PG chose to appy the phrase "anti-immigrant" to the people he disagrees with.
Keep in mind, there are people who support high levels of immigration (the US currently takes 1.2+ million immigrants a year), support a path to legalization for people already living here illegally, even support general skilled immigration. They simply don't see evidence for a specific shortage of high tech workers, and, as a result, oppose tinkering with the immigration system in a way designed to specifically increase the percentage of programmers who are immigrants. In my opinion, it's pretty appalling to call people like this "anti-immigrant". They should bristle at the accusation.
Also - the principle of charity is important, but you've got to admit that calling someone "anti-immigrant" is a serious accusation, kind of a smear.
After re-reading the original post, I am obliged to point out that PG does not use the phrase "anti-immigrant" as I claimed, he uses the phrase "anti-immigration people." This was my mistake, and I apologize for the error. Calling someone "anti-immigrant" (directed at a person) is more serious than calling them "anti-immigration" (directed at a policy).
This doesn't change the core of my argument - I still feel the label "anti-immigration people" is an unfair one and harms the level of discourse. But I do want to be clear about this again - PG did not use the phrase "anti-immigrant".
American technology companies want the government to make immigration easier because they say they can't find enough programmers in the US. Anti-immigration people say that instead of letting foreigners take these jobs, we should train more Americans to be programmers. Who's right?
It sounds to me that the word anti-immigration is simply a word he chose to literally mean "people who disagree with the aforementioned party that we should make immigration easier." It means much the same thing throughout the essay. What word would you suggest instead?
First off, I don't think that I am obliged to come up with a good term as a condition for objecting to a bad term. In other words, I don't think I need to make a good suggestion as a condition for saying that "anti-immigration people" is a very poor choice of phrase.
I also think that your definition of the word anti-immigration isn't reasonable. There are so many ways to be in favor of immigration that don't involve specifically targeting programmers. I don't really agree that technology companies want to make immigration "easier" in some global sense. They want to be able to hire programmers from overseas (I tend to agree with PG that the "good" employers would be just as happy to hire free residents who can change jobs, though the "bad" employers clearly prefer the indentured nature of the visa and the control it gives them over the would-be immigrant). Regardless, tech companies don't necessarily want to make immigration easier for the millions of people living in the US illegally, or for people from traditionally underrepresented regions who have trouble getting a foothold because our system is based on family reunification.
This particular objection is an important one, because the very narrow definition of this phrase carries a whiff of the argument by ambiguity. You defend the term "anti-immigration people" one way (people who see no reason to specifically tinker with the immigration system to increase the percentage of immigrants who are programmers), but then you get to call them "anti-immigration people" knowing full well that you have brought a much broader (and unwarranted) accusation against them.
Why do you need a term or a label? Why not just explain the point of view that you disagree with (making a sincere effort to represent the argument at its strongest), and explain your disagreement?
The crux of PG's essay was this (taking from what is a sort of his thesis statement):
> American technology companies want the government to make immigration easier because they say they can't find enough programmers in the US... The technology companies are right.
He mentions things like how difficult it is to train programmers, and uses the word "great" in describing said programmers, but overall everything is backing up the blanket statement that "we need to allow more programmers to immigrate" without providing a discussion as to how that should be done.
As such, what you call "genetic tangents" are directly addressing the main point of the essay. H1Bs are the main method through which immigration occurs currently, and one would be remiss to have a macro discussion about immigration without mentioning the H1Bs.
I assume that there has been some sort of discussion or knowledge about PG's stance on the tech immigration, and perhaps even related to this thread, but I would argue that the fault of the imprecise nature of the discussion of this essay lies primarily with the essay itself.
"The US has less than 5% of the world's population. Which means if the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly distributed, 95% of great programmers are born outside the US."
A huge portion of the world can't even feed itself let alone educate itself to the high standard of an "exceptional programmer" [1]. If we're in the business of making flimsy assumptions then here's mine: I suspect that the US produces the same amount of "exceptional programmers" as the rest of the world combined.
