goes home, you should have to wait a couple years before you replace him. Then companies will be pickier about who they bring over.
I have to say, managing a team of H1Bs was very rewarding, not necessarily from a technical standpoint but from a cultural standpoint. Because I had to learn about each programmer on my team and the way things are done in his culture, I think I became closer to a lot of them than I would have to a team of Americans.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
and shame on any politician who listens to him.
Inflation adjusted since 1970 per student. Would 6.5x have worked better?
Sure, let the best programmers in. But the law should require H1B immigrants to be paid 20% more than the average pay for workers at the same level. This would ensure that the immigrants really are exceptional and are not beng brought in to undercut the wages of citizens. Over time, if there are lots of immigrants under this 20% requirement, the average wage will rise and so the pay of additional immigrants will also rise. This will continue until it's cheaper to hire citizen workers.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Over 75% of the articles on Slashdot front page are all political in nature over tech/science related. There's even an article that is Pro-FCC which basically every geek knows is trying to shaft us.
I don't like this Slashdot beta. It was bad enough with all the sock puppet accounts trying to do political spin, but it seems like all the articles are now political. I'll give it a few weeks and see if it was just an anomaly, but Slashdot could be in its death spirals. I've been noticing a change, but you can do it yourself, look at the front page of approved articles, they're almost all political in nature.
God spoke to me
(And no, there's nothing racial about that phrase.)
It's hard to draw any reasonable conclusions when you start from a false premise. The idea that because we represent 5% of the population we will only have 5% of the great programmers is obviously ridiculous. 80% of the world's population lives on less than $10/day. I think we can safely assume the vast majority of them are not great programmers. Not that they couldn't be, they simply don't have the resources. Since a small percentage of that 80% live in the US, if we assume great programmers are evenly distributed amongst the remaining 20% we should have at least 25% of them. That's pretty damn good.
should remain in their home country and apply their skills there, instead of giving them to the U.S.
Programming can be done anywhere and the end results can be
moved over transoceanic fiber in a short time.
Only a fool would accept this crap about "the US needs to retain its
power by importing talent". It's just a goddamned lie.
If these people are so great, they can work wherever they want. Why would anyone who has the choice go and live in the U.S. if they have so many places too choose from that are much nicer to live in?
The Netherlands has even less residents than Canada and it has won the Hockey World Cup three times.
Seriously, all h1b, L1b, etc should be stopped. Instead, we should increase the number of green cards and they should be based purely on national needs. If we are short software ppl, then bring them in. It does not matter what nations. Just who is the best in the fields that are needed.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
should be to ruthlessly 'brain drain' the rest of the world.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
Simple question: Are you talking visas, or greeen cards?
If you're talking H1B visas, you're looking for indentured servants, and you are being disingenuous.
If you mean green cards, permanent residency, sponsored by the corporation that brings them in so we know they really are the elite, then I'm with you 100%.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
The problem is that if someone want exceptional programmers, they have to pay exceptions salaries. They are enough exceptional programmers in the states. Just pay the right price. Or face OK programmers.
Exceptional people are exceptional because of their obsessive unquenchable interest in a subject. Exceptional people don't need "training", they just need experience, and even without experience, can still be much better than "normals". A lot of training focuses on rules of thumbs, and dumbs down those rules of thumbs to the point of being "written in stone". There are so many things taught as "never do this", when really they mean, "you're too stupid to know when to do this correctly". Training can help, but much of it is a waste of time.
In every other discipline that I can think of, the people who are exceptional in their field have undergone extensive training. Scientists, engineers, musicians, artists, athletes -- the list goes on and on. It takes training for people to reach the potential of their innate ability. Why do you think that programming is somehow different?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Yeah Paul, phuck you!
they did.So the school entrances have metal detectors, and soon , the gunfire detectors...
however, pass a law that requires companies to pay the folks they hire from overseas the same level of wages the American programmers are paid.
You'll see companies pushing for this due to their claim of " lack of talent " do a com
Show me how do you measure what a great programmer is?
By their score on the programmer's standardized test.
Second, while you might not be able to train everyone to become exceptional, it's safe to say that most people with the ability to become exceptional will not do so without training. Mr. Graham is relying on the argument that the only way to get more exceptional programmers in the US is to import them. That is flat-out not true.
