He sure seems to imply that paying far above market salaries is the best way to get good programmers, rather than immigration. Maybe I'm reading it wrong?
I don't think the economics of that add up, though, long term. If there are a bunch of people willing to work, and an artificial barrier, that barrier will only work for so long before people route around it.
This post seems to imply that there is a single "market salary" for programmers. That's not really the case anywhere - a green intern doing web programming is never going to have an equal salary to a greybeard doing consulting in esoteric niche areas (eg COBOL in banking systems). There's always diminishing returns for superstar talent in any field - a Fortune 25 CEO gets paid how much more than a manager at Wendy's?
The collusion between the big tech companies to drive down salaries for top personnel strongly suggests that the market salary for these people is actually higher than what they're currently paid. They're grade-A talent in a hot field, the fact that their salaries are high doesn't mean they're above-market.
Actually, I didn't read it that way. I saw this as a dispute on a point of logic, rather than a broad statement about the best way to get programmers.
Paul Graham makes the following claim:
"if you talk to startups, you find practically every one over a certain size has gone through legal contortions to get programmers into the US, where they then paid them the same as they’d have paid an American. Why would they go to extra trouble to get programmers for the same price? The only explanation is that they’re telling the truth: there are just not enough great programmers to go around."
Phil Greenspun makes the common (common because, in my opinion, it's so sensible) argument that perhaps a "shortage" exists because the market rate is too low to draw people into the field - that if you raised the price to well above what it currently costs to get a programmer, you'd draw considerably more people into the field. Greenspun claims that Graham's argument is based on the flawed notion that "there is no way that if companies nationwide paid programmers more than the BLS’s median pay of $74,280 per year (source), additional Americans would be attracted to this field."
Part of the problem with Greenspun's retort is that PG claims to be talking only about an extreme elite, not the run of the mill programmers. However, the logic still stands in my opinion. Have you seen what elite people earn in other fields? I guess if you think that it's impossible to get someone who would otherwise have gone to med, law, or finance into programming by offering more money at a comparably elite level of talent, you'd agree that the supply of people is fixed and doesn't respond to market signals. That seems to be the basis of the disagreement.
Oh, I agree that the supply of people is not fixed, and does respond to incentives. But I have done open source software long enough to realize that a lot of great programmers are outside the US, and that creating artificial barriers is not a good solution, long-term.
It is not zero-sum ? companies like Google, Facebook pick 1 out of 100 programmers, if there was 10 fold increase in programmers, they would start picking 1 out of 1000. Instead of complaining shortage of programmer it makes sense to build software development processes around "average" programmers rather than insisting on superstar programmers. How many other fields do that ? Have you read an ad about hiring only superstar plumber,pilot,electrician,nurse? Even if its true that your company will benefit from so called 10x programmers why not train people to be 10x or give degrees to people who are only 10x. Just increasing the pool of 1x while insisting on hiring 10x doesn't make sense.
No, it really isn't. Read my article and the linked economic research.
> if there was 10 fold increase in programmers
There has been a 10 fold increase in programmers since 50 years ago, but more than a 10 fold increase in the amount of programming work, so salaries have done just fine. Also, those programmers are already there, in other countries, so artificial barriers can only create so much salary disparity before companies will pursue other options. At that point, why were you bothering trying to keep them out in the first place?
Read the linked article: it is not a zero-sum game.
Angie's List does explicitly that, showing you superstar plumbers, electricians, doctors, etc. If I am given the choice to hire a great plumber vs. an average plumber I would always hire a great plumber if I can afford him. Your argument that development processes should be built around average programmers is like saying open heart surgical procedures should be designed around average surgeons.
We humans are greedy species. If given opportunity we would always hire superstar (even janitors or hamburger flippers) especially if they don't cost any extra. If you can find superstar, great! but stop crying "shortage" if you are not in the business of open heart surgery.
EDIT: And yes every average heart surgeon is capable of doing heart surgery otherwise they would not get a degree in the first place. There is no such thing as 10x heart surgeon.
heart surgery is very complex and success depends on a lot of things. How a human body will react to a highly invasive procedure is unknown hence if it reacts in a way that your average surgeon has no idea on how to deal with the patient would die. Have you heard of specialists? Do you know why people go to specialists? Why is there a need of specialists if every average heart surgeon can do heart surgery?
So you see there is something like a 10X heart surgeon, he/she is called a specialist.
There is a difference between a specialist and a 10X person. Specialization indicates a detailed knowledge of specialized subject. It has nothing to do with how creative, intelligent and talented you are in solving problems of your domain.
I could be specialized into writing device drivers for Real-time linux systems and yet be average programmer. Specialization has to do with knowledge, 10x indicates fluid intelligence in solving problems.
This what generally people think of 10x. The imaginative 10x heart surgeon would do following:(any or all of it)
1. Take 10 times less time performing heart surgery.
2. Could perform successful surgery at 10 times less cost.
3. Invent new ways of doing work of 10 heart surgeons.
4. Survival rate of his/her patients would be 10 times that of other heart surgeons.
5. Could perform heart surgery so complicated that it would generally require 10 heart surgeons during the surgery.
Are you going to find such a heart surgeon ? If so, how many? would entire healthcare system be functional if all hospitals are adamant on just hiring 10x surgeon and at the same time advocating bringing more 1x heart surgeons into the market.
I don't know how to read your comment. I, for one, do believe that surgical procedures should be designed for the average surgeon.
You want the procedures to be built around superstars?
If I were building a software company that I wanted to survive and thrive long term, I would definitely try to cater to BOTH the superstar and more average programmers. Both have their place.
I think I might have to specify what I mean by average. I read average as competent. Sure there are software processes that a competent programmer can work with but to say all processes should be designed for just competent programmers,as the commentator suggested, is unreasonable in my opinion. I do see your point though about designing processes around just superstars. That's not viable either.
> Instead of complaining shortage of programmer it makes sense to build software development processes around "average" programmers
I tried to explain this to a manager: instead of trying to find a developer with perfect skills, get a junior one and train him.
There is no shortage of developers, but there is definitely a shortage of senior developers with (quoting one of the emails i get weekly):
5+ years of experience in the following skill sets...
Web-Based C# / ASP.NET 3.5 / 4.0 Development – Design / Development / Implementation
MVC Design Pattern
Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) Framework – Entity Framework
WebServices / SOAP / XML
WCF – Windows Communication Foundation
SQL Server 2005 / 2008 – T-SQL / Database Design Frameworks
Having average programmers is possible, but it does two things. Features are added more slowely (sometimes half the rate) and management/architectural overhead has to be much higher as well. Personally I wish that I was working with better devs even if I would appear less exceptional; just so that I could learn a lot more from them and would have to do less refactoring of their existing code
We don't require surgeons or airline pilots or bridge-designing civil engineers to be rock stars. Exactly why do people think you need a rock star programmer to build, I dunno, eBay for cats or whatever is the latest stupid VC fashion?