"But if you talk to startups, you find practically every one over a certain size has gone through legal contortions to get programmers into the the US, where they then paid them the same as they'd have paid an American." and "I asked the CEO of a startup with about 70 programmers how many more he'd hire if he could get all the great programmers he wanted. He said "We'd hire 30 tomorrow morning." And this is one of the hot startups that always win recruiting battles. It's the same all over Silicon Valley. Startups are that constrained for talent."
If you can't hire someone at your expected price then maybe you should raise it. Maybe the market price has gone higher than what you perceive it to be. That CEO could find his 30 "10x" engineers in a heartbeat if he offered 300-500k. Its not your god given right to be able to hire x number of employees for the price you hired your previous employees at.
[1] http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats
In addition if you're going to claim an entire thread is of poor quality, back it up. And while you're looking for examples of poor quality, be sure to use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
My interest in this thread is not about immigration. It's about how far too many Hacker News comments are uncharitable (in this specialized sense) and how that seems to go along with ill-spiritedness. It's time we all stepped up our game.
Given PG used that number in the article's title, and even in its URL, it does seem like it's worth debating. If the number was actually 50% as the parent suggests, then suddenly you have a very different argument.
Obviously anything is unobjectionable if you agree beforehand to disregard any interpretation you could possibly find objectionable.
It's a zero-sum game. If company X hires all 30 of the best engineers currently looking for a job, company Y cannot. Company Y can offer more in an attempt to lure them, but then Company X will be SOL.
We're talking about macro issues here. We want as many companies as possible to succeed.
So what? Why is that a problem that needs to be solved?
There is a positive (but not r=1) correlation to providing value to the economy and offering higher pay to employees. We (that is to say, software pros) don't want all companies to get as many software workers as they might want, because they wouldn't pay any one of us a decent middle-class wage.
I just explained this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8805475
> We're talking about macro issues here. We want as many companies as possible to succeed.
This is a "society exists for the economy" answer to the question. The whole point of the economy is to decide division of resources. If that means you don't get any as a CEO, well then you should just get the same treatment as a person entering your store without money.
Congress is not talking about increasing elite programmer visas (those visas exist, require extraordinary support for the visa, ie. extraordinary pay or extraordinary credentials, so these people are not a problem IF you're willing to pay). They're talking about letting the Indian "consulting"(what they call it)/slavery(what every sane person calls it) do double or triple the amount of work they do now. WIPRO will be the main beneficiary of this.
I find it kind of hard to believe that companies actually complain about this. But from a perspective of "more money for me (NOW), not for you" it makes sense.
From a perspective of maximizing our countries opportunities I would argue it does not (by itself) make sense.
The problem with this debate is neither side has the intellectual courage to state their side properly.
The protectionists latch on to the "indentured servitude" issue even though employers would want H-1Bs whether or not they could hold being fired and having to return home over the employees head (and I personally have never seen this happen, I assume it only occurs with the lower tier workers hired by contracting companies, if at all). Protectionists pretend that this is the mechanism through which H-1B's lower wages, even though the real effect is via increasing the supply.
Similarly people like pg say that the issue isn't wages, even though, as I mentioned, the issue can always be expressed in the supply curve of labor, and equilibrium wages.
It turns out that high-wage employees (e.g. software developers) actually benefit from high immigration because of the resulting increase in capital inflows.
> ...it's easy to imagine cases where a great programmer might invent things worth 100x or even 1000x an average programmer's salary.
Moreover, there is evidence that even IT workers in identical, commoditized roles are sufficiently more productive in the US than than in India so as to justify an extra $75k per capita in client billings for they US-based workers [2]. PG's essay is not sufficiently described by a rudimentary labor supply curve as you claim.
[1] http://www2.hawaii.edu/~noy/362texts/immigration.pdf p.156, particularly footnote 8
[2] https://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2013conference/program/retrieve.p...