You logic is flawed. The matter of the fact is that you are not able to train anybody at all to be exceptional. Exceptional people train themselves (only way it works), giving them some help there just makes the process a bit faster.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The "training" of exceptional people does not have the same nature as training for other people. Exceptional people train themselves and some help can accelerate the process, but it is not the usual case of a teacher training them. The most critical skill an exceptional person in any field has is exceptional judgment what skills and knowledge will benefit them most. In conventional training, teachers make that determination, but that only works if the ones teaching are significantly better than the ones taught. That situation cannot be arranged for exceptional people, or only for a very small part of their training.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Graham pretends that there hasn't been massive fraud in guest worker visas.
Why should anyone pay any attention to him on the issue of immigration at all?
The abuses of immigration statutes mean one thing and one thing only: Shut down immigration and repatriate those that were let in during the period of systemic fraud -- then after we've put our own house in order to a level of prudence commensurate with the history of fraud in this area, reconsider.
Seastead this.
"there is a huge variation in ability between competent programmers and exceptional ones, and while you can train people to be competent, you can't train them to be exceptional"
This two sentences are the most blunt truths an IT professional has to cope with. 10x programmers just render us regular 1x programmers pretty much useless. If I lived in the US, and I had been raised as right-winged patriot, I would trust the local 10x are enough and some local 1x deserve to occupy 10x positions and salary slots.
But even if that's not the US picture, you don't want companies full of 10x's - it's proven to be hard to manage and to hinder company growth in the long run. Many will be headhunted, and many will leave.
If a company needs to be constantly looking for 10x programmers, it should be big enough to look for them locally. Unless it doesn't want to be paying the salary they deserve. This way you can fool a "foreign 10x" with the "El Silliconado" promise. Add some free housing, fast lane green card and a not-so-above-average salary, topped with the "I work for (e.g.) Google" factor. And that's how you're set for some long-term consequences when they to go back and fund their own 1B companies in Mumbai/Warsaw/Moscow/Beijing/Seoul, and start siphoning the local 10x and the local industry profits.
He really went full retard. And I say that as someone who supports the "best and brightest" immigrating to the United States. You're not going to find them in the H1-B pool -- of the top 10 H1-B employers, 7 of them are body shops based in India. You do the math.
Anyhow, what makes a great programmer? I'd say doing it out of passion, curiosity, interest, etc. vs doing it for the money is one key factor. Consider open source projects and people who use their spare time to work on something their interested in. I'm not saying all open source programmers are great, but I am saying it's more likely they are great (or will someday become great). And I'm not saying that's the only way to become great. But... I think we can agree that open source programmers aren't equally distributed across the globe by population. And neither are great programmers. And when I think about the great open source programmers, many of them couldn't get hired in Silicon Valley because they're too old (ie, over 35) or don't have 5 years of ruby or node or, quite frankly, don't want to waste their life working on a shitty business idea.
I'll say it: there's not a shortage of programmers, there's a shortage of valid business plans. That's SV's real problem.
Copyright (c) 1990 - 2014 Dice. All rights reserved. Use of this comment is subject to certain Terms and Conditions.
...when every programmer (and tech support person, and manufacturing person) in the US can get a job, that's the time for US operations to be looking for foreign help.
But since age, health, formal schooling, in-country location, and credit score are widely and consistently used to deny highly skilled US programmers jobs -- I am very confident in saying that Mr. Graham has not even come close to identifying the "programmer problem" from the POV of actual US programmers. All he's trying to do here is save a buck, while screwing US programmers in the process.
Do it his way, and the US economy will suffer even further at the middle class level as decent jobs go directly over our heads overseas, while, as per usual, corporations thrive.
This is exactly the kind of corporate perfidy that's been going on for some time. Graham should be ashamed. He represents our problem. Not any imaginary lack of US based skills.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
That isn't consistent with it all going to administration. Although, yeah, the public schools are filled with unneeded employees.
Force companies to pay them more by law so it is clear that this is for the talent and not to save money. If they want the talent, I have no problem with it. If they're doing it to put pressure on domestic workers then fuck them.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Then why are exceptional and competent programmers paid roughly the same salary?
"It could easily be the defining mistake this generation of American politicians later become famous for."
Um, hyperbole much?