Even if you only run eBay for cats, you probably secretly believe you can become the equivalent of Facebook in your particular space, and feel that what you need is a room full of the eBay for cats version of Mark Zuckerberg, making the billion dollar magic happen on the cheap.
Lot of startups are just looking for superstar programmers because they want to get the most out of their limited funding.
But without proper product-market fit its even counter productive. Superstar programmer is like a sports car, he/she will take you 10x faster in the wrong direction if your direction is wrong.
Exactly. I'm really confused about this situation of VCs having their cake, and eating it too. Why and when did we just stat accepting the assumption that these companies and VCs are entitled to as many "superstar" programmers as they want at the salaries that they want?
I've been arguing for 10 years that AMA needs to increase the supply of doctors in this country. I'm of the opinion we don't have a lot of doctors... if we had more, then in certain contexts healthcare would become a competitive field where the patient wins. That hasn't happened. And that's an area where we do definitely want change, because healthcare is a serious issue. Tech industry has not produced, in my opinion, anything extraordinarily remarkable that truly helps people in substantive ways. Indeed, the highlight of the industry is massive wealth by the VCs and founders by duping customers by way of exploiting their cognitive biases (or "advertising", if you would). If they were doing things in a clean way that actually benefited the customer without emptying his or her wallet, I would maybe be sympathetic to their cries for getting top talent. But after all of that colluding to suppress the wages of the very people they want more of? Wow, the balls that they have.
Top notch programmers come from curiosity, building a fair few complicated projects and a little bitter experience so you know how to avoid problems and be realistic
Possibly grant resident status to anyone (with lot of money of course... after all, it's only the exceptional we are talking about here) who wants to fund and run a VC company? Because there are lots of great programmers who simply can't get funding.
> Possibly grant resident status to anyone (with lot of money of course... after all, it's only the exceptional we are talking about here) who wants to fund and run a VC company? Because there are lots of great programmers who simply can't get funding.
I don't think PG would have any problems with that, because investing in startups is not a zero-sum game, which is one of the reasons why there are so many investors in the bay area. It's not like they seek out "investor free" territory, such as eastern Montana.
You can get a GC in the US if you can prove that you have $1 million invested in the US. Yes, its as simple as that. More rich people not moving is probably because if you're rich, you already have a good lifestyle.
What if the qualities that make a drug dealer are economic, but the qualities that make a GREAT drug dealer may be a mix of environment and genes?
If you want the most amazing, ruthless, and efficient black market for drugs, you must have the largest possible number of drug dealers participating in the system, so the most talented and motivated drug dealers have the opportunity to be the best they can be.
The author of this post is missing some of Graham's core arguments, and it makes me want to go back and reread the original essay. Perhaps it is PG's fault for conflating concepts, as people seem to be raising valid points (startups should be able to hire great programmers if they would just pay more) while missing that the core thesis is undeniable: if there are more programmers participating, more greatness will emerge.
It is probably not even linear. If you track the history of martial arts proficiency, the ones that are in fashion seem to produce a higher overall average of ability, with the "greats" in that martial art always arising when many many people are participating in that art, and there is a rich ecosystem that supports learning and competition. i.e. Judo in the 1970s, or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in the early 2000s.
I see this anecdotally and in published research, where pockets of artists, writers, and musicians have created a wildly disproportionate amount of forward looking work when there are many of them in the same area creating all at once.
Even if startups paid more, it would not significantly increase the total number of great programmers. Google, Apple, and Facebook already DO pay "more" and I think these companies are in exactly the same boat as the startup in the essay - they would happily keep hiring as many great programmers as they can find.
If that is true, the number of jobs available to great programmers is not proved to be finite.
What makes a great programmer? And what does this great programmers do? We have had and still have a vast number of great programmers in US and churning our more and more, but what do they do? is it greatness that they seek? if so, why are more programmers involved in scientific research? I really want to agree with your views, but for now it seems that immigration is an issue for one market sector, and last time I looked, that market sector isn't out to change the world.
I'm an immigrant, served in USMC, after service had to pay and take a test to become a citizen (funny right? can die for the country but won't let me be a citizen).
I love my country(both), but when did immigration become something to benefit the corporations?
I think the subtext of "I would hire thirty great programmers tomorrow!" is "I would hire thirty great programmers tomorrow! They just need to think 55 hours a week is a nice relaxing pace, have impeccable pedigrees, and be capable of spinning up within single-digit weeks. Also, we're looking for top-of-the-skill-curve at a combination of five technologies, two of which are fairly niche. For a variety of reasons we'd strongly prefer if they were located in one particular geographic area where we happen to be in vicious, frothy competition with a hundred firms trying to hire exactly this profile of people."
This happens to be very similar to the rough description that Wall Street is looking for in certain niches of programmers. I have not heard Wall Street loudly complaining about the impossibility of finding Haskell programmers who can code against FIX and also have PhDs in physics.
I rather strongly believe this is because Wall Street institutionally believes in market prices and, unlike Silicon Valley, is willing to tolerate the market telling them that the market clearing price for hiring this type of programmer times thirty is $200k base plus a $600k bonus as opposed to $120k base plus an equity grant with expected value in the $X0k range.
> $120k base plus an equity grant with expected value in the $X0k range.
Or not even $120k. You'd be surprised at what some SV companies get away with. Take a look at angel list and you'll commonly see wages lower than $100k for experienced developers.
I'd say the only epidemic that exists in the US's technology field is a lack of adequate compensation, not a lack of talent.
Using job ads to gauge market salaries will leave you at a disadvantage. There aren't many engineers in the bay area taking work today at $100k or below. Those that are are usually right out of school, or working for a cause they believe in.
It's very hard to get real data, so I can't really fault you for the lack of a good cite. However, it's not like the companies claiming a shortage are exactly forthcoming with the data themselves. Here's a pretty eye-opening story about a journalist and professor trying to get good data to study the issue
I find it remarkable that people make claims of shortages without sharing information about the skill set they need and the compensation they're offering. Well, I don't find it remarkable, in the sense that I don't find PR-speak especially surprising anymore. I guess I should say I find it galling.
I've not hired as many engineers lately as I'm sure others have, but while I agree with your sentiment, I think you're painting only 1/2 the picture.