With all due respect to pg, one data point against the idea that it's just the standards being too lax is that this article was posted on Hacker News in the first place. The Hacker News guidelines state that most stories about politics are off-topic unless they are evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. I've never read tech news sites where the H1-B debate wasn't going on (I've been reading since 2001 or so), and based on the mountains of H1-B rhetoric I've read online, the arguments raised in the article are not new.
Self-policing, in comparison, will always lead to eternal september above some threshold of user churn. That said, HN has weathered growth reasonably well. If nothing else, the median level of discourse on HN has not gotten much worse than it was years ago. But the mean level of discourse has probably gone down. Just my impressions, I have nothing to back this up of course.
If pg wants to grow his business, he can wait for the west coast democrats and republicans to scale up his town or he can make yco a global brand you may find in Idaho or Nigeria.
With higher quality content you will see higher quality discussion. I do hope the lack of charity has shown Paul that his thinking, as demonstrated by his writing, on this topic is muddled.
Your use of the word "charitable" is different from what the principle of charity is about. I'm concerned with the latter. One good thing is that the principle applies regardless of whether or not somebody else is following it, so the excuse of but-the-other-person-started-it (even if they did start it) doesn't wash.
When people don't care to understand each other and try instead to cast the other's statements in the worst light, discussion becomes mediocre and foul. HN has a problem with this, and the principle of charity may be a tonic for it.
This isn't that hard. Let companies bid for H1-B slots. The more they are willing to pay, the better the programmer.
Additionally, many people are questioning the motives of PG. I think that's fine and people are free to respond or downvote. It's no different than people questioning the motives of Larry Ellison after an Oracle announcement. This is healthy.
The Principle of Charity is great, but limiting discussion to the subset of topics of an article severely hampers critical analysis. And I'm concerned that would be the effect of what you're advocating.
The reason we're thinking it may be appropriate for HN, by the way, isn't moral, but intellectual: uncharitable interpretations of others' arguments is all too easy and makes discussion tedious and uncivil.
Let's look at what this post really states:
> The US has less than 5% of the world's population. Which means if the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly distributed, 95% of great programmers are born outside the US.
This is a huge if. Frankly, it is very difficult to make a strong, compelling policy argument on the back of a flimsy, lazy assumption. Yet it is crucial to Graham's position and used to support statements that aim to preemptively rebut arguments critics make ("It would be great if more Americans were trained as programmers, but no amount of training can flip a ratio as overwhelming as 95 to 5").
It is not Graham's responsibility to prove that the backbone of his argument - the 95 to 5 ratio - is reasonably accurate?
> The anti-immigration people have to invent some explanation to account for all the effort technology companies have expended trying to make immigration easier.
The reference to "anti-immigration people" is not only insulting, this statement pretends that those who are not swayed by the arguments of the tech lobby must be "anti-immigration." To the contrary, one can favor immigration reforms that would make it easier for individuals to come to the United States without naively accepting the validity of all arguments tech companies make in support of immigration reforms.
Is it not Graham's responsibility to explain in a compelling fashion why the tech companies Graham says are "right" are indeed right instead of brushing off anybody who doesn't agree as "anti-immigration"?
> We have the potential to ensure that the US remains a technology superpower just by letting in a few thousand great programmers a year.
Even if one is charitable to Graham and is willing to assume that a) the United States is at risk of losing its status as a technology superpower and b) Graham's figure is plausible, he offers no substantive suggestions for how we identify those "few thousand great programmers" and attract them to the United States. In fact, as someone else here pointed out[1], Graham has previously discussed just how difficult it is to recognize the exceptionally talented.
Is it not Graham's responsibility to provide reasonable detail as to how the United States could actually accomplish what he proposes?
It's fair to state that comments here are not always charitable to post authors, but it's also fair to state that many of the authors simply don't make compelling arguments. If authors are disappointed with the criticism they receive, it's just as much their responsibility to make more compelling arguments as it is for critics to give them the benefit of the doubt at every twist and turn.