Personally, I would give one billion dollars to the genius that can fix a web browser to do the following,
1) WYSIWYG print a webpage! 500 million
2) Block auto refresh! 100 million
3) Block animated GIF's! 50 million
4) Stop html5 video from auto starting! 150 million
5) Stop spurious windows from appearing asking you to subscribe! 100 million
6) Properly cache a webpage so that if I visit the page 30 seconds later it is fast! 50 million
7) misc! 50 million
Anybody who has worked with H1Bs knows that they are not typically all that exceptional.
If it were about "great" programmers, why is it okay to fire an American, who is doing a good job, and replace the American with a cheaper H1B?
my god! Did you just say something that discriminates between races and national origins? I'll call your employer and demand that he fire you! If he doesn't it will prove that his shop is a hostile environment, and I'll get some African-American Studies graduates to put in an applications. If one of them is rejected, I'll file a law$uit under the Civil Right$ Act of 1964.
"We have the potential to ensure that the U.S. remains a technology superpower just by letting in a few thousand great programmers a year.
First,
The H1B cap is 85,000, so there's your "few thousand" and then some.
Now that we've solved that problem, is there anything else we can help you with?
Second,
The number of programmers and software developers is about 1,500,000
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm
The top 4% of the US population is about 12 million people. This would be people having 130 IQ and above.
I'm aware that having an IQ of 130+ does not guarantee that they'll be a "great programmer", but it's a good place to start looking
It also tells me the pool of highly intelligent people in the USA is much greater than the number of people needed to be "great programmers".
I ran out of career headspace in the late 1990's in my home country. USA looked good and we moved. 9 fantastic years, but on the downside, filled with constant uncertainty over our visa / status. We got dicked about by lawyers (tens of thousands of dollars) with zero outcome. In the end I took my talent elsewhere in the world. I made some super super fiends, but developed a deep distrust of "the system". I created solutions worth millions of dollars and only reaped stress and ultimately rejection. Many aspects were positive, but I would really recommend anyone even remotely considering the USA to think deep and hard.
Bad MBA programs produces bad managers who don't know how to fully utilize the most educated, skilled generation since World War II. Our company just hired a PhD in Victorian-era literature over an Indian H1B for I.T. work, and gosh, she was a fast learner and hard worker.
And she is a hottie.
It takes good, ethical managers on how to train / re-purpose all these over-educated workforce.
New Economic Perspectives
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.
The entire article is based on that statement.
However, the qualities that make someone a great programmer aren't evenly distributed so there's no reason to read further.
How can I say that?
For starters, if the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly distributed, then half of all great programmers would be females.
If the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly distributed, then older programmers would be as desirable as younger ones.
If you say, well the potential is there in the female population to produce half of the great programmers, then I'll say then encourage, solicit, and hire females from the USA instead of going across the ocean.
Heck, Africa has a billion people who mostly aren't doing anything at this time. We can fill our gap by hiring away all of their great programmers.
That Paul Graham is full of it on one extreme, his logic is that since US has only 5% of the world's population than in order to get the 100% of the world's programmers the US of A has to import 100% of the world population
On the other hand, you unfortunately fall into the trap at the _other_ end of the spectrum
Becoming a programmer requires that a certain amount of infrastructure exist to provide the education necessary
If by providing the infrastructure and the education alone can make a person to become a programmer, pray tell, why isn't every USian is a programmer??
The US economy has been buoyed by the influx of world's best brains since the end of WW 2 - from the captured Nazi scientists to the creme of the crop from all over the world came into the US in the form of students ... That was true until the end of the 1990's
Since then, due to intensified competition for best brains, the best brains no longer necessary have to go to USA anymore
Singapore, for example, has become a Mecca for many of the best brains who chose not to go to USA. It's a tiny island nation, but you will be surprised at the level of high quality researches that are being carried out there
And Singapore is not alone --- many places are putting out red carpet to entice the best of the best
In actuality, USA is starting to face a unique problem --- brain drain, and that problem will only become worse and worse as USA's prestige has lost its shine
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> The Netherlands has even less residents than Canada and it has won the Hockey World Cup three times.
Yes, but everyone knows marijuana's a drug enhancement that can help you on track and field...to come last, in a team of eight million other runners...who are all dead!
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Just make all the STEM programs FREE.
Making one program free while the rest remain expensive (all subjects should be free like they are in school) is not a good way to motivate students to take a STEM degree. You will end up with lots of poorly motivated students who cannot afford to take the subject they really want. The best way to ensure that students want to take STEM is to ensure that there are lots of well paid jobs waiting for them. This provides monetary incentive to people planning to make a career in STEM which is what you want.