Yes, people routinely under-estimate salaries of engineers in the bay area. And I certainly know people at Google and Apple who have comp packages in the neighborhood you mention. But I'm skeptical of calling that the "norm", and even if it is, it's only the norm for RSU-granting, established tech companies. Half the employment for engineers in the area is for smaller companies with ISO grants with Expected Value well below $300k and salaries 25% below your quote.
What's wonderful for engineers in the SFBA is that you have this choice. Take a front row seat at a startup and consistently make $110-130k, go to a huge tech giant like Google and make far more in a more narrowly defined role, or pick some place in the middle. Like Trulia, for example! We're always hiring Android and iOS engineers.
Citation needed for this. The New York metro area has more than 2x the population of the Bay Area and an extremely diverse economic base. That makes claims about availability of choice being limited in NYC in comparison to SF pretty hard to believe.
The population of the metro area has nothing to do with it, it's about concentration of the industry. Acting is similar. There are more acting jobs in Hollywood than NYC.
I've seen many studies of tech hiring/jobs across the country. I'm sure you can find any research you're looking for.
It's certainly a hard thing to measure. I'm approaching this both anecdotally and, I believe, logically.
The vast majority of software developers work in IT departments writing line-of-business applications in Java, .Net, etc. Certainly NYC has a vast number of these jobs. But these roles are all very similar. You're working as a cost-center, in a supporting role, for people who ultimately don't care about software. This is true whether you're a developer for Pfizer or Jet Blue or NBC Universal or any of the other companies based in
I really find the hollywood analogy apt. Yes, you can certainly find work as an actor in NYC. But the epicenter of the industry is in Hollywood.
Of course, pay isn't the only motivation behind a career choice. Many engineers take jobs in less lucrative verticals like game development because the work interests them.
That said, if you're an experienced engineer and you told me you wanted to make $200k next year, if you're in NYC I would say "go into finance" which is far more limited than the advice I would give in SFBA which is "go work for just about any publicly traded tech company, or slightly more risky go work for a tech company that seems to have an imminent IPO, or more risky still go work for a well-funded private marquee tech company (many of these companies would overlap with the 2nd group). In the end, it's a much bigger pond.
Look, I'm not saying NYC is void of these types of opportunities. I've got friends who work in the city for Tumblr and Spotify among others. I'm just saying, it's about density. You could take the skyline of SF and put it in a few blocks of lower manhattan. And you could take the tech population of NYC and put it in a "few blocks" of SF.
All that said, the relation to wages is more complicated than you suggest. Less variety doesn't speak to the balance between labor talent and demand.
Less variety should put downward pressure on wages, all things being equal, not upward pressure
All I am saying is, software development wages are too low, especially relative to the demands of the job - that's why there is a perceived shortage. Raise the wages and smart people from other fields will teach themselves to code and join the fray
It seems highly improbable that cash-based Wall Street compensation packages could be offered by Silicon Valley startups. Maybe established companies could, but it would massively increase the fundraising requirements for early stage companies, with probably bad effects on the SV ecosystem.
Perhaps you can argue that startup equity grants should be higher. Would hiring issues be resolved if the average equity grant tripled? Would more talented people in the U.S. pursue Silicon Valley careers if they got 3% instead of 1% to be an early employee?
I can't prove it, but I'd conjecture it would only have a modest effect. The notion of "expected value" of equity is problematic. It's not like it's simply a 3X stronger offer. The bigger issue is whether the company will be worth anything at all.
"That totally blows out my business model!" may be true [+], but is not an objection which should escape the lips of someone who has the word "capitalist" literally in their job title.
[+] I'm agnostic on this. Pinterest just raised, what, $450 million dollars? That's presumably not intended to buy the world's biggest vat of chocolate pudding.
(I could pull an answer to your question out of this -- hint, search the page for a dollar sign -- but if you're reading "out of curiosity" you should just get some coffee or something and read the whole glorious thing, because the number is useless without the context, and the context is very different from the USA.)
I'd forgotten about that. On the whole, it looks like, despite lower levels of immigration, Japanese engineers do not earn more than their US counterparts, which makes sense: the economy is complex, with a lot of different things factoring into how much people make.
Pinterest is waaay beyond the early stages of startups that Paul Graham focuses on.
It used to be that it did in fact take millions of VC just to get startups off the ground (70s, 80s, 90s). We could go back there. Would it be better for the ecosystem? Would employees have a net gain, or would there be fewer early stage companies & jobs? I don't know, but these are the macroeconomic questions to consider.
The impact would be reasonably small, depending on which sub-slice of the startup ecosystem you are looking at. Paul Graham doesn't advocate jacking up headcount before you have decently functional business fundamentals. The YC model seems to be that (before the product is proven out) development is done by founders, which costs the same no matter what the prevailing wages are. After that, it's either (1) paid by revenues or (2) paid by VC money -- in the latter case the VCs will adjust expectations and/or the amounts they invest, and in the former, they'll just need to get 2x more productive employees, which is well within the band of talent hired by the marketplace today.
I don't think pg says it's founders-only until you prove product-market fit. Usually it takes some hires and seed funding to run some experiments and show proof. Product-market fit is more of a Series A requirement.
If the cash cost of running experiments goes way up, that may very well mean going back to the old way of doing things, where you essentially had to jump straight to VC money just to get off the ground.
While I'm willing to be convinced that things like HFT have some value to society ( https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/hft_apology.html ) and while there are certainly some lame things that come out of Silicon Valley, on the average, I think I'd rather see more resources flow to the latter than the former.
A first approximation would suggest doubling programming salaries would only change their strategies from "fund 100 and hope for 1 to be good" to "fund 50 and hope for 1 to be good". More selective, sure, but not game-changingly so.
Not sure that would be an improvement. If funding gets tighter and more selective, their selection criteria might become pedigree and connections instead of who has the better idea and team.
The very reason they fund 100 and hope for 1 is that all the analysis and data in the world have not helped narrow likely success criteria beyond 'fund the team.' What's stopping you from starting a VC fund that's REALLY CAREFUL with investments?
> Would more talented people in the U.S. pursue Silicon Valley careers if they got 3% instead of 1% to be an early employee?
IMO, no. The difference between founder and employee #1 is still too large, even though the risk is not significantly higher.
Assume there are two founders, splitting 50/50, then there's a 10% employee option pool, so the founders have 45% each. Moving from 1 -> 3% is not enough incentive, but moving from 1->10% might be.
> Maybe established companies could, but it would massively increase the fundraising requirements for early stage companies, with probably bad effects on the SV ecosystem.
Welcome to running a business. You aren't guaranteed anything. If you can't survive, you die. Tough. That's life.
Sadly, it hasn't truly been "flagged off", it was done by the volition (or rather, the acquiescence of HN mods). This has happened for almost every immigration-related submission critical of pg's point-of-view. When you call them out for this, they go back to the excuse "the users voted it off!" But that's not really a good response, since they do routinely take the initiative of bringing to life stories that were voted off.