The charitable reading about the "qualities that make someone a great programmer" is the raw human potential/talent - obviously it is currently not the case that 95% of great programmers are not from the US, due to various factors. But his point is that, since humans everywhere likely have the same potential ranges, the ratio of US to Non-US programmers is going to trend toward the population ratio as remaining countries are brought up to speed, and we should prepare for that. Wouldn't you agree?
> Is it not Graham's responsibility to provide reasonable detail as to how the United States could actually accomplish what he proposes?
Really, no. He's allowed to talk about this without being irresponsible even if he doesn't outline the implementation of the solution.
It starts right out painting people who disagree with its thesis as "anti-immigration".
So no one should be surprised about the quality of conversation that results from that.
Assuming your premise is correct, it's easy to see where the principle of charity would have us go from there: by responding to the strongest interpretation of what that sentence might mean. Its substantive point is clearly something about how companies like Facebook and Google have different interests than H1B body shops do.
Thus, it is undeserving of charity and undeserving of HN. Do the moderator's duty and get it out of here.
When you're using terms which are very heavily politically and emotionally loaded to label people who disagree with you, you're going to get that sort of response back.
You can't be deliberately uncharitable to people and then say, "But you should be charitable when you respond!"
This just isn't a substantive post. It's full of loaded language, highly questionable assertions, and doubtful anecdotes.
(2) If a phrase that you suggest is used, would this allow you to focus on the substance of the argument?
This doesn't even touch on the incredibly un-"charitable" opening to PG's essay, on which he explicitly casts opponents or those who might disagree with him as being anti-immigrant. There is no way to "charitably" interpret that sentiment in a positive way. It is purely negative and entirely unworthy of a person claiming to be interested in honest intellectual discussion.
I didn't particularly like the use of "anti-immigration people," but there is certainly a way to charitably interpret it. You would interpret it as just so - a phrase he's using to refer to people opposing loosened immigration policies, which unintentionally is a poor choice of words. Rather than uncharitably interpreting it as an an intentional attempt at putting down these people.
What is that empirical data? I'm curious, not being snide.
Some raw data http://www.epi.org/publication/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill...
A good analysis of several data sets with links to raw data http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-i...
Nearly everything I've read indicates that immigration doesn't really hurt wages, except perhaps those of recent immigrants.
I pretty much stopped reading after:
> where they then paid them the same as they'd have paid an American
pg knows full well that the argument of those who feel immigrant programmers are used as cheap labor is that wages are currently either being artificially depressed, or there is no shortage, or both.
By ignoring that, and using this BS argument, it's quite obvious that he has no interest in an open, honest debate about the matter. This essay, which consist of little more than superficial political propaganda, is certainly not a good starting point for such a debate.
Similarly, PG pretends that many companies are willing to go to extreme efforts to hire Americans. But I know about a dozen quality programmers who are "stuck" in the Midwest, because companies aren't willing to make them job offers in major tech hubs, even though they're applying to dozens and dozens of companies in San Francisco / Portland / Seattle / etc.
It's pretty clear that while PG's particular startup might not fit this mold (and the people PG typically talks to probably have honest intentions), the vast majority of these companies simply want cheap labor, and are hiding under this mythical "100x programmer" rhetoric to justify it.
He wants the top programmers in the world to be able to come to the USA. But my suspicion is he has very little concern for your above average, but not great, USA born programmer whose wages are threatened by corporations that exploit and abuse the H1B Visa program.
And there isn't any precise way to pick the people who are going to start the next Google- except for the people who already run successful businesses and therefore have the money and influence to emigrate if they wanted to anyway.
So yes, it'd be cool to have all the Job Creators come to America so we could work in their companies, but I see no evidence that would happen.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/google-apple-abobe-a...
Or are you insinuating that all changes in salary are due to illegal collusion? Boy have I got news for you!