The problem with society today is that STEM is viewed as hard by most students and leads to a job which is ok but requires real work. Compare that to the view of subjects like business studies or law where the view is that you can get a well paid job and have to do far less actual work to get the same (or even better) salary. That's not to say that there are a lot of really hard working lawyers and MBAs out there but the general perception is that you can get by doing far less work if you want to and still get a better salary than a STEM worker at least based on my interactions with prospective students.
I've worked with programmers (and I am one as well) for decades, and the excellent ones will always be in demand
The moans and bitchin' that we are hearing are from the code monkeys - they may call themselves "software engineers" or whatever fucking title they wanna award themselves with - but to us, the old timers who have been in this field for decades and still thriving, those moaners are nothing but code monkeys
The H1-B visas are also catered for the code monkeys. The businesses that I have in relationship with hire top notch programmers all over the world, and we never need to get even one fuckin' H1-B visa for those top notch talents --- they are that good that they are super productive no matter where they are staying
Slashdot or yesteryears was filled with top talents but have degenerated into a place where code monkeys congregate
Since wages will fall, you will be left only with the worst programmers, since those with the best skills will find better paid employment elsewhere. This is clearly someone who doesn't understand economics.
I am just fine with it as long as we likewise import the top 5% brightest foreign auto mechanics, lawyers, nurses, drywallers, actuaries, pharmacists, roofers, grocery clerks, and insurance adjustors.
According to https://www.ycombinator.com/
YC funded 9gag.
Field vs ice.
Based on the skills of the foreign born contractors that work for my company and my experiences with my last job, it's very difficult to determine the skill level of someone with any accuracy without them actually doing work. How does Mr. Graham intend to filter out the just the exceptional????
You can't do it based on resumes, and it's difficult in an interview, I hired an white, female MIT grad who interviewed very well that was worthless when it came to coding. Her code was overly complex and she was reluctant to learn anything new. And my prior company hired an Indian chap who, based on few lines of code he wrote while I was there, didn't know how to code. Yet his resume stated he was a Sr. Java Developer, and supposedly had the job experience to prove it.
There are three Indian contractors on my current team. One is just an amazing programmer, one is just about average, and the third one we released. Yet all three had the credentials in their resumes for us to contract them, and the backing of their employer.
When Mr. Graham comes up with his method for finding the exceptional programmers and dismissing the rest, I hope he shares it with the rest of us. It will save the US economy millions of dollars in wasted wages.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
You assume that companies want, need, or could even recognize great programmers if one bit them.
Mostly the want cheap, easy to manipulate, and mediocre if corporate requirements for any other position is an indication.
Just a smokescreen for what is really being done, getting cheap labor and de-leveraging the negotiating position of native grown talent.
This is true for 99% of companies. I grew up training myself to program. I'm 33 now. I do it all the time. To be excellent, it means you have to do it over and over and over again until its 2nd nature. Then continue your learning all the time.
Let's let in all the hackers from North Korea with VISAs. That is an example of a bad move and one of the reasons I vote no on this article. The solution is for us to start with our children as babies. My 2 boys are 5 and 6 and they are really bad as a at computers. In fact I was teaching my 6 year old this morning about the Linux cmd line and taught him 5 basic cmds and let him type them into a gentoo machine. This is where we start!!
the united states has only 5% of the world's population, but 100% of the world's best quarterbacks.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Second, while you might not be able to train everyone to become exceptional, it's safe to say that most people with the ability to become exceptional will not do so without training. Mr. Graham is relying on the argument that the only way to get more exceptional programmers in the US is to import them. That is flat-out not true.
You logic is flawed. The matter of the fact is that you are not able to train anybody at all to be exceptional. Exceptional people train themselves (only way it works), giving them some help there just makes the process a bit faster.
The truth lies somewhere in between. You are correct in saying that "you are not able to train anybody at all to be exceptional", but those people who are exceptional in their field did not get there by training themselves. There are no self-taught surgeons any more. String theory physicists do not acquire their knowledge from google searches. And the OP is correct that most people who have the ability to become exceptional wil not do so without training.
If you wanted to say that exceptional people are self motivated to acquire they training needed to become exceptional, I would give you two thumbs up. Consider this: self motivated people learn and develop advanced skills through self-study of available literature, but the people who wrote the books are the trainers.