I know things get politically dirty on these kinds of submissions, but the conversation needs to happen -- pg can't just open the lid to say what he wants, and immediately close it. This is our bread and butter on the line, why shouldn't we be able to have this conversation without the submissions constantly getting killed.
That's a rather inflammatory claim to make without a lick of evidence, and attributes a whole lot of agency in story selection to a person who appears to have no current involvement with HN whatsoever.
It's also a drive-by from an anonymous throwaway account.
I would back up my claims with evidence other than my stated observations if HN software wasn't so opaque. And anyway, the burden of proof falls upon the party with the pertinent pattern of the acts which they are being accused of. HN often slowbans folks who don't toe the line (michaelochurch, larrys, rayiner (rayiner was rankbanned precisely because of disagreeing with pg on the immigration issue), etc., as well as manipulates ranking of comments to put YC-funded startups in a positive light. Considering all of this, I'm fine making the accusation, YC-staff has to defend this with solid evidence. Anyway, to be clear, I'm not accusing pg, or really anyone particular of doing anything -- I'm saying HN mods (whoever they may be) are behind this story falling off from #1 to not being on the frontpage in a matter of a minute.
To be precise, this thread now has about 80 comments and about 70 upvotes. In the past, at least, HN's software has considered that a "flamewar". Perhaps it's too bad, in this case, since TFA is so much more cogent and reasonable than PG's original self-serving bullshit, but unless you credibly suggest that someone is either inflating comment numbers or deflating upvotes, it is exaggeration to say this has been "killed".
I agree with you, I probably should have been more careful in my word. I should clarify that when I mean "killed", I mean killing either by manually killing, or letting it remain killed. Considering they often exercise their ability to bring around killed stories, they should have brought this one back too.
That doesn't address the question of whether or not we should increase immigration quotas though.
I don't think there's any question that if the only thing we do to increase the supply of great coders is to increase immigration quotas, then this basically just amounts to a pyramid scheme to further enrich the silicon valley elites at the expense of the public. But pg never says that this is the only thing we should do, he only says that it's one of the things we should do.
I don't necessarily agree with pg's realpolitik view of reality, but I also think a lot of the criticism of this piece is based on things that just aren't there.
I think both are true: we should let more talented people into the country AND there is actually no shortage of programmers - there is a lack of programmers at the prevailing rather low programmer salaries.
Off topic, but the second comment from Jason is pure gold. He's calling Philip Greenspun (of Greenspun's tenth law fame), a "Harvard Lawyer of unknown programming provenance". I can see how blog hostnames can confuse people, but maybe google the author for context ?
Besides, he's fighting the strawman of training, where Greenspun talked about economic incentives.
What the blog post is saying is essentially saying is that pg is crying about a broken market, when in fact the market is working perfectly, ie. people who could be great programmers would rather go to other higher paying professions because programmers' salaries don't pay as well. The OP basically says the CEO of the startup could get 30 great programmers if he just raised his salaries and benefits higher, which is what the market is telling him. For example, if that CEO paid his programmers $1M/yr, you don't think he would get 100 of the best programmers in the entire world? What he really is saying is that he wants great programmers at a lower cost, and that's basically what increasing immigration would do by increasing the supply.
I personally have no problems with increasing immigration via H1B, but the OP makes an interesting point about economic incentives that push people to occupations. There are a lot of very smart people who would make great programmers that are going into finance, medicine, law, etc, because of higher prestige and better pay. Increasing immigration will increase the number of programmers, but if it is increased to the point where it affects wages, then people who would be great programmers would likely go to other professions rather than having to compete against immigrants for a comparatively lower wage, so it might be self-defeating in the long run.
What's more is that deflating the cost of programmers makes it less sensible to make programming teams more efficient. If programmers were paid like doctors, you would start to see the tech equivalent of nurses, lab technicians, orderlies, and physicians' assistants.
In other words, if you were paying your best programmers $1M/yr, you would hire more personal assistants. And maybe there would be more demand for people who are (or can become) fluent in technology lingo, even if they can't write code themselves.
Right, but programmers aren't organized like hospital staff, which is my point. And, probably related, test engineer doesn't have the same cachet (or prominent degree programs) that x-ray technician or nurse practitioner has.
Maybe some of this is because they don't make TV shows about programming. But it could also be at least partially about seeing programmers as commodities and cost centers (I need 3 senior Java engineers!) instead of seeing them as effectively the core of your business.
So, I guess I have two suspicions about increasing programmer wages, at least for certain categories of problems:
1. It will incentivize laypeople to learn about how software development works, making technology business analyst seem less like mumbo jumbo and more like a good way to earn a living.
2. It will incentivize organizations to restructure their processes to maximize the productivity of their highest paid employees. This will create more opportunities for the peole described in point 1.
This is me. I am considering switching from programming to other professions because I could reach higher pay a lot faster.
The plus side is that I get to do programming projects I find interesting(machine learning for me) in my spare time. While avoiding the tedious programming.
I am all for letting talented people in. Clearly, everybody would benefit if the really talented programmers from all over the world could work where the eco-system is set up for them. However, tech companies generally complain about a general shortage of programmers. And I don't buy it because a shortage would manifest itself through large real wage increases and we don't see those. I also suspect talented programmers overseas are already working for us - remotely.
"People are born with an innate calling to drug dealing,"
What the hell is this author talking about? While the he's a pretty accomplished individual, he lost me with his shitty analogies based on false premises.
Hypothetically, let's say every YC startup was to double the starting salaries for programmers they hired.
So if they are paying $120K-$150K/year, they start paying $240K-$300K/year. At that salary, programmers are getting paid on par with lawyers, doctors, and bankers.
To pay this much, assume every startup needs to raise double or triple the amount of capital. The $1 million angel round becomes a $3 million VC round. For the VCs, the $100 million doesn't cut it and they start wanting the $300 million or $1 billion exits to justify the volume of seeds to exits.
The net effect is that the entire sector will need to de-leverage the risks they are currently taking. Entire business models that are currently considered fundable become completely impractical. VCs no longer spread the risk among many startups and start to rely on fewer, safer bets.
Maybe in general, the whole sector would feel a little healthier instead of this constant up and down every few years. But in the short term, it would result in a lot of pain for the major players in SF and Silicon Valley today.
I'm really sad that John Doerr won't make another billion dollars.
Oh wait, no I'm not. You see, it won't change a thing. In the current low-interest-rate environment there is nowhere else for the money to go. VCs and startups could pay engineers fairly (i.e. at the price at which the market clears) without breaking a sweat. They just don't, out of naked greed. Except now they're running out of people naive enough to exploit, hence wanting to bring in more people, people who are indentured by their visa status.
