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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?
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.
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.
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.
...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?
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.
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.
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.
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)...
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.
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.
All that great work usually comes with a bad attitude, lack of documentation, and a me vs the world mentality.
Typically these are people who been with the company the longest (i.e., 5+ years). Bad attitude comes from taking the same crap day in and day out. Lack of documentation is the only form of job security that they have from getting randomly laid off. Me vs. the world mentality comes from knowing that their value in the labor market is significantly less than a contractor who makes more money from working at different companies on shorter assignments.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
"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'll be on board once we let 95% of the worlds great managers in and lower their wages first.
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...
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?
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.)
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?
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
Having done quite a bit of code reviews, I fully agree. The need is not for more programmers, but for a lot less. Most people writing software these days have negative productivity, as the few good ones need to clean up their messes.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Only of the playing-field was fair. It is not.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Hint: You have not seen the great ones. You have seen those that think they are great but are actually not that good. Sure, many of these people are really good at writing complex, unmaintainable code and at demonstrating to everybody how smart they are. But that is not what makes a great engineer. Execution critically includes coordination, communication, maintainability, etc. To be a great programmer, you need 30% exceptional coding skills and 70% exceptional other skills that complement them. Of course, actually great coders also understand their worth and you do not get them for the usual "programmer" salaries, so it is quite understandable that you have not seen many or any.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
That is BS. Sure, IQs are indeed not distributed the same, but that is because the IQ does not measure intelligence but aptitude for IQ tests. All these tests are strongly flawed because they include strong cultural aspects. If you correct for those, the deviations in average IQ fall within the error ranges. There is also the little problem that US IQ tests use scales with higher numbers than the rest of the world does, most likely in an act of self-delusion.
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.
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...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.
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?
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?
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
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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.
According to https://www.ycombinator.com/
YC funded 9gag.
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.
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.
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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If the US had a president with any backbone, he'd tell Zuckerberg to fuck off and move his company and himself to India if he doesn't want to hire Americans. Again, these clowns want all the protections a first-world country can offer, but they don't give anything in return.
Why anybody even deals with facebook is a mystery to me. It's nothing but a giant data-mining operation, just like google. It seems almost all of the "web 2.0" companies are about personal information siphoning under the guise of some other shoddy crap. The only "talent" these companies need are psychologists who can tell them how best to fool people into giving up even more info, and how each group is susceptible to a given form of advertising. Any web programmer can do the rest.
Just the hot chick ones, might as well make some sense.
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?
"Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it." --Einstein
Casteism
That is not a "line" or a question of believe. Cultural bias in IQ tests a scientific fact. I can see that your education failed though, as you value your personal beliefs far above proven facts.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
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.
I think you may have misquoted that. Your original source stated that "Teachers' salaries have gone up three times since 1980".