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Comment by MattGrommes | Hacker News Reader

"Stripe’s engineering department would be at least twice as large if we could get working papers for the programmers we are eager to hire."

It looks like Stripe has decided hiring foreign workers is the only solution to the problem instead of trying to find another solution. There are _plenty_ of good programmers who could work for Stripe in the US, maybe they just aren't attracted to the company, to living in SF, don't know about the company, etc. Maybe they should think about their hiring process more generally rather than waiting on hiring some particular group.

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"It looks like Stripe has decided hiring foreign workers is the only solution to the problem instead of trying to find another solution."

That makes no sense. Hiring people from outside the US is harder, slower, and more expensive than hiring US citizens.

We just care a lot about working with the best people, and we're willing to spend months obtaining visas for them in order to do that.

What do you mean by the "best" people? Are there not people in the USA that would work for you, who fit your qualifications? If they won't, why not? Think about it, stop trying to fool us with your red herring about wanting the "best". What you really want is the "best" at prices competitive with the "average" American. One might almost think you were getting them for cheap. Hmm

Given the quality of work that Stripe is known for, I strongly suspect that in their case "best" really means "the best they can find for what they are trying to do." Which is what you'd want it to mean.

If Stripe was known for producing lots of subtly substandard work, I'd have a very different impression of them.

"Hiring foreign workers for cheap" is a myth. The US Labor Department has specific laws that it strongly enforces to ensure foreign workers cannot be hired below market rates.

You know how they get around this, right? They simply change the title. I.e., they hire a senior engineer and slap them with a mid-level title. If you haven't seen that happen, you haven't been paying attention. There's also the more important and salient benefit of hiring H1-Bs--the strong bond it creates between the employee and their visa status. You'd have to pay a US citizen much more to make them sign such an onerous and one-sided contract.

Are there? I know a fair number of people who are unemployed right now, but none of them are programmers. Most of the places I've worked have been constantly looking for more competent programmers too.

Not sure why you are implying that only the unemployed can fill jobs.

There is plenty of tech talent in the San Francisco area (shocking! I know) and people are free to switch jobs. If Stripe offered competitive-enough compensation, they should be able to attract them.

But that would increase prices for programming work to the point where some projects simply would not make financial sense. So there would less projects and therefore less non-programming jobs associated with those projects.

No, it would bring supply and demand into equilibrium, and ensure that resources are utilized where they have the most economic value. Econ 101 tells us that in free markets, price is variable that moves to equate supply and demand, resulting in neither shortage nor surplus.

We're not short of people who want to work at Stripe, we're short of the bandwidth to identify the best ones.

And so we focus on those we know to be good. Some of them live outside the US; some grew up outside the US and now live here; some are US natural-born US citizens. We're performing a BFS of our personal networks. Sometimes, visas get in the way.

So your problem is not immigration, but rather talent-identification at your compensation level.

Increase your compensation level and the talent will find you.

Increasing compensation will increase how many people want to work for you. However it does not help you identify which of those people are any good. There is a lot of research demonstrating that interviews - even the best - are pretty bad filters. Ditto standardized tests.

What does work well? As a lot of organizations have found, personal referrals from people you trust. Which is what Stripe sounds like it is trying to do. Which returns us to the grandfather's point that they are identifying people that they want, and then are unable to hire them.

Wow. So we must change our immigration policies because of Stripe's chosen solution to their talent identification problem?

What other profession would that work for?

e.g., s/engineer/day-care-provider . I need to hire a good day care provider, and can't find one. But I know a good one in another country. Laws get in the way of my hiring them. Let's change the law!

I was arguing that someone else's argument was wrong. That is not the same as arguing a position on this immigration bill.

See https://plus.google.com/114613808538621741268/posts/bNrjdAWp... for my actual opinion on what I'd like to see happen. (It never will.)

I think I see your point. The second half of my original comment may have claimed more than it needed to.

I don't normally call people out on their bullshit, but you, sir, are incredibly ignorant. Stripe's problem is not "talent-identification at their compensation level." It's the general overhead that comes with trying to sort through all the applicants. Increasing compensation does not change that.

Seriously people need to understand that "hiring foreign workers" thing thrown around is simply a myth. I'm a foreign engineer working for a US-based software company, and I make more than my coworkers AND that is on top of what my H1B application and renewals cost the company in terms of lawyer's fees and HR costs. So why did my company hire me? Because at the time they couldn't find any Americans for the position.

"the general overhead that comes with trying to sort through all the applicants" is exactly the same problem I have in trying to find a quality day care provider! I know someone in another country that can do the job, but the law gets in the way!

Sorry if I just call you out on your bullshit.

No more how special you think you are, if you were a citizen you'd be making even more.

Yes, stripe can get more workers by stealing them from their competitors, but then their competitors will be short workers. We aren't considering these reforms for the benefit of stripe in particular but technology companies in general, and one company luring away employees from another isn't going to help that.

A general rise in wages would help somewhat with the number of new programmers being trained, but that only explains the number of people entering STEM versus non-STEM majors. But we'd be totally ok if everybody who enrolled in college in engineering graduated with a degree in engineering. A big problem is that engineering degrees suffer from high attrition, and I suspect that's because teaching undergraduates is a profit center for the English department but a cost center for the engineering department (it distracts grad students from bringing in research grants).

So you are saying that VCs are entitled to tech workers at a price that can make them a profit? Am I entitled to affordable housekeeping?

Well, generally I tend to think that liberty should be the default in most cases, and rather than asking whether or not something has enough justification to be allowed we should be asking if there is sufficient justification to prohibit it. So I'd tend to be all for only the minimum restrictions on immigration necessary to not be swamped, rather than just allowing STEM grad students in.

Still, Congress generally feels that the US's technology related industries are more important than other industries, and so are privileging it. I'm not going to complain about someone doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, so I'll just applaud and hope that they do even better next time.

Liberty sounds great. I can't wait to be liberated from my mortgage when I lose the earning power to pay for it.

Sounds like you are complaining about a personal problem.

No, I was making a point. Surely it got across, so I can only assume you're being obtuse. I just think massive changes to the makeup of our workforce should be done with more care and deliberateness. Not because of a VC panicking they can't get cheap labor.

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