Capital is sitting around instead of being applied properly to this critical issue, and then the people responsible for allocating the capital want to place the blame elsewhere.
Philip Greenspun is notorious for being intentionally provocative in his online essays, but here he makes a thoughtful contribution to the literature by picking apart one of the weakest points in Paul Graham's recent essay. The essay by pg appears to assume that programmers are born and not made and they are born in equal rates by population in all parts of the world. Greenspun correctly challenges that kind of naive genetic determinism and suggests that people around the world, in many occupations, respond to incentives, so that people who are within reach of incentives to become better programmers will tend to become better programmers, while people not offered incentives to become better programmers will choose other career trade-offs.
Our fellow participant in this discussion davidw makes the good point that immigration in general is good for countries in general. So my basic policy predisposition is for the United States to have very open borders to immigration, and to impose few requirements on immigration. (All of my ancestors came to North America under rules like that, after all.) My wife was readily able to immigrate to the United States under the "immediate relative" category of immigrants after we had been married for more than a year overseas. My oldest son has sometimes considered moving away from the United States to settle in another country (he has looked specifically at some other countries), and what he has found is that his programming skills help open doors to permanent residence and settling in other countries to immigrate, but especially so for people with college degrees rather than on-the-job training in programming.
It is still the case today that the United States is by far the most desired country to settle in for immigrants from all around the world.[1] And a lot of people achieve that desire. I know first-generation immigrants from India, China, Russia, Korea, Vietnam, Ghana, Haiti, Australia, Pakistan, Turkey, the Philippines, Romania, Poland, Somalia, Argentina, Ecuador, Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, and a variety of other countries here in Minnesota, where the climate is anything but inviting. My inclination is to welcome even more immigrants than the United States welcomes now (for one thing, that improves the variety of local ethnic restaurants and grocery stores) but the United States already receives more net immigrants from all the rest of the world than any other country on earth, so I can understand why my fellow voters might not think that the United States has a shortage of immigrants. To make a strong policy case for immigration reform takes a more nuanced and tightly reasoned factual argument than Paul Graham made in his recent essay.
> To make a strong policy case for immigration reform takes a more nuanced and tightly reasoned factual argument than Paul Graham made in his recent essay.
I agree with that. To that end, if you have any comments on my own article, please feel free to email them to me. All the muddle-headed thinking I read about immigration the last time around prompted me to write it as a place to collect my own arguments.
The other countries with higher intake (as a percentage of national population) of migrants or of foreign-born persons, as you can see from the Wikipedia links you have kindly shared, are mostly special cases of countries with a very high percentage of refugees or guest workers. For countries accepting permanent residents with a path to citizenship, the United States still ranks plenty high on a percentage basis, and the absolute numbers are much of what generates population growth in the United States these days. I'll have to take a look at your article and ponder it awhile. We need perspective like yours (American living abroad) a lot more on Hacker News. Thanks for your reply.
But there are also others, like Sweden, Canada, Norway, Australia and Spain (and even Italy) that are broadly similar to the US - and in most cases offer much more in terms of government benefits.
I guarantee you, open your doors to remote programmers, and you will get more top-quality prospects than you can possibly hire.
You're restricting your hiring pool to people who are willing to live in a small, overpriced, and absurdly overrated city.
It's a wonderful place, don't get me wrong. But expecting every single great programmer in the world to live in that one tiny city is just ridiculous. By Paul Graham's own arguments, they wouldn't all be able to fit.
I'm not sure if I want to see any particular country progress as much as I want to see tech and the world at large progress. I also agree with the fact that when a lot of people skilled in one particular domain gather at one place, amazing things happen!! But would a small area 100% full of programmers be better or worse than something like SV? At what point does the innovative progress being produced by a city start to plateau? 25% full of high earning programmers, 50% full of high earning programmers, 75% full of high earning programmers?
The point that I'm trying to make is that, without a lot of empirical evidence, I think it would be a much better idea to try and create more such centers across the world. Thus, for those focusing strictly on tech progress (as opposed to American progress) it might be a better idea to let the US immigration laws be the way they are, while encouraging VCs to travel a bit more (even to other American cities, for starters) and helping the amazing culture travel to other cities. I can't understand why we focus on one particular country instead of combined innovation of the world!
The future doesn't lie in Silicon Valley being 100% full of programmers from across the world. It is just not big enough!! The future lies in a 1000 silicon valleys having a certain threshold of programmers. Just a thought.
HN has recently had multiple extensive threads about PG's immigration essay and the questions raised by it. In such cases, we demote follow-up posts as duplicates unless they contain significant new information.
Please note that this criterion depends neither on what the particular topic is, nor the opinions people express, nor who they agree or disagree with. It has to do with avoiding repetition.
The reason for this practice is that without it, the same vociferous discussions would recur on the front page every day, and that would fail to gratify intellectual curiosity.
People are interested in this topic and you are unilaterally killing discussion. It's not like the site is being taken over as it was with some of the NSA topics.
I don't think I said gravity? But by all means, find more substantive stories. Historical material is especially welcome here, and so are out-of-the-way pieces with no obvious relevance except that they're interesting.
Pushing down discussions because they don't make the frontpage varied enough still just doesn't seem right to me. I understand that space is limited and nobody ever checks beyond page 1 but still - making threads harder to find doesn't seem to serve the interests of anyone who might actually be interested in those discussions.
At stake here are the 2 functions that HN serves: 1. a front page for the HN readership, and 2. an electronic town-hall.
Consider that the town-hall service to the community is how HN got where it did today.
It's one thing to rein in repetitious bunkum, it's quite another for the Chair to say, "bah, I find this so boring" if you allow me caricaturizing license.
The only part of this that I really disagree with is the "At stake here". That suggests that there's some danger of destroying one of those things, as if we're unaware of or don't value it. But of course we do. There's no question of suppressing discussion or of thwarting the community from talking about something that it cares about. The issue is one of balance, and it's a purely pragmatic one. If someone can suggest a better way, we're all ears.
The "At stake here" borrows from judicial writing, where disinterested parties offer an analysis that would cut the gordion knot of obscuring details. It's short for, "This is really what the debate is about, isn't it?"
From your comment, I gather that HN moderators feel a bit high-strung over the faintest accusation of censorship.
At stake here, I suppose, is PG's reputation, which I'm generally indifferent about. An upstanding citizen of the tech community he is, nothing less, nothing more.
Philip Greenspun forgot to mention that if immigration restrictions persist, then potential immigrants who cannot enter the US due to immigration restrictions would make less than they would do in the US.
