[MattCuery]

I don't get how hn can be behind this and question how this goes against America first when y'all always whine about "muh mentorship". Y'all know the value of mentorship and incubation and the cost involved in incubating talent. Talent needs to be developed and cultivated right? So why bring in 'founders' from abroad based on very speculative certia with investment levels below the amount to employ a few Americans to compete at least initially within the American domestic market? Why not throw those resources to create firms in America, even if in the spirit of sino-inspired copyism,to create not just work opportunities but founder opportunities for Americans?

[projectramo]

It sort of depends on your beliefs on the distribution and development of entrepreneurial talent.

Do you think anyone with the right capital and encouragement can be made into a great entrepreneur? Then what you say makes sense.

On the other hand if you think entrepreneurship is a rare feature that one in a million happen to develop, then you would want to find it wherever you can and bring it to your neighborhood so that when they hire thousands of people, and make them rich, it is your neighbors and friends who get hired and made rich.

Note that even if you believe that there is a lot of luck involved, you are closer to the second model.

[nostrademons]

Because most Americans want to be employees, not entrepreneurs, and bringing in entrepreneurs from abroad who already have capital & experience increases the pool of mentors available for people who wish to be employees of small, fast-growing businesses.

[cat199]

a) source?

b) this precludes developing an entrepreneurship culture as a related and desirable goal.

[nostrademons]

So I'm an entrepreneur, and a native-born American citizen, so I'm obviously not talking my book here. My source is simply what I've observed trying to recruit co-founders. Folks with actual tangible skills and a realistic outlook would generally rather collect a paycheck for their skills.

But I also don't consider lack of venture capital or mentorship to be an important barrier to my success. When I look at what I do daily, as a founder, there is very little that more money would help with. And their advice is generally pretty cookie-cutter; if you follow it blindly, you will look like every other company they fund, which will be the death of your company. The good ones recognize this, and what they look for in a founder is someone with an independent perspective who will do the legwork to verify their hunches with data, on their own, and don't trust anybody else's ideas of reality. The bad ones, you don't want to do business with.

The hardest core competency for any company to develop is innovation [1], which is literally "doing that which everyone considers to be a bad idea, with tiny variations that make it a good idea". Good entrepreneurs look for how you can change systems, because if you can't leverage some external change in the environment that other people haven't noticed yet, you're competing with everybody else who wants to start a company. If anybody else knew about those loopholes in the system that have opened up, then the opportunity would be gone - and that includes the VC. They'd just fund somebody else to take advantage of it.

[1] https://a16z.com/2010/04/28/why-we-prefer-founding-ceos/

[Alex3917]

> But I also don't consider lack of venture capital or mentorship to be an important barrier to my success.

And yet that's the main criteria for qualifying for this visa. You could literally found a company the size of Google and still not qualify unless you've taken venture capital.

And since most Fortune 500 companies don’t take VC, this seems like just a hand out to investors.

[terravion]

But most fortune 500 companies are older than modern VC, which really came into being as a response to post-war tax policies. Most Fortune 500 companies can trace their founding to similarly speculative capital under a different name.

[vonnik]

Not sure what your argument is here, Matt. Are you saying the US should try to keep foreign talent out and that tech companies and investors should direct their time and resources at Americans? If so, do you know how Silicon Valley works and why it has made the US the global center of tech? It did so by combining foreign capital and talent with US capital and talent. It's a global matchmaker for the best talent, which is evenly distributed across many countries. If we give into jingo-ism, we lose the tech race.

[notyourday]

> Are you saying the US should try to keep foreign talent out and that tech companies and investors should direct their time and resources at Americans?

Yes, because it is the law. The law is that companies must hire those authorized to work in the United States and only if the companies cannot do it can they bring someone into the country.

Of course in reality this is not what happens. If you have spent any time in management in tech companies you know what kind of wink and nod games are played. Hell, some of them are not even games - managers routinely bring in foreigners under all kinds of pretenses.

[vonnik]

That's a very narrow view, and it's not really the point.

America's national interest is tightly linked to whether or not it's able to attract tech talent from around the world. No law forbids US tech companies from doing that.