The "training" of exceptional people does not have the same nature as training for other people. Exceptional people train themselves and some help can accelerate the process, but it is not the usual case of a teacher training them.
That is simply not true for other disciplines. Exceptional musicians are trained by teachers. Exceptional athletes have coaches. Exceptional scientists learn their skills from teachers. So again, why do you think programmers are different?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Good universities teach you how to learn. It's a skill that isn't necessarily obvious, and isn't inherent to people that can become utterly awesome at other things if they know how to learn how to improve.
Anyway, your overall premise is clearly and demonstrably flawed. Great sports coaches are seldom as good as the people they coach, but they still help them get better.
I don't need to be able to intuitively apply knowledge and experience to know that piece of knowledge and experience in applying it are important, and I can share that wisdom with someone capable of intuitively grasping the concepts and applying them.
I like to think I'm pretty good at what I do. I do continually train myself and learn new things - and one key way of doing that is to listen to people that I can learn from. They already have the answers, and one thing I have learned is not to waste my time on solved problems.
He handwaves away 95% of the problem. I'm all for bringing the best and brightest (regardless of profession) into the US. But that's not what the H1-B program does. He could have said that H1-B is massively broken but he didn't.
Hey Paul Graham - if the qualities that make a great programmer are evenly distributed by age and sex, 20-something male brogrammers will only account for 5% of great programmers! Will you and your VC companies hire women? Will you and your VC companies hire people over 40? (That used to be called experience. And believe me, a 60 year old greybeard asking why you don't just use cron is a greater programmer than 5 javascript rockstar ninjas that spend two weeks building a node.js job scheduler)
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In my years as an American software developer, I would estimate that at least half of the developers I've worked with were non-US citizens. The overwhelming majority of those were Indians.
Most of the 10Xers I've encountered have been American. Relatively few were Indian. The trend was so noticeable I developed a theory as to why.
Generally speaking, an American enters the software development field because it interests them. They stick with it mainly because, to one degree or another, they enjoy it. A bright US student with the means to acquire a college education has many career paths available to them. For better or worse, American culture encourages young adults to "follow their passion". So it's much more likely that an American programmer is doing just that.
In India, OTOH, at least within a certain stratum of society, young adults are under a good deal of cultural pressure to enter a STEM profession. (At least that's what I've been told by a number of Indian colleagues.) As a result, many enter the software development profession to please their parents, more than themselves. And it only makes sense that under those circumstances, they're not going to pursue the craft with the same passion as someone who could have followed numerous possible career paths and chose software development out of all of them.
I know it's not politically correct to make such generalizations about different nationalities, unless American people/culture/etc. are portrayed as inferior. (In which case it's perfectly acceptable.) So I fully expect this post to get flamed and modded down.
Just the hot chick ones, might as well make some sense.
... just stop treating the 5% you've already got like shit?
With 5% of the world's population, the US can only expect 5% of the world's great "insert occupation xyz here". So why not open the borders to EVERYONE and drive ALL wages toward zero?
And wouldn't opening the borders also mean that the US can get some of the rest of the 95% of TERRIBLE programmers too?
Bogus argument from a guy who thinks that people will actually believe his crap when what he wants is to pay the cheapest wages and create the worst working conditions possible.
and we can talk. Wages for American Programmers have gone south. The more H1B visa the less American programmers get paid. And the less jobs there are for American programmers. Right now the propaganda is that Americans programmers are stupid and lazy. The reality is totally different. American programmers will stay late, they will work hard and they get things done. The same cannot be consistently said for non-American programmers.
clearly there are a lot of incompetent programmers out there. source: years of reading slashdot comments
Personally I don't understand people who are anti-immigration in general because if you have a skill that we need, why not bring them in? If their a benefit to the country as a whole we should be recruiting them. Now, What I personally hate is illegal immigration; I've heard all the arguments pro-immigration people give IE. "We were all illegal immigrants at some point" but that was over a hundred years ago prior to the laws that was made to control the influx of new citizens into the US. Everyone should abide by those laws and do not BREAK them by sneaking across the border, by breaking them they are committing a crime and it's not fair to everyone waiting to get in the country legally. I'm all for immigration if they do it legally that follows are CURRENT laws that should be enforced but currently are not. People who yell that the current laws are outdated or unfair, should do something about it and get them changed ... them sitting around doing nothing and complaining isn't going to fix the problem. Don't we all want to know who is coming across our borders? I sure as hell want to know if a convicted serial killer or child molester that was just released from prison tried to cross the border, wouldn't you?