The principle of charity would ask you to suspend that suspicion in the absence of clear evidence for it (in which case it would be more than a suspicion).
So no, the onus is on all of us to contribute substantively even in response to something we consider unsubstantive. When we can't do that, posting nothing is a fine option.
The reason we're considering adding the Principle of Charity to the HN guidelines is that it gives practical guidance on how to comment substantively, which is what HN has always called for. I'm racking my brains trying to think of why anyone would object to having this rule, and so far haven't found a good reason.
You say, "the onus is on all of us to contribute substantively even in response to something we consider unsubstantive." How about the responsibility of the original poster? Is it acceptable to write that way? Can he be legitimately criticized for that? If you don't accept that, then you've created an unfair situation.
(regarding your refusal to criticize pg) "I think that would be a mistake" The real mistake is the way you try to shut down dissent by painting it as "uncharitable" or misguided/mistaken. Can you point out the many examples of "much of this thread is of low quality" ? I don't think you can make that case, because it seems that you disagree with the opinions more than anything else.
Some of the dissenting opinions are passionate. And there is nothing wrong with that. Just look at pg's original post, there is a lot of passion there. I would suggest that you be an adult and understand that there are controversial topics which will cause passionate discussion. It makes no sense to a accuse everyone of being wrong in their interpretation and to scold them as if they're children. Just read the comments and you'll see that a lot of people here have unique knowledge and understanding of the topic. Your point is incorrect, and adds nothing to this very important (and passionate) subject.
What do you want to see happen?
Another thing that would lower salaries is the movement of the jobs themselves. If companies can't get enough workers here, at affordable salaries, they'll just move to a country that likes immigration, like Canada. In fact, this has already started: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-05-22/vancouver-we...
Limiting the number of new graduates is exactly what doctors and engineers have done to keep their wages high.
Only a fool would destroy his own livelihood. VCs would never, ever support a policy that would threaten their oligopoly on the good deals, for example.
Don't be a sucker. No one is looking out for tech workers but ourselves.
P.S. If these companies can successfully relocate to Vancouver it totally torpedoes the VC-sponsored idea that San Francisco is somehow essential. Limiting all the jobs to one city is NOT good for tech workers. Silicon Valley is not a good place to make money because the cost of living is stupid. I would go so far to say that the Silicon Valley anti-density and anti-development culture and government make Silicon Valley a shit place to start a company, and companies should be moving.
I would rather work in Vancouver or San Diego or most any other urban center than get raped by rent-seeking landowners in SV.
The above is not true for exceptional talent (Linus Torvalds, John Carmack, etc). I will vote in heartbeat for visas for people with total comp >$300k. If you are truly that valuable, you should be paid more than average Sr. Software Engineer at Google.
Given that this point is clear in the essay itself and has been going the rounds outside of it, I find the portrayal of PG's point as if it were about a too-large H1B program or immigrants driving wages down to be a distraction.
Even pg can occasionally come off as an ignoramus, but don't let that convince you of the fallibility of your glorious leader.
When I see cases like this, I've been asking: would the Principle of Charity [1] have helped here? The answer is usually yes. In this case, the idea of pg lobbying to flood the market with cheap programming labor is not only demonstrably wrong from the article (which talks about a much smaller order of magnitude and endorses lowering H1B-style quotas), it fails a laugh test for anyone familiar with his arguments in general.
The essay may be wrong, impractical, or impolitic; if you want to criticize it, there are plenty of legit criticisms you could make, starting with: how are we to objectively evaluate who the great programmers are, when it has often been argued (including by a certain essayist) that this can't be measured?
But if you're going to dispute an article—any article—on Hacker News, you have a responsibility to engage with what it really says. The Principle of Charity is the best way I know of to formalize this requirement, and unless someone can make a case for any bad consequences of doing so, we're planning to add it officially to the HN Guidelines in the new year.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity and http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html