And in fact, there are a lot of incredibly talented people who are Americans, and we should be grateful if they want to come to the US and work. We should try to convince them to do so. Because we don't, they will found their Googles and their Facebooks somewhere else, and they will help non-US tech companies succeed.

You want resources? Be so good they can't ignore you.

[notyourday]

> America's national interest is tightly linked to whether or not it's able to attract tech talent from around the world. No law forbids US tech companies from doing that.

That's not correct. Basis for seeking authorization for a currently non-authorized worker is inability to find a currently authorized worker to do this job. Note, it is not an american worker. It is someone who hold a current work authorization such as:

American citizens

Permanent residents

Holders of work authorization paperwork

[vonnik]

cx: people who are *not Americans

[biocomputation]

I always ask the same question about huge American tech companies. They have almost unfathomable amounts of cash, but complain about the lack of qualified American talent. If there really is a shortage of qualified American talent, then American tech companies should use some of the cash to train American citizens.

H1B and similar really are about labor arbitrage. It's amazing that anyone thinks the best paid jobs in America should go to hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals. (There are hundreds of thousands of H1B workers in America right now doing jobs that Americans are imminently qualified to perform.)

Not to mention, non-profits are exempt from the annual cap on H1B. This includes virtually all hospitals and universities. If Democrats are serious about the middle class, then they really should do something about this.

[mrkurt]

H1B visas are all kinds of broken, but I don't believe there are an excess of qualified American citizens for most software jobs. In fact, it's so hard to get an H1B now that I don't think they're having much effect on "jobs available to Americans" at all.

I've never run a huge tech company, but even when trying to hire 10-50 engineers it's been a real slog trying to find good ones. We built one of the least biased hiring processes imaginable, promoted jobs to largely American audiences, and the pool of applicants was still hugely unqualified. We found ~2 qualified people per ~1000 applications.

American tech companies _do_ train American talent, I'm a product of this. I think you're overestimating how good we are at training software devs, though. It's not a fast process, it's not very scientific, and it doesn't seem to "take" for most people.

[Apocryphon]

What was your training experience like?

[mrkurt]

Hired as junior dev for super cheap, got a lot of great mentoring at 3 different, then learned enough to keep progressing on my own.

A family member had the first half (mentoring, foundation to learn from) but didn't go anywhere. It's part of why I think it's so hard to train people at what we do. It's not at all clear what set of skills make someone good at software.

[biocomputation]

>> Hired as junior dev for super cheap, got a lot of great mentoring at 3 different, then learned enough to keep progressing on my own.

Yes, and I'm saying that there should be a similar path for American citizens who want to get into tech. There is more than enough money in tech to hire and train American workers.

We're talking about companies with a combined market value that is more than the GDP of Russia.

[mrkurt]

I am an American Citizen. As is my brother. We're about as white bread Oklahoma kid as they come. The path is there, it's just really freakin' hard.

[nrhk]

It just takes so long before someone realizes software might not be from them.

You can be a great programmer yet a completely terrible developer. But you need the base programming skills and theory first. Then when you get into the real world you realize the slog is crap and you don't enjoy it.

I think there's plenty of room for a code technician type of job which should proliferate in today's environment. Move the good and motivated ones to engineering.

[theptip]

I'm not sure I buy this argument. Each tech job in the Bay Area creates ~4 other jobs[1]. So currently it's a net win for the country to bring someone in to fill a role in that sector. The people who lose out in that case aren't your hypothetical middle-class American, they are tech workers whose salaries go down somewhat because the supply of labour in their sector increased.

Another way of putting that same fact is that tech jobs are paid well above the mean salary, and so they necessarily increase the country's GDP per capita. Bring in more people like this! Give them a green card instead of making it hard for smart people to plant roots in the US! It'll boost our economy and generate more service sector jobs as well.

You could make a case that if you trained up an unemployed coal miner to do the job you'd create another job on top of the 4 that we already created, but it's not clear why you'd go to all that effort to create one job when you could just grant another green card to another tech worker and create 4 jobs; why would a company spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars training someone who might work out, when there are plenty of applicants in the world who are ready to do good work now?

