Paul Graham pushes the government: 95% of the world's excellent programmers are out of work, let them in

“The beasts stood near the door. They were shot, they died. ”
- Strugatsky

Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

Translation: Katya Shershneva
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US technology companies want the government to simplify the immigration process because they cannot find enough programmers in the United States. Opponents of immigration, they say that instead of allowing foreigners to take up jobs, more Americans should be taught programming. Who is right?

Technology companies are right. Opponents of immigration do not understand that there is a big difference in abilities between competent programmers and exceptional ones, and you can train people to become competent, but you cannot make them exceptional. Exceptional programmers have a propensity and interest in programming, it is not just the result of learning. [one]

In the US, less than 5% of the world's population lives. It turns out that if those qualities that make a person a great programmer are evenly distributed, then 95% of these great programmers are born outside the United States.

Opponents of immigration need to come up with some explanation for why technology companies are making such efforts to make immigration easier. Therefore, they argue that they do it in order to reduce wages. But if we talk about startups, you will find that almost every one of them, larger than a certain size, went through legal delays to bring programmers to the United States, where they would pay them as much as they would to Americans. Why do they go to extra trouble, getting programmers for the same price? The only explanation is that they are telling the truth: there are simply not enough good programmers around. [2]

I asked the head of one startup, in the staff of which about 70 programmers, how much more he would hire if he could get all the good programmers he wanted. He said: "We would take another 30 tomorrow morning." And this is one of the hot startups that always wins the recruiting race. The same thing throughout Silicon Valley. So startups are deprived of talents.

It would be great if more Americans studied programming, but no amount of training can cope with such an insurmountable gap as 95 to 5. Especially considering the fact that in other countries programmers are also taught. If we exclude any cataclysm, it will always be true that the majority of prominent programmers are born outside the US. It will always be true that the majority of outstanding in any way people are born outside the USA. [3]

Exceptional performance involves immigration. A country that makes up only a few percent of the world's population will be exceptional in any area only if it has many immigrants working in it.

But in this whole discussion, it’s taken for granted that if we let more good programmers in the US go, they will want to move. Now it is so, and we do not realize how lucky we are with it. If we want to preserve such a disposition, it would be best to use this advantage: the more outstanding programmers from around the world are here, the more the rest will want to come here.

And if we do not, then the United States can seriously screw up. I understand that this is a strong statement, but people who argue about this do not seem to realize what powerful forces are operating here. Technologies give the best programmers tremendous leverage. Apparently, the global market for programmers is becoming much more volatile. And since good people like good colleagues, this means that the best programmers can concentrate in just a few centers. Perhaps mainly in one center.

What if most prominent programmers gather in one center, and he will not be here? Such a scenario may seem unlikely now, but not if the situation changes in the next 50 years in the same way as in the previous 50.

We can guarantee that the United States will keep the technological superpower, just blowing a few thousand good programmers a year. What a great failure it would be to let such an opportunity slip away. This can easily become the very mistake for which later the current generation of American politicians will be famous. And unlike other potential errors of this magnitude, this one doesn’t cost anything to fix.

So please, let's get this over with.

Notes

[1] How outstanding is the programmer better than usual? So much so that you can't even directly measure the difference. A great programmer doesn't just do the same work faster. A great programmer invents things that the usual would not even think about. This does not mean that an outstanding programmer is infinitely more valuable, because everything has a finite market value. But it is easy to imagine a situation where an outstanding programmer invents a product worth 100 or even 1000 times his average salary.

[2] There are some consulting firms that hire out large groups of foreign programmers, whom they invite on H1-B visas. In all ways this must be fought. It should be easy to make legislation that distinguishes them, as they are very different from technology companies. But from opponents of immigration, it is not fair to say that companies like Google and Facebook are driven by the same motives. The influx of inexpensive but mediocre programmers is the last thing they want; it will just destroy them.

[3] Although this essay is about programmers, the group of people we need to bring is wider, from designers to electrical engineers. The best term for them would be “digital talents”. However, it was better to make the parameter too narrow than to confuse everyone with neologism.

PS

Publishing support is Edison , which is developing an automatic firmware assembly system for network equipment , as well as translating software into Russian for a transnational industrial corporation .

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