Is that discrimination against potential immigrants fair?
118 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 68.3 ms ] threadhttp://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-jobs...
I don't think the economics of that add up, though, long term. If there are a bunch of people willing to work, and an artificial barrier, that barrier will only work for so long before people route around it.
The collusion between the big tech companies to drive down salaries for top personnel strongly suggests that the market salary for these people is actually higher than what they're currently paid. They're grade-A talent in a hot field, the fact that their salaries are high doesn't mean they're above-market.
Paul Graham makes the following claim:
"if you talk to startups, you find practically every one over a certain size has gone through legal contortions to get programmers into the US, where they then paid them the same as they’d have paid an American. Why would they go to extra trouble to get programmers for the same price? The only explanation is that they’re telling the truth: there are just not enough great programmers to go around."
Phil Greenspun makes the common (common because, in my opinion, it's so sensible) argument that perhaps a "shortage" exists because the market rate is too low to draw people into the field - that if you raised the price to well above what it currently costs to get a programmer, you'd draw considerably more people into the field. Greenspun claims that Graham's argument is based on the flawed notion that "there is no way that if companies nationwide paid programmers more than the BLS’s median pay of $74,280 per year (source), additional Americans would be attracted to this field."
Part of the problem with Greenspun's retort is that PG claims to be talking only about an extreme elite, not the run of the mill programmers. However, the logic still stands in my opinion. Have you seen what elite people earn in other fields? I guess if you think that it's impossible to get someone who would otherwise have gone to med, law, or finance into programming by offering more money at a comparably elite level of talent, you'd agree that the supply of people is fixed and doesn't respond to market signals. That seems to be the basis of the disagreement.
No, it really isn't. Read my article and the linked economic research.
> if there was 10 fold increase in programmers
There has been a 10 fold increase in programmers since 50 years ago, but more than a 10 fold increase in the amount of programming work, so salaries have done just fine. Also, those programmers are already there, in other countries, so artificial barriers can only create so much salary disparity before companies will pursue other options. At that point, why were you bothering trying to keep them out in the first place?
Read the linked article: it is not a zero-sum game.
EDIT: And yes every average heart surgeon is capable of doing heart surgery otherwise they would not get a degree in the first place. There is no such thing as 10x heart surgeon.
So you see there is something like a 10X heart surgeon, he/she is called a specialist.
1. Take 10 times less time performing heart surgery.
2. Could perform successful surgery at 10 times less cost.
3. Invent new ways of doing work of 10 heart surgeons.
4. Survival rate of his/her patients would be 10 times that of other heart surgeons.
5. Could perform heart surgery so complicated that it would generally require 10 heart surgeons during the surgery.
Are you going to find such a heart surgeon ? If so, how many? would entire healthcare system be functional if all hospitals are adamant on just hiring 10x surgeon and at the same time advocating bringing more 1x heart surgeons into the market.
You want the procedures to be built around superstars?
If I were building a software company that I wanted to survive and thrive long term, I would definitely try to cater to BOTH the superstar and more average programmers. Both have their place.
I tried to explain this to a manager: instead of trying to find a developer with perfect skills, get a junior one and train him.
There is no shortage of developers, but there is definitely a shortage of senior developers with (quoting one of the emails i get weekly):
5+ years of experience in the following skill sets... Web-Based C# / ASP.NET 3.5 / 4.0 Development – Design / Development / Implementation MVC Design Pattern Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) Framework – Entity Framework WebServices / SOAP / XML WCF – Windows Communication Foundation SQL Server 2005 / 2008 – T-SQL / Database Design Frameworks
I've been arguing for 10 years that AMA needs to increase the supply of doctors in this country. I'm of the opinion we don't have a lot of doctors... if we had more, then in certain contexts healthcare would become a competitive field where the patient wins. That hasn't happened. And that's an area where we do definitely want change, because healthcare is a serious issue. Tech industry has not produced, in my opinion, anything extraordinarily remarkable that truly helps people in substantive ways. Indeed, the highlight of the industry is massive wealth by the VCs and founders by duping customers by way of exploiting their cognitive biases (or "advertising", if you would). If they were doing things in a clean way that actually benefited the customer without emptying his or her wallet, I would maybe be sympathetic to their cries for getting top talent. But after all of that colluding to suppress the wages of the very people they want more of? Wow, the balls that they have.
Possibly grant resident status to anyone (with lot of money of course... after all, it's only the exceptional we are talking about here) who wants to fund and run a VC company? Because there are lots of great programmers who simply can't get funding.
I wonder how PG would feel about that?
That already exists in various forms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-2_visa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EB-5_visa
I don't think PG would have any problems with that, because investing in startups is not a zero-sum game, which is one of the reasons why there are so many investors in the bay area. It's not like they seek out "investor free" territory, such as eastern Montana.
If you want the most amazing, ruthless, and efficient black market for drugs, you must have the largest possible number of drug dealers participating in the system, so the most talented and motivated drug dealers have the opportunity to be the best they can be.
The author of this post is missing some of Graham's core arguments, and it makes me want to go back and reread the original essay. Perhaps it is PG's fault for conflating concepts, as people seem to be raising valid points (startups should be able to hire great programmers if they would just pay more) while missing that the core thesis is undeniable: if there are more programmers participating, more greatness will emerge.
It is probably not even linear. If you track the history of martial arts proficiency, the ones that are in fashion seem to produce a higher overall average of ability, with the "greats" in that martial art always arising when many many people are participating in that art, and there is a rich ecosystem that supports learning and competition. i.e. Judo in the 1970s, or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in the early 2000s.
I see this anecdotally and in published research, where pockets of artists, writers, and musicians have created a wildly disproportionate amount of forward looking work when there are many of them in the same area creating all at once.
Even if startups paid more, it would not significantly increase the total number of great programmers. Google, Apple, and Facebook already DO pay "more" and I think these companies are in exactly the same boat as the startup in the essay - they would happily keep hiring as many great programmers as they can find.
If that is true, the number of jobs available to great programmers is not proved to be finite.
I love my country(both), but when did immigration become something to benefit the corporations?
Immigration, at the root, has always been about economic necessity in North America. Why would it be any different now ?
This happens to be very similar to the rough description that Wall Street is looking for in certain niches of programmers. I have not heard Wall Street loudly complaining about the impossibility of finding Haskell programmers who can code against FIX and also have PhDs in physics.
I rather strongly believe this is because Wall Street institutionally believes in market prices and, unlike Silicon Valley, is willing to tolerate the market telling them that the market clearing price for hiring this type of programmer times thirty is $200k base plus a $600k bonus as opposed to $120k base plus an equity grant with expected value in the $X0k range.
