Paul Graham is fighting for his side. I hope any developers here are smart enough to fight for theirs.
He's arguing that the same companies who colluded illegally to drive down the wages of the "best" programmers, now have no interest in lowering their wages when they're arguing for increased immigration. LOL.
Is "your" side US-born developers? I was born outside and was able to immigrate to the US on H1B. For the last few years it is very hard for my friends to do the same. I wish they were given the opportunity. In no way they are inferior to Americans. US became what it is because of openness to immigration. But these days it's easier for engineers to immigrate to Europe or Asia than the US. It may have long-term competitive consequences for the US companies as there is definitely a lot of programming talent outside the US. However if you view this as a zero-sum game with a "they came for our jobs" xenophobic vision, you of course would not care about that.
Why didn't you and your friends found companies in your home country? You do realize many h1b visa programmers, and the ones they want in the future, are just being taken advantage of to drive wages down?
What is wrong with immigrating to Europe / Asia? As an American, if I had many foreign associates that wanted to work for / with me, I would not hesitate to relocate with them to some country that lets us, that would the be US's loss.
But to open the proverbial floodgates is to let entrenched interests win and all the potential startups and growth elsewhere wither and die. It is not like you are going to be founding the next big thing while bound to employment at one of the big three to stay in the country.
> What is wrong with immigrating to Europe / Asia?
You may be right here. I used to think it's better to immigrate to the US, because that's where everyone was immigrating to. I thought I wouldn't find good people elsewhere. But your comment just made me realize I'm not so sure.
> and all the potential startups and growth elsewhere wither and die
All of them, really? Every single one? There's no middle-ground?
> It is not like you are going to be founding the next big thing while bound to employment at one of the big three to stay in the country.
This. How is this not the top comment? The story that it is about talent and not about wages is terribly convenient for an industry that has shown it is willing to flagrantly violate the law to drive down engineer wages.
Maybe it is about wages for companies that don't understand there's huge variance in productivity of programmers. But it is about talent and not wages for companies that do.
You do have a valid argument that when you increase supply prices drop. But they drop in proportion to the supply. It would be nice if one could estimate the total number of those great programmers, and then calculate what % of the total programmers they are. If they are 50% that would be a problem. But if they are 0.5% (1/100th that), is it still a problem?
It can only be about wages. That's supply and demand. If more people are fighting over fewer programmers, that means they just have to pay more to get them. If pay is not an issue, then you'll get them.
If some companies don't appreciate the variance in programmers, either they have no excellent ones (because they wouldn't be willing to pay the price premium for a trait they can't see), or, more likely, they are lots of undervalued programmers out there you can hire if you can find them and you're willing to pay them more.
I don't see what you're getting at about the number of great programmers.
It's not only about wages. It's also about total wealth generated, which is driven by growth. The issue is you hit a limit.
Any startup eventually hits the limits of the market it operates in. But the point is startups don't get the chance to hit those market limits. The limit they hit first is they can't get great programmers. Their growth is stiffled early on.
Here's an example. Assume a startup is working on only one project and doesn't have a great programmer. Result: they don't get to make some breakthrough that would have increased the wealth of the startup by 100x-1000x. Without generating that wealth, demand decreases. You are still looking for just one great programmer to work on the project and can't start other new projects before you finish the existing one.
But if you didn't limit that growth (if you had a great programmer) there would be increased demand, because then you'd have 100x-1000x more wealth and could start new projects hiring more great programmers. It comes down to growth.
So having great programmers increases demand, not decrease it. The more you have, the more you end up needing.
Until you hit a limit. Once all great programmers who are in the US are snatched up, at any price, then you reached a limit to the amount of wealth that can be generated in the US by great programmers.
It's not more wealth that would generate more projects. It's finishing a previous project that would generate more projects. You don't even get to finish the project without a great programmer so you don't get to start new projects. New projects can depend on older projects.
Generating that wealth serves as proof the project completed, which justifies moving on. It's not merely being handed that wealth by a VC that completes the project because then you didn't generate anything. All you did was transfer wealth between two parties. Having wealth isn't enough to generate new wealth in tech. You also need skill.
What having more wealth would do is help pay for more great programmers but it's neither the driving nor the limiting force. The limiting force is having great programmers. They are the ones who generate new wealth.
So what you said possibly supports the argument that it's not about wages. If there were unlimited great programmers, we might indeed hit a limit on VC wealth. We could be nowhere that limit because there aren't enough great programmers.
My comment above was confusing in that it makes someone think a limit in VC wealth is what makes it prohibitive to hire great programmers. That's not what I meant to say. I meant to say that if you are limited in having great programmers, then the total amount of wealth you can generate is also limited. The US, and any country, would be better off having more great programmers.
The limit you hit is in having great programmers. Lack of great programmers limits growth. Lack of growth limits wealth.
The rewards for being a great programmer already exceed the rewards for other options. Great programmers can clump together and start companies, and be rewarded more than they are offered by existing companies. This could destroy existing companies.
Are you trying to say great programmers don't do that because starting a company that succeeds is hard? And that existing companies try to take advantage of this (and possibly a first mover or other advantages) by not rewarding programmers?
It's not an unreasonable point to make, by the way, which is also an undervalued opportunity. Markets correct themselves. Maybe the only way to be rewarded for the value you generate as a great programmer in the future will require starting a company. I don't know enough to say.
- A related issue: you can't make someone be a great programmer just by rewarding them. Great programers tend to be intrinsically motivated. Which could be an additional opposing force that keeps them from starting companies.
- Another: pg claimed data that say there aren't enough great programmers; you claim there are: can you talk more about your data?
pg provided no data, he provided a sketchy anecdote and made an unsupported claim.