As I see it the only coherent argument against more foreign tech workers is a political/sociological one noting that America is becoming increasingly xenophobic (due to concerns about low-skilled immigrants), and increasing immigration (even if it was solely high-skilled) would cause even more political instability than we've seen in the last year. But I don't see an economic argument against it.

[1]: http://www.bayareacouncil.org/community_engagement/new-study...

[trgv]

> They have almost unfathomable amounts of cash, but complain about the lack of qualified American talent. If there really is a shortage of qualified American talent, then American tech companies should use some of the cash to train American citizens.

You believe that anyone can be trained to be an effective programmer. If that's true, then there's some truth to your argument: why not invest in education and training to meet the high demand for programmers?

But I disagree with that premise. I think "ability to be a great programmer" is generally something you're born with, or at least something that's been determined by the time you're ~18. Therefore it makes perfect sense to import programmers to meet the demand. The US population is just not big enough to meet the demand for programmers and it would be insane/damaging to the economy to refuse to employ non-Americans.

I think the reason for H1B workers is supply and demand. The demand for developers far, far exceeds the supply.

[Apocryphon]

> But I disagree with that premise. I think "ability to be a great programmer" is generally something you're born with, or at least something that's been determined by the time you're ~18.

That's your opinion, but it's far from a majority one. It flies in the face with the continuous education/MOOCs/coder bootcamp industries and the "anyone can be a coder" mantra of the current age. Either you're right, or all of those programs and institutions are hucksters.

Not to mention, "great programmer" is hyperbolic when many many coding jobs these days are really just about fixing broken JavaScript and gluing together APIs. Software has eaten the world, and Sturgeon's law applies to software as much as anything else.

[gozur88]

>You believe that anyone can be trained to be an effective programmer. If that's true, then there's some truth to your argument: why not invest in education and training to meet the high demand for programmers?

We have. We've had retraining programs for decades, where people in declining industries get retrained as programmers or SAs (plus a bunch of other things).

The problem is nobody will hire them without experience. Some percentage of these people could be at least serviceable programmers, but they pretty much just languish on benefits because it's more convenient for companies to hire H-1B people with experience.

Megan McArdle had a good piece on this related to her retraining as a Netware admin.

[biocomputation]

My comment should have been clearer. By 'train' I mean train applicants who are somewhat qualified, but not fully qualified.

There are 2+ decades of anecdotes about poorly qualified programmers from India and China arriving here as H1Bs. The poorly trained Americans should be getting these jobs instead.

[qaq]

You can not "train" someone who has no interest and those companies with unfathomable amounts of cash are hiring basically top 2-3% of software engineers world wide. You have to realize that they have offices in Australia, EU, Switzerland, UK etc. So if they need to hire someone and do not have an easy option to bring that someone to the US they will have that person work out of one of their offices in the countries listed above with all the implications as far as which country is now collecting taxes.

[biocomputation]

My comment should have been clearer. By 'train' I mean train applicants who are somewhat qualified, but not fully qualified.

There are 2+ decades of anecdotes about poorly qualified programmers from India and China arriving here as H1Bs. The poorly trained Americans should be getting these jobs instead.

[qaq]

Are you seriously suggesting there is a lack of opportunity for US citizens do become founders :)?

[vm]

> Talent needs to be developed and cultivated right?

Feels like you're overstating the value of "mentorship and incubation". It doesn't "make" companies or founders, it just helps guide the ones who are already on that path. Employees benefit from skills training and career mentorship, but that's different for someone who started a company. The most prolific entrepreneurs are hell bent on success and don't need training or incubation.

We need more companies that hire lots of people. Therefore we need the most prolific founders possible - bring 'em in from anywhere to start more big companies in the US! For example, Google being HQed in the US created thousands of jobs here, not even counting all the companies started by Ex-googlers -- if those founders were sent back to Russia, all those jobs could be overseas. Wouldn't you want them in the US, per your argument?

Source: worked as VC for 5+ years