Or not even $120k. You'd be surprised at what some SV companies get away with. Take a look at angel list and you'll commonly see wages lower than $100k for experienced developers.
I'd say the only epidemic that exists in the US's technology field is a lack of adequate compensation, not a lack of talent.
http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2013/09/20/profs-immigr...
I find it remarkable that people make claims of shortages without sharing information about the skill set they need and the compensation they're offering. Well, I don't find it remarkable, in the sense that I don't find PR-speak especially surprising anymore. I guess I should say I find it galling.
Yes, people routinely under-estimate salaries of engineers in the bay area. And I certainly know people at Google and Apple who have comp packages in the neighborhood you mention. But I'm skeptical of calling that the "norm", and even if it is, it's only the norm for RSU-granting, established tech companies. Half the employment for engineers in the area is for smaller companies with ISO grants with Expected Value well below $300k and salaries 25% below your quote.
What's wonderful for engineers in the SFBA is that you have this choice. Take a front row seat at a startup and consistently make $110-130k, go to a huge tech giant like Google and make far more in a more narrowly defined role, or pick some place in the middle. Like Trulia, for example! We're always hiring Android and iOS engineers.
I've seen many studies of tech hiring/jobs across the country. I'm sure you can find any research you're looking for.
http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_41860.htm#15-0000 http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_35620.htm#15-0000
Edit: Also, counting the total headcount of ppl writing code in the area is not a measure of how many choices you have in the job market.
Still doesn't get you into more choice than NYC.
If you don't want to use head count (and I agree there is nuance), what do you want to use? Thus my citation needed request.
The vast majority of software developers work in IT departments writing line-of-business applications in Java, .Net, etc. Certainly NYC has a vast number of these jobs. But these roles are all very similar. You're working as a cost-center, in a supporting role, for people who ultimately don't care about software. This is true whether you're a developer for Pfizer or Jet Blue or NBC Universal or any of the other companies based in
I really find the hollywood analogy apt. Yes, you can certainly find work as an actor in NYC. But the epicenter of the industry is in Hollywood.
Anyway, happy new year!
also if engineers had fewer choices, wages would be lower, wouldn't they ?
That said, if you're an experienced engineer and you told me you wanted to make $200k next year, if you're in NYC I would say "go into finance" which is far more limited than the advice I would give in SFBA which is "go work for just about any publicly traded tech company, or slightly more risky go work for a tech company that seems to have an imminent IPO, or more risky still go work for a well-funded private marquee tech company (many of these companies would overlap with the 2nd group). In the end, it's a much bigger pond.
Look, I'm not saying NYC is void of these types of opportunities. I've got friends who work in the city for Tumblr and Spotify among others. I'm just saying, it's about density. You could take the skyline of SF and put it in a few blocks of lower manhattan. And you could take the tech population of NYC and put it in a "few blocks" of SF.
All that said, the relation to wages is more complicated than you suggest. Less variety doesn't speak to the balance between labor talent and demand.
All I am saying is, software development wages are too low, especially relative to the demands of the job - that's why there is a perceived shortage. Raise the wages and smart people from other fields will teach themselves to code and join the fray
Perhaps you can argue that startup equity grants should be higher. Would hiring issues be resolved if the average equity grant tripled? Would more talented people in the U.S. pursue Silicon Valley careers if they got 3% instead of 1% to be an early employee?
I can't prove it, but I'd conjecture it would only have a modest effect. The notion of "expected value" of equity is problematic. It's not like it's simply a 3X stronger offer. The bigger issue is whether the company will be worth anything at all.
[+] I'm agnostic on this. Pinterest just raised, what, $450 million dollars? That's presumably not intended to buy the world's biggest vat of chocolate pudding.
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/
(I could pull an answer to your question out of this -- hint, search the page for a dollar sign -- but if you're reading "out of curiosity" you should just get some coffee or something and read the whole glorious thing, because the number is useless without the context, and the context is very different from the USA.)
It used to be that it did in fact take millions of VC just to get startups off the ground (70s, 80s, 90s). We could go back there. Would it be better for the ecosystem? Would employees have a net gain, or would there be fewer early stage companies & jobs? I don't know, but these are the macroeconomic questions to consider.
If the cash cost of running experiments goes way up, that may very well mean going back to the old way of doing things, where you essentially had to jump straight to VC money just to get off the ground.
Maybe this would force VC companies to be more selective in who they fund, vs "fund 100 and hope for 1 to be the next google".
IMO, no. The difference between founder and employee #1 is still too large, even though the risk is not significantly higher.
Assume there are two founders, splitting 50/50, then there's a 10% employee option pool, so the founders have 45% each. Moving from 1 -> 3% is not enough incentive, but moving from 1->10% might be.
Welcome to running a business. You aren't guaranteed anything. If you can't survive, you die. Tough. That's life.
I know things get politically dirty on these kinds of submissions, but the conversation needs to happen -- pg can't just open the lid to say what he wants, and immediately close it. This is our bread and butter on the line, why shouldn't we be able to have this conversation without the submissions constantly getting killed.
It's also a drive-by from an anonymous throwaway account.
To be precise, this thread now has about 80 comments and about 70 upvotes. In the past, at least, HN's software has considered that a "flamewar". Perhaps it's too bad, in this case, since TFA is so much more cogent and reasonable than PG's original self-serving bullshit, but unless you credibly suggest that someone is either inflating comment numbers or deflating upvotes, it is exaggeration to say this has been "killed".
And consider the possibility that your comment is in the "not intellectually stimulating" category.
I don't think there's any question that if the only thing we do to increase the supply of great coders is to increase immigration quotas, then this basically just amounts to a pyramid scheme to further enrich the silicon valley elites at the expense of the public. But pg never says that this is the only thing we should do, he only says that it's one of the things we should do.
I don't necessarily agree with pg's realpolitik view of reality, but I also think a lot of the criticism of this piece is based on things that just aren't there.
Besides, he's fighting the strawman of training, where Greenspun talked about economic incentives.
I personally have no problems with increasing immigration via H1B, but the OP makes an interesting point about economic incentives that push people to occupations. There are a lot of very smart people who would make great programmers that are going into finance, medicine, law, etc, because of higher prestige and better pay. Increasing immigration will increase the number of programmers, but if it is increased to the point where it affects wages, then people who would be great programmers would likely go to other professions rather than having to compete against immigrants for a comparatively lower wage, so it might be self-defeating in the long run.
What's more is that deflating the cost of programmers makes it less sensible to make programming teams more efficient. If programmers were paid like doctors, you would start to see the tech equivalent of nurses, lab technicians, orderlies, and physicians' assistants.