How about we boost our education system instead? Education in this country is sorely underfunded. Or we could work harder to retain more of the women who leave the tech industry in the middle of their careers because they are disgusted by how they're being treated.
I think it would be a mistake to solve this problem by importing people from other countries when we can solve at least part of this problem by improving education for everyone and career opportunities for women and minorities who are already here.
If this is really about bringing in the very best programmers, the ones that Paul Graham believes are worth 100x or 1000x an ordinary programmer, then the solution is not only simple, but can easily be extended to the other categories of "digital talent".
Allow American employers to bring in anyone whom they are willing to pay at least $500,000 per year.
Because I wouldn't call the ones we've been letting in so far either "great" or "exceptional".
If anybody thought he had any cred at all before, let there be no doubt he has none now.
"Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it." --Einstein
Casteism
You are "simply" wrong. For all exceptional people, trainers (that must be exceptional themselves) help and can point out things easier seen from the outside, but the actual training is done by the exceptional person itself. Then maybe you just lack that experience?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Seeing things from the outside and "training" somebody are fundamentally different things.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You confuse what makes them exceptional. What surgeons and physicists and others get in training is just about known facts and procedures and approaches. It does not make them exceptional at all. What makes them exceptional is what they add by themselves on top of that training and that "icing" always has to be added by the exceptional person themselves. So, yes, what makes an exceptional surgeon exceptional was added by the surgeon himself, what makes him a (not yet exceptional) surgeon was added by training.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Funny how Slashdotters are all pro-Libertarian and "Evolve or die, you buggy whip makers" until it's their jobs that are at stake.
And by "funny", I mean self-serving and hypocritical.
Because NOTHING attracts the best and the brightest to an industry like driving down salaries...
....but the current industry controlled immigration banks on low to mid level developers who do mundane work for low wages. Exceptional programmers know what they can do and surely won't work for pennies. So even if immigration would be expanded the corporations would not sponsor the excellent developers. There is also the question if we need more than the 5% of awesome developers to reside in the US. Further, how about 'farming' more excellent developers right here? That will not only be faster and cheaper, it will also cut out unproductive (political) discussions.
As far as I can tell, exceptional people in most fields get trained by others. Opera singers have voice coaches. Scientists virtually all have Ph.D. degrees, meaning they were trained and mentored by others. Professional athletes generally train hard under supervision (baseball being something of an exception until recently). Lots of jobs have apprentice programs (some formal, some informal and called "mentoring"). About the only businesses where I see untrained people succeeding big are start-ups and some artistic fields.
By simple regression to the mean, exceptional people were generally trained by people not up to their standards. This didn't stop them from achieving greatness.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If we extend that logic to all professions, then in theory we should let just about everybody in. There's a guy in Timbuktu who will fix my plumbing top notch for $2/hr, which is good money back home. Maybe his brother can replace Paul for $3.
Table-ized A.I.
Outsourcing factory work was NOT good for the average factory worker, although it was a net benefit for everybody else. The whole thing is pitting one profession against another.
In theory some say such eventually floats all boats, but in practice the benefits of "open" trade appears to have flowed to a select few, as the inequality metrics show. They rest may have cheaper trinkets, but there is more to life than cheap trinkets.
I suggest we try balanced trade instead of "free" trade and see how it works out. Countries that don't import enough of our services or products to balance their exports are tariffed. That encourages them to open their own markets to our country.
Table-ized A.I.
I feel the points drawn up in this discussion, and by this article are very moot. I've browsed the comments and many are very good, and the topics are broad and far-reaching. I've ignored the article because it is drivel, propaganda, and as many commenters have pointed out, self-serving salesmanship.
But there's a very important point that I'd like to bring up which casts all of this aside as moot:
Everyone is assuming that they want more programmers in the US. Everyone is assuming that they want the US to remain a technological superpower.
I don't believe they do. Example: The University of Florida, a couple years ago, announced the closure of its computer science department, with the intention of focusing more the liberal arts, and on sports. No matter that it was in the wake of anon-ops and similar hacktivist actions which sincerely pissed off the established powerbase.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.