The idea of offering more rewards is that people who otherwise go into other fields (which are more rewarding, socially and financially), would then be attracted programming. A percentage of those people will be great programmers.
Grouping great programmers together gives them a tiny, tiny, tiny chance at large rewards. It's a gigantic risk. People aren't stupid. Most go to paths with less risk. The market has corrected itself. It attracts people in a manner appropriate to its risk/reward equation.
The way to reduce that risk is to provide more guaranteed rewards. Which means more compensation. Which means transferring more of that unused capital sitting around in VC accounts to the great programmers. Which means the limiting factor is the capital put into the system.
Absent some big payday from a startup, which is a roll of the dice not in their favor, programmer compensation is low relative to other, much less risky career paths. If the field truly wants to attract the best and brightest, it's got to offer a lot more rewards.
How much of a reward are "great programmers" 71-100 that company needed in pg's example going to get, anyway? How huge a success does the company have to be for someone that far down the line to come out way ahead? You have to offer those taking such a position a lot of up front compensation, or you won't get them.
As far as "great programmers" being intrinsically motivated, that's only true of people who are currently in the field, as the extrinsic motivation isn't really there, is it? So how do we know extrinsic doesn't work? We're not trying it.
It's ludicrous to think we have all the great programmers we could have. There are any number of people who are capable. Any number of highly intelligent, incredibly driven people who could fit the bill. They just go into other fields with better odds of superior rewards.
Want more great programmers, offer better rewards. They will come.
I'm trying to understand what you are saying. I also see holes in some arguments.
1) I agree there's gigantic risk.
If I understood you correctly, you are saying great programmers should have less of the downside of risk with more of its upside.
2) Are you saying great programmers apply to this hot startup in pg's example, pass the interviews, and then refuse the job offer because the compensation offered is too low? If that's what going on, then pg provided something worse than a sketchy anecdote: he lied. He omitted the startup is low-balling candidates it wants to hire. Is this what you are saying?
Or are you saying there are people with the potential of being great programmers who went into other fields because the average compensation of competent (but not great) programmers is low (which may very well be true), and this is the main reason we don't find them?
Also a small correction in "There are any number of people who are capable." It's great programmers we are looking for, not merely capable.
Another in "highly intelligent, incredibly driven people". It's not enough to be highly intelligent and incredibly driven to become a great programmer. You may have aptitude for, but not interest in programming.
3) Is it possible for a great programmer to go into another field? Because if it isn't, maybe the opposite is also true. That you can't take someone from another field and turn them into a great programmer. It's probably as hard for a great programmer to become a great sales person as it is for a great sales person to become a great programmer for example.
4) On the effectiveness of extrinsic motivation of great programmers, we already know extrinsic motivation doesn't work in general. It shouldn't be hard to find research on this. A quick search points to the following. Please correct me if this impression of mine isn't true. I want to find the truth:
1. I believe the type of person who is capable of being a great programmer has a very large number of career options open to them, most of which don't involve becoming a great programmer.
2. Thus, I believe there is a set of people who could be great programmers who are not actually are great programmers. I believe this set to be fairly large compared to the existing set of great programmers.
3. I believe that a good sized percentage of that set of people could be motivated to become great programmers if the rewards were increased substantially. I believe they have chosen other paths which they believe will be more rewarding. If you want to change the number of great programmers, you need to change that calculation.
My position is fairly straight forward. You can agree or disagree as you wish.
> I hope any developers here are smart enough to fight for theirs.
I'm confused. I'm a developer, originally from the US, who lives in Europe. Is an Indian guy who works as a developer on my side? How about a German woman? Is a guy in Alabama willing to work for cheap on my side? Is someone like PG, whose actions have created a shitload (that's the metric shitload, not the American version) of companies completely on the wrong side? Don't some of those companies create jobs? Coming back to whose side I should be on, should I be on the side of Europeans wanting to move to the US, since I have a bunch of friends here, and they seem like pretty good people who are bright, and hard workers? Or are they on the other side? Or am I, an American taking European jobs, on the wrong side?
Labor can be seen as a scarce resource. If a US developer want to maximize profit he needs to be as scarce as possible.
PG and startup employers are in the reverse situation: they need to commoditize labor as much as possible to maximize their profit (labor can be 80% of the fixed expenses in a IT business).
A developer residing outside US needs to support PG at first so he has access to bigger profit, but once he's in US, he's in the same position as the US developer (he needs to become scarce).
> From the essay: But it is dishonest of the anti-immigration people to claim that companies like Google and Facebook are driven by the same motives. An influx of inexpensive but mediocre programmers is the last thing they'd want; it would destroy them.
Eric Schmidt not only illegally colluded in a conspiracy to drive down programmer salaries, his e-mails say things like "this may be illegal so delete this e-mail".
I guess I'm one of those "dishonest" wealth-creating worker bees who read these subpoenaed e-mails where I spin the "dishonest" narrative that I actually believe what Eric Schmidt said about his attempts to secretly and illegally drive down his programmer's salaries.
Trying to keep the wages low of people you know are good is a different issue than trying to hire people from other countries.
Now, BigCos may still want good people they bring from the outside to have low wages, but that doesn't change the fact that they still want to (and can't) bring in good people from the outside.
The problem with this argument is that Facebook very clearly refused to join the wage fixing scheme, and in fact it was Facebook that was responsible for the collapse of the scheme (by aggressively bidding up wages and poaching Google employees). And Facebook is in favor of looser immigration.
And you can't claim that Facebook now wants to bid down wages - your assertions rely on using a company's past actions as evidence for their future choices.
He's arguing that the same companies who colluded illegally to drive down the wages of the "best" programmers, now have no interest in lowering their wages when they're arguing for increased immigration. LOL.