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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?
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.
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?
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.
...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?
"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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%.
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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
Inflation adjusted since 1970 per student. Would 6.5x have worked better?
That is not what is spent on education but what is spent on the budget for education. The amount of money spent per student in the classroom has gone down since 1970. The rest has gone for unnecessary administrators, buildings to house said administrators, and equipment and infrastructure for said administrators.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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.
...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.
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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