Immigration to increase the supply of programmers
blogs.law.harvard.edu
blogs.law.harvard.edu
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
http://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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is that discrimination against potential immigrants fair?
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.
Besides, he's fighting the strawman of training, where Greenspun talked about economic incentives.
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.