Did you read the essay? You seem to be totally ignoring the point that excellent programmers will be paid well because they are scarce compared to "decent" programmers. The goal is not to import cut-rate talent at cut-rate prices.
Well, will great programmers line up at the "great programmers" H1B line? Probably not. Will the government screen applicants in order to increase the concentration of "great programmers"? Hah. There are no means available to us to increase the concentration of great programmers in a pool of programmers without great cost, and this inevitably means that in order to get more great programmers, one has to go through more programmers.
Why can't programmers work as contractors from their location before filing for their H1B's? Yes, hiring process has to change. The companies those who have distributed teams have figured this out already.
The problem is that it's extremely difficult to identify whether someone will excel at a job just through an interview. Even if someone really impresses everyone during the interview phase, it's totally possible that once they get hired they'll hate whatever you have them do and just do a mediocre job at it.
Actually, studies have shown that IS the goal. It might not be Paul's goal, personally, but generally speaking it is the goal of immigration policy for tech workers - to make labor cheap.
Yeah, I concur. Basically the gradient in the price of labour between countries is driven up to a point by immigration policies. In the general sense increasing the pool of candidates will lower wages.
I suppose what PG is after is creating a policy of allowing 'black swan standard' programmers of outstanding skill more in to the US using a different mechanism than the current H1B?
I'm pretty sure that already exists in the form of an O-1 visa. However I doubt the vast majority of programmers who get an H1B come close to meeting the standards for an O-1 visa.
So yeah, if you are a really great programmer and the rest of the world knows this, then any employer in the US can help you get an O-1 visa based off of that. If your programming prowess isn't well demonstrated, then yeah, you have to go through other channels.
No it isn't. For great programmers, the O-1 visa is basically a hack that we use to get in the US. It was not intended to be used that way for programmer (you can note that the criteria fits more for profile of a reasonable successful working in entertainment industry, athlete etc.)
You will need to be something like a top 1% programmers, working on things that are semi-public to qualify for the O-1, but any decent (top 25%? I'm pulling number out of my ass) fashion models can probably get in.
If the O-1 is already admitting the top 1%, then we're already closing in on solving the ostensible problem.
At least inside an order of magnitude (1/5) at a naive guess, but probably much closer, in fact, if we run with two assumptions this piece rests on:
(a) The small top portion of a given talent pool have exceptional intrinsic abilities that give them a power-relation advantages over the rest of the pool when it comes to productive enterprise.
(b) Taking a small highest portion of a very large talent pool is going to give you the largest source of power-law productive talent.
If (a) is true, one would assume the top 1% of external programmers is going to be as much better than the next 5% as the top 20% is than the next 80%.
If (b) is true and we're already looking at the worldwide market, the top 1% is already a huge boost to the pool, almost certainly bigger than the number of open jobs on the market (if 5% of the top 1% of the world's smartest are programmers, then that's a number bigger than the ~4 million unfilled positions of any kind in the US). The top 5% is redundant.
It's a bit more nuisance than that. As I mention, I was pulling numbers out of thin air. The main point I was trying to make is that criteria for O1 isn't applicable as a good measurement for hackers. We don't have any award for what we do, and the nature of the work is that there isn't much publicity most of the time (it's even the reverse, people who works on really haRd stuff have to be silence about them). And that's no fault of anyone, we barely know how to judge good and bad programmer ourselves.
Another point to be noted is that if you try to get the top 1%, you might get 1% of that pool (1% of 1%). As many people noted, not everyone want to come to the US. You might as well trying to get all of them
Agreed, the goal is to drive down prices of IT salaries. I find it disingenuous of PG to indicate otherwise since he sits on the side of the table that directly benefits from a cheaper IT labor market.
I have worked at numerous places where they have hired on H1Bs. One of those employers did so because they were looking for good talent no matter where they could find it and H1B holders were paid fairly. Every other employer was doing it because they could pay lower wages and force longer hours on H1B holders since they are in a sort of held-hostage situation. In one case developers were frequently working such long hours that they would just sleep at the office and only go home once or twice a week. This same place was paying their entry to mid developers in the 25K to 35K range and their most senior developers were making less than 50K.
If you are just worried about keeping your salary up, that will go down no matter what, as the talent pool all over the world increases and companies will offshore more work, that not only means less salary but fewer jobs.
Most of those who argue against pg's argument here are concerned about lower salaries, no one is concerned about fewer jobs (because companies will move work offshore), less innovation (new product development moving away).
Creating boundaries and not letting talent in, is just a big downward spiral and if it accelerates to a certain speed it will be too difficult to turn it around. May be not in short term but in couple to few decades.