In other words, if you were paying your best programmers $1M/yr, you would hire more personal assistants. And maybe there would be more demand for people who are (or can become) fluent in technology lingo, even if they can't write code themselves.
What do you think business analysts, testers, non-developer IT specialists, etc., are?
Maybe some of this is because they don't make TV shows about programming. But it could also be at least partially about seeing programmers as commodities and cost centers (I need 3 senior Java engineers!) instead of seeing them as effectively the core of your business.
So, I guess I have two suspicions about increasing programmer wages, at least for certain categories of problems:
1. It will incentivize laypeople to learn about how software development works, making technology business analyst seem less like mumbo jumbo and more like a good way to earn a living.
2. It will incentivize organizations to restructure their processes to maximize the productivity of their highest paid employees. This will create more opportunities for the peole described in point 1.
The plus side is that I get to do programming projects I find interesting(machine learning for me) in my spare time. While avoiding the tedious programming.
Best of both worlds.
What the hell is this author talking about? While the he's a pretty accomplished individual, he lost me with his shitty analogies based on false premises.
So if they are paying $120K-$150K/year, they start paying $240K-$300K/year. At that salary, programmers are getting paid on par with lawyers, doctors, and bankers.
To pay this much, assume every startup needs to raise double or triple the amount of capital. The $1 million angel round becomes a $3 million VC round. For the VCs, the $100 million doesn't cut it and they start wanting the $300 million or $1 billion exits to justify the volume of seeds to exits.
The net effect is that the entire sector will need to de-leverage the risks they are currently taking. Entire business models that are currently considered fundable become completely impractical. VCs no longer spread the risk among many startups and start to rely on fewer, safer bets.
Maybe in general, the whole sector would feel a little healthier instead of this constant up and down every few years. But in the short term, it would result in a lot of pain for the major players in SF and Silicon Valley today.
Oh wait, no I'm not. You see, it won't change a thing. In the current low-interest-rate environment there is nowhere else for the money to go. VCs and startups could pay engineers fairly (i.e. at the price at which the market clears) without breaking a sweat. They just don't, out of naked greed. Except now they're running out of people naive enough to exploit, hence wanting to bring in more people, people who are indentured by their visa status.
Capital is sitting around instead of being applied properly to this critical issue, and then the people responsible for allocating the capital want to place the blame elsewhere.
Also that idle hands are the devil's workshop.
There's a fiduciary duty to channel disruption where it is due, while at the same time stabilizing the polity elsewhere.
Our fellow participant in this discussion davidw makes the good point that immigration in general is good for countries in general. So my basic policy predisposition is for the United States to have very open borders to immigration, and to impose few requirements on immigration. (All of my ancestors came to North America under rules like that, after all.) My wife was readily able to immigrate to the United States under the "immediate relative" category of immigrants after we had been married for more than a year overseas. My oldest son has sometimes considered moving away from the United States to settle in another country (he has looked specifically at some other countries), and what he has found is that his programming skills help open doors to permanent residence and settling in other countries to immigrate, but especially so for people with college degrees rather than on-the-job training in programming.
It is still the case today that the United States is by far the most desired country to settle in for immigrants from all around the world.[1] And a lot of people achieve that desire. I know first-generation immigrants from India, China, Russia, Korea, Vietnam, Ghana, Haiti, Australia, Pakistan, Turkey, the Philippines, Romania, Poland, Somalia, Argentina, Ecuador, Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, and a variety of other countries here in Minnesota, where the climate is anything but inviting. My inclination is to welcome even more immigrants than the United States welcomes now (for one thing, that improves the variety of local ethnic restaurants and grocery stores) but the United States already receives more net immigrants from all the rest of the world than any other country on earth, so I can understand why my fellow voters might not think that the United States has a shortage of immigrants. To make a strong policy case for immigration reform takes a more nuanced and tightly reasoned factual argument than Paul Graham made in his recent essay.
[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/161435/100-million-worldwide-drea...
In terms of absolute numbers, yes. In terms of percentages, no:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migrat...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign-bo...
> To make a strong policy case for immigration reform takes a more nuanced and tightly reasoned factual argument than Paul Graham made in his recent essay.
I agree with that. To that end, if you have any comments on my own article, please feel free to email them to me. All the muddle-headed thinking I read about immigration the last time around prompted me to write it as a place to collect my own arguments.
Yes, there are certainly plenty of those (and there are some arguments in favor of that, too: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120179/how-reduce-global-... )
But there are also others, like Sweden, Canada, Norway, Australia and Spain (and even Italy) that are broadly similar to the US - and in most cases offer much more in terms of government benefits.
You're restricting your hiring pool to people who are willing to live in a small, overpriced, and absurdly overrated city.
It's a wonderful place, don't get me wrong. But expecting every single great programmer in the world to live in that one tiny city is just ridiculous. By Paul Graham's own arguments, they wouldn't all be able to fit.
The point that I'm trying to make is that, without a lot of empirical evidence, I think it would be a much better idea to try and create more such centers across the world. Thus, for those focusing strictly on tech progress (as opposed to American progress) it might be a better idea to let the US immigration laws be the way they are, while encouraging VCs to travel a bit more (even to other American cities, for starters) and helping the amazing culture travel to other cities. I can't understand why we focus on one particular country instead of combined innovation of the world!
The future doesn't lie in Silicon Valley being 100% full of programmers from across the world. It is just not big enough!! The future lies in a 1000 silicon valleys having a certain threshold of programmers. Just a thought.
Please note that this criterion depends neither on what the particular topic is, nor the opinions people express, nor who they agree or disagree with. It has to do with avoiding repetition.
The reason for this practice is that without it, the same vociferous discussions would recur on the front page every day, and that would fail to gratify intellectual curiosity.
People are interested in this topic and you are unilaterally killing discussion. It's not like the site is being taken over as it was with some of the NSA topics.
Pushing down discussions because they don't make the frontpage varied enough still just doesn't seem right to me. I understand that space is limited and nobody ever checks beyond page 1 but still - making threads harder to find doesn't seem to serve the interests of anyone who might actually be interested in those discussions.
So it's only worth one day of discussion?
At stake here are the 2 functions that HN serves: 1. a front page for the HN readership, and 2. an electronic town-hall.
Consider that the town-hall service to the community is how HN got where it did today.
It's one thing to rein in repetitious bunkum, it's quite another for the Chair to say, "bah, I find this so boring" if you allow me caricaturizing license.
From your comment, I gather that HN moderators feel a bit high-strung over the faintest accusation of censorship.
At stake here, I suppose, is PG's reputation, which I'm generally indifferent about. An upstanding citizen of the tech community he is, nothing less, nothing more.
Is that discrimination against potential immigrants fair?