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Comment by _dps | Hacker News Reader

The telecommuting issue is separate from the "rest of the world" issue; the former is primarily a communication and culture problem, but the latter is all about concentration of talent around leading technical companies (primarily in the US).

There are indeed many people all over the world with programming knowledge; there are far fewer with experience on a technically sophisticated project. The latter class of talent is highly concentrated around the hotspots of sophisticated technical companies which, on average, keep their most important teams in the US.

If you are just reading and writing rows on a single instance of MySQL you can get all the talent you want from just about anywhere in the world. If you want to roll your own fault-tolerant distributed filesystem your options are (statistically) much more narrow, because anyone who can do that is likely to have been tempted by an offer to work at, e.g., Google in Mountain View.

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I don't know about that. I am located in Toronto, Canada and would be interested in a UX design/front end development telecommuting job that paid $120k+.

However, nobody really wants to hire somebody that they can't watch. In the past I have emailed several companies about job postings that list telecommute as an option, and in all but one of the cases they where not open to somebody more than 3 hours away from the office.

I don't really understand this position. I am in ET so the time zone can't be an issue. I am in an English speaking country so there won't be any language barriers. I think companies in the US need to realize that increasingly fever people will want to move there because it the US is become very scary.

The US is only scary for Canadians and Western Europeans perhaps.

I don't doubt what you're saying but I think that sounds in-line with my previous claim that the telecommuting problems are separate from the "rest of the world" problems.

If I understand you correctly, those companies don't want to hire telecommuters that can't come into the office from time to time. This seems unrelated to being in Canada; the same criterion would eliminate a Boston-based developer from working remotely for a Chicago-based startup.

Cut it with the crazy US exceptionalism. You might be surprised how many technically sophisticated projects are worked on outside the US. It's not as if the rest of the world still lives in the stone age.

I apologize if I gave that impression; it was not my intention.

I'm merely suggesting that the amount of money in the US for technical research and development is vastly larger than in any other country (as evidenced both by its research universities and its venture-backed economy). This is why, despite its failings in other ways, it still manages to pull talent from all over the world for graduate programs and employment.

To be clear: there are great institutions, companies, and people all over the world. I never meant to suggest otherwise. I was merely making a claim about the economics of R&D, and the resulting distribution of talent.

It is difficult to argue with the sums of money thrown around in the USA.

I remember your original post was kind of condescending to talented people from other parts of the world, implying that the rest of the world only shuffles around a single MySQL table and the only real talent can be found in SV.

And now you prove the point by saying the US is sophisticated because it imports the most talent of all countries.

(Also don't think all or even most talent ends up in the US; some of us simply don't like to move, or don't want to live in the US because they don't like the immigration procedures or political landscape. I've had several offers, but I'd at most telecommute for an US company)

In hindsight I can see how one could read it that way. It was poorly phrased. Sometimes it's hard to see your own text as others will see it :-)

It was certainly not my aim to slight the talent of people originating from anywhere else; I merely wanted to point out that over time the US actively sucks up external talent, and that since there is very little counterbalancing flow out of the US you end up with an unbalanced talent distribution. The quip about the single-instance MySQL was not at all to suggest that this is the only thing (or the typical thing) people outside the US do; it was that this kind of expertise is much less actively recruited into the US and so the distribution of talent is much more uniform across the world.

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