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If the Programmer Won't Go To Silicon Valley, Should SV Go To the Programmer?
theodp writes: "If 95% of great programmers aren't in the U.S.," Matt Mullenweg advises in How Paul Graham Is Wrong (a rejoinder to Graham's Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In), "and an even higher percentage not in the Bay Area, set up your company to take advantage of that fact as a strength, not a weakness. Use WordPress and P2, use Slack, use G+ Hangouts, use Skype, use any of the amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as previous generations of company did offline. Let people live someplace remarkable instead of paying $2,800 a month for a mediocre one bedroom rental in San Francisco. Or don't, and let companies like Automattic and Github hire the best and brightest and let them live and work wherever they like." Microsoft and Google — which hawk the very tools to facilitate remote work that Mullenweg cites — have shuttered remote offices filled with top talent even as they cry the talent sky is falling. So, is "being stubborn on keeping a company culture that requires people to be physically co-located," as Mullenweg puts it, a big part of tech's 'talent shortage' problem?"
Chris Pepper also recently posted another reasoned rebuttal to Graham's post.
For scaling teams.
The vast majority of people won't relocate. People in the tech world are more likely to want to, and people in 3rd world countries are very likely to want to, but in general, people won't.
So if you need to hire 50 great engineers, your best bet is to go where the highest concentration of them are. Even having to compete with hundreds of other companies, its still better (the ones you lose to others can be made up by poaching). If you go and open up shop in the middle of nowhere, you'll never fill up a large team. Now some of the cities you mentionned are ok (ie: Seattle) too. SV isn't the only spot, of course.
Telecommuting only works for a small percentage of top of the top, because phones suck, there's no great videoconference solution out there (No, i know which one you're talking about, it sucks. No, that other one sucks too), and text-only communication makes you lose all the non-verbal, making such communication inefficient for complex matters (it works great as a complement though).
End result: companies need to open up shop in hot spots, and pay the insane amount of $$$ for both real estate and inflated engineer salaries. A few positions can still be filled by remote workers of course, but not the whole thing. Hell, even companies with international offices in the same timezone (ie: a NYC financial with an office in Montreal) have issues with those. It works to some extent, which is why they do it, but its far from ideal.
I assume he wasn't being us specific as the article sure wasn't. I work on a remote team that spanned, at one point six timezones - a guy in Australia, a team in China, a team in SV and a few others scattered among the other three north american timezones. It certainly had its challenges.
I think it is especially difficult for a preexisting company to start thinking remote, and that is probably the real problem. The org is very head office centric and so many meetings start in a room and remote people get added in either part way through or after the pleasantries have taken place. They don't think to introduce people in the room so on the remote end all you hear is voices going back and forth at varying volumes depending on how far away the person is from the mic. If a couple of people in the room start having a person to person chat amongst themselves (not private but where the in room attendees are spectators and can listen in) then you are almost guaranteed to be SOL because they end up speaking quickly and don't enunciate as much and they don't speak as loud. If you are in the room you can jump in if you have something to add (probably using body language to indicate you want to add something) but you're lost very quickly if you are in the phone.
If Graham really wants the exceptional programmers, you don't bring then over on the H-1B, you use use the O visa and there is no quota for that program. Of course, that is not want he wants. The fact of the matter is there are not that many exceptional people in the world. The ones that have been identified and convinced to come over to the United States, have done so.
The H-1B was created as a stop gap measure, to fill actual shortages for 3-6 years while America trains its residents to meet its own needs. This is why this visa does not confer residency on its recipients. They were to come over, work the gap, and go home when they were no longer needed.